Politics & Power Quote by John Moody

Money, not romance, is the engine of American “discovery” in John Moody’s telling. His sentence pretends to celebrate the “extraordinary possibilities” of the West, then quietly reveals the trigger: an annual jolt of “over fifty million dollars” pumped into circulation. The Pacific doesn’t seize the national imagination because people suddenly see mountains and harbors; it becomes legible once capital makes it legible. That’s not poetry, it’s balance-sheet destiny.

Moody, a businessman writing in an era when railroads, mining, and finance were knitting the continent into a tradable asset, frames attention itself as an economic variable. “Suddenly and definitely concentrated” sounds like a camera snapping into focus, but the hand on the lens is monetary expansion. He’s implying that national will is reactive: investment creates vision, not the other way around. The West’s “possibilities” are treated as latent value awaiting monetization, as if territory is an underpriced security.

The subtext is a kind of respectable determinism. By locating the pivot in “circulating medium,” Moody naturalizes a politically charged process - speculation, dispossession, state support for infrastructure - as a neutral financial mechanism. The language lets the reader admire inevitability rather than argue about choices. It also nods to a recurring American pattern: big geographic myths tend to arrive with liquidity. When the money supply expands, so does the country’s imagination, and what looks like national ambition is often just the market clearing its throat.