Edwards Pierpont (North American Review): “When currency is small it is always easy for a few lords of corporations and rich money-lenders to combine and lock it up, and thus throw down the price of stocks, wheat, cotton and other commodities, and work a corner on the currency. Thus the market is made tight and extortion easy.”
John Sheldon (New England Yale Review, March, 1890): “This is of supreme importance, for prices tend to carry with the amount and not simply with the kind of legal-tender money in circulation. The greater the amount the higher the range of prices; the less the circulation the lower the prices. Prices tend ever to follow up and down the amount of legal-tender money in circulation; they do not tend to fixity of the particular kind of money or standard used.”
Alexander Baring (before the committee, House of Lords, 1819): “The reduction of paper would produce all those effects which arise from reduction in the amount of money in any country.”
Sir Robert Peel (May 6, 1844, speaking of the act to regulate the currency): “There is no contract, public or private, no engagement, national or individual, which is unaffected by this.”
Lord George Bentinck (Parliamentary Debates, about 1847): “Of all the subtle devices which the wit of man has contrived to despoil the community of their property, nothing equals the contrivance of laws which limits the currency to gold.”
Lord Beaconsfield (“Agricultural Depression”): “Gold is every day appreciating in value, and as it appreciates in value the lower become prices.”
Sir Walter Scott (speaking of abundant currency): “It is not less an issue that the consequences of this banking system as conducted in Scotland have been operated with the greatest advantage to the country; have converted Scotland from a poor, miserable and barren country into one where, if nature has done less, art and industry have done more than in perhaps any country in Europe, England itself not excepted.”
Encyclopedia Britannica (1859): “A fall in the value of precious metals, like a fall of rain water after a long course of dry weather, may be prejudicial to certain classes. It is beneficial to an incomparably greater number, including all who are engaged in industrial pursuits, and is, speaking generally, of great public or national advantage.”
North British Review (November, 1861): “Metallic money, whilst acting as coin, is identical with paper money in respect to being destitute of intrinsic value.”
William Jacob[Jacob], F. R. S., gives statistics of the world’s volume of money from the year 14 A. D., when it was $1,790,000,000, to 806, when it had fallen to $168,000,000. The price of a horse in England then was £1 15s 2d; an ox, 7s 2d; a cow, 6s 2d; sheep, 1s 2d; goat, 4d.