Excerpt from Fiat Money Inflation in France: How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended America, in every modern civilized nation. In his letter to Cerutti, written in January, 1789, hardly six months before, he spoke of paper money as a nursery of tyranny, corruption, and delusion; a veritable debauch of authority in delirium. In his private letters written at this very time, which were revealed at a later period, he showed that he was fully aware of the dangers of inflation, but he yielded to the pressure: partly because he thought it important to relieve the treasury at once; partly because he thought it important to sell the Govern ment lands rapidly to the people, and so develop speedily a large class of small landholders, pledged to stand by the Government which gave them their titles; partly, doubtless, from a love of immediate rather than remote applause; and wholly in a vague hope that the severe, inexorable laws of finance, which had brought heavy punishments upon gov ernments emitting an irredeemable currency in other lands, at other times, might, in some way, be warded off from France, at this time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.