Dr. Soetbeer (German statistician): “The value of money has fallen through the issue of paper money as well as through the increased production of gold and silver.”
Leon Fouchet (1843): “If all the nations of Europe adopted the system of Great Britain the price of gold would be reduced beyond measure. The government could not decree that legal tender should be only gold, for that would be to decree a revolution, and the most dangerous of all, because it would be a revolution leading to unknown results.”
M. Wolowski (French Institute, 1868): “The suppression of silver would bring on a veritable revolution. Gold would augment in value with rapid and constant progress, which would break the faith of contracts and aggravate the situation of all debtors.... If by a stroke of the pen they suppress one of these metals [gold or silver] in the monetary service, they double the demand for the other metal, to the ruin of all debtors.”
John Locke (“Considerations, etc., in Relation to Money,” 1691): “The greater scarcity of money enhances its price and increases the scramble, and makes an equal portion of it exchange for a greater of any other thing.” 1690: “Money is really a standing measure of the falling and rising value of other things. If you increase or lessen the quantity of money current, then the alteration of value is in the money. The value of money in any one country is the present quantity of the current money in that country in proportion to the present trade.”
Adam Clark’s commentary on II. Matthew: “The scarcity of money in England in 1351 influenced Parliament to pass an act fixing a day’s labor at 1d. Twenty-four eggs sold for 1d; a pair of shoes 4d; wheat 3d; a fat ox 80d.”
Copernicus, the astronomer (treatise “Monete Cudende Ratio,” addressed to the King of Poland): “Numberless as are the evils by which kingdoms, principalities and republics are wont to decline, these four are, in my judgment, most baleful: civil strife, pestilence, sterility of the soil, and corruption of the coin. The first three are so manifest that no one fails to apprehend them; but the fourth, which concerns money, is considered by few, and those the most reflective, since it is not by a blow, but little by little, and through a secret and obscure approach, that it destroys the state.”
Daniel Watney, of England: “I cannot suppose that everybody is wise. Must think of the folly of the United States, when they were a debtor nation, in adopting a gold standard. They knew nothing about currency matters; they did not know it was going to increase their debt enormously.”
Paulus (Roman jurist, third century): “Money circulates with a power which is derived, not from the substance, but from the quantity.”
Blackstone (vol. I., page 2761): “As the quantity of precious metals increases they will sink in value and become less precious. If any accident were to diminish the quantity of gold and silver they would proportionately rise.”
Faucet (“Handbook of Finance,” page 146): “The decline of prices since 1872 and 1873 is explained by the increased value of gold. The first effect was to cause a collapse of speculative securities, namely, bonds of railroads, etc.”