ABSTRACT
The main features of Irish economic conditions with which Berkeley was confronted, and which he sought to remedy, can be gathered from suggestions of The Querist, as one goes through it. Monetary conditions were primitive, defective, and confused in extreme. The principal aim of monetary institutions and policy must be to maintain a high level of economic activity and above all to prevent the paradox of poverty and unemployed resources existing side by side. In spite of the strong prejudices attaching to gold and silver, money is essentially a ‘ticket’, and, as things are, through the reliance on uncertain supply of the precious metals, tickets of convenient denominations are simply not available. It was vital that the National Bank should be publicly owned and controlled. It might perhaps be said of Berkeley, as Sidgwick said of Mill, that his main achievement was to have ‘brought a higher degree of philosophical reflection to bear upon the exposition of the common doctrines’.
