Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
A cent is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, Poet & Essayist, Politics, 1844
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is the first major history of banks written in the United States.
The exact phrase has not been found in Gresham's writings but the idea appeared in a 1558 letter to Queen Elizabeth I. The expression has come to be known as Gresham's Law.
The alternative would have been for the colonies to borrow English money at high interest rates and use that. Or use money from private banks (which occurred later.) Many conservatives are today a little shocked that some of the American Colonies just printed money with no backing but it worked—at least at the local level. A Boston Bank for example, would take a large commission for a Bostonian to convert Pennsylvania money into Massachusetts money. So it was not a very good system for trade between colonies and International trade. But English money was used for that. The colonists pragmatically got the “best of both worlds” and paid as little interest as they needed to. This system is essentially what we use today on a national scale with no gold or silver backing of the money.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
