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.
To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan's first view of China - so rich, so soft, so unaware.
Revolution in the modern case is no longer an uncouth business.
Lenin, the greatest theorist of them all, did not know what he was going to do after he had got the power.
There was endless controversy as to whether the acts of the New Deal did actually move recovery or retard it, and nothing final could ever come of that bitter debate because it is forever impossible to prove what might have happened in place of what did.
Loyalty of the law-making power to the executive power was one of the dangers the political fathers foretold.