The Physiocrats
Henry Higgs
[Part 6]
We have so far considered the Physiocrats descriptively, their rise
and history, the members, the doctrines, the practical activities, and
the opponents of the school. We come now to ask ourselves the
question, What is the conclusion of the whole matter? They were the
first scientific school of Political Economy, but which of the
principles they enunciated have survived the storm and stress of
criticism, and been incorporated in the progress of science into the
wisdom of to-day? If they took the first step, how far did that step
go? In other words, what is the produit net of their teaching, and
their place in the history of economic theory?
It would, indeed, be distressing if a comparison between the most
recent economic writings the volume e.g. of Professor Marshall's Principles
of Economics and the speculations of the Physiocrats presented no
striking variation. Viewed in the light of a century and a half of
scientific progress the Physiocrats seem even to have had but an
imperfect appreciation of the central terms and radical concepts of
the science itself. Their fundamental errors were the identification
of Wealth with material objects, and of Value with Cost of Production;
their opinion that this Cost of Production was represented by the sum
of the material embodied in a commodity, and of the cost of
subsistence of those who were occupied in fashioning the raw material;
and their conviction that the shifting and incidence of taxation were
unimpeded by any effective friction. Given these propositions, most of
their conclusions follow by inexorable logic. But it is now a
commonplace of economics that the catalogue of Wealth embracing
commodities, personal qualities, and services which directly or
indirectly satisfy human wants, far transcends the narrow bounds of
material goods; that Value depends, not merely on the cost of supply,
but also on the intensity of demand, varying with the utility or power
which a certain supply of wealth possesses to satisfy the wants of
man; that the cost of production, so far as labour is concerned, is
not identical with the mere subsistence of the labourers of all kinds
who co-operate m production; and that the geometrical elegance of the
argument that all taxes fall ultimately on the land is founded upon an
unreal hypothesis. It would be absurd to maintain that a sculptor who
exercises a divine gift of art upon a block of marble adds to it only
the equivalent of his subsistence during the time he is at work; or,
in other words, that the value of the statue is equal merely to the
value of the stone and of his maintenance during the period for which
he is engaged. But the progress which we owe to Adam Smith, to
Ricardo, to Mill, to Jevons, and many others, must not blind us to the
services of the early French writers. The establishment of a clear and
cogent Theory of Value, the kernel of economic science, has come,
indeed, only in the present generation. The originality of the
Physiocrats will, perhaps, be most clearly seen by considering what
Adam Smith says of them in the Wealth of Nations.
His Fourth Book, it will be remembered, is entitled "Of Systems
of Political Economy." "The different progress of opulence,"
he remarks, "in different ages and nations has given occasion to
two different systems of political economy,[1] with regard to
enriching the people." He calls one " The Commercial or
Mercantile System," which he says "is the modern system, and
is best understood in our own country and in our own times." This
is the system of State- regulation, followed by Colbert. The other is
the system of the Physiocrats, which Adam Smith examines briefly
because he thought it Utopian,[2] as he considered Free Trade to be
also. But he discusses it with care because of its theoretical
importance. Its "ingenuity" is frequently praised, and the
author is in entire sympathy with its spirit of "allowing,"
as he says, "every man-to pursue his own interest his own way,
upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice." After a
succinct description of this "liberal and generous system,"
he observes that its "capital error . . . seems to lie in its
representing the class of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants as
altogether barren and unproductive," and upon this capital error
he offers five considerations.
First, he says, granting that this sterile class reproduces annually,
as the Physiocrats assert, "the value of its own annual
consumption, and continues at least the existence of the stock or
capital which maintains and employs it ... the denomination of barren
or unproductive should seem to be very improperly applied to it. We
should not call a marriage barren or unproductive, though it produced
only a son and a daughter, to replace the father and mother, and
though it did not increase the number of the human species, but only
continued it as it was before. . . . As a marriage which affords three
children is cer- tainly more productive than one which affords only
two, so the labour of farmers and country labourers is certainly more
productive than that of merchants, artificers, and manufacturers. The
superior produce of the one class, however, does not render the other
barren or unproductive. This criticism indicates an important
influence of the Physiocrats over Adam Smith, for no competent
economist would defend the thesis to-day that agriculture is "more
productive" of wealth than manufacture.
Secondly, he says, it is "altogether improper to consider
artificers, manufacturers, and merchants in the same light as menial
servants." For the work of the first, unlike that of the second,
fixes and realises itself in some vendible commodity which can replace
the value of wages and maintenance. The work of menial servants
consists "in services which perish generally in the very instant
of their per- formance," and these truly belong to the barren or
unproductive class. Here again Adam Smith is very near to the
doctrines of the Physiocrats, for it is now seen that all labour
productive of utility is free from the reproach of being barren. It
is, indeed, remarkable that in his unpublished article Homines,
Quesnay himself admits domestic servants to be indirectly productive,
so far as their services liberate the energies of the agricultural
classes ; and it is not a little curious that the great apostle of the
advantages of Division of Labour should uphold the position that the
specialisation of domestic service is an economic loss.
Thirdly, the consumption of artificers, etc., is not lost, for even
if they produce a value equal only to what they consume, yet their
product remains, and is so much more added to the stock of the country
than if the consumption had been by a menial or a soldier. He hints,
moreover, that the manufacturing class may save something out of the
fund allotted to them for subsistence, and these savings increase the
wealth of society. This had already been suggested by Turgot in his
Reflexions.
Fourthly, "Farmers and country labourers can no more augment,
without parsimony, the real revenue, the annual produce of the land
and labour of their society, than artificers, manufacturers, and
merchants." Indeed as division of labour, which increases
production, is susceptible of further extension in manufacture than in
agriculture, and as manufacturers, etc., "are, as this system
seems to suppose, naturally more inclined to parsimony and saving than
proprietors and cultivators, they are, so far, more likely to augment
the quantity of useful labour employed within their society, and
consequently to increase its real revenue."
Fifthly and lastly, even though the wealth of a nation consisted
altogether in the quantity of subsistence which its industry could
procure to it, yet " the revenue of a trading and manufacturing
country must, other things being equal, always be much greater than
that of one without trade or manufactures. ... A small quantity of
manufactured produce purchases a great quantity of rude produce."
And as a town draws to itself such a quantity of raw produce as
supplies not only the materials of work but also the means of
subsistence, so a trading country like Holland "draws a great
part of its subsistence from other countries live cattle from Holstein
and Jutland, and corn from almost all the different countries of
Europe."
After these criticisms comes a generous tribute to the system which, "
with all its imperfections, is perhaps the nearest approximation to
the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political
economy. . . . Though in representing the labour which is employed
upon land as the only productive labour, the notions which it
inculcates are perhaps too narrow and confined; yet in representing
the wealth of nations as consisting, not in the unconsumable riches of
money, but in the consumable goods annually reproduced by the labour
of the society, and in representing perfect liberty as the only
effectual expedient for rendering this annual reproduction the
greatest possible, its doctrine seems to be in every respect as just
as it is generous and liberal. Its followers are very numerous, and as
men are fond of paradoxes, and of appearing to understand what
surpasses the comprehension of ordinary people, the paradox which it
maintains, concerning the unproductive nature of manufacturing labour,
has not perhaps contributed a little to in- crease the number of its
admirers. . . . Their works have certainly been of some service to
their country, not only by bringing into general discussion many
subjects which had never been well examined before, but by influencing
in some measure the public administration in favour of agriculture. It
has been in consequence of their representations, accordingly, that
the agriculture of France has been delivered from several of the
oppressions which it laboured under. . . . The ancient provincial
restraints upon the transportation of corn from one province of the
kingdom to another have been entirely taken away, and the liberty of
exporting it to all foreign countries has been established as the
common law of the kingdom in all ordinary cases." It must be
remembered that all this was written before the fall of Turgot in
1776.
In his Fifth Book, dealing with Taxation, Adam Smith refers l to the
impot unique, "recommended by that sect of men of letters in
France who call themselves the economists, as the most equitable of
all taxes. All taxes, they pretend, fall ultimately upon the rent of
land, and ought therefore to be imposed equally upon the fund which
must finally pay them. That all taxes ought to fall as equally as
possible upon the fund which must finally pay them is certainly true.
But without entering into the disagreeable discussion of the
metaphysical arguments by which they support their very ingenious
theory," he proceeds to show "what are the taxes which fall
finally upon the rent of the land and what are those which fall
finally upon some other fund." The chief objection which he saw
to the impot unique, a percentage of the produit net varying of course
in its total yield with the state of the harvests, was "the
discouragement which it might . . . give to the improvement of land. .
. . The landlord would certainly be less disposed to improve when the
sovereign, who contributed nothing to the expense, was to share in the
profit of the improvement." The Physiocrats urged that their plan
drew the attention of the sovereign towards the improvement of the
land, from a. regard to the increase of his own revenue. But Adam
Smith thought no such incitement to the attention of the sovereign "
can ever counterbalance the smallest discouragement to that of the
landlord. The attention of the sovereign can be at best but a very
general and vague consideration of what is likely to contribute to the
better cultivation of the greater part of his dominions. The attention
of the landlord is a particular and minute consideration of what is
likely to be the most advantageous application of every inch of ground
upon his estate." "The principal attention of the sovereign
ought," he says, " to be to encourage, by every means in his
power, the attention both of the landlord and of the farmer, by
allowing both to pursue their own interest in their own way, and
according to their own judgment, by giving to both the most perfect
security that they shall enjoy the full recompense of their own
industry, and by procuring to both the most extensive market for every
part of their produce," by promoting internal communications, "as
well as the most unbounded freedom of exportation to the dominions of
all other princes."
Professor Oncken has stated that even to-day the physiocratic system
awaits its scientific refutation.[4] This is the language of an
enthusiast, justified only in part even if we confine our attention to
the criticisms of Adam Smith. The Earl of Lauderdale (1752-1839), a
conscientious and sympathetic student of the French economists, quotes
and translates numerous passages from their writings, the Tableau
Oeconomique, the Physiocratie, the Philosophic Rurale^ the
Aphemerides^ and from Turgot and Morellet; but he attacks their view
that "even the labour of the artificer and the manufacturer is
totally unproductive."[5] Adam Smith, he points out, was far from
consistent. In Book II. chap. i. of the Wealth of Nations he had
stated that " lands, mines, and fisheries, require all both a
fixed and circulating capital to cultivate them ; and their produce
replaces with a profit not only those capitals but all the others in
the society," while the Physiocrats had not "with all their
ingenuity done so much to support this doctrine [the sterility of
non-extractive labour] as the author of the Wealth of Nations, by the
manner he has attempted to refute it."
In Lauderdale's view "wealth can alone be increased by the means
by which it is produced"; and to this end land, labour, and
capital co-operate, and each of them, in greater or less measure,
becomes productive. George Purves, who had published under his real
name in 1815 The Happiness of States, by Simon Gray, expresses
opinions similar to Lauderdale's in All Classes Productive of National
Wealth, or the Theories of M. Quesnai, Dr. Adam Smith, and Mr. Gray,
concerning the various classes of men as to the production of Wealth
to the Community, London, 1817, but he emphasises the importance of
intelligence and enterprise as a factor in production. Simon Gray's
theory the " productive "theory was, he says, the true one,
not the "unproductive" theories of Quesnay and Smith, who
merely drew the line higher up than Quesnay without perceiving that
the landed interest derives its income from other classes quite as
much as they depend upon the landed interest. Air, heat, and water are
as necessary and useful to man as the soil. Heat is even as
extensively so. But how false and absurd would it be to say because
heat was absolutely necessary to man, directly or indirectly, in all
his operations in producing wealth, that heat is the sole source of
wealth! What the economist affirms of the soil is indeed true of human
reason (pp. 15-18).
In a shallow criticism of Adam Smith, M'Culloch has stated that,
unaware of the later Ricardian theory of rent, "his refutation of
the system of the Economists is far from satisfactory," because
when none but the most fertile soils are cultivated there is no rent
at all. The produit net is therefore by no means a natural and
necessary phenomenon in agriculture.[6] The impot unique, which had
possibly been suggested to Quesnay by a statement of Locke that all
taxes fall ultimately upon the land, is sufficiently condemned by
various arguments mentioned in the course of these lectures. It may be
added that there are further and fatal objections of a practical
character. The metayer or the peasant proprietor who produces for his
own consumption, and has but a small surplus with which to satisfy his
few and simple requirements in other words, the agriculturist who is
practically self-supporting would find himself afflicted with an
intolerable and disproportionate burden not to be shifted off, as the
Physiocrats supposed, by raising the price of his produce, for this
virtually never finds its way into the market at all, but is consumed
on the farm where it is produced. Moreover, in modern States, no
financier would venture to leave the equilibrium of public income and
expenditure at the mercy of the seasons, with a single source of
revenue fluctuating according to the vicissitudes of the weather,
neither to be predicted nor controlled. Finally, the enormous budgets
of to-day, so far from being balanced by a quarter or a third of the
produit net^ would, in many States, present a yawning deficit even
after appropriating the whole agricultural rent of the country.
Proudhon invoked the name of the Physiocrats in support of his
proposal to tax rents 100 per cent, and to impose additional taxes
also, to each of which suggestions the school of Quesnay would have
offered strenuous resistance, the first violating the sacred right of
property by arbitrary confiscation, the second a departure from the
impot unique. Mr. Henry George has, in his Progress and Poverty,
made a similar mistaken appeal to the Physiocrats, though he has the
candour to state that he has not read their original writings.[8] But
it is in the main on principles like theirs (see p. 72, supra] that
Mill proposed the taxation of the unearned increment of land, and that
philosophers like Professor Sidgwick regard unearned increment of
every kind as a preeminently suitable object of taxation provided it
can be attained. It cannot, of course, be any longer successfully
maintained that all taxes ultimately fall on the land, or that either
in theory or practice the land is a suitable object to bear, in the
first instance, the whole burden of taxes.
Malthus (1766-1834) shows in his writings an affinity with the
Physiocrats, which must undoubtedly be traced to their direct
influence. Quesnay and Mirabeau had laid down propositions which
contain the germ of his theory of population, though his views on this
subject were probably arrived at independently. But he is in close
correspondence with the ideas of the school in the importance which he
attaches to the disposable surplus produce of the country as its real
fund of wealth; and he seems, like them, to emphasise the essential
importance of a maximum production of the means of subsistence.[9] On
the other hand, he differs entirely from the rigorously deductive and
absolute frame of mind which is one of their main characteristics, and
refuses to give an unqualified adherence to their arguments for Free
Trade. Dugald Stewart, the friend and biographer of Adam Smith, held
the balance carefully between Smith and the Physiocrats, and concluded
that the French economists were more nearly right than their great
critic. Sometimes, he admits, Adam Smith, though substantially in
agreement, gains a verbal victory over them. At other times, as in his
views upon productive and unproductive labour, he is less consistent
than they. Generally speaking, the Physiocrats are more precise and
definite in their language, and more scientific in their principles,
which are founded on a more accurate metaphysical analysis. Yet the
doctrines of the Wealth of Nations are, "with a very few
exceptions, of greater practical utility" to statesmen and men of
business.[10]
Among minor economic writers we find Paley making the following
statement in his Moral Philosophy: "Let it be remembered, then,
that agriculture is the immediate source of human provision, that
trade conduces to the production of provision only as it promotes
agriculture; that the whole system of commerce, vast and various as it
is, hath no other public importance than its subserviency to this end"
(p. 476). But the chief follower of the Physiocrats in England was
William Spence, the antagonist of James Mill. Spence's Britain
Independent of Commerce, 1808, and his Agriculture the Source of the
Wealth of Britain, 1808, were published, together with two others, on
the 'Corn Bill and the East India Trade under the title of Tracts on
Political Economy, 1822. Spence endeavoured to show that even if
Napoleon succeeded in ruining the foreign trade of the country we
might still maintain our prosperity unimpaired. He examines the
doctrines of the Physiocrats with some skill. Their "grand axiom"
that agriculture is the great source of national wealth he declares to
be "undoubtedly founded in truth." But he urges against them
that in Britain the influence of manufactures has been the cause of
thriving agriculture." Agriculture and manufactures are the two
chief wheels in the machine which creates national wealth"; but
in Europe "it is the latter which communicates motion to the
former" (p. 27).
Owing to the monopoly of the soil, the mainspring of the machine upon
which the motion of these wheels depends is the class of land
proprietors. He urges that all taxes are finally paid out of the nekt
produce of the soil. Adam Smith has, he says, virtually admitted this
by laying down that all revenue must be derived from rent, profits, or
wages, for he allows that taxes on profits are always shifted on to
the consumer, and that " taxes on wages cannot finally fall upon
wages, since the wages of the labourer increase in proportion as the
price of the articles he consumes is augmented by taxation. On what,
then, can taxes fall, but upon the rent of land?" (p. 37). Yet,
says Spence, though all taxes are ultimately paid out of rent, it by
no means follows "that no tax except a land-tax should ever be
levied."
To Britain Independent of Commerce James Mill replied in his
well-known Commerce Defended, 1808, and Torrens in The Economists
Refuted, the same year, the latter combating the Physiocrats with the
arms of Lauderdale. If Spence admitted the axiom of the Economists he
must, Mill says, admit the whole of their system which is built upon
it "with logical and unquestionable exactness." But Spence
resists this conclusion. Adam Smith, he says, did not embrace their
system. Yet he adopted their axiom, for in Book II. chap. i. par. 28
of the Wealth of Nations he has the passage already quoted (pp. 132,
133, above). The truth is, nothing would be easier than to select
sentences in which Adam Smith exhibits the influence of the
Physiocrats, notably in his arguments that capital is more
productively employed in agriculture than in manufacture, still more
than in commerce, and that internal commerce is more productive of
national wealth than foreign trade. He was in Paris in 1766 when
Turgot was composing his Reflexions. He was acquainted with the
Physiocrats and their writings, and proposed to dedicate the Wealth of
Nations to Quesnay, for whom and for whose system he expressed the
highest respect.[11] But in the long retreat at Kirkcaldy he carefully
sifted their doctrines, and definitely rejected some of them. An "agricultural
system" seems, as it were, to spring from the soil in a mainly
agricultural country at an early stage of economic reflection. It is
to be found in Spain even earlier than in France; Adam Smith has
illustrated it by comparisons with Egypt and India ; and Mr. Garret
Droppers tells us[12] that it had an independent birth in Japan; while
the analogy of China so forcibly impressed the Physiocrats that they
were seized With an enthusiasm even for the Celestial government,
clerided by de Tocqueville as imbecile et arbare? In countries like
Holland or England the theory was too sharply in contrast with the
facts of commercial activity to find a favourable soil. Most of the
teaching of the Physiocrats has come down to us through Adam
Smith,[14] and even some portions of it which he accepted have since
been discarded. But much remains. The younger Mill's chapter on Unpro-
ductive Labour in which he classes as "unproductive" certain
kinds of labour and consumption admittedly useful to society as a
whole, and his chapter on Circulating and Fixed Capital in the same
book (Book I. Principles of Pol. Econ) show us how long-lived much of
the analysis of the Physiocrats has been. Their rudimentary analysis
of capital into avances foncieres, primitives, and annuelles according
as it was sunk in the soil, laid out for movable stock and plant at
the outset, or expended for annual maintenance and renewal, marks the
discriminating and systematic frame of mind with which they commenced
to reduce economic phenomena to organised science. And their other
scientific contributions of temper and method almost evade special
recognition so closely are they identified with, and incorporated in,
current doctrine.
It is their spirit working through Say and Gamier which animated
Bastiat, and still inspires the optimism of the French classical
school, not always to its advantage. Biology has shown us " the
struggle for existence," "the survival of the fittest,"
in animated nature, which rudely shakes the foundation of their
assumption that to let things alone will produce social peace and
harmony. Their followers, advocates of liberty, sometimes seem to have
surrendered the greatest of all freedom, the unfettered play of the
intellect. Content to reason in a dogmatic, unhistorical spirit from a
few general principles, they pay insufficient attention to modifying
facts in social phenomena, become unreal, and fall into scientific
stagnation. The founders of the school were, in one sense, deeply
influenced by their environment. Finding, like Malthus, the bow bent
too much in one direction, they bent it too much in the other in the
effort to make it straight. The miserable state of the nation seemed
to demand a volte face. Taxes were many and indirect. Let them be
single and direct. Liberty of enterprise was shackled. Let it be free.
State- regulation was excessive. Laissez faire! Their economic plea
for liberty is buttressed by an appeal to Nature, greater than kings
or ministers, and by an assertion of the natural, inherent rights of
man to be unimpeded in his freedom except so far as he infringes upon
that of others.
Unlike Locke and Montesquieu and Rousseau they refuse to admit that
man's natural rights are modified by any form of social contract. To
these rights even the State must bow; and the Declaration of Rights
which precedes the Constitution of 1791 borrows from them its second
article that liberty, property, and security are inalienable and
imprescriptible rights. Fanciful as it may seem that they proposed to
limit the royal power within the vague circle of what was "advantageous
to the nation" or consonant with reason (Tordre nature?), under
pain of forfeiting all claim to obedience, such a limitation is not
far removed in principle from the constitutional check of the Supreme
Court on legislation in the United States, while the economic history
of England shows us objections to royal charters to companies engaged
in foreign trade, on the ground that monopolies were in derogation of
"a right natural and human." To illustrate the social
utility of the sanctity of contract Montesquieu had devised the fable
of the Troglodytes, a simple folk who lived in virtue and happiness,
until there spread among them a disregard for the fulfilment of
engagements, rapidly followed by mutual distrust and social anarchy.
In like manner the ethical and the economic system of the Physiocrats
appeared to be but different sides of the same object. They propound,
before Bentham, the principle of enlightened self-interest. In
diametrical opposition to Mandeville's Private Vices Public Benefits
they consider that every vice is a public injury. To maximise the
produit net was, in their view, to promote the best interests of
society, and vice versa.
An action was in fact good or bad according as it increased or
decreased, directly or indirectly, the welfare of society; and they
contended that every anti-social action could be shown to diminish the
net wealth of society, every laudable action to increase it. From this
point of view they would have rejected the ridiculous paradox of
Bastiat that the State does harm even when it does good; but they
seem, like Adam Smith, to go sometimes dangerously near the doctrine
that self-interest is identical with the interest of society as a
whole. Cossa's view that they dealt a last and decisive blow at the
theory of the economic omnipotence of the State is perhaps somewhat
sanguine if we look at the world of action instead of the world of
ideas. But at any rate they went to the roots of economic and
financial conditions. They showed that taxes do not always rest where
they seem to fall, that in the long-run the State suffers by an unfair
and unequal distribution of its burdens, and, above all, that the
economic welfare of a nation may be stifled by excessive restrictions.
Their impot unique might have proved, as Voltaire said, an impot
inique; but in probity and honesty of purpose they fought earnestly
against injustice and oppression. At the Revolution the nation desired
the abolition of indirect taxes, but the war budgets defeated the
project. The modern tendency in England has shown a remarkable
movement in this direction, over 40 per cent of the national income
now coming from direct taxation, as compared with 25 per cent a
quarter of a century ago. The Treaty of Commerce with England in 1786
must be regarded as the last important success of the Physiocrats in
the field of politics. The corvees, the farming of taxes, and the
jurandes were abolished at the Revolution, and a tax was laid upon all
land without privilege or exemption.
The Physiocrats form at once the first and the most compact school to
be encountered in the history of economics. The first to share and
provoke a widespread enthusiasm for the study of economic causes and
effects, they stood boldly together daring, original, sometimes
paradoxical, but rendering great service to future ages by their
luminous and penetrating theories, which spread like a wave over the
whole Continent. The rulers of the earth did not disdain to learn from
them. And though their own country, for which they wrote and worked,
still turns a deaf ear to one part of their pleading, it must be
remembered that Adam Smith and Pitt, Huskisson, Peel, and Gladstone
have but repeated their arguments in endowing us, for better or for
worse, with our settled policy of Free Trade.
NOTES
1. Adam Smith has himself been
described as " the great founder of the industrial system, as
distinguished from the mercantile and agri- cultural systems."
Twiss, View of the Progress of Political Economy in Eiirope since the
Sixteenth Centiiry, 1847, p. 1 60.
2. "If a nation could not prosper without the enjoyment of
perfect liberty and perfect justice, there is not in the world a
nation which could ever have prospered."
3. Wealth of Nations, bk. v. ch. ii.
4. (Euvres de Quesnay, 1888, p. xix.
5. An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth , and into
the means and causes of its increase, Edinburgh, 1804, pp. 133, 293,
134, 275.
6. Wealth of Nations, edition 1839, p. 305 note. M'Culloch should
have added, to make his statement complete, the conditions that the
soils cultivated are all equally advantageous, and that there is no
monopoly of supply. This would have deprived his statement of all
practical significance.
7. The impot unique was never to exceed -fo, or at most \, of the
produit net, in other words, was to be a tax of 6s. to 6s. 8d. in the
on agricultural rent. The nature of the proposal is misunderstood not
only by Voltaire, Proudhon, and Henry George, but also in another
manner by Mr. Lecky, who describes it as "a single tax to be paid
by every man in strict proportion to his income." /fist, of
England in \Wi century, 2nd ed. 1887, vol. v. p. 370.
8. He dedicates his Protection or Free Trade? (New York, 1891) "
to the memory of those illustrious Frenchmen of a century ago,
Quesnay, Turgot, Mirabeau, Condorcet, Dupont and their fellows, who in
the night of despotism foresaw the glories of the coming day."
9. Cf. e.g. " The great position of the Economists will always
remain true, that the surplus produce of the cultivators is the great
fund which ultimately pays all those who are not employed upon the
land " (Essay on Popiilation, edition 1803, p. 435).
10. Lectures on Political Economy, vol. i. p. 306. The whole dis-
cussion is well worth reading, pp. 253-308. These lectures, delivered
at the beginning of the century, were edited by Sir W. Hamilton, and
published at Edinburgh, 1877. 2 vols. 8vo.
11. The statement often made that he kept up an active corre-
spondence with Turgot has now been disproved. See Economic Journal,
March 1896, p. 166.
12. Asiatic Society of Japan, 1895.
13. In modern times M. Le Play has held up to the admiration of "unstable";
France the morality of China as a basis of material solidity and
social permanence.
14. See Note C, Appendix
|