[3] He took no serious part in discussion of economic questions until 1819, when he gave evidence before committees of both Houses of Parliament on the resumption of cash payments by the Bank of England.

[3] Tooke was one of the earliest supporters of the free trade movement which assumed the form in the petition of the merchants of the City of London presented to the House of Commons by Alexander Baring, on 8 May 1820.

[4] It was to support the principles of the merchants' petition that Tooke, with David Ricardo, Robert Malthus, James Mill, and others, founded the Political Economy Club in April 1821.

[4] Besides giving evidence on economic questions before several parliamentary committees, such as those of 1821 on agricultural depression and on foreign trade, of 1832, 1840, and 1848 on the Bank Acts, Tooke was a member of the factories inquiry commission of 1833.

There was a watercolour sketch of Tooke in the office of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation, and a portrait was painted by Sir Martin Archer Shee.

To combat this view was the task to which Tooke applied himself in his earliest work, Thoughts and Details on the High and Low Prices of the last Thirty Years (1823), and the same line of argument is pursued in his Considerations on the State of the Currency (1826), and in a Letter to Lord Grenville (1829).

He entered on a detailed examination of the causes which might affect prices, and claimed to establish the conclusion that the variations, both during the period of restriction and after the resumption, were due to circumstances directly connected with the commodities themselves, and not to alterations in the quantity of money.

The two final volumes, written with William Newmarch, deal with railways, free trade, banking in Europe and the effects of new discoveries of gold.

[4] Tooke, on the other hand, reinforced later on by John Fullarton and James Wilson, maintained that a paper currency which was readily convertible on demand must necessarily conform to the value of a purely metallic currency; that for this purpose no other regulation was required beyond ready convertibility; that under these conditions banks had no power of arbitrarily increasing their issues; and that the level of prices was not directly affected by such issues.