ABSTRACT
In The New Age office in 1918 Pound met Major C. H. Douglas who had come to Orage with the claim that he knew what caused economic depressions and how they could be avoided. Drawing upon his own experiences with the cost accounting methods of modern industry Douglas explained to his listeners that industry in general created prices faster than it distributed the power to buy; he had a scheme, he said, whereby the system could be healed and private property protected without inflation, government debt, collectivism or any other form of authoritarianism. Douglas had already expressed some of his ideas very badly in Holbrook Jackson's The Organizer (1917) and in December 1918 published a further article in The English Review edited by Austin Harrison. Orage drew out Douglas's ideas in conversation and Pound and others joined in. Pound suggested, he said later, that if what Douglas said was right then ‘any government worth a damn’ could pay dividends instead of collecting taxes. It was agreed that Douglas seemed to have found a solution to the problem of instituting an economic democracy to match political democracy. Orage helped Douglas with his prose style and the first of his articles published by The New Age appeared on 2 January 1919; his first book, Economic Democracy, began to appear serially in June, and a second book, Credit-Power and Democracy, the following February. Thus Pound was drawn into what later became well known as Social Credit.
