William Douglass Quotes
A general Clamour for a depreciating Paper Currency, is a certain Sign of the Country being generally in bad Circumstances
William Douglass, 1691-1752, Colonial Economist & Scholar, Discourse on the Currencies of the American Plantations, 1740
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time the United States was on the Gold Standard and all our money was backed by gold. Root and others were afraid that a Federal Reserve Bank, a proposal that was being debated in Congress, would cause a large amount of paper money to be printed which other nations would obtain through trade and then exchange that for American gold—a process which would deplete the American gold supply. A few years before, William Jennings Bryan had argued that the Gold Standard did not allow America sufficient ability to increase the money supply to serve the growing population and economy. See {640992}.
Conservatives are surprised to learn that their great economic nemesis was one of the early economists who saw the danger of paper money and government control over the minting of money which is one of their core concerns.
This quotation is fascinating because it illustrates the degree to which the Southern people censored themselves on what in most cultures would be morale issues. In many ways the ability to ignore reality made it easier for the Confederate government to operate, but distorted the decisions that were made. Arguably, in most other cultures, public opinion on the reality of the situation would have brought the war to an end sooner and ironically on far better terms than they ended up with. Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view.
The “Fed Note” was the term for a Federal Reserve Note. It was a then a new form of paper money issued by the Federal Reserve Banks instead of the Treasury department as the previous United States Notes had been. The United States was a guarantor of the Federal Reserve Notes in case the Federal Reserve defaulted and there were many who feared having the responsibility to back up the Federal Reserve notes which could be issued by the Federal Reserve Banks—not government entities and not under the control of the President or Congress.
William Douglass (c. 1691–1752) was a physician in 18th-century Boston, Massachusetts, who wrote pamphlets on medicine, economics and politics that were often polemical.
