"For handling problems such as those facing the British or French treasuries during the war, there are no miracle men. Either current earnings from exports, salable assets, loans or credits... or gold exist for paying foreign suppliers, in which case the officials are a success. Or these assets do not exist, in which case those involved are a failure. However, nothing comes so easily to the press and public mind as the vision of financial genius. Both wish to believe that... there are individuals of transcendental insight and power, men who can make something out of nothing. In Britain during the war (and after) the popular imagination settled on the thirty-one-year-old (in 1914) Treasury official, John Maynard Keynes. His papers of the period, recently published, suggest that he was a hard-working, competent and resourceful man who matched resources to payments with attention and skill and who extended his mind to the similar problems of the French and the Russians. That was all."