more clear by better arrangement and supplementary information.

ANDREW D. WHITE.
Cornell University,
September, 1912.


FOREWORD BY MR. JOHN MACKAY

I am greatly indebted to the generosity of Mr. Andrew D. White, the
distinguished American scholar, author and diplomatist, for permission
to print and to circulate privately a small edition of his exceedingly
valuable account of the great currency-making experiment of the French
Revolutionary Government. The work has been revised and considerably
enlarged by Mr. White for the purpose of the present issue.

The story of "Fiat Money Inflation in France" is one of great interest
to legislators, to economic students, and to all business and thinking
men. It records the most gigantic attempt ever made in the history of
the world by a government to create an inconvertible paper currency,
and to maintain its circulation at various levels of value. It also
records what is perhaps the greatest of all governmental efforts--with
the possible exception of Diocletian's--to enact and enforce a legal
limit of commodity prices. Every fetter that could hinder the will or
thwart the wisdom of democracy had been shattered, and in consequence
every device and expedient that untrammelled power and unrepressed
optimism could conceive were brought to bear. But the attempts
failed. They left behind them a legacy of moral and material
desolation and woe, from which one of the most intellectual and
spirited races of Europe has suffered for a century and a quarter, and