Synthesized answer
Keynes uses the phrase "The Old World was tough in wickedness" in the context of describing the political maneuvering and the personalities involved in the post-war negotiations. He contrasts the shrewd and manipulative abilities of Mr. Lloyd George with the perceived naivety of "the President," suggesting that the Old World, characterized by its established political acumen, was a harsh environment for those lacking such sophistication [2]. The passage implies that the established powers of the Old World possessed a certain ruthlessness, capable of overwhelming even those with good intentions [2].
The passages suggest that this "wickedness" is tied to a hardened, unyielding nature ("heart of stone") that can resist even the most valiant efforts [2]. It also seems to relate to the self-interested actions and "imbecile greed" that marked the dealings of the European powers after the war [3]. However, the passages do not provide a comprehensive definition of what Keynes specifically means by the "Old World was tough in wickedness," beyond these implications of political shrewdness, a hardened disposition, and self-serving actions within the context of post-war Europe.
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
this process began to be reversed, and a diminishing yield of Nature to man's effort was beginning to reassert itself. But the tendency of cereals to rise in real cost was balanced by other improvements; and--one of many novelties--the resources of tropical Africa then for the first time came into large employ, and a great traffic in oil-seeds began to bring to the table of Europe in a new and cheaper form one of the essential foodstuffs of mankind. In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it, most of us were brought up. That…
ch a man have against Mr. Lloyd George's unerring, almost medium-like, sensibility to every one immediately round him? To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's buff in that…
rope, if she is to survive her troubles, will need so much magnanimity from America, that she must herself practice it. It is useless for the Allies, hot from stripping Germany and one another, to turn for help to the United States to put the States of Europe, including Germany, on to their feet again. If the General Election of December, 1918, had been fought on lines of prudent generosity instead of imbecile greed, how much better the financial prospect of Europe might now be.
t happiness but numbers; and lest the cake be after all consumed, prematurely, in war, the consumer of all such hopes. But these thoughts lead too far from my present purpose. I seek only to point out that the principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of Society and of progress as we then understood it, and to emphasize that this principle depended on unstable psychological conditions, which it may be impossible to recreate. It was not natural for a population, of whom so few enjoyed the comforts of life, to accumulate so hugely. The war has…
declining population, and, relatively to others, had fallen seriously behind in wealth and in the power to produce it. In spite, therefore, of France's victorious issue from the present struggle (with the aid, this time, of England and America), her future position remained precarious in the eyes of one who took the view that European civil war is to be regarded as a normal, or at least a recurrent, state of affairs for the future, and that the sort of conflicts between organized great powers which have occupied the past hundred years will also engage the next. According to this vision…