The Physiocrats
Henry Higgs
[Part 1]
THE Physiocrats have been the subjects of so many and such divergent
appreciations by historians, philosophers, economists, and students of
political science, that hardly a single general proposition of
importance has been advanced with regard to them by one writer which
has not been contradicted by another. To de Tocqueville they were
doctrinaire advocates of absolute equality. To Rousseau they were the
supporters of an odious, if "legal," despotism. To Professor
Cohn they are, in their main proposals, "thoroughly socialistic."
To Louis Blanc they were tainted with a bourgeois individualism. To
Linguet their mystic jargon was charlatanical nonsense, not to be
understood even by themselves. To Voltaire it was so clear as to be
made easily comprehensible (and ridiculous) to the meanest
intelligence. To Taine, as to many others, they made powerfully for
revolution. To Carlyle, who speaks ironically of "victorious
analysis" and scornfully of "rose-pink sentimentalism,"
they seem to have been a mere literary ripple on the surface of the
great flood. Rossi praised them for conceiving a vast synthesis of
social organisation; certain writers, like Mably, have blamed them for
a narrow materialism; while there are judges who pronounce them
markedly deistic. To Proudhon their system of taxation was a rare
Utopia; to others they lack an ideal of any kind. They were to de
Lomenie a bundle of contradictions at once monarchical and democratic,
half-socialist and highly conservative. To Adam Smith their "system,
with all its imperfections, is perhaps the nearest approximation to
the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political
economy, and is, upon that account, well worth the consideration of
every man who wishes to examine with attention the principles of that
very important science." To many compilers of little text-books,
who know better than Adam Smith, they are merely people who lived in
the dark ages before 1776, and held some absurd opinions about land.
To some they appear to have had a transitory success followed by
complete and lasting reaction. To Leon Say their principles, after
suffering reverses in the eighteenth century, have dominated the
nineteenth. Of many serious writers these, anxious for precedent, have
appealed to their authority in support of their own views; those,
striving after originality, have been eager to prove that the point
which they seek to emphasise was really missed by the Physiocrats; and
the great majority of authors have been content to follow the
well-worn phrases of one predecessor or another without direct
reference to the writings of the old economists themselves. Probably
no man alive has read the whole published works of, say, the Marquis
of Mirabeau to mention only a single member of the school. And happily
no one is obliged to do so. When we have once mastered their doctrines
we are dispensed from following the prolix repetitions and tedious
amplifications which make up nine-tenths of their literary activity.
Yet this mastery is essential to a due acquaintance with the history
of economic theory. For the Physiocrats were the first scientific
school of political economy.
The Mercantilists, it is true, come first in order of time, but they
are not in any proper sense of the term "a school" at all.
There is no personal link between the different writers who, for more
than a century, support what is called "the mercantile system"
an indiscriminate phrase covering proposals so different that their
authors can only be said to have had a common tendency and not a
common doctrine any more than a common acquaintance. But in the
Physiocrats we see an alliance of persons, a community of ideas, an
acknowledged authority, and a combination in purpose, which banded
them into a society apart. To this personal tie, Turgot, the great
lover of individual liberty in thought and deed, took grave objection.
"It is the sectarian spirit," he says, "which arouses
against useful truths enemies and persecutions. When an isolated
person modestly proposes what he believes to be the truth, he is
listened to if he is right, and forgotten if he is wrong. But when
even learned men have once formed themselves into a body, and say ive
t and think they can impose laws upon public opinion, then public
opinion revolts against them, and with justice, for it ought to
receive laws from truth alone and not from any authority. Every
society soon sees its badge worn by the stupid, the crack-brained, and
the ignorant, proud in joining themselves to it to give themselves
airs. These people are guilty of stupidities and absurdities, and then
their excited opponents fail not to impute folly to all their
colleagues." Turgot refused to wear their intellectual badge,
but, as we shall see, he shared many of their ideas.
The Physiocrats were not merely a school of economic thought ; they
were a school of political action. Kings and princes were among their
pupils. The great French Revolution itself was influenced by their
writings. And the force of their work is still not wholly spent. But
before the origin and significance of their writings can be
appreciated it is necessary briefly to sketch the circumstances of
their time in relation to which their ideas must be considered.
The economic angl financial condition of France at the beginning of
the eighteenth century was truly pitiable. In spite of her great
natural resources, the variety of her favourable climates, the
fertility of her well-watered soil, and the thrift, industry, and
intelligence of her people, the efforts of able ministers like Mazarin
and Colbert to increase her national wealth had been rendered nugatory
by the senseless politics of the Great Monarch. Costly campaigns
abroad, ruinous extravagance at home, left the kingdom at his death,
in 1715, with a debt of 3460 million francs, of which over 3300 had
been contracted since the death of Colbert in 1683. His murderous
wars, reducing the birth-rate, increasing the mortality, and "an
act of religious intolerance, disavowed by religion"[1] the
expulsion of the Protestants had reduced the population by four
millions, or 20 per cent, since 1660.[2] Agricultural products had
fallen off by one -third since he ascended the throne. Burdens
increased while they were diminished who bore them. And competent
judges computed that two -thirds of the taxes themselves iterr up by
the cost of collection.[3]
The contemptible creatures who succeeded Louis XIV., Philip, Duke of
Orleans (the Regent), and Louis XV., squandered the national revenues
in vice and frivolities with shameless prodigality. The system of Law
(1718-1720), which is generally held responsible for a large share of
the subsequent financial trouble of France, had, it might be shown,
little or no ill effect as a whole upon the royal treasury either
immediately[4] or in the long-run, for it taught useful lessons of the
power as well as the dangers of credit, and proved by bitter
experience to masses of men the folly of striving after fortune by
gambling instead of by honest work. The Court maintained its outward y
brilliance, and the seigneurs who surrounded the king at Versailles
vied with one another in splendour and extravagance, while their
country houses were abandoned, and young labourers fled from the
gloomy farms and the hated militia to the glitter of the cities and
the security of domestic service with the great. An economic drain of
wealth from the fields to the town thus intensified the contrast
between luxury and misery, and a vicious financial system pressed with
increasing weight upon the already crushed industries of the nation.
The faille or direct tax (said to be etymologically related to our
words tallage and tallies] was imposed only upon the goods and persons
of the common people, and not on the nobles or clergy, who by a relic
of feudal fiction owed the king their personal service and not their
money, so that subjection to faille was synonymous with and incidental
to degradation from nobility. A man who could afford to buy a patent
of nobility obtained with it the privilege of exemption from taille;
and the inequality with which the tax was levied, as between place and
place, man and man, constituted an additional aggravation. The
gabelle, an indirect tax which had come eventually to stand simply for
the tax upon salt, was collected at the rate of 62 francs a quintal in
some provinces, at 33 francs 1 2 sous in others, at 2 1 francs 1 2
sous in others, while certain districts had either redeemed it or been
exempted from its operation. Except in these favoured districts every
person over eight years of age was compelled to pay on at least a
certain quantity of salt (set de devoir); and the tax was collected
with revolting harshness at a cost of about 50 per cent. The indirect
taxes were leased out to a body of financiers, the farmers-general,
who paid a fixed sum in advance year by year and purchased thereby the
taxes they collected. Armed with stringent powers they paid
domiciliary visits, seized goods suspected to be smuggled, and in
their efforts to capture smugglers (whose fate was the galleys or the
gibbet) they frequently provoked strife and bloodshed. "Those who
consider the blood of the people as nothing," says Adam Smith, "in
comparison with the revenue of the prince, may, perhaps, approve of
this method of levying taxes."
The corvee, an obligation upon the peasant to supply the state with
labour or services without payment, e.g. to work so many days in the
year on repairing the roads, was extended to the whole country in
1737, and was estimated in 1758 to yield 1,200,000 livres worth of
forced labour, though its cost to the peasants greatly exceeded this
sum, and was stated by Necker to amount to 624,000 livres a year in
Berry alone. It included also the billeting and the transport of
soldiers. The regular army was, it is true, recruited by enlistment
and not by conscription; but each district was compelled to provide
its quota for the militia; and this service was so distasteful that
the men whose names were drawn often fled to the woods or the
mountains, and were pursued by their neighbours x in arms who had no
relish for serving in their stead. Voluntary substitutes were not
accepted lest recruiting should suffer. Apart from these and other
national vexations there were the tithes of the clergy and numerous
troublesome local dues. Minute regulations fettered industry and
commerce; tolls had been lightened and simplified by Colbert in i664,
2 but Forbonnais still mentions twenty-eight on the Loire alone. Until
1754 corn could not be freely "exported" even from one part
of France to another, much less to foreign countries. And at the
peasant's own door were the innumerable fees, often for absurdly
trifling amounts, but none the less irritating, due to his feudal
lord. Financial deficit was chronic. The capital of the nation, its
industrial life-blood, ebbed away and left it weaker and weaker. Even
the seed-corn was often lacking. In the first half of the century
large territories lay waste, and over great tracts of country the poor
were reduced to live on grass and water, like the beasts of the field.
When the king asked the Bishop of Chartres how his flock fared he was
answered that they ate grass like sheep and starved like flies. The
Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand described his people without beds or
furniture, and lacking half their time the barley-bread or oaten cakes
which constituted their sole food as infinitely less fortunate than
the negro slaves of the colonies, who had at least food and raiment.
The government intendant of Bourges reported that whole families
passed two days without food, and' that in several parishes the
starving lay abed most of the day to diminish their suffering. His
colleague of Orleans refers to poor widows burning their wooden beds
and their fruit-trees for lack of fuel. Beggars abounded. Bread riots
were frequent, and so desperate that they were only quelled by lead
and cold steel. Young men and maidens refused to marry, asking why
they should add to the misery around them. And all the while taxes
were ruthlessly wrung from the poorest families. The collectors forced
doors, seized furniture and clothing, and even the last measure of
meal, and sold the very materials of the building, often for
ridiculously small sums, barely sufficient to pay the expenses of
distraint. The duties levied upon land were so onerous that some
proprietors preferred to abandon their property, and more would have
done so if the law had not confiscated the whole local property of an
owner who left his land derelict. "The people," says Taine, "is
like a man walking in a pond with water up to his chin; the least dip
in the ground, the least ripple, and he loses footing, goes under, and
suffocates. In vain ancient charity and new humanity strive to succour
him; the water is too high. Its level must abate, and the pond find
some great outlet. Till then the miserable man can breathe only at
intervals, and at every moment will run the risk of drowning."[7]
Here and there, no doubt, the people hoarded a little money and
enjoyed some surreptitious comfort; but they either bought parcels of
land, which brought home to increasing numbers the tyranny of
taxation, or they hid their money in secret hoards; for a man was
assessed according to his apparent wealth, and there was no inducement
to stock a farm well or work it to greater advantage when the rapacity
of the tax-gatherer might confiscate more than the whole of the
increased profit. Payment of taxes was wilfully delayed, law costs
were deliberately incurred, and sheriffs officers were housed and fed
for days together lest a readier payment should provoke suspicion of
greater wealth, and lead to increased assessments the following year.
The nobles, indeed, stood between the people and the crown, but it was
only, in the bitter words of Chamfort, as the hounds are between the
hunter and the hare; and the fierceness of popular indignation, which
was directed first against the agents of the royal treasury, vented
itself upon the privileged classes before it spread to the throne in
that "general upset" which the elder Mirabeau clearly
foresaw, and his son was to be instrumental in bringing to completion.
Such in barest outline were the economic woes of the ancien regime.
So deplorable a condition of things could not fail to evoke the
criticism and suggestion of thinking men. Passing by La Bruyere and
Fenelon, we come, at the end of the seventeenth century, to a
courageous, outspoken, and well-informed writer in Boisguillebert ( 1
646- 1 7 1 4),[8] a state official of Normandy, who mercilessly
exposed the blunders of administration, the misery of the people, and
the connection of one with the other. He urged upon successive
ministers plans of reform, the consolidation and reduction of taxes,
and, convinced that agriculture, the all -important business of the
country, was being stifled, he pressed for the abolition of fetters
upon internal and export trade,[9] until he was disgraced and exiled
to Auvergne as a warning against meddling importunity. In 1707 the
great soldier, Marshal Vauban, in his seventy-fourth year, printed
anonymously, for private circulation, his Dixme Royalc or proposal to
substitute for a host of other taxes a general tithe upon all classes
of men and all kinds of revenue, and died the same year, chagrined at
the king's severe disfavour, and the suppression of his book as a
social danger.[10] The army of financiers and functionaries found
their occupations menaced by this hardy plan for the simplification of
taxation. The anger of the privileged classes was easily roused by
proposals to tax them equally with others. The amour propre of the
king himself could not fail to be wounded by the rude simplicity with
which Vauban proved him to be, as St. Simon wrote in the security of
his closet, not the greatest monarch in Europe, but "a king of
tatterdemalions." In my forty years' wanderings, says Vauban in
effect, I have carefully noted the state of the people.
Boisguillebert[11] is perfectly right. Taxation has reached a pitch of
absurdity. Naked, starving mendicants swarm the streets and roads. "Of
every ten men one is a beggar, five are too poor to give him alms,
three more are ill at ease, embarrassed by debts and law-suits, and
the tenth does not represent 100,000 families.
I believe not 10,000 great or little are really well-to-do, and these
include rich merchants, officials, and the favoured of the king. Take
them away and hardly any remain." He stigmatised luxury,
privilege, public debts, and the farming of taxes; extolled labour,
agriculture, and equality before the law; and reiterated in capital
letters the warning that kings have a real and most essential interest
in not overburdening their people to the point of depriving them of
the necessaries of life. Half a century was to pass before Vauban's
ideas reappeared, in a modified form, with the Physiocrats, and then
their spokesman was clapped into prison for using similar language.
Such was the encouragement afforded to these early writers on
taxation. After Vauban they kept long silence, and the intellect of
the nation seemed to lie fallow. "The government," says
Buckle," had broken the spirit of the country." Writings on
paper money raged round the system of Law; and Melon, a former
secretary of Law, published in 1734 his overrated Essai politiquc sur
Ic commerce. The Abbe Alary had indeed founded a little club, the Club
de V Entresol[12] in 1724, which counted Bolingbroke, D'Argenson, and
the Abbe de Saint-Pierre among its members, and met in the Abbe
Alary's rooms,[13] in the Place Vendome at Paris, to discuss political
economy. But the club was closed in 1731, because the Cardinal de
Fleury, then minister, disliked its debating Government affairs.
Saint-Pierre, who had been expelled from the Academy for denying to
Louis XIV. the title of Grand, turned his prolific pen from one
project to another ; from spelling-reform to utilising
horse-chestnuts, from the advantage of a census to the disadvantage of
debasing the coinage, and dreamed a dream of Universal Peace. But his
writings, though some of them are not without economic importance,
need not detain us. And D'Argenson's economic reflections appeared
only in 1764. During the whole of the first half of the eighteenth
century the Government underwent little public criticism. It was the
calm before a storm.
After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 began a veritable
renaissance in every department of thought, in religion, in politics,
in philosophy, and in science, largely under the impulse of English
writers, and especially of Locke. The old crystallised forms of
thought and action were broken up by the solvent of free criticism and
fearless inquiry. Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois appeared in 1748. The
Encyclopedic of Diderot and D'Alembert was started in 1751. Voltaire
and Rousseau were sharpening their pens, and had even begun to write.
Gournay, appointed intendant of commerce in 1751, devoted his
attention to the English economists, translated Child and Culpeper,
and directed into the same channel the mental activity of Turgot, whom
he persuaded to translate a volume of Tucker. The original and
suggestive essays of Hume appeared in a French translation (1756). The
efforts of Du Pin,[14] Gournay, Trudaine, Fourqueux, and Machault had
assisted in wringing from the Government an edict in 1754 permitting
free trade in corn between one part of France and another ; and
Herbert had argued (Essai sur la police des grains, 1755) in favour of
free export.
But the work which heralded in the era of active and original thought
in French economics was Cantil Ion's Essai sur la nature du commerce
en general, 1755, a little volume of 430 pages duodecimo, immeasurably
superior to anything which had preceded it, and profoundly important
by the influence which it exercised over the minds of leading
writers.[15] Cantillon, who died in 1734, was an English banker of
Irish extraction. He had houses in all the principal countries of
Europe, made a great fortune out of sagacious operations at Paris
during the "system" of Law, and studied with great
penetration the general principles which regulate the production,
distribution, and consumption of wealth. His original English writings
are unfortunately lost; but his Essay was handed about in manuscript,
and a translation of part of the Essay which he made for a French
friend is all that we have remaining of him. The Mercantilists seem
always to have propounded to themselves the problem, How can
Government make this nation prosperous? Nationalism, state-regulation,
and particularism are the essence of their policy. But a man of much
travel is less prone to be trammelled by narrow views of local
circumstance, as had already been shown by Dudley North in his tract
of 1691, the Discourse of Trade, and especially by Nicholas Barbon in
his book of the same title a year before.[16]
In Cantillon and his successors we find broader and more
philosophical views of the fundamental principles which govern the
Science of Wealth at all times and in all places, though time and
place are not without their modifying effect The u or Is en general
which figure in his title are significant of much. They mark a change
from works like Mun's England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (published
1664), Malynes's Canker of England 's Commonwealth ( 1 60 1 ),
Fortrey's England's Interest and Improvement (1663), Britannia
Languens (1680), Yarranton's England's Improvement by Sea and Land
(1677, 1681), and others, to the cosmopolitan spirit which Adam Smith
was to show in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (1776) of nations in general and not of England in particular.
Cantillon sets himself to answer the questions, What is wealth? How
does it originate? What are the causes which regulate its distribution
among the different classes of society, and determine its circulation
not only within the country but between one country and another? "Land,"
he begins (and this is the keynote of physiocracy), "is the
source or material from which Wealth is extracted"; but he
continues, "human labour is the form which produces it; and
Wealth in itself is no other than the sustenance, the conveniences,
and the comforts of life." He sketches the growth of human
societies, beginning with the nomadic stage, and concludes that in all
forms of society the ownership of land necessarily belongs to a small
number ; that in modern societies, after satisfying the claims of
farmers and labourers, the surplus product is at the disposition of
the landowners, and that their mode of consuming this surplus will
determine the nature of national production. After dwelling upon the
formation of villages, hamlets, towns, and cities, he passes to a
consideration of labour, shows why the work of an agricultural
labourer cannot command such high wages as that of an artisan, and
distinguishes between the causes which regulate the difference of
wages in different industries. The supply of labour of all kinds is
determined by the demand for it; and, generally, the normal price of
all services and commodities is regulated by the cost of Production.
Without, pursuing his analysis further, or dwelling upon his masterly
account of foreign exchanges, it will be seen that this manner of
attacking the problem at once raises economic discussion to the
highest plane.[17]
It has been mentioned that Cantillon's manuscript had been handed
about before its publication. Postlethwayt plagiarised large portions
of it verbatim in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce as
early as 1751.[18] But the French translation, subsequently published,
had been for many years in the hands of the Marquis of Mirabeau,
father of the great orator and tribune of the French Revolution.
Mirabeau seems at one time to have meditated publishing this fragment
as his own work; but he eventually set himself to write a commentary
upon it, and after the Essai itself had been reclaimed from him and
given to the world in 1755 he expanded and published his commentary
under the title of LAnii des Homines, Avignon, 1756, which took the
public by storm. The anonymous author was soon revealed. He became the
lion of the hour. The people flocked to see him when he showed himself
in public. Tradesmen set up the sign-board of LAmi des Hommes, and
Mirabeau himself was so designated to the day of his death. His book
ran, it is said, through forty editions, and was widely translated.
Its peculiarities of style accounted for part of its success. The
Marquis's first work was a plea for decentralisation of local of
Economics (Harvard, U.S.A.), July 1892. An analysis of Gantillon's
essay is given in Espinas, Histoire des doctrines (conoiniques) Paris,
1891.
[missing text] … government published in 1750, the
Memoire concernant Vutilite des etats provinciaiix. The country was
divided into two groups pays d'etat and pays d\'lection> in the
first of which (consisting mainly of the frontier provinces) the
inhabitants themselves decided how to raise the money demanded from
them by royal precept, in the second, the officials of the Government
(the intendants) allotted its share of burden to each parish. Mirabeau
pleaded for a general extension of the system of the pays d'etat. His
Memoire had been attributed by D'Argenson, no mean judge, to
Montesquieu. The Ami des Homines now reminded readers of the nai've
prattle of Montaigne. Here it glowed with the fire of eloquence, there
it glittered with wit and humour, elsewhere it exhibited shrewd
observation, sober judgment, and able, though often inconsecutive,
discussion. Its success owed something to its style, where quaint
archaisms jostled with words freshminted by the author, and provoked
Quesnay to write Ou diable avez-vous pris ce style viarotique? Je ne
connais pas Marot, was the answer, mais apparemment f ai bu de la memo
eau que lui. Victor Hugo finds in him the style of Moliere and
Saint-Simon, the beau style-grand- seigneur du temps de Louis XIV. The
sub-title of the book was Traite de la Population, and its central
purpose was to show that a large population was desirable as conducive
to the wealth of the country. It was a time of peace, and the
population was already recovering from the set-back it had experienced
during half a century. But it was seen that for a long time there had
been, side by side with a diminution of population, a reduction in
national wealth; and in Mirabeau's view the problem of the statesman
was to remove the economic causes which kept down the numbers of the
people. "Men multiply," he says, borrowing from Cantillon, "like
rats in a barn, if they have the means of subsistence." "The
means of subsistence are the measure of population." The
production of food should therefore be assisted. The burdens of
agriculture should be alleviated. The small cultivator was to be
encouraged and held in honour; the idle consumer viewed with
reprobation. ..Luxury he defined as the abuse of wealth. An unequal
distribution of wealth is prejudicial to production, for the very rich
are "like pikes in a pond" who devour their smaller
neighbours. Great landowners should live upon their estates and
stimulate their development, not lead an absentee life of pleasure t
in the metropolis. Interest should be reduced, public debts
extinguished, and a ministry of agriculture created to bring to
agriculture the [text unreadable] …, to facilitate the
development, communications, drainage, and so forth.
The state is a tree, agriculture its roots,[19] population its trunk,
arts and commerce its leaves. From the roots come the vivifying sap
drawn up by multitudinous fibres from the soil. The leaves, the most
brilliant part of the tree, are the least enduring. A storm may
destroy them. But the sap will soon renew them if the roots maintain
their vigour. If, however, some unfriendly insect attack the roots,
then in vain do we wait for the sun and the dew to reanimate the
withered trunk. To the roots must the remedy go, to let them expand
and recover. If not, the tree will perish.
Such was the burden of the book which fell into the hands of Quesnay,
a doctor at the court, in attendance on Madame de Pompadour, the
mistress of the king. Quesnay, the son of an advocate,[21] had early
distinguished himself as a surgeon and physician, and had come to
court as the Abbe de Saint-Pierre had done before, and perhaps from
the same motive. This is how the Abb6 had expressed himself in a
letter to a friend: " I have taken a little opera-box to get a
better view of the principal actors on the stage of the world. I see
our Government at its headquarters, and already I perceive that it
would be easy to make it much more honourable to the king, much more
convenient to his ministers, and much more useful to the people."[22]
If these, too, were Quesnay's motives, he purchased his advantages
dearly; for, as will be found, his official position fettered his
freedom of action very considerably. He was now over sixty-three years
of age, had written nothing on economic subjects except two recent
articles, "Fermiers" (1756) and "Grains" (1757),
in the Encyclopedic of Diderot, and the courtiers by whom he was
surrounded seem to have regarded him as a harmless eccentric with a
mania for agricultural science. But there was much in Mirabeau's book
of which he approved. "The child," he wrote on the margin, "has
been nursed on bad milk: the strength of his constitution often sets
him right in the [flfrJ], but he has no knowledge of principles."
He expressed a desire to meet the author, and they had an interview,
of which Mirabeau, many years later, wrote a graphic and perhaps
somewhat fanciful account to Rousseau. Quesnay, he says, showed him
that Cantillon had set the plough before the oxen, that population was
not a means to national wealth, but vice versa. Quesnay sketched his
own ideas to the Ami des Homines^ who confesses that, much as he had
written, his mind was still swimming in an ocean of uncertainties. He
thought the doctor mad, and quitted him. But he came back the same
night, renewed the discussion, and was converted into a life-long
disciple and friend. Each found in the other the qualities lacking in
himself. Quesnay, aged, sententious, oracular, personally retiring,
timorous in action, but a hard thinker, who had carved out for himself
a consistent theory, the marquis, young (for all his forty- two
years), garrulous, diffuse, egotistic, daring, and imaginative, but
unsystematic and incapable of sustained connected thought. As an
example of his boldness take the following extract from LAmi des
Homines, in which the preface declares that he personifies la voix de
rhumanitc qui reclame ses droits. Sire, he says to the king, regard
that class of your subjects which is "the most useful of all,
those who see beneath them nothing but their nurse and yours
mother-earth; who stoop unceasingly beneath the weight of the most
toilsome labours; who bless you every day, and ask nothing from you
but peace and protection. It is with their sweat and (you know it
not!) their very blood that you gratify that heap of useless people
who are ever telling you that the greatness of a prince consists in
the value, and above all, the number of favours he divides among his
courtiers, nobility, and companions. I have seen a tax-gathering
bailiff cut off the wrist of a poor woman who clung to her saucepan,
the last utensil of her household, which she was defending from
distraint. What would you have said, great Prince?" etc. etc.
This fiery spirit was never quite kept in check by Quesnay's
influence, but the energy which lay behind it soon raised up a band of
followers for the solitary thinker of Versailles. The school of the
Physiocrats dates from this interview in July 1757.
NOTES
1. jur, Recherches historiqites sur
le systeme de Law, Paris, 1854, p. i.
2. Lavergnd, Les economises franfttis du XVIII 6 siecle, Paris, 1870,
p. 65. Taine probably overstates the case when he estimates at six
millions the deaths due to poverty and starvation alone between 1690
and 1715. L'Ancien Regime, vol. i. p. 430.
3. Quesnay, quoted by Lavergne, p. 79.
4. Those who vilify Law will find food for reflection in the fact
that at the moment when he quitted France, ruined and disgraced, the
Czar offered to place him at the head of the finances of Russia. Law
declined the offer. Lemontey, Ilisloire dc la A'Sgcncc, 1832, vol. i.
p. 342.
5. Wealth of Nations, bk. v. ch. ii. 6. See P. Clement's Colbert,
Leltrcs ct Instructions, ii. 2, 787-796.
7. Taine, UAncien Regime, vol. i. pp. 429-441. He works out the
average taxation of a small peasant proprietor (taille, etc., tithes,
and feudal dues) at nearly 82 per cent of his total net produce, P-
543.
8. Detail de la France^ 1697; Factum de la France, 1707.
9. He did not, however, desire free imports except when famine was to
be feared.
10. See the researches on this subject of A. M. de Boislisle, De la
proscription de. la dune royale, Paris, 1875. The official papers
there printed prove how much Vauban took to heart the arrits against
his book, and how rigorously they were carried out; while they
disprove the allegation that the Abbe de Beaumont, as alleged by
Voltaire and others, was its real author. The arrct which proscribed
the Dixme Royale was followed the same day, I4th March 1707, by
another suppressing Boisguillebert's Factuni dc la France as
seditious.
11. Vauban had made his personal acquaintance. Hist, of Civilisation
in England, vol. ii. p. 291, eel. 1868.
12. In the house of President Henault. A full account of the club was
written by D'Argenson, Memoires, 1825, pp. 247-269. The chatter- box
Abbe de Pomponne was the cause of its suppression. Lavergne's history
of its foundation is erroneous.
13. Sainte-Beuve devoted two of his Causeries dit f.undi lo
D'Argenson (3rd and l0th Nov. 1853), vol. xii. p. 93, edition of 1857.
It tells us that the Considerations of 1764 were a very defective
edition of the original manuscript, and that the edition of 1784, "which
for better," is still imperfect and inaccurate. The title
designed by D'Argenson himself was Jusques oh la democratic pcul clre.
admisc dans le gouvernement.
14. A farmer-general, and grandfather of Georges Sand. His tract on
the corn trade, separately printed under the title Mcnioire snr les
Bleds, 1 748, is the first plea for free trade in corn by a French
writer. It formed a chapter of his Oecononiiqties, Carlsruhe, 1745, 3
vols., rigidly suppressed, and now extant in only three copies.
15. See the fascinating essay of Jevons on Cantillon in Contemporary
Review, January 1881, "The Nationality of Political Economy."
The present writer has added some further information upon Cantillon's
life and work in the Economic Journal, vol. i. No. 2, June 1891. Kautz
points out that some of the ideas of the Physiocrats arc to be found
in Asgill, Several Assertions Proved in Order to Create Another
Species of Money than Gold and Silver, 1696, and in Vanderlint, Money
Answers all Things t 1734. It would be easy to multiply such
references, but there is no evidence that the Physiocrats were
acquainted with them.
16. On Barbon see the articles of Dr. Stephan Bauer, by whom his
importance was first fully recognised, in Palgrave's Diet, of Pol.
Econ. s.v., and in Conrad's Jahrbiicher fur Nationalokonomie und
Statistik t xxi. Bd. N.F. pp. 561-590 (1890).
17. Cf. Higgs, "Cantillon's Place in Economics," in
Quarterly Journal.
18. A fact first noticed by Mr. Edwin Cannan. See Economic Journal,
March 1896, p. 165.
19. Cf. Leibnitz in Dutens, G. G. Ldbnitii Opera omnia, Geneva, 1768,
vol. v. p. 577. Quesnay, art. "Grains" in Encyclopedic 1757.
20. This became a favourite figure with the Physiocrats, see e.g. Le
Trosne, De Fordre social, 1777.
21. According to Grand Jean de Fouchy, Eloge dc Quesnay, 1774. and
the Comte d'Albon's Aloge, 1775. Other accounts say his father was a
peasant. The truth seems to be that his father left his wife and child
at home on a small farm, and that, in effect, Ouesnay's early
childhood was that of a peasant's son. He was taught to read by a
friendly gardener at the age of twelve.
22. Lavergne, p. 5.
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