Upon this material, mainly, was based a course of lectures then given
to my students, first at the University of Michigan and later at
Cornell University, and among these lectures, one on "Paper Money
Inflation in France."
This was given simply because it showed one important line of facts in
that great struggle; and I recall, as if it were yesterday, my feeling
of regret at being obliged to bestow so much care and labor upon a
subject to all appearance so utterly devoid of practical value. I am
sure that it never occurred, either to my Michigan students or to
myself, that it could ever have any bearing on our own country. It
certainly never entered into our minds that any such folly as that
exhibited in those French documents of the eighteenth century could
ever find supporters in the United States of the nineteenth.
Some years later, when there began to be demands for large issues of
paper money in the United States, I wrought some of the facts thus
collected into a speech in the Senate of the State of New York,
showing the need of especial care in such dealings with financial