Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/319

. 1] The abuses of paper money inflation have usually called forth some attempts to safeguard against it. It was in order to escape from such evils in Colonial days that, in Massachusetts, the commodity bonds described in Appendix V, § 2, below, were devised. These Colonial abuses and those of the Continental paper currency of the American Revolution led also to the provision in our Constitution forbidding states to emit "Bills of Credit."

After the English experience with depreciated money in the Napoleonic wars came, as natural consequences, the great investigations on prices by Tooke and Newmarch and the classic Bullion Report of Parliament.

After the flood of gold in the '50s we note a great interest in the instability of money. It was soon after this that Jevons devised the index number as a measure of the general level of prices and wrote on "a serious fall in the value of gold."

After our experience with the greenbacks of the Civil War, the subject of money and prices became one of intense interest. There were soon developed two parties, the inflation and the contraction parties, and acts of Congress alternately favored first one and then the other of the opposing policies. Our "Legal Tender" controversies, our Greenback party and our Resumption Act, were direct outgrowths of the monetary instability of the Civil War.

An increasing and worldwide interest in money and prices was displayed through the long years of falling prices, experienced throughout the world, between 1873 and 1896.

During that period we find increasing complaints, many official inquiries and reports, and numerous proposed remedies, including various forms of bimetallism and several anticipations of the very stabilization plan of this book (see Bibliography, Appendix VI). International conferences assembled to discuss the gold and bimetallic questions.

To be more definite, there were the Bland-Allison