sure that it never occurred, either to my Michigan students or to
myself, that it could ever have any bearing on our own country. It
certainly never entered into our minds that any such folly as that
exhibited in those French documents of the eighteenth century could
ever find supporters in the United States of the nineteenth.

Some years later, when there began to be demands for large issues of
paper money in the United States, I wrought some of the facts thus
collected into a speech in the Senate of the State of New York,
showing the need of especial care in such dealings with financial
necessities.

In 1876, during the "greenback craze," General Garfield and Mr. S. B.
Crittenden, both members of the House of Representatives at that time,
asked me to read a paper on the same general subject before an
audience of Senators and Representatives of both parties in
Washington. This I did, and also gave it later before an assemblage
of men of business at the Union League Club in New York.

Various editions of the paper were afterward published, among them,
two or three for campaign purposes, in the hope that they might be of
use in showing to what folly, cruelty, wrong and rain the passion for
"fiat money" may lead.

Other editions were issued at a later period, in view of the principle
involved in the proposed unlimited coinage of silver in the United
States, which was, at bottom, the idea which led to that fearful wreck
of public and private prosperity in France.

For these editions there was an added reason in the fact that the