Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/174

 The American people have always been harassed with the "more money" fiat delusion. Among no other people has there been more absurd governmental interference with currency, affecting values, promoting speculation and upsetting confidence. Bitter lessons have been theirs with fiat currency, in colonial times, revolutionary and confederation periods, early years of national life and during and after the Civil War. The delusion has possessed one generation after another that currency is capital; that citizens can be made prosperous with cheap substitutes for gold money. Even yet, the insidious fiat notion persists, though in lesser degree, than heretofore. Silver and paper currency was of doubtful redeemability until the gold standard was secured in 1896 and 1900. Only strong, recuperative powers of the Nation have prevented overthrow of the gold standard of value and the good faith of the government.

However much of the greatness of the American Nation has come out of the progressive spirit of the pioneer West, however puny or different the American State would have been without the stimulus coming out of the land toward the setting sun, it is fair to say that out of this expanding land came also the financial and monetary heresies that have afflicted its politics, business and industry. The virile race of the West, restive under its poverty, confused capital with money, falsely thinking that, if currency be multiplied, capital could be multiplied also.

Himself, a son of the West, Mr. Scott knew its mind as to money and capital as intimately as any man could know it. This knowledge equipped him to cope with it in his skillful way. Perhaps no other writer of the day equalled him in this perception and in ability to meet it. His struggle through 45 years was laborious, distasteful to himself, creative of personal animosities. He estranged his closest friends by sharp criticisms of their advocacy of silver coinage. But he regarded that issue the most critical in the country's industrial history and he could not be deterred from, his duty by matters of friendship. His appeals reached the sober thought of the Common-