Against all these assertions Grotius published to the world a demonstration that no such rights could exist. His whole argument was mainly a developm… - Andrew Dickson White

This whole theory [of John Law and Jean Terrasson], as dear to French financial schemers in the eighteenth century as to American "Greenbackers" in the nineteenth, had resulted, under the Orleans Regency and Louis XV, 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.

He [Turgot] now, in 1749, 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 them, he dissected them mercilessly, but in a way useful not only in those times but in these. ...Terrasson's arguments in behalf of unlimited issues of paper had been put forth in 1720. ...and he declared that the material used for bearing the sign of value is indifferent ...and that if a sovereign issues enough of paper promises, he will be able to loan or even to give money in unlimited amounts to his needy subjects. ...without danger of depreciation. ...Terrasson also made the distinction between the note of a business man and notes issued by a government, that the former comes back and must be paid, but that the latter need not come back and can be kept afloat forever by simple governmental command, thus becoming that blessed thing—worshiped widely, not many years since, in our own country—"fiat money."

Into the very midst of all this welter of evil, at a point in time to all appearance hopeless, at a point in space apparently defenseless, in a nation of which every man, woman, and child was under sentence of death from its sovereign, was born a man who wrought as no other has ever done for a redemption of civilization from the main cause of all that misery; who thought out for Europe the precepts of right reason in international law; who made them heard; who gave a noble change to the course of human affairs; whose thoughts, reasonings, suggestions, and appeals produced an environment in which came an evolution of humanity that still continues. Huig de Groot, afterward known to the world as Hugo Grotius was born at Delft in Holland on Easter day of 1583. It was at the crisis of the struggle between Spain and the Netherlands. That struggle had already continued for twenty years, and just after the close of his first year, in the very town where he was lying in his cradle, came its most fearful event, that which maddened both sides—the assassination of William of Orange, nominally by Balthazar Gerard, really by Philip II of Spain.