During the various stages of this debate there cropped up a doctrine
old and ominous. It was the same which appeared toward the end of the
nineteenth century in the United States during what became known as
the "greenback craze" and the free "silver craze." In France it had
been refuted, a generation before the Revolution, by Turgot, just as
brilliantly as it was met a hundred years later in the United States
by James A. Garfield and his compeers. This was the doctrine that all
currency, whether gold, paper, leather or any other material, derives
its efficiency from the official stamp it bears, and that, this being
the case, a government may relieve itself of its debts and make itself
rich and prosperous simply by means of a printing
press:--fundamentally the theory which underlay the later American
doctrine of "fiat money."

There came mutterings and finally speeches in the Jacobin Club, in the
Assembly and in newspaper articles and pamphlets throughout the
country, taking this doctrine for granted. These could hardly affect
thinking men who bore in mind the calamities brought upon the whole
people, and especially upon the poorer classes, by this same theory as
put in practice by John Law, or as refuted by Turgot, but it served to
swell the popular chorus in favor of the issue of more _assignats_ and
plenty of them.[27]

The great majority of Frenchmen now became desperate optimists,
declaring that inflation is prosperity. Throughout France there came
temporary good feeling. The nation was becoming inebriated with paper
money. The good feeling was that of a drunkard just after his
draught; and it is to be noted as a simple historical fact,
corresponding to a physiological fact, that, as draughts of paper