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Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.

The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world.

Wealth, in terms of dollars and so forth, could be counted up, because dollars were finite. It doesn't make any difference how many dollars you have-at a certain point you only have dollars. You start with finite, you end with finite.

The problem started before World War I. The gold standard was working fairly well. But it broke down because of the war and what happened in the 1920s. And then the U.S. started to become so dominant in the world, with the dollar becoming the central currency after the 1930s, the whole world economy shifted.

As a precious metal, silver is also money.

I think the reality is that, that money was probably badly spent.

What is the effect of unlimited coinage of silver in this country? and I invite your attention to this particularly, because it is a question of vital importance.

You can always say that it was scarce dollars when Lewis and Clark wanted to go to the West Coast and explore the West. And people complained about it, I understand, from a reading of the history books.

Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them.

The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.