Prudence was the watchword of Edmund Burke, the great 18th-century Irish statesman, except where his own money was concerned. The West’s founding conservative lived his financial life on the edge of disaster. It was a mercy for him that members of Parliament were legally spared the rigors of debtors’ prison.
Money in the abstract was rather where Burke shone, especially in the pages of his immortal “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” published in 1790, a year after the fall of the Bastille.
It cost money to turn a nation upside down, and the sans culottes could scrape up only so much by melting down church bells and expropriating noble estates. Anticipating modern central-banking practices, the new French republic turned to the printing press. Its scrip, the infamous assignat, couldn’t hold a candle to the good-as-gold British pound, as Burke proceeded to demonstrate.
Liberty was the touchstone of English monetary arrangements, Burke’s argument ran. “Cash,” as gold was known, was the one and only legal tender. Of course, bank notes were handier than ingots, but nobody had to accept such IOUs (not even the Bank of England’s) in lieu of gold itself. Weighing the soundness of the issuing bank, an Englishman could choose one or the other.
