As we have seen, the toil and trouble of the Bank Restriction Period gave rise to very few new developments in economic theory. It did, however, canvass and secure general acceptance for views previously held only by the authors of little read works on technical economics. Progress in the social sciences has often been made up of periods when thought made rapid advances, followed by times of intellectual quiet in which the time lag between the thought of the few and the beliefs of the many was made up. The Restriction Period was of the latter sort. The result of this work of consolidation was the emergence of a body of orthodox economic doctrine such as had not previously existed. First and foremost, so far as our present subject is concerned, it was agreed that the standard of value was and ought to be gold. The advocates of an issue of government inconvertible paper, of a silver standard, or of bimetallism, still raise their voices in time of trouble, but they are voices crying in the wilderness. Secondly, the broad outlines of the quantity theory were generally accepted. The changes in prices of the post-war years had induced a more careful consideration of the mechanism which connects the volume of money with the price level. If money be taken to include all instruments of payment, then the dispute was not whether the volume of money really did influence prices, but as to the relation between different sorts of money, and their varying degrees of potency. In fact, however, the word was not used in this comprehensive sense, and the problem resolved itself, like so many others, into a matter of definition. What is money? Thirdly, there was accepted the theory of international price adjustments advocated by Ricardo and the Bullion Report, which had effectively displaced both its converse, the view that high domestic prices promote a favourable balance of trade, and Thornton's income theory of transfer.

In fact, during the quarter of a century following the resumption, monetary theory slides down to a lower plane; We are concerned less with general principles and more with administrative details. How was the Bank to regulate its issues so as to ensure the maintenance of convertibility? What was the effect of the growth of deposit banking and the cheque system? and so on.