The credit of the government was the ability and intention of the country to meet the promises of its government, and this ability determined its currency.
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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No sooner did the supply of gold at the command of the government fail, than the latter was compelled to resort to its credit, or to a direct representation of the true value and wealth of the country.
In all seasons of financial distress, gold, as a standard, has failed.
But suppositions are only true generally, and hence it came that promises to pay often exhausted the ability to pay, and here began the ills that must necessarily attend a false standard of values.
It is plain, then, that money, be it gold, silver or what else it may, if not intrinsically of the value set upon it, but that it represents something that has intrinsic value.
To demonstrate that money is only a convenience and not an absolute necessity, any one has only to observe that frequent purchases, sales and payments are made without the use of money or any other representative of value, but by the…
If it can be dispensed with and trade continue, its importance as money entirely disappears.
Our money is not measured by Gold—Gold is measured by it.
Gold has been the accepted money standard, but the practice, since the depreciation of our country’s credit, has, to all intents and purposes, reduced it to a mere commodity.
And, considered as a god, none other has in this day and age one-half the power, nor is any other worshiped with one-half the devotion it is.
Intrinsically, it has no value other than for the other uses to which it is adapted, but custom and long usage have raised it into the position of a god, before whom the world falls down and worships with as much devotion as Pagans do…
It is the duty of those who labor in the interests of society to lay hold of the future, and bring its conditions into the broadest present application.