ABSTRACT
When the Bank Restriction Act was passed in the early months of 1797, it was intended to be a temporary measure, lasting a few weeks at most. Instead, it became one of the most enduring institutions of the Romantic era, remaining in effect until 1822, and thus outlasting both Pitt's ministry and the French Republic. The ability of paper money to substitute, seemingly indefinitely, for specie, provoked a variety of reactions. In the October 1802 volume of the Edinburgh Review, political economist Francis Horner suggested that the suspension of gold payments had enabled the public to better understand the inner workings of finance, a system that had “remained in a great measure unknown to all but the bankers and traders of London, until the suspension of cash payments at the Bank of England produced the copious information, which, in various forms, has been communicated to the public” (vol. 1: 176). More radical commentators, such as William Cobbett, agreed with Horner that the Act allowed insight to the inner workings of state finance, but contended that what was illuminated was the rot of a system that employed paper money and the national debt to shuttle money from the poor and middling classes to rich merchants, and encouraged the poor to counterfeit money and then executed them for their troubles (Cobbett 1817; see also Anon. 1818?).
