The materials gathered in this volume speak to dimensions of Fisher’s interests and activities that extend beyond his work as a professional economist. Nonetheless, Fisher the economic theorist and Fisher the crusading activist are inseparable. He set out his own assessment of the inter-connectedness in a letter to his wife in mid-1924, written while he was in the midst of a transcontinental speaking tour to mobilize public support for American membership in the League of Nations. In his words:
“It troubles me very much to be away from you so much especially as I know you need me and find it hard to reconcile yourself to my idea in spite of all your wonderful self effacement and desire to see me and all your dear ones do what they please. If it was a self indulgence I’d fly to your side this minute and cancel everything. Perhaps I’d a Don Quixote but I’m trying to be a Paul Revere. Had it not been for those long years in Saranac Lake, Colorado Springs and Santa Barbara I wouldn’t be on these missions but would be the regular college professor interested in my mathematical economics almost exclusively. But that illness and your sweet noble unselfishness aroused the latent altruism which my preacher father, I suppose, transmitted to me and from that time forth I have felt the urge of the preacher and have wanted to make up for the waste spaces in my own life by preventing some of the needless waste of this wastrel world. First, the tuberculosis fight, then hygiene in general and the Life Extension Institute, and now the Eugenics and Peace movements have appealed to me. It’s not the conventional college professor’s attitude and it’s just because others are not seeing these big things that I am championing them. … It is the same thing that has taken hold of thousands of the world’s reformers from the giants like Christ and Socrates or Buddha down through the Garrisons, John Browns, … and so forth to the social workers at Lowell House and the salvation army. I don’t know where I belong in the scale but I do want before I die to leave behind something more than a book on Index Numbers, much as I love my strictly professional work. I feel as though I have found a niche in making application of my scientific training. Stable Money is coming forward by leaps and bounds (if that’s a possible metaphor for anything stable!) and that is largely the fruit of my individual efforts, though my work was largely out of sight…. And in this battle for a warless world I feel that I am needed and needed at this particular time because the non-partisan idea had to be spread…. The danger of a world war is still with us…. Isn’t it worth a big effort at critical times to prevent such tragedies not simply for you and me but for millions of others?”
