Victoria Chick wrote: "Roy Weintraub and Robert Leeson suggest that Keynes was the chief promoter of the idea that he was the first economist against laissez faire, but they surely can't suppose that he was unaware of the widespread support of his 'classical' contemporaries for public works in the Depression. For example, speaking of Pigou and Robertson he wrote (to Kahn, 10 Oct 1937) : '... when it comes to practice, there is really extremely little between us. Why do they then insist on maintaining theories from which their own practical conclusions cannot possibly follow?' (CW XIV, p 259). See Also CW XIII, 495ff. (Thanks to Geoff Tily for finding the quote for me.)" This is a strange posting, since not only did I not say what Chick accuses me of "suggesting" or "supposing", but I have written exactly the opposite, most recently (2005) in HOPE (37.1: 133-155): "What we have is Harrod, and the other Oxford signatories, none of them part of the Cambridge Circus, urging Keynesian policies prior to the theorization of those policies in a full-blown fashion in Keynes' just-being-created /General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money/. This provides more evidence for the now standard view that there was a large literature advocating public works in the mid-1920s to mid-1930s, a literature that used arguments quite different from the ones Keynes put forth in his 1936 book (e.g. Hutchison 1968; Davis 1971; Howson and Winch 1977). We now understand that the solution to the depression was not simply Keynes', nor was it a result of Keynes' theory, but rather that Keynes' theory emerged as the unifying glue to what had been emerging as a policy consensus." Is it that Americans and Australians must not tread on Keynes? E. Roy Weintraub