Late President and Professor of History at Cornell University; SometimeUnited States Minister to Russia and Ambassador to Germany; Author of "AHistory of the Warfare of Science with Theology," etc.
As far back as just before our Civil War I made, in France andelsewhere, a large collection of documents which had appeared during theFrench Revolution, including newspapers, reports, speeches, pamphlets,illustrative material of every sort, and, especially, specimens ofnearly all the Revolutionary issues of paper money,—from notes of tenthousand livres to those of one sou.
Upon this material, mainly, was based a course of lectures then givento my students, first at the University of Michigan and later at CornellUniversity, and among these lectures, one on "Paper Money Inflation inFrance."
This was given simply because it showed one important line of facts inthat great struggle; and I recall, as if it were yesterday, my feelingof regret at being obliged to bestow so much care and labor upon asubject to all appearance so utterly devoid of practical value. Iam sure that it never occurred, either to my Michigan students or tomyself, that it could ever have any bearing on our own country. Itcertainly never entered into our minds that any such folly as thatexhibited in those French documents of the eighteenth century could everfind supporters in the United States of the nineteenth.
Some years later, when there began to be demands for large issues ofpaper money in the United States, I wrought some of the facts thuscollected into a speech in the Senate of the State of New York, showingthe need of especial care in such dealings with financial necessities.
In 1876, during the "greenback craze," General Garfield and Mr. S. B.Crittenden, both members of the House of Representatives at that time,asked me to read a paper on the same general subject before an audienceof Senators and Representatives of both parties in Washington. This Idid, and also gave it later before an assemblage of men of business atthe Union League Club in New York.
Various editions of the paper were afterward published, among them, twoor three for campaign purposes, in the hope that they might be of usein showing to what folly, cruelty, wrong and rain the passion for "fiatmoney" may lead.
Other editions were issued at a later period, in view of the principleinvolved in the proposed unlimited coinage of silver in the UnitedStates, which was, at bottom, the idea which led to that fearful wreckof public and pr