The Physiocrats
Henry Higgs
[Part 5]
FRANCOIS Louis VERON-DU VERGER DE FORBONNAIS (1722-1800) was one of
the chief contemporary opponents of the Physiocrats in France. He
wrote the articles "Change," "Colonies," "Commerce,"
etc., for the Encyclopedic, and translated or adapted The British
Merchant (Le negotiant anglois, 1753) from the English, and Ustaritz's
Theory and Practice of Maritime Trade from the Spanish, 1753; but he
is best known by his great works on finance, Considerations sur les
finances d'Espagne relativement a celles de France 1753-55, and
especially by his Recherches et considerations sur les finances de
France depuis isysjusqu'en 1721, 1758, a standard critical and
historical account. He concerns us chiefly by the general tenour of
his views (for his was the highest economic reputation opposed to that
of the Physiocrats), and by the writings which he directed expressly
against them. His Principes et observations economiques (Amsterdam, 2
vols., 1767), with the motto est modus in rebus is a close and weighty
criticism of the Tableau Oeconomique, and the articles "Fermiers"
and "Grains."
The Physiocrats replied in the Ephemerides of the same year. They
recognise his ability and intelligence, but regret that he dwells in
the thick darkness of Colbertism. He is, in reality, a very moderate
and level-headed writer of a practical turn. He refuses to admit that
trade and industry are sterile. Without human agency the land itself
is doomed to absolute or relative sterility, and the energy of labour
is as much a factpr in the production of wealth as the material upon
which that energy is expended. He objected to free trade and the impot
unique. He opposed privileges and exemptions from taxation, desired
moderate import duties, a reduction in the expenses of the royal
household, and recommended graduated and progressive taxes upon
articles of luxury as well as upon the land, which could not, he
maintained, be fairly saddled with the whole burden of taxation. He
lent himself to attack by maintaining the Mercantilist position that
the State should endeavour to obtain a favourable balance of foreign
trade, but shows to more advantage in controverting the dictum of
Quesnay that "dearness and abundance constitute opulence,"
though he does not realise the full force of the paradox.
While the Physiocrats stood for laissez-faire, he upheld State
regulation; and his official position as Inspector-General of Mints,
and as a confidant of the Due de Choiseul and Silhouette,
Comptroller-General of Finance, contributed to cause the Physiocrats
to regard him as their most redoubtable adversary. Towards the close
of his life he wrote in Du Font's journal LHistorien (1795),
supporting the editor's efforts in the Cornell des anciens. But this
reconciliation did not extend to his economic views. His Elements du
Commerce, 1754, was reprinted in 1796, with the addition of portions
of the Principes, in which some of his strictures upon the Physiocrats
were repeated. He pays tribute to the originality and substantial
value of their speculations, while protesting against the extravagant
length to which they were carried.
Widely different from the matter-of-fact Forbonnais, whose bent of
mind is comparable to that of the German cameralists, was the Utopian
Abb de Mably (1709-1785), whose criticisms of Mercier de la Riviere
are, however, by no means to be despised. Fastening upon the earlier
political and philosophical chapters of the Ordre naturel et cssentiel
des Societes politiques, which Daire has omitted from his
Physiocrates, and passing by the later, more strictly economic,
chapters which Daire has printed, he published in 1768 his Doutes
proposes aux Philosophes economistes sur V Ordre naturel et essentiel
des Societe's politiqucs in the form often letters addressed "to
the author of the fLpJicinc rides du Citqyen" He begins as
follows: "Sir, I have long been, like you, the disciple of the
celebrated philosophers whom you call your masters. How many truths do
we not owe to them on the nature of taxes, on the means of making
agriculture and trade prosper! After having exhausted these matters,
one has learned with pleasure that our masters meditated still greater
discoveries, and were going to deal with the first principles of
society. . . . These hopes, I will admit, sir, were nevertheless
accompanied by some misgivings. It was seen that our philosophers had
a kind of contempt for the peoples whom we were most accustomed to
respect, and exhibited a predilection for the government of China . .
. ; but in the fear of blaspheming against unknown truths one waited
in silence for the Oracle to speak with less of mystery." Now
that the Oracle has spoken, the reader is unconvinced, and seeks
further explanations.
His first letter may be thus summarised. How can property in one's
person, in movable things, and in land be "three sorts of
property inseparably united"? The first may exist (as in
communism) without the second, and (witness the Iroquois, the Hurons,
and the Spartans of old) without the third. Landed property is an
arbitrary human institution. You will say that property is a stimulus
to labour. But has it not introduced idleness into the world? And are
avarice and gratification alone capable of stirring the human heart,
or might not the love of distinction, honour, and glory produce
greater effects than property itself? The Ordre naturel seems, after
all, to be contrary to nature. On landed property follow unequal
fortunes and all their attendant vices of wealth and poverty, the rich
despising the poor, injustice, tyranny, and oppression. Nature meant
us to be equal, gave us the same needs, and united us by social
qualities which would have made us happy, but wealth and poverty
engendered brutality and ferocity.
It would be vain to seek to go back to nature, for property creates
its own supporters, and an attempt to abolish it would provoke greater
disorders than those we fly from. But why not seek palliatives? Why
narrow ourselves to extend the culture of the fruits of the earth and
not the culture of the social qualities? If avarice, ambition, and
vanity were abolished, men would be happier even with less wealth.
Property is unnatural and anti-social. True, nature may have given one
man greater strength than another, but this is no reason for greater
individual wealth, unless force and ruse are to be glorified. Modern
philosophers present the abuses of our passions as laws of nature.
Admitting that man's physical needs contributed to the establishment
of society, surely moral causes have co-operated. Man is not a
physical machine, but an inseparable blend of the physical and the
moral. No doubt it is physically impossible to live without
subsistence, but so it is to live in society without scfcial
qualities, and these have contributed the greater share to the
establishment of society. Agriculture was designed for society, and
not society for agriculture. If we, like animals, concerned ourselves
only with subsistence, we should, like them, be incapable of society.
Justice, prudence, courage, are as necessary as the fruits of the
earth. Without them we should be devastated by foreigners. The
cultivation of men and the social virtues is the basis of social
happiness: let our fields come after.
The communistic feeling which appears in this first letter becomes
stronger and more evident as he proceeds, but his remarks on communism
may be omitted without weakening the rest of his criticism, which
proceeds as follows: Why are the rulers and magistrates of La
Riviere's ideal society co-proprietors of the produit net? Confidence,
esteem, and respect should be their sufficient reward. Corruption
follows upon money-payments to them and to soldiers. It is
unreasonable to expect a labourer to be satisfied that the best
possible state of society is one which leaves him in a pitiful
condition, while large landowners live in luxury. Equality alone
produces contentment.
The pretended union of society is a fiction. Why should I be
satisfied to play the miserable role of poverty, while others, I know
not why, have the fat part of the rich? Moreover, the conomisUs are
strangely inconsistent. Sometimes they regard man as a browsing
animal, concerned only with his nourishment, the maximum production of
the fruits of the earth his social ideal. When they deal with him as
an intelligent being, he ceases to be a voracious animal and becomes
an angel, docile to the manifestations of reason (evidence). Evidence
appears and passions are respectfully silent. Would to Heaven it were
true! But passions govern the world; and men reck not of Evidence,
which changes from time to time like other fashions, but are ruled by
opinion. Moral and political truths are not like geometrical
propositions. Euclid is unassailable, but his terms are simple and
clear, while our problems have a hundred different facets, and
prejudice and private interest pervert the mind. Do not be too
confident in the victory of reason over passion. One error gives way
to another, and new passions arise when the old are gone.
Passing next to the constitution of ideal society, he asks: If
evidence is so convincing, why trouble about the forms of government?
Every government would be equally good. The author would need only to
tell us of the necessary public schools, and the doctrinal works which
the philosophers should hasten to compose.[1] Certainly laws should be
just, but no precept was ever better known and more neglected : and
the injustice of laws is directly proportioned to the inequality of
fortunes. Your magistrates are to be perfectly wise, but such men are
rare out of China, where the fcconomistes think nature has been
pleased to mould a nation of sages. The magistrates are a check upon
the imperfections of the Despot, but why should not the magistrates be
imperfect too? It would have been simpler to make the Despot
infallible at once; and if he differ from the magistrates, will not
confusion and arbitrary despotism arise? The crown is to be
hereditary. By what secret do you ensure a succession of enlightened
Despots in lineal descent ? You say that in the last resort the nation
itself is the judge, but its organised coercive power is centred in
the Despot, who thus by a vicious circle is the check upon himself.
The rhapsodies of some writers over the agriculture of China have
bewitched the author to such a point that he wished to copy their
government.
He now descends into a detailed examination of the reports of
missionaries and others upon the history and condition of China, which
he finds upon many points to be contrary to reason and experience, and
he concludes that the writers have been misled or mistaken. Even if it
were not so, a horde of inhabitants, slavishly obedient to custom,
free from the fear of foreign wars, and surrounded by no redoubtable
enemies, but too timorous and effeminate to make head even against the
Tartars, would be no model for the progressive people of France, with
whom martial qualities are a condition of national existence. The
Emperor's wants are satiated by immense wealth, and he has no need to
increase the contributions of his people. But what parallel does this
afford for France?[2]
He criticises vigorously La Riviere's opinions upon the necessity of
separating the legislative and the executive power, and of avoiding a
democratic or even aristocratic assembly of lawgivers. He points to
the example of England, and pleads that until humanity is infallible
society must decide upon the probable advantages of contemplated
changes by a majority of votes. Morals deserve the principal attention
in politics; good or bad, they decide the fate of States.
In conclusion he says: "If I have thought that I find nothing
but errors and a sophisticated and dangerous doctrine in the first two
parts of the Ordre naturel et essentiel des Societes y I will say with
the same sincerity that the third part of that work presents a great
number of important truths on taxation, agriculture, and commerce. I
might have wished to discuss a certain thirty-fifth chapter,[28] where
I think I see many errors mixed with a few truths, but this would need
a work which I have not the courage to undertake. I await your
explanations with the greatest impatience, and though you may perhaps
regard me as a spirit rebellious to evidence^ whose conversion cannot
be hoped for, I pray you not to refuse them to me." This last
letter is dated 27th October 1767. The phmerides replied in a series
of seven articles (1768-69), which profess to clear up the doubts
expressed.
These wordy disputations of secluded philosophers are not without
great practical importance. It was an age of ideas, an "age of
paper" as Carlyle has epigrammatically declared and there were
men of action eager to receive ideas and to put them into practice.
The important position of Mably in the history of communism does not
fall within our subject.[4] But it is necessary to add that the Poles
begged Mably to frame their laws, and that he went to Poland for this
purpose and published in 1771 a work Du gouvernement de la Pologne.
Still more important is the fact that the American Congress desired
him to draw up a constitution, which led to his Observations sur le
gouvernement et les lots des tats-Unis d'Amerique, 1784.
The title of Mably's book was very likely suggested by the
philosophic doubts of Descartes. The Doutes sur la theorie de Vimpot,
1761, a reply to Mirabeau, is the anonymous work of Le Pessellier.
Most of the important writings of the Physiocrats called forth a "refutation"
in some form or another. Messance wrote to disprove the thesis of
L'Ami dcs Homines that the population of France was decreasing.
Riviere (not Le Mercier de la Riviere) published in 1761 L'Ami de la
Paix, ou rfyonse a la theorie de Vimpot du Marquis de Mirabeau, Of
many other works directed against the impot unique upon land, it may
suffice to mention Guiraudet's Erreurs des Economistes sur Vimpot in
1790; the Marquis de Casaux's Absurdite de Vimpot territorial, 1790;
Considerations sur I'effet de Vimpot, 1794; and J. Tifaut de la Noue's
Reflexions philosophiques sur Vimpot, 1774. The Ordre naturel was not
to escape with the onslaught of Mably. Voltaire (1694-1774), provoked
by the injudicious, exaggerated praise of Galitzin[5] and others, and
irritated as well by the arrogant and sectarian spirit as by the
conclusions of the author, took up his pen "in a moment of
humour," as his editor tells us, and perpetrated a witty attack
upon the book (which he had probably never read) and upon the
Economises as a whole. Lhomme aux quarante ecus, 1767, though flippant
and shallow, is a very smart satire charged with Gallic humour and
vivacity which might have effectually laughed down a less earnest and
strenuous body of men. It makes fun of statisticians, theoretical
financiers, physiocrats, geologists, doctors, biologists,
ecclesiastics, and others ; but the Physiocrats are in the forefront.
An extract will give the best idea of the form and nature of the
attack:
"I am happy to make known to the universe that I have a piece of
land which would be worth 40 crowns[6] a year net but for the taxes.
"There appeared several edicts of a few persons who, finding
themselves at leisure, govern the State from their fireside. The
preamble of these edicts ran that the legislative and executive power
is born by divine right co-proprietor of my land, and that I owe it at
least the half of what I eat. The enormity of the maw of the
legislative and executive power made me cross myself earnestly. What
if this power, which presides over the essential order of societies,
were to have all my land, which would be still more divine than ever!
"Monsieur the comptroller-general knows that I only used to pay
12 livres in all, that it was a very heavy burden for me, and that I
should have succumbed if God had not given me the genius to make
wicker baskets, which helped me to support my poverty. How then can I
all at once give the king 20 crowns?
"The new ministers said also in their preambles that only land
ought to be taxed, because everything comes from the land, even the
rain, and that consequently there are only the fruits of the earth
which owe taxes.
"One of their bailiffs came to me in the last war; he demanded
of me for my quota three bushels of corn and a sack of beans, the
whole worth twenty crowns, to maintain the war which they were
carrying on the reason of which I have never known, having heard
merely that in this war my country had nothing to gain and much to
lose. As I had then neither corn nor beans nor money, the legislative
and executive power had me dragged off to gaol and they carried on the
war as best they could.
"Coming out of my prison with nothing but my skin on my bones, I
met a plump and ruddy man in a carriage with six horses; he had six
man-servants, and gave each of them in wages the double of my income.
His steward, as ruddy as he, had a salary of 2000 francs, and robbed
him of 20,000 a year. His mistress cost him 40,000 crowns in six
months: I had known him formerly in the time when he was less rich
than I. He told me, to cheer me up, that he had 400,000 livres a year.
Then you pay 200,000 to the State said I to him, to carry on the
advantageous war which we have; for I, who have only my 120 livres,
have to pay half of them?
"I?" said he, "I contribute to the needs of the State?
You are poking fun, my friend; I have succeeded an uncle who had
gained eight millions at Cadiz and Surat; I have not an inch of land:
all my property is in securities; I owe the State nothing; it is for
you who are a landed gentleman to give half of your subsistence. Do
you not see that if the Minister of Finance required of me some
assistance for the country he would be a misguided idiot; for
everything comes from the land; money and notes are only tokens of
exchange; instead of staking at cards a hundred bushels of wheat, a
hundred oxen, a thousand sheep, and two hundred sacks of oats, I wager
piles of gold which represent these disgusting commodities. If, after
putting the impot unique on these commodities, they were still to ask
me for money, do you not understand that they would be getting it
twice over? My uncle sold at Cadiz two millions of your corn and two
millions of cloth made with your wool; he gained over 100 per cent in
these two affairs. You see clearly that this profit was made upon land
already taxed; what my uncle bought of you for ten sous he sold for
over fifty francs in Mexico; and, all expenses paid, he came back with
eight millions.
"You perceive of course that it would be a horrible injustice to
require of him again a few oboles over the ten sous he gave you. If
twenty nephews like me, whose uncles had gained, in the good time,
eight millions at Mexico, Buenos Ayres, Lima, Surat, or Pondicherry,
only lent the State 200,000 francs apiece in the urgent need of the
country, it would produce four millions. How horrible! Pay, my friend,
you who enjoy in peace a clear and net income of forty crowns, serve
well your country, and come now and then to dine with my servants.
"This plausible speech made me think a good deal, but did not
console me much."[7]
Voltaire became better acquainted with the Physiocrats and their work
in later years and praised them very highly. His admiration of Turgot
as man, philosopher, and minister was unbounded.[8] He wrote to Du
Pont in 1774: "J'ose feliciter la France que M. Turgot soit minis
tre et qutil ait un homme tel que vous pres de lui" And in his
Fragments sur Vhistoire he says: "I have read the Jipkemfrzdes du
Citoyen, a work worthy of its title. This journal, and the good
articles upon agriculture in the Encyclopedic, are enough, in my
opinion, for the instruction and happiness of a whole nation. ... I
have written nothing upon agriculture because I should never have been
able to do anything better than the Ephemerides" Like Mably,
therefore, Voltaire was a partial adherent as well as, in some
respects, a formidable opponent of the Physiocrats. The elder Mirabeau
hated him heartily. In one terrible sentence he accuses him of
breathing a leper on the human race,[9] and his indignation on reading
La Pucelle was so great that he "flung the book physically into
the fire."
Hardly less self-restrained than Voltaire himself was the Abbe
Galiani (1728-1787), a Neapolitan envoy at the Court of Paris, and one
of the wittiest writers who ever dealt with economic questions. The
little Abbe (he was only 4-J feet in stature) was the pet of the Paris
salons; and there must have been many who found the Physiocrats too
dry and dull to be read, who eagerly devoured the amusing writings of
Voltaire and Galiani. In his Dialogues surle com- merce des bles,
Londres, 1770, translated from the Italian by Diderot, Galiani took up
a position nearly approaching that of the extreme wing of the modern
historical economists. Abstract principles are no safe guide of
commercial policy. Corn laws which are good in one time or place may
be bad in another. The best policy for France is not necessarily the
one which has proved best in England, Holland, or Italy, or even in
the France of Colbert's time, which was a different France from that
of to-day. The statesman who admired Colbert should not imitate him,
but ask himself, "What would Colbert do if he were here now?"
Land cannot be the sole source of wealth, because Geneva, Frankfort,
Lucca, and other free cities are rich, with little land and that
little infertile.
The man in the comedy whose mania was to turn the whole of his
country into seaports was hardly more foolish than the Physiocrats
whose proposed free trade in corn might do very well for a country
like Holland, which has to get her corn from abroad. The best of all
systems is to have no system. Manufacture is a kind of production, for
it adds to the raw material (elle ajoute a la matiere premiere).
Commerce also adds freight to raw material, and is thus a source of
subsistence to many. Not only corn laws are desirable in some
circumstances, but even bread laws and State granaries. But in no case
can England be a model for France. England is the most complicated and
artistically-contrived political machine the world has ever seen. She
is at once agricultural, manufacturing, martial, commercial, and is
really all seaport. Everything is peculiar in England character,
manners, soil, climate, products, etc. She takes the treasures of
Bengal to stake them at Newmarket, and exercises her troops (sailors)
when carrying on her foreign trade. In fine the book is a clever
dissertation upon its motto, a line of Horace:
In vitium ducit culpae fuga, si caret arte.
"You are the only sensible man I know," says the Marquis de
Roquemaure, one of his interlocutors, to the Chevalier Zanobi
(Galiani), "who is against the export of corn." "I am
against nothing," is the repartee, "but the export of common
sense." Galiani complained in later years that no one had
understood the purport of his book, and that what he had meant his
readers to infer was that free export was impossible under a despot,
and therefore impossible in France. This is in keeping with his
definition of eloquence as "the art of saying everything without
going to the Bastille": but the reader, even now, will find it
difficult to read into the book the intention suggested. The Dialogues
met with great success. Voltaire said Plato and Moliere seemed to have
combined to write it. Turgot was much struck by its elegance and gay
wisdom, though he noted its inconsistencies. The liphemerides rushed
into the lists. In the number dated December 1769, but published
later, Du Pont replied to Galiani. The next month, and more
effectually, Baudeau essayed the task. Roubaud wrote a refutation in
the Gazette die Commerce. In 1770 appeared Morellet's Refutation (see
p. 97, supra]; and Mercier de la Riviere brought out a pamphlet
entitled L'Interet general de VEtat, ou la liberte du commerce des
bles etc. avecla refutation d'un nouveau systeme publie par V Abbe
Gatiam, etc., Amsterdam and Paris, 1770, to which the abbe answered by
La Bagarre, still unpublished. Galiani, now returned to Italy, kept up
a correspondence with Paris in which he overwhelmed the Physiocrats
with persiflage for their ennui narcotique, and mockingly proposed for
himself a statue on which a Latin inscription was to declare that he
had "wiped out the economists, who were sending the nation to
sleep "economistis deletis qui rempublicam obdormiebanty Grimm
and Bachaumont followed his cue in their literary correspondence, and
reviled the Physiocrats for their dulness and their arrogance.
Graslin (1727-1790), a receiver-general of taxes at Nantes, was a
serious economical writer, who stood up fairly and squarely against
the doctrines of the impot unique and the territorial source of
wealth, with an amount of ability unsurpassed by any of their critics.
When Turgot offered a prize for an essay on the incidence of indirect
taxation, Graslin had the courage to compete with an anti-physiocratic
essay which drew forth a reply from Turgot.[11] The prize was awarded
to Saint -Peravy,[12] but Graslin's essay was given honourable
mention. In 1767 appeared his Essai Analytique sur la Richesse et sur
rimpot, Londres, arguing that the produce of the land is wealth, even
though it be equal merely to the cost of production, a proposition
which the Physio crats would not have disputed, and that industry
applied to raw material is as much wealth as the raw material itself.
So far from all taxes falling ultimately on land, he contended that
taxes levied on the land might ultimately be shifted on to consumers.
His Correspondence contradictoire with Baudeau, London, 1779, well
repays perusal as a capable discussion on both sides of the doctrines
of the school.
Necker (1732-1804), the opponent of Turgot in action as well as in
theory, ranged himself with Forbonnais on the side of
State-regulation, a fact which did not prevent him from making a
fortune by speculating in corn during the brief triumph of free trade
after 1764. His loge of Colbert, 1773, and his works Sur la
Legislation et le commerce des Grains, 1775, and De I' administration
des finances de la France, 1784, lose no opportunity of emphasising
his dissent from the doctrines of Laissez-faire and the Tableau
Oeconomique. His declamatory, appeals to the rights of humanity and
attacks upon landed property, though probably incited by an ambitious
desire to secure political popularity, bring him into close harmony
with State-socialists, who, like himself, desired a large intervention
of the Government; and the Physiocrats had always to reckon with him
as a determined adversary. His Mtmoire au roi on municipal government
plagiarised Mirabeau's Memoire on the subject (see p. 20, supra}.
The most sarcastic of all the writers against Quesnay and his school
was the crack-brained and contentious Linguet (1736-1794), a lawyer of
much ability. In an attack upon Montesquieu, he stated that society
lives by the destruction of liberty, as carnivorous beasts live on
their prey. This produced a reply from Morellet, the Thtorie du
paradoxe, 1775. Turning upon Morellet, Linguet wrote a Thcorie du
Libelle ou Fart de calomnier avec fruit, 1775, in which he bursts into
a tirade against the Physiocrats, quoted in the Dictionnaire de
fAconomie Politique, I852.[13] He had already assailed them in his
Reponse aux docteurs modernes . . . avec la refutation du sy sterne
des philosophes economistes, Londres, 1771, and returned to the charge
in company with Mallet du Pan, in his Annales Politiques 1778, vol.
iii. No. xx. p. 275, His diatribes amount to little more than sneers
at the occult character of their school and doctrines.[14 He
considered bread a slow poison, and was guillotined in 1794 for having
calumniated lepain y la nourriture du peuple. His attack on the
Tableau Oeconomique has been recently studied in a monograph by Ad.
Philipp, Zurich, 1896.
Of other continental opponents of the Physiocrats it must suffice to
mention Johann Jakob von Moser, whose A nti-Mirabeau appeared in
I77i;[15] Pfeiffer, who wrote Der Anti-Physiokrat, 1780; D ohm, the
correspondent of Mauvillon,[16] and author of Knrzc Darstellung der
physiokratische Systems, Cassel, 1778; and Von Sonnenfels, Grundsatze
der Polizei, Handlung und Finanz, Vienna, 1765.
NOTES
1. Mercier de la Riviere responded
to this challenge by his book DC V instruction publique, 1775. See
supra, p. 88.
2. It is curious that Mably does not see here, and especially in his
later writings, that he exposed himself to the same line of criticism
with regard to the different circumstances of different countries, in
his unbounded praise of Sparta. Mutalo nomine de te fabula narratur.
What China was to the Physiocrats, Sparta was to Mably. More- over,
Spartan society was based on slavery.
3. This chapter deals with international relations. See sufira, p.
73.
4. It is discussed by A. Sudre, Histoire du Communzsme, 1849.
5. See p. 69.
6. The cu of 3 livres: 40 ecus =120 livres was the sum which Mercier
de la Riviere considered sufficient for the existence of each citizen
in a physiocratic society.
7. Condorcet defended the Physiocrats against r this sally in his
edition of Voltaire. See also A. Batbie, Llhomme aux quarante t'cus et
les Physiocrates.
8. See Dtpitre a un homme, written on Turgot's fall, his letters and
memoirs addressed to Turgot, and especially his Diatribe d rauteurdcs
Ephtme'rides (Baudeau), Geneva and Paris, 1775, in which he describes
Turgot as better informed than Sully, with as large views as Colbert,
and with more true philosophy in his mind than either one or the
other.
9. II a sotifflt la ttpre sur le genre humain. Lomenie, vol. ii. p. r
266.
10. See for a recent study of Galiani and the Physiocrats, Frank Blei
in the Berner Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Nationalokonomie, No. 6.
Berne, 1895.
11. (Euvres, Paris, 1844, p. 439. Du Pont also replied in his Lettre
d Saint -Pdravy, fcphtmtrides, 1768, tome ii.
12. See p. 76, supra.
13. s.v. Physiocrates, vol. ii. p. 361.
14. See the quotations in Note B, Appendix.
15. A reply to F. N. Vierordt's Von den Ursprung und Fortgang neuen
Wissenschaft, Carlsruhe, 1770, 8vo, a German translation of Du Font's
Origine et progrh tfune science nouvelle.
16. See p. 100.
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