ABSTRACT
It is the common opinion that the foundations of the monetary science of today (or yesterday) were laid by the writers who discussed the issues of English monetary and banking policy from the Restriction Act (1797) to the gold inflation of the 1850's. This neglects indeed the French and Italian work of the eighteenth century but nevertheless comes nearer to the truth than such sweeping statements usually do. Many of those writers moved on an unusually high level. They soared with ease into the sphere of abstract generalization and were possessed of a genuine will to analyze. This is the more remarkable because most of them were men of practical affairs and primarily interested in practical measures. We are accustomed to a different state of things: few modern economists would look to men of practical affairs and especially to bankers for help in their analytic task or even consider them as authorities on the principles of their own business. But this situation developed in the next period. In the one under survey, it was the practitioners who were in the van of analytic advance, and research workers of different types were in most cases content to take their clues from them.
