To all things there are two extremes and a mean, the evidence of perfection being that there is always an equilibrium sustained between the extremes through the medium of the mean.
Victoria C. Woodhull
The Public Record
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because according to the Constitution she would have been too young to be president if elected.
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Now, you know very well that the gold there is in the world cannot redeem or represent the values of the world.
Hence it is seen that every step we take in examining the true bearings of the money question brings us nearer and clearer to the proposition already made—that the capacity for production is the true basis of value.
Money is that which can equally represent the wheat, the horse and the gold; and anything that cannot do this is not money.
A gallon of molasses would never be thought of as a measure of distance, but it would be just as reasonable to expect it to measure it as it is to expect a certain quantity of gold to measure the value of a horse.
We have heretofore shown that gold is a purely arbitrary standard which has no scientific relations whatever to the product of labor which it is required to measure, but that it is itself a product, and as such requires to be measured.
If there are wants in existing systems, and if there are illegitimate practices which are possible under them, there is but one way to supply the one or to correct the other, and that is to go to the root of the matter where the causes…
All such kind of treatment deals with effects, and would never remedy an existing want, nor correct illegitimate practices.
When the consideration is fairly begun upon this basis, scientific ideas regarding money will be rapidly diffused among the people, who now do not even dream that money can be reduced to the rules of scientific demonstration.
Policy should be entirely discarded from all place in the argument, and principles should alone be discussed.
Like all other questions that are now coming prominently before the world for solution, this one of finance and commerce rises to the dignity of a question of humanity.
It is in this broad and general sense that all questions regarding it should hereafter be considered and not upon the basis of how much advantage such a measure will give an individual or a nation over another individual or nation.