Andrew Dickson White

The British ambassador was Sir Robert Morier. He too was a strong character, though lacking apparently in some of General [der Infanterie] von Schweinitz's more kindly qualities. He was big, roughish, and at times so brusque that he might …

For similar folly, our own country, in the transition from the colonial period, also paid a fearful price; and from a like catastrophe the United States has been twice saved in our time by the arguments formulated by Turgot.

Refusing to heed his argument the French people had again to be punished more severely than in John Law's time: the over-issue of assignats and mandats during the Revolution came forty years after his warning; and paper money inflation was …

As regards currency inflation, Turgot saw that

Never was there a more perfect demonstration of the truth asserted by Daniel Webster, that, of all contrivances for defrauding the working people of a country, arbitrary issues of paper money are the most effective.

in ruin to France financially and morally, had culminated in the utter destruction of all prosperity, the rooting out of great numbers of the most important industries, and the grinding down of the working people even to starvation.

at the age of twenty two, wrote... a letter which has been an object of wonder among political thinkers ever since. Its subject was paper money. Discussing the ideas of John Law, and especially the essay of Terrasson which had supported …

suit the purposes of his enemies, exasperated by his tolerant spirit and his reforming plans, to proclaim him an atheist; but that sort of charge has been the commonest of missiles against troublesome thinkers in all times.

The French philosophy of the eighteenth century was in full strength. Those were the years in which Voltaire ruled European opinion

thought and work upon those problems in religion which transcend all theologies, and upon those problems in politics which are of vast importance in all countries

The greatness of Turgot now began to appear

a theological seminary, as then conducted—whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan, was the most perfect.

destined for an ecclesiastical career was placed within walls carefully designed to keep out all currents of new thought

and then lived only long enough to see every leading measure to which he had devoted his life deliberately and malignantly undone; the flagrant abuses which he had abolished restored, apparently forever; the highways to national …

yet, judged by ordinary standards, a failure. For he was thrown out of his culminating position

were you to count the greatest men of the modern world upon your fingers, he would be of the number

TURGOT...I present today one of the three greatest statesmen who fought unreason in France between the close of the Middle Ages and the outbreak of the French Revolution—Louis XI and Richelieu being the two other.

change it in the slightest particle—never.

Even before Melanchthon sank into his grave, he was dismayed at seeing Lutheranism stiffen into dogmas and formulas, and heartbroken by a persecution from his fellow-Protestants more bitter than anything he had ever experienced from …

which today is invincibly making its way in all other lands, including our own.

to undermine the pedantry which had paralyzed German scholarship, to substitute thought for formulas, to bring right reason to bear upon international and municipal law, to discredit religious intolerance, to root out witchcraft …

and his disciples was to dethrone the heavy Protestant orthodoxy

The work of this young professor

neither from revelation nor from national enactments, but from natural law as ascertained by human reason.