The Physiocrats

The Physiocrats
Henry Higgs

2001
First Edition: The Macmillan Company, 1897
This Edition:
Batoche Books Limited
52 Eby Street South
Kitchener, Ontario
N2G 3L1
Canada
email: batoche@gto.net
ISBN: 1-55273-064-6


Contents
Preface............................................................................................... 5
I: Rise of the School........................................................................... 6
II: The School and Its Doctrines. ..................................................... 17
III: The School and Its Doctrines (contd.)....................................... 29
IV: Activities of the School.............................................................. 43
V: Opponents of the School. ............................................................ 55
VI: Influence of the School. ............................................................. 66
Appendix.......................................................................................... 77
Authorities....................................................................................... 80
Notes................................................................................................ 82
Preface
This little volume consists of lectures delivered before the London School
of Economics in May and June of the present year. Impossible though it
was found to give a truly adequate account of the Physiocrats in these
six lectures, it has been thought that they may perhaps furnish a useful
introduction to a subject upon which no book has yet been written in the
English language, though its study has, during the last seven years, been
deemed worthy to engage the active attention of many leading econo-
mists on the Continent of Europe. In Switzerland, Professor Oncken of
Berne, and Professor Stern of Zurich; in Germany, Professor Knies of
Heidelberg, and Professor Hasbach of Kiel; in France, M. Schelle; in
Austria, Dr. Bauer of Brunn, and Dr. Feilbogen of Vienna, are the most
noteworthy recent contributors to our knowledge of this important chapter
of economic theory. More hesitation would have been felt in publishing
these lectures if M. de Lavergne’s charming essays on the French econo-
mists of the eighteenth century had been translated into English. But the
materials brought to light since 1870 by the researches of Professor
Oncken, and the brilliant discoveries of Dr. Bauer, would have made it
necessary to bring his work up to date, while it is evident that in choos-
ing the subjects for his cabinet of cameos Lavergne was influenced rather
by the fact that two of them (the Abbé de St. Pierre and the Marquis de
Chastellux) were once, like himself, members of the French Academy,
than by their intrinsic importance as economists, while they cannot, in
any case, be ranked among the Physiocrats. The French writer’s ex-
ample has been followed in the effort to make the lectures interesting.
To this end gleanings of research and minuter points of difference among
authorities have been deliberately sacrificed where they appeared to be
of secondary importance. For the same reason critical and doctrinal
6/Henry Higgs
comment has been restricted within the narrowest limits. The reader
who desires fuller information will turn to the monographs mentioned in
the lectures, and, above all, it is hoped, to the original works of the
Physiocrats themselves.
HAMPSTEAD, LONDON, 1896.
I: Rise of the School.
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 advo-
cates 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 ridicu-
lous) to the meanest intelligence. To Taine, as to many others, they made
powerfully for revolution. To Carlyle, who speaks ironically of “victo-
rious 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 material-
ism; 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 Loménie a bundle of contradic-
tions— 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 pub-
lished 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 com-
pilers 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 transi-
tory success followed by complete and lasting reaction. To Léon Say
their principles, after suffering reverses in the eighteenth century, have
dominated the nineteenth. Of many serious writers these, anxious for
The Physiocrates/7
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 amplifica-
tions which make up nine-tenths of their literary activity. Yet this mas-
tery 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 per-
sonal 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 com-
bination 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 iso-
lated 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 we, 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 stu-
pidities and absurdities, and then their excited opponents fail not to im-
pute folly to all their colleagues.” Turgot refused to wear their intellec-
tual 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
8/Henry Higgs
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 and 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 were eaten 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
immediately4 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 brilliance, and the
seigneurs who surrounded the king at Versailles vied with one another
in splendour and extravagance, while their country houses were aban-
doned, 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 taille or direct tax (said to be etymologi-
The Physiocrates/9
cally 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 taille was synony-
mous with and incidental to degradation from nobility. A man who could
afford to buy a patent of nobility obtained with it the privilege of ex-
emption from taille; and the inequality with which the tax was levied, as
between place and place, man and man, constituted an additional aggra-
vation. 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 12 sous in others, at 21 francs
12 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 (sel 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.”[5] The corvée, 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 esti-
mated 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 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 com-
10/Henry Higgs
merce ; tolls had been lightened and simplified by Colbert in 1664,[6]
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 beastsof
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 cloth-
ing, 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 suffo-
cates. 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 com-
fort; but they either bought parcels of land, which brought home to
The Physiocrates/11
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 fol-
lowing 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 be-
tween 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 régime.
So deplorable a condition of things could not fail to evoke the criticism
and suggestion of thinking men. Passing by La Bruyère and Fénélon,
we come, at the end of the seventeenth century, to a courageous, outspo-
ken, and well-informed writer in Boisguillebert (1646–1714),8 a state
official of Normandy, who mercilessly exposed the blunders of adminis-
tration, the misery of the people, and the connection of one with the
other. He urged upon successive ministers plans of reform, the consoli-
dation 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 dis-
graced and exiled to Auvergne as a warning against meddling importu-
nity. In 1707 the great soldier, Marshal Vauban, in his seventy-fourth
year, printed anonymously, for private circulation, his Dixme Royale 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, cha-
grined 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 taxa-
tion. 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
12/Henry Higgs
forty years’ wanderings, says Vauban in effect, I have carefully noted
the state of the people. Boisguillebert11 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 190,000 families. I believe not
10,000 great or little are really well-to-do, and these include rich mer-
chants, 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 us-
ing 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,12 “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 politique sur le commerce. The
Abbe Alary had indeed founded a little club, the Club de I’Entresol, 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 Vendôme 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 disad-
vantage 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’s14 economic reflec-
tions 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
The Physiocrates/13
forms of thought and action were broken up by the solvent of free criti-
cism and fearless inquiry. Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois appeared in
1748. The Encyclopedie 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 sugges-
tive essays of Hume appeared in a French translation (1756). The ef-
forts of Du Pin,15 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 Cantillon’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.16 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 prob-
lem, 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.17 In Cantillon and his succes-
sors 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 words en général 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 Com-
14/Henry Higgs
monwealth (1601), Fortrey’s England’s Interest and Improvement
(1663), Britannia Languens (1680), Yarranton’s England’s Improve-
ment 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 ques-
tions, What is wealth? How does it originate? What are the causes which
regulate its distribution among the different classes of society, and de-
termine 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 con-
tinues,” human labour is the form which produces it; and Wealth in
itself is no other than the sustenance, the conveniences, and the com-
forts of life.” He sketches the growth of human societies, beginning with
the nomadic stage, and concludes that in all forms of society the owner-
ship of land necessarily belongs to a small number; that in modern soci-
eties, 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 produc-
tion. 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 differ-
ence 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. With-
out 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.18
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 1751.19 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
The Physiocrates/15
L’Ami des Hommes, 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 L’Ami 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 government published in 1750, the
Mémoire concernant l’utilité des états provinciaux. The country was
divided into two groups—pays d’état and pays d’élection, in the first of
which (consisting mainly of the frontier provinces) the inhabitants them-
selves 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 gen-
eral extension of the system of the pays d’état. His Memoire had been
attributed by D’Argenson, no mean judge, to Montesquieu. The Ami
des Homines now reminded readers of the naive 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 some-
thing to its style, where quaint archaisms jostled with words freshminted
by the author, and provoked Quesnay to write Où diable avez- vous pris
ce style marotique? Je ne connais pas Marot, was the answer, mais
apparemment j’ai bu de la même eau que lui. Victor Hugo finds in him
the style of Molière and SaintSimon, the beau style-grand-seigneur du
temps de Louis XIV. The sub-title of the book was Traité de la Popula-
tion, 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 produc-
tion 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
16/Henry Higgs
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 in the metropolis. Interest should be reduced, public debts
extinguished, and a ministry of agriculture created to bring to agricul-
ture the succour of applied science, to facilitate the development of ca-
nals, communications, drainage, and so forth. The state is a tree, agri-
culture its roots,20 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 mis-
tress of the king. Quesnay, the son of an advocate,21 had early distin-
guished himself as a surgeon and physician, and had come to court as
the Abbé de Saint-Pierre had done before, and perhaps from the same
motive. This is how the Abbé had expressed himself in a letter to a
friend: “I have taken a little opera-box to get a better view of the princi-
pal actors on the stage of the world. I see our Government at its head-
quarters, 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 Encyclopédie 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 end, 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
The Physiocrates/17
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 lack-
ing in himself. Quesnay, aged, sententious, oracular, personally retir-
ing, timorous in action, but a hard thinker, who had carved out for him-
self 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 L’Ami des Hommes, in which
the preface declares that he personifies la voix de I’humanité qui réclame
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.
II: The School and Its Doctrines.
Francois Quesnay, the founder of the school of the Économistes (or, as
they came to be called in later years, the Physiocrates), was born at
Mere near Versailles on the 4th of June 1694, the same year as Voltaire,
and died at Versailles on the 16th December 1774, the same year as
Louis XV. His first published work was Observations sur les effets de
la saignee, 1730, in which he successfully opposed the theories of bleed-
18/Henry Higgs
ing of Silva, the leading contemporary medical authority. The reputa-
tion of this work led to his selection as Secretary of the Academy of
Surgery at Paris, founded 1731. In 1736 he published an Essay phy-
sique sur l’economie animale, in 1749 a Traité de la suppuration, and
a Traité de la gangrène, and in 1753 a Traité des fièvres continues.
Meanwhile defective eyesight had led him to abandon surgery for medi-
cine. In 1749 he had settled at Versailles as physician to Madame de
Pompadour. In 1752 he successfully attended the Dauphin for small-
pox, and was rewarded by being appointed physician to the king, and
given a patent of nobility.23 In 1756 he published an anonymous, meta-
physical article on “Evidence”24 in the Encyclopedic, in which appeared
the same year his article “Fermiers,” and the following year “Grains,”
both over the signature of his son, Quesnay le fils; for the doctor’s
official position restrained him, as he thought, from publicly writing
upon matters of government and administration, and he invariably,
throughout his life, published his economical views anonymously or
pseudonymously,—sometimes under the name of oneof his disciples.
The article “Fermiers” begins by balancing with minute detail and inti-
mate knowledge the direct and indirect advantages of using horses or
oxen in cultivation, and decides in favour of the former,—the grande
culture, as against the petite culture.25 Most farmers, Quesnay admits,
were too poor to employ horses. The result was a great national loss of
wealth. The disastrous poverty of agriculture was mainly due to three
causes: (1) the desertion of the children of the peasantry, driven by penury,
taille, and milice26 to immigrate into the large towns, whither they brought
some of their parents’ little capital; (2) the arbitrary taxation which
deprived agricultural investors of security in their property; (3) the re-
strictions which embarrassed the corn trade. It might, he says, be worth
while to exempt farmers’ sons from the militia, as some of them chose a
town life to evade this service. He satirises the view that indigence is a
necessary spur to rural industry: hope is a better stimulus than despair,
and activity is proportioned to success. He examines the agricultural
statistics of the country, of acreage, arable and pasture, live stock, popu-
lation, production and consumption of corn, the range of prices, ex-
penses of production, and profits. Agriculture was the fundamental in-
dustry of the country; liberty and security were its chief requisites. Free
trade in corn, permission, and even (as in England) encouragement to
export, would greatly diminish fluctuations in annual prices, and con-
duce to the prosperity of farmers, which would in turn beget further
The Physiocrates/19
prosperity, and result in higher and more lucrative farming, increased
national and individual wealth, a larger and healthier population, and a
more flourishing treasury. But, above all, the arbitrary taille was to be
given up. Quesnay did not see, he says, how to impose taxation on any
just and simple principle; his impot unique had not yet presented itself
to him as the perfect solution of this problem. “La repartition
proportionnelle n’est guere possible.... Il n’est guère possible d’imaginer
aucun plan general pour établir une repartition proportionnelle des im-
positions.” Following, probably, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre’s plan of a
taille tarifée, he suggested that a personal declaration, somewhat re-
sembling our income tax returns, might be the best basis for assessment.
But at any rate the taxes should be, as Adam Smith urged some years
later, certain, or, in the language of Bentham, cognoscible.
The only writers mentioned in this article are Locke and an agro-
nomic authority, Dupré de Saint Maur. In the next article, “Grains,” we
have a much more significant and important exposition of Quesnay’s
views. For a long time the policy of the Government had been to stimu-
late manufactures (and especially those of luxuries like silk stuffs), to
the detriment of agriculture. The people had been forbidden to plant
vines, and encouraged to plant mulberry-trees. The true national eco-
nomic policy was to turn to account the great productive powers of the
soil of France, and buy luxuries from abroad —exactly the reverse of
what was being attempted. The country would leap into prosperity by
good harvests of corn and a free corn trade, at home and abroad. The
actual production of corn in the country he estimated as worth about
595,000,000 of livres a year. If properly cultivated, with horses every-
where, the harvests would amount to 1,815,000,000, or more than three
times as much; while the surplus, after paying all the costs of produc-
tion, would be 885,000,000 compared with 178,000,000, or nearly five
times the amount.27 The details are as follows:—
Actual Possible.
Landlords 76,500,000 400,000,000
Taille 27,000,000 165,000,000
Farmers 27,500,000 165,000,000
Tithe 50,000,000 155,000,000
Cultivation415,000,000 930,000,000
Total (sic) 595,000,000 1,815,000,000
20/Henry Higgs
Agriculture and commerce are regarded as the two resources of
wealth in France; but this distinction is, he says, a mere abstraction, for
commerce and industry (which is much more considerable than com-
merce) are but branches of agriculture,—the primary and indispensable
source of the other two. The policy of Sully and the “fundamental truths”
expressed by Cantillon are praised, the hindrances to viticulture and the
wine trade deplored. Large farms, raised to their highest value by well-
to-do farmers, are the true basis of prosperity and of a large population.
By a rich farmer he means not “a workman who himself tills the soil,
but an entrepreneur28 who governs and manages his enterprise by his
intelligence and his wealth.” “Those who regard the advantages of a
large population only as a means of recruiting large armies judge but ill
of the strength of a state. The military merely consider men as potential
soldiers; but the statesman regrets men destined for war as the landlord
regrets land laid out in a ditch to preserve his field. Great armies drain a
state, a large population and much wealth make it redoubtable.... With-
out human labour land has no value. Men, land, and cattle are the primi-
tive wealth of a great state.” The taille, he now suggests, should be
based upon the farmer’s rent, so as to spare taxation of his means of
production, and to enable him to take the taille into account when con-
sidering what rent to offer for his farm. This ideal is not easily attained
in the present state of affairs, and for that reason he had proposed a
different system in his article “Fermiers”; but his new idea might be
applied forthwith to farmers on lease, and, though not without diffi-
culty, to metayers. He would not speak of the petty policy attributed to
the Government29 of regarding arbitrary taxation as an assured method
of keeping its subjects in submission. Conduct so absurd was not to be
imputed to great ministers, who all knew how objectionable and ridicu-
lous it would be. The taillables were men of very modest fortune, need-
ing to be encouraged rather than humiliated. The author of the
Remarques, contrasting the enlightened policy and the wealth of En-
gland with the unwise policy and the poverty of France, had concluded
that England had nothing to fear from her neighbour. But let us adopt
free trade, says Quesnay, and we shall be as rich as they. We might,
indeed, seem to be in danger from the fertile soils of America; but their
competition is not much to be dreaded, for their corn is not of such good
quality; it deteriorates in the sea- voyage; and they will soon need all
their corn themselves.30 Our corn makes better bread, and keeps in bet-
ter preservation.
The Physiocrates/21
Arrived at this point he proceeds to compare the advantages of a
foreign corn trade with that of a trade in manufacture, and lays down
fourteen maxims of economic government. Of these maxims, each fol-
lowed by a short explanation, we shall hear again. Like other parts of
this article they are steps towards his crowning work, the Tableau
Oeconomique. (1) Labour expended in industry (les travaux d’industrie),
as opposed to agriculture, does not multiply wealth, though (2) it con-
tributes to population and the increase of wealth, unless (3) it occupies
men to the prejudice of agriculture, in which case it has the contrary
effect. (4) The wealth of the agriculturist begets agricultural wealth. (5)
Industrial labour tends to increase the revenue from the land, and this
again supports industry. (6) A nation having a large trade in its raw
products can always keep up a relatively large trade in manufactures;
but (7) if it have little of the first and is reduced to the second for subsis-
tence, it is in a dangerous and insecure condition. (8) A large internal
trade in manufactured articles can only be maintained by the revenue
from the land. (9) A nation with a large territory which depreciates its
raw products to favour manufactures, destroys itself in all directions.
(10) The advantages of external trade do not consist in the increase of
money, (11) The balance of trade does not indicate the advantage of
trade or the state of wealth of each nation, which is (12) to be judged by
both internal and external trade and especially by the first. (13) A nation
which extracts from its soil, its men, and its navigation the best possible
result needs not grudge the trade of its neighbours, and (14) in recipro-
cal commerce nations which sell the most useful or necessary commodi-
ties have the advantage over those which sell luxuries. Finally, he sums
up the measures which Government should take to render the country
prosperous: freedom in the production and circulation of goods; the
abolition or diminution of tolls on transport; the extinction of local or
personal privileges in dues of the same character; the repair of roads
and of river communication; the suppression of the arbitrary discretion
of private persons in subordinate administrations, so far as the national
revenue was concerned. With these reforms progress would be rapid.
Under Henri IV the kingdom, worn out and burdened with debt, soon
became a land of wealth and abundance. To persist in the present courses
would devastate the country. A hundred years ago there was a popula-
tion of 24,000,000. In 1700, after forty years of almost continuous war
and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, there were still 19,500,000.
To-day there are but 16,000,000, and many of these in extreme misery.
22/Henry Higgs
Prices must not be too low, for abundance and inability to sell are not
wealth; dearness and penury are misery; abundance and a fair price,
normal and continued, are opulence. The export of surplus corn would
conduce to this fair price. Something must be done to remedy the “enor-
mous degradation of agriculture and of the population.”
This is a bold and a statesmanlike programme. If a serious, cau-
tious, and continued effort had been made to carry it out, the subsequent
history of France and of the world would not have been what they are.
Other articles were to be contributed by Quesnay,— Homines, Impôt,
and Intérêt de l’argent,—but the Encyclopedic fell under the official
ban in 1757, became a secret publication, and Quesnay withdrew his
co-operation. The manuscript of the article Hommes was discovered by
Dr. Stephan Bauer in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris in 1890. The
others are lost.
The article “Grains” shows wider economic reading and deeper
thought than the article “Fermiers.” The text is short,—the dissertation
comprehensive and far-seeing. It makes mention of Dupré de Saint Maur,
the Financier Citoyen,31 D’Angeul’s book referred to above (p. 31 n.),
Sully, Colbert, Cantillon, and Herbert’s Essai sur la police générale
des grains, 1755. It contains many indications of Quesnay’s later views.
But before he next went into print he made, as already described, the
acquaintance of Mirabeau, and it was after discussion with that writer
that he printed his Tableau Oeconomique in December 1758 at the pal-
ace at Versailles. We shall find him inspiring much of the work of other
men, notably the Physiocratie of Du Pont, 1767 and 1768, but except
some articles in the Journal de l’agriculture in 1765 and 1766, and in
the Éphémérides du citoyen in 1767 and 1768, he wrote little more that
concerns us here; and the Tableau Oeconomique may serve to explain
at once the main doctrines of the master and the school.
It is necessary, however, first to return for a moment to the Essai of
Cantillon. At page 55 of his Essai Cantillon begins to develop an argu-
ment of this kind. If the owners of land shut off their property and al-
lowed no one to labour on the soil, there would be neither food nor
clothing available. Every inhabitant of a state is therefore, in a sense,
dependent upon the landowner. But since the latter himself desires the
means of subsistence he cultivates his land, or lets it out to a farmer,
who usually pays him about a third of the product for the use of the soil,
retains another third for himself, as profit, and pays the remainder in
wages and expenses of cultivation. Now the landlord and the farmer
The Physiocrates/23
expend part of their shares of the product upon services and commodi-
ties furnished by manufacturers, artisans, and other members of society,
who are not directly engaged in agriculture. And so it comes about that
“the annual produce of the land and labour of the country,” to use the
later, favourite phrase of Adam Smith, becomes circulated throughout
the community. But the landlords, and especially the sovereign as the
largest proprietor, by their modes of living determine the economic ac-
tivities of the nation. Industries are responsive to, and dependent upon,
their demands, their humours, fashions, and style of life. These regulate
the uses to which the soil shall be put, and thus determine indirectly the
number of inhabitants of the state, which must be limited by the means
of subsistence available. Here is the whole theory of the Tableau
Oeconomique. Cantillon, with his fine eye for light and shade, charac-
teristically adds (p. 59): “It is true that there are often in the large towns
many employers and artisans who subsist by foreign trade, and there-
fore at the expense of landowners in foreign parts; but at present I am
considering a state only with regard to its own produce and its own
industry.”
The practical economic problem of contemporary France, as it pre-
sented itself to the mind of Quesnay, was of this character. Here is a
country, abounding in natural resources, but production is starved in its
infancy for lack of capital. Yet capital is only to be obtained by setting
it aside out of the fund created by production. If this fund be turned into
channels where it is not available for utilisation as producer’s capital,
the nation is doomed to sterility. How then is wealth distributed throughout
the different classes of the nation, and how is a larger portion of it to be
diverted from immediate consumption to the benefit of future produc-
tion? It was clear to him that luxury and extravagance had reached a
pitch at which the nation was rapidly impoverishing itself, living above
its means and consuming not only its revenue but its capital. To make
this intelligible at a glance he designed a chart or table which, so far as
rapid intelligibility is concerned, is a ludicrous failure. It occupies one
quarto page, and consists of three columns, headed respectively Défenses
productives relatives a I’Agriculture, etc., Defenses du Revenu, and
Defenses steriles relatives a l’Industrie, etc. He assumes that agricul-
ture “as in England” produces a net product (produit net) or net profit
of 100 per cent (in other words a rent of cent per cent) over and above
all the expenses of production including farmers’ profits. Taking the
hypothesis of an employment of 600 livres of capital a year (avances
24/Henry Higgs
annuelles) in agriculture he attempts to track out the fate of the result-
ing rent year by year. First of all it goes to the landlord, who spends (it
is assumed) half in agricultural produce and half in other expenses (de-
fenses steriles); and the 600 livres by dotted lines are conveyed, as by
divergent streams, from the central column, one-half to the left and onehalf
to the right. The 300 livres which go to the left are again applied to
agriculture, and again yield a rent of 100 per cent, or 300 livres (centre
column), which is again divided right and left, admitting of a further
investment of 150 livres to agriculture, and so on continually. Mean-
while the wealth which has found its way annually to the right of the
table in payment for manufactures, lodging, clothing, interest of money,
domestic servants, cost of transport, foreign commodities, and gener-
ally for everything except the conduct of extractive industry, is divided
annually into two portions which are assumed to be equal, of which one
is re-expended upon raw material or products of the soil, and is thus
reconducted by dotted lines to the column on the left; the other half is
consumed “unproductively.” This zic-zac, as Quesnay calls it, was as
significant as Lord Burghley’s nod in Sheridan’s play of The Critic.
Whole volumes of political economy were read into it. In a well- known
passage, quoted by Adam Smith,32 Mirabeau refers to it as follows:
“There have been since the world began, three great inventions which
have principally given stability to political societies, independent of many
other inventions which have enriched and adorned them. The first is the
invention of writing, which alone gives human nature the power of trans-
mitting, without alteration, its laws, its contracts, its annals, and its
discoveries. The second is the invention of money, which binds together
all the relations between civilised societies. The third is the economical
table, the result of the other two, which completes them both by perfect-
ing their object; the great discovery of our age, but of which our poster-
ity will reap the benefit.”33
The Tableau is followed by twelve pages of “explanation,” and this
again by a restatement of the Tableau without the crossed and dotted
lines. Next come four pages of maxims, twenty-three in number, headed
Extrait des Oeconomies Royales de M. de Sully. The “explanation”
points out that the effective production of the country turns upon the
extent to which the left-hand column is alimented. If a large portion of
wealth is annually absorbed by the right-hand column without finding
its way back to the left, the national dividend is reduced. “Hence it is
seen that excess of decorative luxury may very promptly ruin by mag-
The Physiocrates/25
nificence an opulent state.” As Voltaire says, when writing a few years
later against the Physiocrats, luxuries and new wants were intensifying
a refined misery. “Nous sommes pauvres avec goût.”34
Given a wise employment of capital such as is assumed in the table,
and granting, as is also assumed, that horses everywhere replace oxen
in cultivation, it is estimated that the total capitalised wealth of the country
should amount to some 59,000,000,000 of livres, or, allowing for a
margin of error, from 55,000 to 60,000 of millions. But all this is condi-
tional further upon the absence of eight great obstacles, — the principal
causes of decay of an agricultural nation. These are:—
1. Bad forms of taxation, bearing upon the capital of
cultivators.
2. Excessive cost of collection of taxes.
3. Excessive luxury of decoration.
4. Excessive expense in litigation.
5. Lack of export trade in raw materials.
6. Lack of freedom (a) in internal trade in raw materials and (b) in
cultivation.
7. Personal harassing of the country people.
8. Lack of return of the annual produit net to the category of pro-
ductive expenses.
The pretended extracts from the Oeconomies royales of Sully are
really the Maximes of economic government of the article “Grains” fur-
ther worked up and developed. They are too succinct to be stated with-
out full quotation and explanation, and only the gist of them can be
given in the course of a further brief summary of Quesnay’s views. An
able commentary upon them will be found in the excellent little volume
of Lavergne. Certain bold maxims or principles of government had in-
deed been laid down by Sully, the favourite minister, chief agent, and
almost sole adviser of the most popular monarch who ever sat on the
throne of France; and there was in truth much affinity of spirit between
the reforming zeal and the predilection for agriculture which characterised
alike Sully and the Physiocrats. But it is hardly doubtful that a further
motive with Quesnay was his desire to place himself under the aegis of
the great rulers of the state in a glorious past. To refer again to the Abbe
de Saint-Pierre for comparison,—the Abbé’s Projet de paix perpétuelle,
3 vols., 1713, was abridged and published in 1728 as: Abrégé du projet
de paix perpétuelle inventé par le roi Henri le Grand, etc. To claim the
sanction of Henri IV and of Sully was to disarm much opposition. And
26/Henry Higgs
as Sully had declared labourage et pâturage sont les deux mamelles de
la France, so Quesnay too devised an apophthegm for the motto of his
Tableau,—pauvres pay sans, pauvre royaume; pauvre royaume, pauvre
roi. His desire was to publish the Tableau in the official Mercure de
France, but the tactful Pompadour dissuaded him, foreseeing that the
form of the Tableau would expose it to ridicule, such as it encountered
at the merciless hands of Linguet in 1771. It was, therefore, privately
printed in the royal palace of Versailles in December 1758.35 Only a few
proofs were struck off, and until 1890 it was believed to be extinct, but
in that year a copy of it, slightly revised by Quesnay for further proof,
was discovered by Dr. Stephan Bauer among the manuscripts of
Mirabeau in the Archives Nationales at Paris; and this copy has been
reproduced in facsimile by the British Economic Association in honour
of Quesnay’s bicentenary in 1894. In 1760 Mirabeau printed the Tab-
leau with some modifications in the sixth part of his L’Ami des Hom-
ines, and again in 1763 in the Philosophie Rurale, and in 1767 in the
Élements de philosophie rurale. In June 1766 Quesnay published an
Analyse du Tableau Économique in the Journal de l’agriculture, du
commerce et des finances; in November 1765 Objections contre le Tab-
leau économique, and in January 1766 Réponse aux objections, both in
the same journal. Quesnay’s analysis of his Tableau appears also in the
Physiocratie (November 1767), dated Leyden, 1768. Baudeau’s Expli-
cation du Tableau in the Éphémérides, 1767, Quesnay’s Maximes, 1775,
and the reprints of Forbonnais, Linguet, Daire and Oncken complete the
list of reproductions.
We come now to consider Quesnay’s views with regard to taxation.
Identifying wealth with material objects he opines that the only industry
productive of wealth is that which produces raw material. The labours
of artisans and craftsmen may be productive of refinement and utility,
but do not add anything to the stock of wealth, for they merely change
the form of existing material, and the enhanced value of the object upon
which their work is expended is simply the equivalent of the payment
for their services. In other words, agriculture alone yields a rent (produit
net); manufacture yields none, and is sterile—an unfortunate and ill-
chosen expression which did the Physiocrats much mischief. The
statesman’s aim should be to meet the national expenses out of national
revenues, without trenching upon capital. But as the produit net is the
only true revenue, so should it be the only corpus to be taxed. All taxa-
tion of persons or of manufactured articles must eventually be paid out
The Physiocrates/27
of this fund. Simplicity, justice, and economy alike, therefore, require
that the taxes should be collected at their source. A single, simple, direct
tax (impôt unique) should be levied upon land, and should not exceed
one-third of the produit net. Landowners and farmers will adjust their
burdens by raising the price of raw materials, every consumer of which
will thus pay a share of taxation with the minimum of expense for cost
of collection, and the whole cumbrous apparatus of existing fiscal ma-
chinery will be swept away. To sum up, the Tableau prescribes wise
consumption (individuals, classes, and nations should direct their ex-
penditure so far as possible into “productive” channels), taxation (which
must fall eventually upon the land) should be directly levied upon, and
should not exceed a small proportion of, the annual net production of
the soil, and freedom should be allowed to individuals to prosecute the
production and circulation of wealth free from let or hindrance on the
part of Government.
So much for the economic and financial bearings of Quesnay’s teach-
ing. The philosophical foundation on which it seems to rest will be found
in his other writings, especially Le Droit Naturel, which is included in
the Physiocratie. Every man, he urges, has a natural right to the free
exercise of his faculties provided he does not employ them to the injury
of himself or others. This right to liberty implies as a corollary the right
to property, and the duty of the state to defend it,—in other words secu-
rity. The guarantee of security is indeed the sole function of the state. To
extend it would be to encroach on individual liberty. The state cannot be
too strong for this purpose,—any constitutional checks and balance of
power would but weaken the central authority. The despotism of the
state is to be tempered only by enlightened public opinion, which will
revolt against any infraction of natural law, or rather render it impos-
sible. The Dauphin once bemoaned to Quesnay the difficulty of the kingly
office, which he was not destined to live to assume. “I do not see,” said
Quesnay, “that it is so troublesome.”— “What then,” asked the Dau-
phin, “would you do if you were king?”—“Nothing.”—“Then who would
govern?” and the laconic answer was, “The law.” On another occasion
a courtier, seeing the king wearied with the disputes of clergy and par-
liament, proposed violent measures: “It is the halberd which governs the
kingdom.”—“And pray, sir,” asked Quesnay, “who governs the halberd?”
His adversary was reduced to silence. “It is opinion,” added the doctor:
“therefore it is upon opinion that you must set to work.”
In Professor Hasbach’s opinion Quesnay based his economic views
28/Henry Higgs
upon a deductive system of philosophy derived from the English writ-
ers, Shaftesbury, Locke, and Cumberland. Like them, he appeals to the
Law of Nature, but unlike his predecessors (with the exception of Grotius,
who had declared for free trade) he extends its sphere beyond religion,
politics, and individual life, to the realm of political economy. As Locke
was the father of political individualism, so Quesnay was one of the
fathers of economic individualism; and his real originality lies in his
organic theory of economic life.36 It might be argued that his economic
principles were buttressed by, rather than deliberately founded upon,
his philosophy; but in the hands of Mercier de la Rivière and others it
undoubtedly took on more and more of a philosophical form.
In 1758 Quesnay drew up a table of motives,37 4 pp., 4to, some-
what resembling the later work of Bentham, and printed it at Versailles
about the same time as the Tableau Oeconomique, with which it is uni-
form in type, paper, and form. The only copy which I have ever seen is
in the library of Professor Foxwell at Cambridge, bound up in a volume
once the property of Adam Smith, who wrote the name of Quesnay
against it in the title-page. It is entitled Observations sur la psycho-
logic, ou science de I’âme. The versatility of Quesnay’s genius is fur-
ther attested by several writings upon mathematics,38 and in his extreme
old age he believed he had solved the problem of squaring the circle.
Some analogous belief he may well have held as to the originality and
unshakable accuracy of his speculations in economic and financial sci-
ence; for the exaggerated eulogies of his followers were enough to turn
the head of the most modest of men. Exacting from each of his disciples
an undertaking not to refer to him by name, and publishing his own
views on economics under the anagram of Nisaque, M. H., M. N., M.
Alpha, M. de l’Isle, anonymously, or under the sole name of some col-
laborator, he was the victim of much hyperbolical periphrase for which
Mirabeau was usually responsible. He was in turn “the greatest genius
of our age,” “the Confucius of Europe,” “the Socrates of our day,” “the
Moses of modern times.” Well might Adam Smith say of the Physiocrats,
“The admiration of this whole sect for their master, who was himself a
man of the greatest modesty and simplicity, is not inferior to that of the
ancient philosophers for the founders of their respective systems.”39 He
was not without honour in England.
The Royal Society elected him a Fellow.40 On the death of Louis
XV he lost his Court favour, lived just long enough to see Turgot’s
accession to power and commencement of reforms, but died at Versailles
The Physiocrates/29
the same year, q6th December 1774, before the fall of Turgot, and be-
fore the appearance of the Wealth of Nations (both in 1776) which it
had been Adam Smith’s intention to dedicate to this “very ingenious and
profound author,” the “modest and simple” founder of the physiocratic
school.41
III: The School and Its Doctrines (contd.)
The artist has not yet arisen who has chosen to paint a great historical
picture of the scene which M. de Lomenie42 describes as follows:—
“On the 20th December 1774, amidst the enthusiastic hopes to which
a new reign gave birth, five months after Turgot’s entrance into the
ministry, a considerable number of persons, attired in mourning, were
gathered in the principal room of a townhouse in the Rue Vaugirard [at
Paris]. At the end of the room had been placed a large pedestal sur-
mounted by a marble bust, and the whole assembly being turned to-
wards this bust in an attitude of sorrow and respect, the master of the
house pronounced a speech of a rather odd character, especially for the
epoch.” “Gentlemen,” began the orator, “we have just lost our master;
the veritable benefactor of humanity belongs to this earth only by the
memory of his good deeds and the imperishable record of his achieve-
ments.” He goes on to declare that Socrates43 had been said to have
drawn down morality from heaven. Their master had done more, he had
made it germinate upon earth. Religion was a solace and a ruling power
only to a few elevated souls. The terrestrial guide of conduct based
upon the produit net appealed to the reason and intelligence of every
man, persuading him by the enlightened pursuit of selfinterest to pro-
mote the welfare of mankind at large. The speaker, now left, he says, the
leader of the band, appeals to his hearers to carry on their immortal
founder’s work, and further the progress of “the science which shall one
day render societies peaceful and prosperous, and men reasonable and
virtuous.” And he concludes by apostrophising the bust on which they
gazed: “O venerable bust, that represents to us the features of our mas-
ter,”44 etc. The silent bust which looked down upon this somewhat the-
atrical mise en scène was that of Quesnay. The extravagant and stilted
eloquence, its pomp redeemed by sincerity and affection, was the char-
acteristic language of the Friend of Humanity, the Marquis of Mirabeau,
refraining, even now, with pious fidelity, from speaking the doctor’s
name. We can guess who were many of the disciples gathered round,
30/Henry Higgs
but none of them was so popular or authoritative an exponent of
physiocracy as Mirabeau himself, and several of them were his own
proselytes. His indefatigable industry and ardent zeal had spread the
fame of the Physiocrats and their system through all the countries of
Europe.45 He brought to the service of Quesnay in 1757 a literary repu-
tation already firmly and widely established, a considerable amount of
social influence, and valuable resources of time and energy, as well as
of money. The history of his family—a “tempestuous race,” he himself
confesses — is, as recounted by M. de Lomenie, one of the most strik-
ing and fascinating in the whole range of biographical literature, and is
not without importance for the student of his works. He was born on the
4th October 1715, the year of the death of Louis XIV, and died on the
13th July 1789, the day before the storming of the Bastille. His life thus
coincides with what is usually regarded as the inception and the triumph
of the French Revolution. After serving with bravery in the army, he
succeeded, in 1737, when only twenty-two years of age, to his father’s
title and estates, and gave up the profession of arms. He seems early to
have cherished the ambition of becoming a great philosophical states-
man, and of aggrandising the honour and power of his own family. He
married a wife whose great expectations, her only recommendation,
became a veritable apple of discord. When her unspeakable miscon-
duct, approaching—if not overstepping—the bounds of madness, and
the sensational follies of his famous but dissolute and spendthrift son,
wounded his family pride, he acted with the despotism of a Highland
chief smarting under a sense of dishonour to his clan. But in 1757 these
troubles were yet to come. He had been the friend of Vauvenargues and
an acquaintance of Montesquieu. The system of government appeared
to him hopelessly unsuited to the needs of the nation, and far better than
most of his contemporaries he saw the real power which lay dormant in
the people—the force of numbers. “He was,” says Victor Hugo, “at
once in advance of and behind his age.” “He presents in himself,” says
de Tocqueville, “ the spectacle of a feudal character invaded by demo-
cratic ideas.” He had argued in the first part of L’Ami des Hommes for
a multiplication of small peasant proprietors; but he allowed Quesnay
to persuade him that the true ideal was the maximising of the produit
net of the country, which was to be better achieved by an economical
exploitation of land on the larger scale. He had also urged, following
Cantillon, that imports of corn should be encouraged and exports dis-
couraged; but, as we have seen, this too was in opposition to Quesnay’s
The Physiocrates/31
views, for the doctor considered such a course, in the long-run, inimical
to a large food supply, since low prices of corn would discourage its
national production. But while giving way upon these points he remained
the most independent member of the school. Utilising the popularity
acquired by L’Ami des Hommes, he proceeded, after allying himself
with Quesnay, to publish continuations of the work (part 4, no imprint,
4to and 12mo, 1758; parts 5 and 6, do. do., 1760), making a whole of
three quarto or six duodecimo volumes. In these later parts the coopera-
tion of Quesnay is evident. Part 4 contains a Dialogue entre le
Surintendant D’O. et L.D.H., a reprint of the Mémoire sur les États
provinciaux, with a reply to an anonymous criticism of Naveau’s, and a
series of (separately paged) Questions interessantes sur la Population,
l’Agriculture, et le Commerce proposées aux Académies et autres
sociétés sçavantes des Provinces, asking for local information upon
agricultural conditions, and also suggesting some general considerations
somewhat in the style of Berkeley’s Querist. These questions, the reader
is informed, are not by the author of the Mémoire sur les États
provinciaux.46 The 5th part contains the essay which Mirabeau had
written for the prize of the Berne Agricultural Society in 1759, on the
reasons why Switzerland should give preference to the cultivation of
corn. The essay is followed by extracts from the first six books of an
English work (translated from T. Hale’s Compleat Body of Husbandry,
1756). The 6th part consists of a Réponse a I’Essai sur les Ponts et
Chaussées, La Voierie, et Les Corvées, and of the Tableau Oeconomique
avec ses explications. In the same year with this later part, 1760, ap-
peared his Theorie de l’Impôt, 4to and 12 mo, without imprint, which
immediately had an enormous vogue. It was a spirited and able attack
upon the financial administration of the country, and especially upon
the farmers-general, whom Mirabeau regarded as parasites preying upon
the vitals of the nation.47 The taxgatherer is never a welcome visitor,
even when he is the direct representative of local or central authority;
but when he presents himself in the guise of a speculator whose per-
sonal profit or loss turns upon the amount of taxation he can collect,
whose agents have no bowels of compassion, no willingness to hear or
ability to accept excuse or appeal, and who violate the public conscience
by relentless severity, while their employer is seen to be making a con-
siderable fortune at the public expense, then indeed an outcry against
him will awaken innumerable echoes, and the Theorie de l’Impôt spread
like wildfire. “Seigneur,” begins the author, with an address to the king
32/Henry Higgs
—“Seigneur! you have 20,000,000 of subjects, more or less,48 all with
a little money, and almost all capable of rendering you such service as
you require; and yet you can no longer obtain service without money,
nor money to pay for service. In plain language your people are holding
back from you, without knowing it, for they are still well disposed to
your person even though they be not to the agents of your authority.”
And he puts into the mouth of the king the soliloquy that his position as
the head of his people is justified only so long as, and only because, he
costs them less than he is worth to them. This remorseless test, “Are you
worth what you cost?” must have been like acid to a raw wound, for the
colonial empire was falling to pieces, and within a year the French had
been driven out of Canada and of India. He makes the king add: “Where
my people loses its rights, there is the limit of my empire.” Taxes are
really of the nature of voluntary offerings rather than forced contribu-
tions. The sovereign has not the right to tax his subjects without their
participation and assent, and the collection of taxes should be handed
over to the representatives of the people themselves. The powerful fi-
nancial interest, fastening upon such passages, where exhortation is
mingled with barely veiled menace, denounced the Ami des Hommes to
the king, who caused him to be imprisoned (16th December 1760) in the
chateau of Vincennes, which was afterwards to receive the author’s son.
The anger of the king was mollified by Madame de Pompadour49 and
Mirabeau’s friends, and on Christmas Eve he allowed him to be liber-
ated under orders to reside at his property at Bignon and not in Paris.
This sharp reminder of the limits of freedom kept the Physiocrats silent,
though not inactive, for two and a half years. In 1763 Mirabeau made a
convert of Du Pont de Nemours, who, writing in 1769 of the Théorie de
I’Impôt, says: “This sublime work has, to my knowledge, been multi-
plied by eighteen editions.” Beyond the abolition of the practice of farming
out the taxes it recommends reforms in the direction of making taxation
lighter, simpler, and more direct. It urged that the tax on salt should be
reduced, with the object of increasing the total yield (a recognition of
the principle, now well known under the name of the elasticity of the
exchequer), that there should be a special tax upon tobacco-farms, and
that apart from the Post Office, the Mint, and the Domaine (crown
lands and crown dues) the rest of the national revenue should be derived
from a tax upon land. This is the Impôt unique with modifications. The
work contains many valuable remarks, and is of real importance in the
history of financial theory.
The Physiocrates/33
In 1763 appeared the Philosophie rurale, Amsterdam (Paris), 4to,
which presents perhaps the most complete and magisterial account of
the views of the physiocratic school, and was called by Grimm “the
Pentateuch of the sect.” Daire, who shows little sympathy for Mirabeau,
declares it to be “the best, or rather the least bad, of all his works”; but
he would have expressed himself more respectfully had he known the
large share taken in the work by Quesnay, who, according to Du Pont,
inspired it and wrote the whole of the seventh chapter himself.50 An
abridgment of it, under the title Éléments de philosophie rurale, was
published in 12mo at The Hague in 1767. Of his other works it is suffi-
cient to mention Réponse du correspondant à son banquier, 1759, 4to
(a reply to Forbonnais); Lettres sur le commerce des grains, Amsterdam
and Paris, 1768, 12mo; Les Économiques, Amsterdam and Paris, 1769–
72, 2 vols. 4to, or 4 vols. 12mo; Lettres d’un ingénieur... pour servir de
suite à I’Ami des Hommes, Avignon, 1770, 12mo; Lettres Économiques,
Amsterdam, 1770, 12mo; Les Devoirs, Milan, 1770; La science, ou les
Droits et les Devoirs de I’homme, Lausanne, 1774, 12mo; Lettre sur la
legislation, Berne, 1775, 3 vols. 12mo; Supplement à la théorie de
I’impôt, La Haye, 1776; Entretien d’un jeune Prince avec son
gouverneur par L.D.H. Publié par M.G... [l’Abbé Grivel], Paris, 1785,
4 vols. 8vo and 12mo; Éducation civile d’un Prince, Doulac, 1788,
8vo; Rêve d’un goutteux, ou le Principal (end of 1788), an octavo pam-
phlet, his hopes of the Constituent Assembly about to meet—and Hommes
a célébrer pour avoir bien mérité de l’humanité par leurs écrits sur
l’Économie politique. Ouvrage publie par P. Boscovitch, ami de I’auteur,
Bassano, 2 vols. 8vo. Many of these works were announced as by L.D.H.
(L’Ami des Hommes), but the later ones appeared sometimes anony-
mously and in foreign countries by the care of his friends. Les Devoirs
had been seen through the press by the Marquis of Longo, professor of
political economy at Milan. It urged that, in the interests of society, men
should receive economic instruction as a guide to conduct. And so el-
ementary education should be compulsory, and even free where the re-
cipient cannot afford to pay.
It is sometimes supposed that the French Revolution destroyed the
influence of the Physiocrats. But in truth their reputation in France had
in 1789 long been on the wane. The year 1776 struck it three blows
from which it never entirely recovered. The fall of Turgot, though he is
not strictly to be reckoned as one of the sect, paved the way to their
discomfiture. The publication of the Wealth of Nations more slowly but
34/Henry Higgs
effectually destroyed their authority by sapping the scientific basis on
which it reposed. And finally, in 1776, began the scandalous dissemina-
tion of lies and libels by Mirabeau’s wife and children which shook the
Friend of Men from his pedestal of popularity, and dragged him through
the mire as a hideous impostor, whose private life, at hopeless variance
with his public precept, would show the teacher of morality unmasked
as a monster of hypocrisy. In his well-known Lettres de Vincennes the
younger Mirabeau ridicules the Physiocrats, and does not spare their
chief: “It will sooner or later be seen,” he says, “that my father owes
only to his own generosity the title of L’Ami des Hommes... a man who
calls himself tender, compassionate, the legislator of kings, the benefac-
tor of humanity at large, and is the oppressor of his wife and children.”
“I know,” whines the young profligate, “that appearances are against
me. But so they are against my father, who imprisons me. Facts can be
so easily distorted. It might, for instance, be said that he had ruined
himself in creating a political economy; that he had compromised two
millions of the fortune of his wife and children, while protesting against
luxury and debts; that he had persisted in founding a sect at Paris and
living there to the detriment of his means while declaiming vigorously
against absentee landlords; and that after denouncing lettres de cachet
in his writings he had employed fifty-three of them against his wife and
children, of whom all but one are under lock and key.” “No doubt,” he
suggests, “my father could defend himself against all these charges.
Why, then, will he not hear a defence from me?” The labours of M. de
Loménie, exposing the prejudice and misrepresentation of M. de
Montigny, have rehabilitated in great measure the economist’s reputa-
tion, and in his later years the orator of the Revolution rallied to his
father’s side and loaded him with praise and respect. But it concerns us
to note that the immediate effect of these attacks was, on the one hand,
to weaken the elder Mirabeau’s popular repute, while, on the other, they
drove him to absorb himself more and more in economic writing as a
distraction from his family troubles. He left 400 quartos in manuscript
written by his own hand, forty published volumes, several contributions
to journals, a number of unpublished writings, and an immense corre-
spondence, exchanging upwards of 4000 letters with his brother alone.
Other branches of his activity will be mentioned in the next chapter.
“Had my hand been of bronze,” he said in his old age, “it would long
since have been worn out.”
Among the “persons attired in mourning” who “turned towards the
The Physiocrates/35
bust of Quesnay in an attitude of sorrow and respect,” there was one
notable gap. There was a vacant place for an eminent young disciple
returning from Poland to serve with Turgot, Du Pont de Nemours (b.
18th December 1739, d. 7th August 1817), who, converted by Mirabeau
in 1763, became the amiable hard-working hack of his masters, editing
the works of Quesnay (thePhysiocratie, 1767–8), and the economic Jour-
nals of the school, besides becoming the secretary, biographer, and friend
of Turgot, a trusted adviser of foreign princes, and finally a member of
the Constituent Assembly. The bibliography of his own writings, ap-
pended to M. Schelle’s excellent monograph, contains 112 separate en-
tries in addition to new editions and translations, and one of these en-
tries alone covers some 120 articles in the Éphémérides, while others
embrace a number of separate writings. In 1763 the nation stood, at the
conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, literally bankrupt. The question of
finance was one of life and death. An anonymous pamphlet, La Richesse
de l’État, 1763, 8vo, written by a state official, Roussel de la Tour,
proposed to replace all taxes by a progressive poll-tax. Du Pont, then
twenty-three years of age, criticised it in a pamphlet entitled Réflexions
sur la Richesse de I’État. Taxes really fall, he says, on the land, and
should be levied directly on landowners. This pamphlet interested
Quesnay and Mirabeau (whose exile to Bignon had not yet been can-
celled) for two reasons. They found in it a statement of their own doc-
trine; and they concluded, since the Government allowed it to circulate,
that they might venture to renew their own activity. Mirabeau’s exile
was now soon brought to an end. Du Pont was invited to one of Quesnay’s
meetings in the entresol of Mme. de Pompadour, and was definitively
recruited as a member of the school the same year, 1763. “Let us have a
care of him,” said Quesnay to Mirabeau; “he will speak when we are
dead.” On the 25th May 1763, the edict of 1754, permitting internal
freedom in the corn trade, was re-enacted with extensions; nobles might
trade in corn without derogation, and corn was to be free from tolls for
transport. The edict was suspended by Terray in 1770; but on Turgot’s
accession to office in 1774, his first act was a still more liberal edict
permitting virtual freedom of export and import—the preamble, drafted
by Du Pont, following very closely the views of Quesnay in his article
“Grains.” The new policy was designed, says the edict, “to animate and
extend the cultivation of the land, whose produce is the most real and
certain wealth of a state; to maintain abundance by granaries and the
entry of foreign corn; to prevent corn from falling to a price which
36/Henry Higgs
would discourage the producer; to remove monopoly by shutting out
private licence in favour of free and full competition; and by maintain-
ing among different countries that communication of exchange of su-
perfluities for necessaries which is so conformable to the order estab-
lished by Divine Providence.” The Physiocrats appeared to have gained
a large part of their cause. But they recognised that it was necessary, in
Quesnay’s phrase, to “act upon opinion.” Popular prejudice feared that
rings and corners would force up the price of corn to famine point for
private profit by sending it abroad. It was necessary to educate the pub-
lic upon the safeguards which “the obvious and simple system of natu-
ral liberty,” as Adam Smith called it, carries within itself; and the
Physiocrats therefore sought for a journal in which they might circulate
their ideas. Such a journal they found in a supplement to the Gazette du
Commerce, founded 1763, entitled Journal de l’agriculture, du com-
merce, et des finances, of which Du Pont was appointed editor in Sep-
tember 1765, probably on the recommendation of Trudaine.51 The pro-
prietors, instigated by the opponents of the school, dismissed him after
the issue of the November number, 1766, and the economists were obliged
to find another organ. The Éphémérides du citoyen, ou Chronique de
l’esprit national, a bi-weekly paper, had been founded in 1765 by the
Abbé Baudeau on the model of our Spectator. The Abbé defended the
mercantile system, but admitted articles criticising his views, and to one
such article by Le Trosne he proposed to reply in nine articles, the first
of which he sent to Du Pont’s Journal in 1766. Du Pont published it,
with some annotations. “You argue,” he said, “that nations grow rich or
are ruined according to the balance of foreign trade. But surely you will
admit that a nation may have no foreign trade and yet be ruined. How
does your theory account for this?” Baudeau visited Du Pont, discussed
the matter, said he had found his road to Damascus, and threw in his lot
with the Physiocrats. The Éphémérides suspended publication for two
months, and in January 1767 reappeared with a new sub-title,
Éphémérides du citoyen, ou Bibliothèque des sciences morales et
politiques, a monthly duodecimo. In May 1768 Baudeau received eccle-
siastical preferment in Poland. Du Pont, now employed in Limousin
with Turgot, sacrificed his position to come to Paris and take over the
post of editor, which he retained till the Journal was suppressed by Gov-
ernment (November 1772). The Margrave of Baden next appointed him
Privy Councillor, and drew him to Carlsruhe, where he remained until
(July 1774) he started for Poland to serve as tutor to the son of Prince
The Physiocrates/37
Czartoryski. Arrived in Poland, he heard from Turgot of his accession
to the ministry, and was offered a place, which he did not feel justified in
accepting immediately. In September, however, Turgot formally nomi-
nated him inspector-general of manufactures, and Du Pont rendered
Turgot valuable service till they fell together in 1776. The Mémoire sur
les municipalités, Turgot’s plan of reform in local government, was the
work of his pen; and when Turgot died in 1781 he wrote an account of
his life and writings (1782), and many years later edited his works in
nine octavo volumes (1809–1811). In 1782 he negotiated with England
the treaty recognising the American Independence. In 1786 he was en-
trusted with the negotiation of the commercial treaty with England. In
1787 he took part in the Assemblée des notables. In 1789 he was elected
to the Constituent Assembly,52 struggled for “freedom and for an eco-
nomic policy, opposed the assignats and the Jacobins, and, after run-
ning many dangers, in 1793 voluntarily exiled himself to America. He
came back in 1802, and took office under Louis XVIII, but with the
return of Napoleon he again quitted France for America, where he spent
the two remaining years of his life.
So much of history and biography is necessary to the comprehen-
sion of the march and influence of the physiocratic school. Of Du Pont’s
other writings space does not permit mention. Many of the articles writ-
ten by himself and others in the Journal and the Éphémérides appeared
as separate publications. The Physiocratie, 1767–8,53 consisted of sev-
eral such articles by Quesnay, edited by Du Pont, and a pamphlet of
1768, De I’origine et des progrès d’une science nouvelle, has for many
years been the fountain of the history of the Physiocrats.54 It is now
seen to contain numerous inaccuracies, some of which are due to Du
Pont’s anxiety to repel the sectarian charge which had been urged against
the school. To him all economists worked together,—their differences
were less important than their points of agreement. “You are an econo-
mist like ourselves, my dear Say,” he wrote to J. B. Say at the end of his
life, when the French Adam Smith had tried to dissociate himself from
the school of Quesnay. And in sketching the origin of the school he
declared that Quesnay and Gournay were its two founders. Of Gournay,
pending the publication of Professor Oncken’s volume, little more is
known than is contained in the Éloge of his friend Turgot (1759). He
was born in 1712, engaged in commerce at Cadiz (1727–1744), trav-
elled over Europe (1744–1751), came back to France, was made an
intendant of commerce (1751), and went about the country, taking Turgot
38/Henry Higgs
with him on some occasions, on his visits of official inspection. He
chafed at the trammels which harassed trade, recommended the study of
economics, especially the writings of Cantillon, Tucker, Culpeper,
Child,55 and other English authors, and was in favour of internal free
trade and of light customs duties. He died in 1759, held few of the pecu-
liar doctrines of the Physiocrats with regard to land and taxation, and it
is doubtful whether he ever had any personal acquaintance with Quesnay
himself. Du Pont attributes to Gournay the origin of the famous maxim
Laissez-faire, Laissez-passer, which Gournay indeed seems to have
popularised. But a study of Turgot’s Éloge de Gournay shows that the
expression Laissez-faire is really due to Le Gendre, a merchant who
attended a deputation to Colbert about 1680 to protest against excessive
state regulation of industry, and pleaded for liberty of action in the phrase
Laissez-nous faire.56 Boisguillebert and D’Argenson had used it also
before Gournay, who may, however, be said to have made it classical in
its later form. His personal influence stimulated many persons, notably
Turgot; and Du Pont mentions a number of writers as belonging to his
“school”—the commercial rather than the agricultural advocates of free
trade.
The next eminent Physiocrat to require mention is Mercier de la
Rivière (1720–1794), a magistrate who filled for some time the post of
Governor of Martinique, and wrote an important treatise, already re-
ferred to, L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques, 1767,
which Adam Smith has described as “the most distinct and best con-
nected account of the doctrine” of the sect. It is composed in the “grand
style,” to which the Scotch economist was not insensible, and like many
of the chief works of the school was prepared under the eye of Quesnay,
though the author omits the usual eulogies of him, and moved Mirabeau
to write in later years, “I have seen him at work in his dressing-gown six
whole weeks in the entresol of the doctor, casting and recasting his
work, and then renounce his father and his mother.”57 [Quesnay and
Mirabeau.]
In 1767 the school was still young. Daire asserts that the public had
only a choice between the laconics of Quesnay and the disheartening
prolixities of Mirabeau, whose oddities of style, diffusion of matter, and
profusion of figures were, he says, enough to kill political economy on
the spot.58 Exception must be taken to this statement, so far as the writ-
ings of Du Pont and Abeille and the articles of the Journal are con-
cerned. But it is none the less true that the Ordre naturel et essentiel
The Physiocrates/39
was at once warmly greeted. Du Pont called it “sublime,” “eloquent,”
“logical and closely reasoned,” and the Russian ambassador, Prince
Galitzin, wrote to Voltaire that it was “far superior to Montesquieu.”
The followers of Colbert and lovers of stateregulation had attacked the
Physiocrats from the political side. On one occasion Carl Friedrich of
Baden, who had come to Paris on purpose to see his master Mirabeau,
asked with naive sincerity whether it might not be hoped that, with the
spread of physiocratic knowledge, sovereigns would become unneces-
sary and be reformed out of existence. Mirabeau admitted that their role
would be much restricted, but the public domains would need an owner,
and his duty would be to preserve social order and encourage social
instruction. The question addressed to the Physiocrats was, “If your
system says ‘Hands off!’ to the state, and begs it to ‘let things alone,’
what do you consider the functions of the state to be?” Mercier de la
Rivière attempts to create a philosophy of the state. Newton and others
had discovered great laws governing the harmonious order of the physi-
cal world. There were surely similar laws governing the moral order of
the social world, and the motto of the book is a sentence from
Malebranche’s Traité de Morale: “L’Ordre est la Loi inviolable des
esprits; et rien n’est réglé, s’il n’y est conforme.” The general plan of
creation had provided natural laws for the government of all things, and
man could be no exception to the rule. He needed only to know the
conditions which conduce to his greatest happiness to follow and ob-
serve them. All the ills of humanity arise from ignorant opposition to
these laws, study of which will show that the welfare of each member of
society is inseparably bound up with the welfare of others, and the at-
tainment of this common welfare will dispose mankind to grateful ado-
ration of the beneficent Being by whose order this perfect cosmos is
maintained.
The organisation of man proves that he is a social animal, designed
by nature to live in society. In this state of society there are no rights
without duties, no duties without rights. The right of selfpreservation
implies the right to property; but the faculties of men are by nature
unequal, which gives rise to a natural inequality of conditions. Indi-
vidual property in the products of the soil carries with it a physical
necessity for individual property in the soil itself. Increased wealth is
the mediate object of society, as a condition of increased happiness; and
this happiness is enhanced by an increase of numbers, rendered possible
only by additional production. But the right to property would be null
40/Henry Higgs
without the liberty of using it, and social liberty is a branch of property.
The natural and essential order of society is thus unarbitrary, simple,
evident, immutable, and the most advantageous to the human race. It
binds together prince and people in common interest, its evident charac-
ter, publicly recognised, makes it socially dominant, despotic without
violence. Two social institutions are necessary: (1) Magistrates, dis-
tinct from the legislature, to resolve doubts and put into execution all
laws of whose justice they are satisfied and no other (to act differently
would be as if a doctor should follow with his patient a course which he
knows to be mortal); (2) a tutelary authority, the depositary of the pub-
lic power, and enacting laws in accordance with justice (for the right of
law-giving rests on the duty of not enacting laws evidently bad). This
power must be single and indivisible. A so-called legislative body is not
a body but a multitude of units momentarily brought together without
unity of views. If they differ, they are not all perfectly wise: if they
agree, one would do as well as many, or better, since it is contrary to
order that authority should be divided among many hands. The best
tutelary authority is a single sovereign who ean gain nothing by ill-
government, but has the greatest interest in governing well. He must be
hereditary, not having a mere usufruct but a fee- simple interest in the
nation, co-proprietor of the produce of its soil. Despotism is held in
horror, because we confound what it has been (an arbitrary despotism
which is fatal) with what it might be (a legal despotism, which is the
most advantageous form of government). In fact an arbitrary despot
commands but does not govern, for as his caprice is above law, there
are, under him, neither rights, laws, nor nation,—“a nation being a po-
litical body whose members are united by a chain of reciprocal rights
and duties, inseparably combining governor and governed in one com-
mon interest.”
Thus far the first twenty-six chapters. The remaining eighteen are
of more direct economic interest, and are the only ones printed by Daire
in his collection of the Physiocrats. The sovereign, as already stated, is
co-proprietor with landowners,—a partnership involving mutual rights
and duties and mutual interests,—and has a share in their produit net.
In the origin of society this share was at the expense of the first land-
owners, though even to them the kingly office was of more utility than
their contribution. Subsequent holders of land have taken it subject to
this royal charge, so that it has ceased to be a burden upon individuals.
But if the sovereign takes more than his proper share, he injures his
The Physiocrates/41
partners and thereby injures himself. Government exists to secure the
rights of property, and any arbitrary element in taxation is not only
unwise and suicidal, but essentially unjust, for it is an attack upon and
an infringement of the very rights which it is the business of Govern-
ment to protect. An invariable sum of taxation would be unfair, either to
the sovereign or the landowner, for the produit net varies with the sea-
sons. The proper form of taxation is therefore a proportional share of
the produit net. From each harvest must be set aside the whole costs of
production, for these are the necessaryelements of new wealth, and the
surplus must be divided part to the landowner, part to the king. It must
be collected direct, for if it be imposed upon commodities or upon per-
sons, its equity and incidence cease to be evident and become arbitrary,
which is its condemnation, to say nothing of the expense of collection,
the taxation twice over (once when the material is produced and once
when it is manufactured), and the fact that part of the taxes will fall
upon the sovereign himself. Every vendor is a purchaser, and every pur-
chaser a vendor. The liberty of individuals holds as well for external as
for internal trade, and the different nations should be regarded by the
economist as if they all formed part of one nation. International freedom
of trade would enable each nation to pursue its greatest natural advan-
tage; and it is the interest of a single nation to adopt this view, even
though it be not adopted by other natiops. Industry and commerce are in
themselves unproductive. A weaver buys fifty francs’ worth of mate-
rial, works it up, and sells it for 200. He has, it is said, quadrupled its
value; but this is not so. He has added to its original value an outside
value,—that of 150 francs’ worth of material which he has consumed in
clothing, food, etc., while engaged on his work. Addition is not multipli-
cation. If there were no one to take the finished product off his hands,
this additional value would be irretrievably lost. But if I let you an acre
of land for ten francs, you spend ten more in cultivation, and obtain a
harvest of thirty francs, the acre returns you your rent and your ex-
penses, and a surplus over and above. The role of industry and of com-
merce which makes values change hand, but does not multiply them, is
thus narrowly restricted, and the main economic ideal of a nation is to
maximise its net products.
Adam Smith remarks of the Économistes that “in their works, which
are very numerous, and which treat not only of what is properly called
Political Economy, or of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations,
but of every other branch of the system of civil government, all follow
42/Henry Higgs
implicitly, and without any sensible variation, the doctrine of M. Quesnai.
There is, upon this account, little variety in the greater part of their
works.” And then he adds the statement, already referred to, that “the
most distinct and best connected account of their doctrine” is given by
Mercier de la Rivière. But La Rivière’s book, which deals especially
with the political side of their teaching, was not entirely accepted by
some members of the school in its plea for an enlightened despotism.
Mirabeau and Du Pont, Abeille and Morellet, for instance, while agree-
ing in the letter with most of these opinions, differed from them in spirit,
and even, later on, in practice. As for Turgot, Mirabeau relates that Du
Pont repeated to him Turgot’s words when Du Pont was leaving for
Poland: “I am not an encyclopaedist, for I believe in God: I am not an
economiste, for I should wish to have no king.”
We shall have some glimpses of other members of the school in
later chapters; but space does not admit of any such detailed account of
their lives and work as it has been thought best to give of the four chief
writers of the school. Mention must, however, be made of the following
works as among the most important not yet referred to.
The Abbé Baudeau’s (1730–1792) chief service to the school con-
sisted in his editing the Éphémérides and the Nouvelles Éphémérides,
to which he contributed largely. His Première introduction a la
philosophie économique ou analyse des États polices, Paris, 1771,
deserves special attention among his separate writings, and has been
reprinted in the collection of Daire.
Le Trosne (1728–1780), a lawyer of ability and a distinguished
pupil of Pothier, is best known by a work in two volumes, the first
entitled De I’ordre social, and the second De l’intérêt social, 8vo, Paris,
1777, a clear and methodical exposition of the physiocratic system.
Turgot distributed broadcast throughout his province in 1765, Le Trosne’s
La Liberte du Commerce des Grains, toujours utile et jamais nuisible,
with a covering memorandum in which he gives it the highest praise.
Saint-Péravy (1732–1789) is remembered chiefly for his Mémoire
sur les effets de I’impdt indirect sur le revenu des proprietaires de
biens fonds, qui a remporte le prix proposé par la société royale
d’agriculture de Limoges en 1767, 1768, 12mo, Londres et Paris, which
owes its fame in part to the Observations sur la memoire de M. Saint-
Péravy of Turgot, the president of the society, which he had himself
founded in his province. The memoir supported the impôt unique.
Abeille (1719–1807), secretary of the Agricultural Society of Brit-
The Physiocrates/43
tany, a contributor first to the Journal and then to the Éphémérides,
wrote Lettres d’un négociant sur la nature du commerce des grains,
Paris, 1763; Réflexions sur la police des grains en Angleterre et en
France, Paris, 1764; Principes sur la liberté du commerce des grains,
Paris, 1768; Faits qui ont influé sur la cherté des grains en France et
en Angleterre, Paris, 1768, and other pamphlets, besides editing the
Observations of his society. He became inspector-general of manufac-
tures in 1768, deserted the school, and became “anti-liberal.” He had
long been jealous of Quesnay’s fondness for Du Pont.59
The Abbé Roubaud (1730–1789) at one time edited the Journal,
and later the Gazette du Commerce, in a physiocratic spirit, until it was,
at Turgot’s expense, and at the commencement of his ministry, amal-
gamated with Baudeau’s Nouvelles Éphémérides. His Récréations
économiques, Amsterdam and Paris, 1770, attempted to refute the Dia-
logues of Galiani. He contributed to the Éphémérides, and was exiled
from Paris by Maurepas on Turgot’s fall in 1776, like Du Pont and
Baudeau. A jesting contemporary compared the sound of the names of
the chief Physiocrats to that of a pack of hounds,—Mirabeau, Turgot,
Baudeau, Roubaud!
If we add the agricultural writers, H. Patullo, Essai sur
l’amelioration des Terres, 1759, and the Marquis de Turbilly, Mémoire
sur les défrichements, 1760, to the authors mentioned in the next chap-
ter, we have a tolerably complete list of Quesnay’s disciples.
IV: Activities of the School.
The meeting referred to in the last chapter at the Marquis of Mirabeau’s
house in 1774, when he pronounced before the assembled economists a
sort of funeral oration upon Quesnay, was only one of a long series,
which had been suggested by Quesnay himself. From 1767 onwards the
marquis had held a succession of Tuesday receptions. A number of econo-
mists came to dinner (some of them bringing or sending wine), and after
dinner were read and discussed papers which were frequently published
later in the Éphémérides. Mirabeau describes these Tuesdays in an in-
teresting letter to Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom he vainly attempted to
convert to physiocracy.60 They were, he says, le foyer de la doctrine,
were very largely attended, highly successful, and gave their votaries
the name of économistes. Among those who attended them at one time
or another were the Princes of Weimar, the Maréchal de Broglie, the
Duc de la Rochefoucauld, the Duc de Choiseul, the Maréchal de Belle-
44/Henry Higgs
Isle, the Duc de Nivernois, Turgot, Malesherbes, Mme. de Pailly, a num-
ber of other ladies, and many distinguished foreigners and notabilities,
attracted sometimes by mere curiosity rather than by scientific sympa-
thy or economic interest. It was there, says Mirabeau, that Galitzin, the
ambassador of Russia, came to tell Mercier de la Rivière that the Em-
press Catherine wished him to come to St. Petersburg to counsel her
upon the art, of government. On another occasion Forbonnais had been
persuaded to come, and was introduced by Mirabeau to the Abbé
Baudeau. “I want, like Cicero, to see,” said the host, “if two augurs can
look each other in the face without laughing.”—“I am no augur,” re-
plied Forbonnais, “but monsieur (the Abbé) wears their robe.” Baudeau
whispered to Mirabeau that he was just about to publish a crushing
attack upon Forbonnais in the Éphémérides. “Never mind,” said the
marquis confidentially, “we will gild the pill.” Adam Smith can never
have attended the Tuesdays, for he returned to England before they com-
menced. After the fall of Turgot (12th May 1776), the marquis was
“invited” by Government to suspend these assemblies, which thus had
an existence of nine years. Some of Mirabeau’s Tuesday addresses are
extant among his manuscripts in the Archives Nationales at Paris. One
of the papers still unpublished, on Political Curves by Du Pont,61 seems
to have been an early example of the diagrammatic (if not
mathematical)treatment of economic questions; and the promise of Daniel
Bernoulli to study these curves promised a serious development of the
method, which was left, however, to other hands in later years. The
meetings were a powerful engine for propagating and popularising the
ideas of the school. A still mightier force, however, was the periodical
organ of the school, at first the Journal de l’Agriculture, as already
stated, and later the Éphémérides. These contained a great number of
interesting and valuable articles upon a variety of economic subjects by
different hands. The best account of the Éphémérides is that written by
Dr. Bauer for Mr. Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy.62 The
Journal was edited by Du Pont, from September 1765 to November
1766. Mirabeau says that the proprietors, impatient at the editor’s
unpunctuality and inexactitude, dismissed him from his post.63 Baudeau
then put at the disposal of the Physiocrats his Éphémérides, founded
December 1765. And in January 1767 it became their organ. Baudeau
continued to edit it till May 1768, when he was succeeded by Du Pont,
who held the post till the review was discontinued (May 1772; last num-
ber dated March 1772). It is usually stated that it was then suppressed
The Physiocrates/45
by the comptroller-general, the Abbé Terray. But Mirabeau throws fur-
ther light upon this statement in a letter to his friend, the Marquis of
Longo. The inveterate dilatoriness of Du Pont had, it appears, annoyed
the booksellers, disgusted the subscribers, and run the journal into debt.
“We profited,” he says, “by the hailstorm upon journalists to make it
come to an end at the fourth volume of 1772 with the decorum of perse-
cution.” There had been sixty-three volumes of this series. In 1774 Turgot,
who had become minister, sanctioned its resuscitation, and Baudeau put
out in December his Nouvelles Éphémérides Économiques ou
Bibliotheque raisonnee de l’Histoire et de la Politique,64 of which eigh-
teen further volumes appeared, twelve in 1775, and six in 1776. This
was suppressed in 1776, after the fall of Turgot. The Abbé Roubaud
now (1775) began to edit the Journal de I’Agriculture, once more a
physiocratic review (1775–1783). Baudeau attempted to revive his
Nouvelles Éphémérides in 1788, but only a few numbers appeared be-
fore he went mad, and the publication ceased. Both the Éphémérides
and the Nouvelles Éphémérides are extremely rare. Dr. Bauer states
that the only known complete set of the latter is to be found in the library
of the University of Giessen.
These journals of the Physiocrats, according to Dr. Bauer, are “the
first example of journalism made subservient to social science, the rich-
est source for the history of contemporary economic life, and the growth
of modern ideas, not only in France but even in eastern Europe.” They
were written “with a distinct practical tendency, namely to struggle for
free trade, free enterprise, and equal taxation; to combat the crushing
burdens imposed by commercial restraints, industrial monopoly, arbi-
trary assessment, and lavish public expenditure... and by inducing mon-
archs, statesmen, and landlords to introduce agricultural and financial
reforms, to alleviate feudal burdens and commercial restraints, they
benefited even the lower classes in Sweden, Denmark, Baden, Austria,
and Tuscany. Thus they helped towards transplanting economic progress
eastward both in thought and practice.”65 Among the contributors were
Quesnay, Mirabeau, Du Pont, Mercier de la Riviére, Baudeau, Abeille,
Le Trosne, Butré, Roubaud, St.-Péravy, Turgot, Morellet, Franklin,
Fréville, Fourqueux, De Vauvilliers, the Duc de Saint-Mégrin, Bigot de
Ste. Croix, the Abbé Loiseau, Rouxelin, De la Touane, Treillard, Belly,
St. Maurice de St. Leu, and the Margrave of Baden. They had a wide
and respectful circle of readers, of whom Voltaire was one.
One illustration must suffice to serve as an indication of the practi-
46/Henry Higgs
cal utility of these reviews. In 1767 a bad harvest having driven up the
price of bread to a very serious extent, Baudeau published an article,
Avis aux honnetes gens qui veulent bien faire, in which he pointed out
that a better system of grinding corn and baking would enable flour and
bread to be sold at a cheaper rate. Mirabeau set up one of these eco-
nomical flour-mills, and bakeries (fours économiques) at his property
at Fleury, near Paris, and sold good bread at one-third less than the
current price. He turned out nine hundred livres a day, and could, he
says, have sold double as much if it could have been supplied. “The
poor people,” he writes, “fight who shall have my bread. It has become
the fashion. The Duc de Choiseul sends a courier out twice a week for
Fleury bread and so does Mme. du Deffand.” He intends to set up these
mills everywhere, “send to the devil his feudal rights of banalité,” and
instead of compelling his people to bring their corn to his mills and pay
their legal dues for grinding, will attract them voluntarily by the low
price, which will upset the crying abuses of monopoly and regulation.
The Prince of Rohan-Rochefort and other celebrities followed his ex-
ample; and M. de Loménie tells us that the millers themselves adopted
the improved form, which is in use in France to-day and produces more
flour than the old system from the same amount of corn. The interest of
Mirabeau in this reform was so strong that the younger Mirabeau ma-
lignantly explains his father’s preference for one of his daughters, the
Marquise du Saillant, by saying that, among other things, her husband
had feigned an enthusiasm for the moulins économiques.
Another blow which the Physiocrats struck at monopolies to the
enhancement of their own reputation is also associated with the name of
Baudeau. The corporation of butchers had been compelled since 1743
to take loans of capital at high rates from a body of financiers, the
farmers of the caisse de Poissy,66 who had advanced money to the Gov-
ernment. Baudeau denounced the iniquities of this arrangement, and
was cited by the farmers before the tribunal of the Parliament in 1776.
He successfully defended himself at two sittings against the famous ad-
vocate Gerbier, and was borne home in triumph by the victorious butch-
ers through the streets of Paris amidst a concourse of his physiocratic
brethren.
But it was not in Paris alone that these apostles of economic liberty
obtained honour. Carl Friedrich, Margrave of Baden (1728–1811), en-
rolled himself in their ranks. On the 22nd of September 1769 he wrote
to Mirabeau as follows: “I have a right as a man to claim your friend-
The Physiocrates/47
ship” (a delicate allusion to L’Ami des Homines), and he says that with-
out being personally acquainted with Mirabeau he feels entitled to seek
his counsel. God had brought him into the world to govern a country
whpse climate and soil held out the prospect of a good return to indus-
try, when the necessary capital was applied to the land. But from time
immemorial the land had, when handed down, been divided into as many
portions as there were heirs. There were now no large owners and prac-
tically no tenant-farmers; and the produit net of the country was small
and taxes were hard to collect. What advice would Mirabeau, as an
economic expert, offer? Should there be a new law of succession to
substitute for the compulsory partition of land a money payment by one
heir to the others? And how could the produit net be made the basis of
taxation in a simple and practical form? Answers to these questions
would contribute to “spread the light of economic science by showing
that it is applicable to all places and to all circumstances.” Mirabeau
deprecates new legislation. “You have not the right,” he says, “to make
such a law”; and he piquantly refers him upon the second point to his
Theorie de l’Impôt, for the publication of which his own sovereign had
cast him into prison. The correspondence thus begun ripened into friend-
ship, and continued to the time of Mirabeau’s death twenty years later.
Personal visits were exchanged as well as books and letters, and Carl
Friedrich consented to become the guardian of manuscripts which
Mirabeau might leave behind him. The Margrave proposed free trade in
corn to the German Diet, and even introduced the impôt unique, 20 per
cent of the produit net, in his own Duchy of Baden. The experiment was
made in 1770 in the three villages of Dietlingen, Theningen, and
Balingen—a fact of which Adam Smith was probably unaware when he
declared that “that system which represents the produce of land as the
sole source of the revenue and wealth of every country has, so far as I
know, never been adopted by any nation, and it at present exists only in
the speculations of a few men of great learning and ingenuity in France....
A system,” he says, “which never has done, and probably never will do,
any harm in any part of the world.”67 The experiment was abandoned at
Theningen and Balingen in 1776, but was maintained at Dietlingen till
1792.68 The Margrave invited Du Pont to Carlsruhe, intending to put
him at the head of his finances, but, not venturing actually to appoint a
foreigner to this post, made him conseiller aulique, retained him at his
side as an adviser, and made him tutor to his son. The Margrave himself
wrote an abridgment of political economy, based mainly on Mirabeau’s
48/Henry Higgs
Les Économiques. It first appeared in the Éphémérides, and was sepa-
rately printed and seen through the press by Du Pont in 1772 under the
title Abrégé de l’Économie Politique. It forms a commendable precis of
physiocracy.
Another prince, Gustavus III, King of Sweden, who had made
Mirabeau’s acquaintance when travelling in France, honoured the Friend
of Men, as well as himself, by the following letter (18th August 1772,
the day before his coup d’état): “Monsieur the Marquis de Mirabeau,
the title which humanity has long since conferred upon you, is much
above what kings can do for your glory. I have, however, been jealous to
pay at least my share of the tribute which all nations owe to you. I have
thought, moreover, that an institution created in honour of agriculture
would be defective without the name of him who has taught sovereigns
to recognise all its importance. Henceforth I consider myself more than
ever authorised to beg of you the continuation of the useful lessons to
which you have dedicated your labours and your rare knowledge; on my
side I feel bound more than ever to profit by them. And I pray God,
Monsieur le Marquis, to preserve you in His high and holy keeping.—
GUSTAVE.” This letter was accompanied by the grand cross of the Order
of Wasa, just founded “in honour of agriculture.” Du Pont was made a
knight of the Order, and, when the Ésphémérides were suppressed,
Gustavus joined with his fellow-disciple the Margrave of Baden in com-
missioning Du Pont to send them a manuscript journal in which matters
of economic interest should receive a large share. The king attempted to
pursue, in his own politics, the liberal ideals of the school; and it was at
his request that Mercier de la Rivière wrote his work on public educa-
tion, De l’instruction publique, 1775.
Mention has already been made of the advances of Catherine of
Russia to Mercier de la Rivière, but these seem to have been little more
than a womanly whim for the fashion of the moment, and to have had
little practical result. When the philosopher arrived at her Court at
Moscow she had an interview with him, which Thiebault reports as
follows:69 “Sir,” said the Czarina, “could you tell me the best way to
govern a State well?” — “There is only one, Madame,” answered the
pupil of Quesnay; “it is to be just, i.e. maintain order, and enforce the
laws.” — “But on what basis should the laws of an empire repose?” —
“On one alone, Madame, the nature of things and of men.” — “Exactly,
but when one wishes to give laws to a people, what rules indicate most
surely the laws which suit it best?” — “To give or make laws, Madame,
The Physiocrates/49
is a task which God has left to no one. Ah! what is man, to think himself
capable of dictating laws to beings whom he knows not, or knows so
imperfectly? And by what right would he impose laws upon beings whom
God has not placed in his hands?” — “To what, then, do you reduce the
science of government?” — “To study well, to recognise and manifest,
the laws which God has so evidently engraven in the very organisation
of man, when He gave him existence. To seek to go beyond this would
be a great misfortune and a destructive undertaking.”—“Monsieur, I
am very pleased to have heard you. I wish you good-day.” She sent him
home richly rewarded, and wrote to Voltaire: “He supposed that we
walked on all fours, and very politely took the trouble to come to set us
up on our hind legs.”
A more serious interest in the Physiocrats was taken by Leopold II,
Grand Duke of Tuscany, afterwards Emperor of Austria, to whom
Mirabeau had dedicated Les Économiques, 1769–1772. He carried out
some of their reforms in practice, ordered his ministers to consult with
Mirabeau, and corresponded with Du Pont. Stanislas of Poland, Charles
III of Spain, the Emperor Joseph II, Ferdinand of Naples are also to be
mentioned among their adherents.70 A tribute to the fashionable craze
for the “Agricultural System” was the ceremony performed by the Dau-
phin at Versailles, 15th June 1768, when he publicly “held the plough”—
a toy bedecked with ribbons. The Emperor Joseph more sturdily drove a
peasant’s plough in Moravia, 19th August 1769. The Dauphin boasted
of knowing L’Ami des Hommes by heart, and, but for Mirabeau’s sturdy
opposition, would have been willing to become the patron of the
Éphémérides. Du Pont classes Carl Friedrich and Leopold (brother of
Marie Antoinette) among the followers of Quesnay; Joseph II with Turgot
and Adam Smith; La Riviere and Baudeau as a separate branch. Du
Pont wrote a heroic drama upon Joseph II, which Turgot with difficulty
persuaded him not to publish. Turgot’s own chief economic work, his
Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des Richesses, November
1776, 12mo, first appeared in the Éphémérides in 1770, and the only
cloud which for a moment shadowed his friendship with Du Pont was
when the latter subjected these Réflexions to editorial amendment and
“improvement,” to bring them into harmony with the sacrosanct doc-
trines of Quesnay, when there appeared to be any departure from them.
In his early writings in the Encydopedie Turgot had expounded Gournay’s
ideas of freedom in industry and commerce (articles “Foires” and
“Fondations”), and his noble efforts as intendant and as minister to
50/Henry Higgs
carry these ideas into practice are permanently engraven in the history
of France. He believed in the doctrines of the produit net and the impôt
unique, the central ideas of the school, but upon numerous points of
detail he emphasised his differences and his independence, while he al-
ways speaks of the economists as an outsider,71 and is never tired of
deploring their sectarian spirit and preaching the advantages of an open
mind. It was at Quesnay’s rooms that he met Adam Smith in 1766. It
was by Turgot’s money, and sometimes by his pen, that Du Pont’s
Éphémérides were aided to keep afloat so long as they did; and he sup-
ported the expense of Baudeau’s Nouvelles Éphémérides during his
ministry. His youthful essay on Law’s paper money, a letter to the Abbé
de Cicé in 1749, was written when he was but twenty-two years of age,
and before the influence of the Physiocrats came into existence, but it
shows already the powerful calibre of his mind. He was for many years
immersed in administration; from 1761 to 1774 was intendant of
Limoges, and from 1774 to 1776, after serving five weeks as Minister
of Marine, was Comptroller-General of Finance,—the most important
minister of the kingdom. Nevertheless he found time in his active life to
endow economic literature with valuable writings, as well as to enrich
economic history by useful measures. We can refer only to those which
directly concern us. In Limousin he applied himself to the Herculean
labour of a complete survey or cadastre—a kind of Domesday—which
should serve as a more rational basis for assessing the taille. He boldly
abolished the corvee in his province, had the roads repaired by hired
workmen, and threw the expense on the ratepayers. He proposed, but
could not carry, a reform of the militia. And in numerous able memoirs
he urged upon the ComptrollerGeneral, the Abbé Terray, free trade in
corn, free trade in capital, and reforms of the taxes. When he found
himself at the head of affairs he at once established the first, and took
numerous steps to secure the last of these objects throughout the coun-
try, amended the octrois or municipal duties on articles of food and
drink brought into the town, and in twenty-three towns abolished the
droit d’aubaine, a special tax upon foreigners. He swept away the corvee
everywhere, as well as the privileged jurandes or gilds, and battled at
all points against monopolies and fiscal abuses. The opposition stirred
up by this reforming zeal not only drove him from power, but within
three months brought back again the corn laws, the corvee, and the
jurandes. The jurandes were finally abolished in 1789, and the corvées
in 1791, while all internal duties or local tolls except the octroi were
The Physiocrates/51
suppressed by the National Assembly in 1790, on the ground that “they
had made the different parts of the country foreign to one another.” The
preambles of Turgot’s edicts, striking denunciations of old abuses and
closely-reasoned pleas for their reform, had sunk in the minds of the
people and prepared the way for their ultimate triumph.
Some of his writings have been mentioned already. The letter on
paper money, the articles in the Encyclopédie, the Éloge de Gournay,
the letter on Mines and Quarries—a plea for free mining even under the
land of a neighbour provided his superficies be uninjured—and on la
marque des fers, an argument against an apprehended tax on foreign
iron, need not detain us. Of his seven letters to Terray on free trade in
corn three were subsequently handed by Turgot to the king, and disap-
peared at the Revolution. Those which remain speak the language of the
Physiocrats. “The revenues of the landowners,” he says, “are the only
source from which the State can derive its own revenue. In what form
soever taxes be imposed or collected they are always, in the last result,
paid by the proprietors of the land, either by increase of their expenses
or diminution of their receipts.”72 And he expressly builds his policy
upon Quesnay’s estimates in the article “Grains.” In his Mémoire sur
les prêts d’Argent he seized, as often, a particular occasion to lay down
a statement of general principles. Defaulting debtors at Angouleme having
denounced their creditors for infractions of the usury laws the whole
fabric of credit was rudely shaken. Adam Smith need not have waited
for Bentham to convert him from Quesnay’s opinion in favour of usury
laws if he had carefully studied Turgot’s admirable argument against
them. The canonist and the jurist are alike refuted. St. Thomas Aquinas
and appeals to Scripture are dealt with on one side, the eminent Pothier
on the other. Turgot approximates somewhat closely to the position which
Adam Smith subsequently assumed by admitting that loans to prodigal
sons are injurious to society. But he logically urges that they should be
punished on that ground alone, and not because they are loans.73 The
Usury Laws were abolished in France at the Revolution, long before
they disappeared from the Statute Book in England.
The Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des Richesses
were written in 1766 for two Chinese students who were returning from
France to their own country. They appeared in the Éphémérides in 1770,
and were published in book form in 1776. Cossa considers that “this
work states in a clear and taking form the common doctrines of the
Physiocrats, but it also marks a step forward in the history of our sci-
52/Henry Higgs
ence, since Turgot achieved in it a complete separation of economics
from jurisprudence. It therefore deserves to be entered in red-letter, as
the first scientific treatise on social economics.”74 This judgment can
hardly stand, for Cantillon at least preceded Turgot, and, as comparison
would abundantly show, influenced this work very considerably. Turgot
divides his book into a hundred short sections or paragraphs. Com-
merce, he says, arises from (1) the unequal distribution of land; (2) the
diversity of the soil in fitness for production; (3) the multiplicity of
human needs, and (4) the advantages of the division of labour, which he
illustrates by examples. The agricultural labourer is pre-eminent over
the artisan, not in honour or dignity but in physical necessity, for he
might do without them but they cannot do without him. In fact, what his
labour produces from the soil is the only Wages Fund (l’unique fonds
des salaires), and the commodities which he buys are the exact equiva-
lent of the produce which he gives in exchange. Competition forces ar-
tisans’ wages down to subsistence level (the doctrine of Necessary
Wages). But the agricultural labourer produces a surplus over and above
this, for Nature does not higgle with him for a subsistence-wage, and he
is thus the only producer of wealth. The extractive classes, then, are
productive, the artisan classes salaried (l’une productive, l’autre
stipendiée). As society progresses and lands are all taken up, the owner
becomes distinct from the labourer, the newcomers may as well earn
wages on the land as in manufactures. The product is now divided into
two parts—the wages of labourers and the surplus which goes to the
landlord as his revenue. The landlord becomes available for social needs
like war and justice, either by personal service or by deputies whom he
pays. He may therefore be assigned to a third class, an available reserve
(classe disponible). The evolution of labour on the land is traced from
(1) labourers to (2) slaves, (3) serfs, (4) metayers, (5) farmers. He pro-
ceeds to examine the mechanism of exchange, and describes the stage of
barter and the rise and nature of money in terms reminiscent of Cantillon,
and suggestive of comparison with Adam Smith. The accumulation and
social utility of Capital is next sketched, and its functions in aid of
production are described with an argument that interest for the use of
capital is as legitimate and should be as free as the sum paid for the use
of land or any other object of commerce, and depends, in either case,
upon supply and demand. The annual net produce of the land of a coun-
try capitalised, plus the movable wealth in the country, gives the sum of
the national riches,—excluding loans, for they would otherwise count
The Physiocrates/53
twice over. The capitalist, who lends at interest, does not form part of
the classe disfonible, and his income is not available for the State, for it
is not a produit net, but the result of a buying and selling like the profit
of other merchants. It should no more be taxed than the manure which
fertilises the land. “C’est toujours la terre qui est la premiere et l’unique
source de toute richesse” “II n’y a de revenu que le produit net des
terres”—a frankly physiocratic conclusion.75 Yet the Physiocrats hardly
claimed Turgot for their own, and even in the height of his prosperity
Mirabeau’s letters refer to him with a mistrust not unmingled with dis-
dain—a feeling partly due, no doubt, to Turgot’s somewhat haughty
independence, his lack of political tact, his reservations upon monarchy,
his friendship with Voltaire, and his alleged scepticism. Yet, upon the
last point, it is Mirabeau himself who recounts Turgot’s phrase, “Je ne
suis point encyclopediste car je crois en Dieu. Je ne suis point
économiste car je ne voudrais pas de roi”76
Other writers who were, like Turgot (himself known as an abbe—
the Abbé de Laulne—in his Sorbonne days), in virtual but not unre-
served accord with the Physiocrats, were the Abbé Morellet and the
Abbe de Condillac. Morellet (1727–1819), a follower of Gournay, and
a college friend of Turgot, was called by Voltaire the Abbé Mord-les
from his polemical sarcasms. He wrote Réflexions sur les avantages de
la libre fabrication et de l’usage des toiles peintes en France, Geneva,
1758, supporting Gournay against Forbonnais, and a pamphlet addressed
to Malesherbes, Fragment d’une lettre sur la police des grains, Brus-
sels and Paris, 1764. He published in 1769 a memoir against the mo-
nopoly of the East India Company, and carried on a warfare against
Necker as well on this subject as on Free Trade in corn. Of interest to
economists are also his Refutation of Galiani, London, 1770, his Pro-
spectus d’un nouveau Dictionnaire du Commerce followed by a bibli-
ography of economics, Paris, 1769, and his Mémoires sur le XVIIe siècle
et sur la révolution, posthumously published in 1821. The last of these
contains oft-quoted references to his acquaintance with Quesnay, Turgot,
and Adam Smith. Lavergne, in his Économistes français du XVIIIe siècle,
has devoted an essay to Morellet, almost the latest surviving friend of
the physiocratic leaders. He disclaims being a member of the inner circle,
says he had never attended their meetings or understood the Tableau
Oeconomique, and accepted their doctrines only with some modifica-
tions.
Condillac (1714–1780), better known as a philosopher, is remark-
54/Henry Higgs
able by his treatise, Du commerce et du Gouvernement considérés
relativement tun a I’autre, 1776, in which he follows the doctrine of
Quesnay so far as to regard the land as the sole source of wealth, but
refuses to regard industry as “unproductive.” Jevons, while praising the
work as “original and profound,” points out its obligations to Cantillon.
Mr. M’Leod has covered it, in his Dictionary of Political Economy,
with exaggerated praise, while J. B. Say stigmatises it with undeserved
contempt. The orthodox Le Trosne engaged in a discussion with Condillac
upon his dissent from the school, but was unable to convince him.
Condorcet (1743–1794), likewise a philosopher, and a friend and
biographer of Turgot, is also to be mentioned among the allies of the
Physiocrats. He pleaded for freedom in the Encyclopedie (arts. “Mono-
pole” and “Monopoleur”), and in his Lettres sur le commerce des grains,
Paris, 1775; Réflexions sur le commerce des blés, Londres, 1776;
Réflexions sur l’esclavage, Neufchatel, 1781; and wrote to Necker a
Lettre d’un laboureur de Picardie à M. N..., auteur prohibitif à Paris,
Paris, 1775.
It is hardly possible to do more than mention the principal disciples
of the Physiocrats in foreign lands. The more important are—in Ger-
many, besides Carl Friedrich of Baden, already referred to, Schlettwein,
Fr. Karl von Moser, Mauvillon, Schmalz and Krug; in Switzerland,
Iselin; in Italy, Longo; and in Russia, Galitzin. Mention of other lesser
lights will be found in the Histories of Political Economy of Roscher,
Kautz,77 and Cossa. Schlettwein (1731–1802), Professor at the Univer-
sity of Giessen, is regarded by Professor Oncken as the chief of the
German physiocratic school. Officially charged with the administration
of the domains of the Margrave of Baden, it fell to him to conduct the
experiment of the impôt unique in 1770, and his faith remained firm to
the last. F. K. von Moser (1723–1798) — not to be confounded with the
more famous Justus Möser, the cameralist, nor his own father Johann
Jakob von Moser — was an adherent of the Ami des Hommes. Mauvillon
(1743–1794) became a Physiocrat through translating into German the
Reflexions of Turgot, and spread the doctrine in Germany by his
Physiokratische Briefe an den Herrn Professor Dohm, Brunswick, 1780.
He also wrote an essay on “Public and Private Luxury,” how to check it
according to the principles of the French Physiocrats, in his Sammlung
von Aufsatzen, etc., 1776–1777. Roscher considers him the ablest of
the German Physiocrats, and Cossa describes him as a profounder thinker
than Schlettwein, views which Professor Oncken does not share. Other
The Physiocrates/55
adherents are Fürstenau, Versuch einer Apologie des physiokratischen
Systems, 1779, and Springer, Über das physiokratische System, 1780.
Schmalz (1760–1831), Professor of Law at Berlin, examines the vari-
ous systems of Political Economy, and (as late as 1808) gives the palm
to that of Quesnay. The same year Krug (1770–1843) expressed his
concurrence in the view that it is the land upon which all taxes ulti-
mately fall, and is therefore the only proper object of taxation.78 The
adherents of the Physiocrats are thus brought down to the memory of
those still alive.
Isaak Iselin (1728–1782), Secretary to the State Council at Basle,
seems to have been introduced to a study of the Physiocrats by
Schlettwein, before he wrote his Versuch über die gesellige Ordnung,
1772. The Éphémérides, he says, made Quesnay appear to him what
Newton is to a mathematician. He recast his Traüme eines
Menschenfreundes (Dreams of a Friend of Men) in 1776, abandoning
the views of his earlier edition twenty-one years before, and started a
German Éphémérides, Ephemeriden der Menschheit, the same year,
with the co-operation of the chief German writers on Political Economy.79
The Marquis de Longo, Professor of Political Economy at Milan,
has already been referred to2 as a friend and assistant of Mirabeau, with
whom he exchanged a lengthy correspondence, upon which Loménie
has drawn with advantage. The Prince de Galitzin (1730–1803), it will
be remembered, was the Russian ambassador at Paris, who frequented
the Tuesdays, and persuaded Catherine to send for Mercier de la Rivière.
Many years later he published at Brunswick a work De l’esprit des
economistes, ou les économistes justifiés d’avoir posé par leurs
principes les bases de la revolution française, 2 vols. 8vo, 1796, in
which he exculpates the Physiocrats from responsibility for the more
violent principles of the Revolution.
V: Opponents of the School.
Francois Louis Véron-Duverger 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
Encyclopédie, and translated or adapted The British Merchant (Le
négotiant 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, Considérations sur les finances d’Espagne
relativement à celles de France, 1753–55, and especially by his
56/Henry Higgs
Recherches et considérations sur les finances de France depuis 1595
jusqu’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 économiques (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 Éphémérides 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 factor in the production
of wealth as the material upon which that energy is expended. He ob-
jected to free trade and the impôt 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 dic-
tum 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 Duc de Choiseul and Silhouette, Comptroller-General of Finance,
contributed to cause the Physiocrats to regard him as their most re-
doubtable adversary. Towards the close of his life he wrote in Du Pont’s
journal L’Historien (1795), supporting the editor’s efforts in the Conseil
des anciens. But this reconciliation did not extend to his economic views.
His Éléments du Commerce, 1754, was reprinted in 1796, with the ad-
dition 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 ex-
travagant 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
The Physiocrates/57
Abbe de Mably (1709–1785), whose criticisms of Mercier de la Rivière
are, however, by no means to be despised. Fastening upon the earlier
political and philosophical chapters of the Ordre naturel et essentiel
des Société 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
économistes sur l’Ordre naturel et essentiel des Sociétés politiques in
the form of ten letters addressed “to the author of the Éphémérides du
Citoyen.” 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 accompa-
nied 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 in-
separably 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 intro-
duced 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 pov-
erty, 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 en-
gendered brutality and ferocity. It would be vain to seek to go back to
nature, for property creates its own supporters, and an attempt to abol-
ish it would provoke greater disorders than those we fly from. But why
not seek palliatives? Why narrow ourselves to extend the culture of the
58/Henry Higgs
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 na-
ture. Admitting that man’s physical needs contributed to the establish-
ment 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 social qualities, and these have contributed
the greater share to the establishment of society. Agriculture was de-
signed 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 hap-
piness: 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 commu-
nism may be omitted without weakening the rest of his criticism, which
proceeds as follows: Why are the rulers and magistrates of La Rivière’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. Equal-
ity 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 Économistes are strangely inconsistent. Sometimes they regard man
as a browsing animal, concerned only with his nourishment, the maxi-
mum 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 evi-
dence, which changes from time to time like other fashions, but are
ruled by opinion. Moral and political truths are not like geometrical
The Physiocrates/59
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 pas-
sions 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.80 Certainly laws should be just,
but no precept was ever better known and more neglected: and the injus-
tice 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 Économistes 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 succes-
sion 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 mis-
sionaries 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?81
He criticises vigorously La Rivière’s opinions upon the necessity of
separating the legislative and the executive power, and of avoiding a
60/Henry Higgs
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 Sociétés, 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,82 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 Éphémérides 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 ac-
tion 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.83 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 pub-
lished in 1771 a work Du gouvernement de la Pologne. Still more im-
portant is the fact that the American Congress desired him to draw up a
constitution, which led to his Observations sur le gouvernement et les
lois des États-Unis d’Amerique, 1784.
The title of Mably’s book was very likely suggested by the philo-
sophic doubts of Descartes. The Doutes sur la théorie de l’impôt, 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
des Homines that the population of France was decreasing. Rivière (not
Le Mercier de la Rivière) published in 1761 L’Ami de la Paix, ou réponse
à la théorie de I’impot du Marquis de Mirabeau, Of many other works
directed against the impôt unique upon land, it may suffice to mention
Guiraudet’s Erreurs des Économistes sur l’impôt in 1790; the Marquis
The Physiocrates/61
de Casaux’s Absurdité de l’impot territorial, 1790; Considérations sur
l’effet de l’impôt, 1794; and J. Tifaut de la Noue’s Réflexions
philosophiques sur l’impôt, 1774. The Ordre naturel was not to escape
with the onslaught of Mably. Voltaire (1694–1774), provoked by the
injudicious, exaggerated praise of Galitzin 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 Économistes as a whole. L’homme aux quarante
écus, 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 statisti-
cians, 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 crowns84 a year net but for the taxes.
“There appeared several edicts of a few persons who, finding them-
selves at leisure, govern the State from their fireside. The preamble of
these edicts ran that the legislative and executive power is born by di-
vine 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 pre-
sides 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
havesuccumbed 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
62/Henry Higgs
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 gentle-
man 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 bush-
els of wheat, a hundred oxen, a thousand sheep, and two hundred sacks
of oats, I wager piles of gold which represent these disgusting com-
modities. If, after putting the impôt 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 re-
quire 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 mil-
lions 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 con-
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sole me much.”85
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.86 He wrote
to Du Pont in 1774: “J’ose féliciter la France que M. Turgot soit ministre
et qu’il ait un homme tel que vous près de lui.” And in his Fragments
sur l’histoire he says: “I have read the Éphémérides du Citoyen, a work
worthy of its title. This journal, and the good articles upon agriculture
in the Encydopédie, 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
Ephémérides.” 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 ac-
cuses him of breathing a leper on the human race,87 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 Abbé 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 Abbé
(he was only 4½ 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 sur le commerce des blês, Londres, 1770,
translated from the Italian by Diderot, Galiani took up a position nearly
approaching that of the extreme wing of the modern historical econo-
mists. 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
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is a kind of production, for it adds to the raw material (elle ajoute à la
matière première). 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 compli-
cated 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, man-
ners, soil, climate, products, etc. She takes the treasures of Bengal to
stake them at Newmarket, and exercises her troops (sailors) when car-
rying 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 again’st 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 Molière seemed to have combined to
write it. Turgot was much struck by its elegance and gay wisdom, though
he noted its inconsistencies. The Éphémérides 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 du Commerce. In 1770
appeared Morellet’s Refutation; and Mercier de la Rivière brought out
a pamphlet entitled L’Intérêo général de I’Etat, ou la liberté du com-
merce des blês, etc., avec la refutation d’un nouveau système publié
par l’Abbé Galiani, etc., Amsterdam and Paris, 1770, to which the
abbé 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 mock-
ingly proposed for himself a statue on which a Latin inscription was to
The Physiocrates/65
declare that he had “wiped out the economists, who were sending the
nation to sleep”—economistis deletis qui rempublicam obdormiebant.88
Grimm and Bachaumont followed his cue in their literary correspon-
dence, 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 impôt 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.89 The prize was awarded to Saint-Péravy,3
but Graslin’s essay was given honourable mention. In 1767 appeared
his Essai Analytique sur la Richesse et sur l’Impôt, 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 Physiocrats 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 Correspondance 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 Èloge of
Colbert, 1773, and his works Sur la Legislation et le commerce des
Grains, 1775, and De l’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 prob-
ably 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 Memoire au roi on
municipal government plagiarised Mirabeau’s Mémoire 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
66/Henry Higgs
lives by the destruction of liberty, as carnivorous beasts live on their
prey. This produced a reply from Morellet, the Théorie du paradoxe,
1775. Turning upon Morellet, Linguet wrote a Theorie du Libelle ou
l’art de calomnier avec fruit, 1775, in which he bursts into a tirade
against the Physiocrats, quoted in the Dictionnaire de I’Economie
Politique, 1852.90 He had already assailed them in his Réponse aux
docteurs modernes... avec la réfutation du système des philosophes
économistes, 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 charac-
ter of their school and doctrines.91 He considered bread a slow poison,
and was guillotined in 1794 for having calumniated le pain, 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 Anti-Mirabeau appeared in
1771;92 Pfeiffer, who wrote Der Anti-Physiokrat, 1780; Dohm, the cor-
respondent of Mauvillon,4 and author of Kurze Darstellung der
physiokratische Systems, Cassel, 1778; and Von Sonnenfels, Grundsatze
der Polizei, Handlung und Finanz, Vienna, 1765.
VI: Influence of the School.
We have so far considered the Physiocrats descriptively,—their rise and
history, the members, the doctrines, the practical activities, and the op-
ponents 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 enunci-
ated have survived the storm and stress of criticism, and been incorpo-
rated 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 Prin-
ciples 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 imper-
fect appreciation of the central terms and radical concepts of the science
itself. Their fundamental errors were the identification of Wealth with
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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 cooperate in 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 sys-
tems of political economy,93 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 Stateregulation, followed by
Colbert. The other is the system of the Physiocrats, which Adam Smith
examines briefly because he thought it Utopian,94 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
68/Henry Higgs
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 of-
fers 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 certainly
more productive than one which affords only two, so the labour of farmers
and country labourers is certainly more productive than that of mer-
chants, 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 performance,” 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 Hommes,
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
The Physiocrates/69
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 allot-
ted 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 manu-
facturers, 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 em-
ployed within their society, and consequently to increase its real rev-
enue.”
Fifthly and lastly, even though the wealth of a nation consisted alto-
gether 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 dif-
ferent 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 con-
sisting, not in the unconsumable riches of money, but in the consumable
goods annually reproduced by the labour of the society, and in repre-
senting 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 un-
derstand what surpasses the comprehension of ordinary people, the para-
70/Henry Higgs
dox which it maintains, concerning the unproductive nature of manu-
facturing labour, has not perhaps contributed a little to increase the
number of its admirers.... Their works have certainly been of some ser-
vice 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 for-
eign 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 refers95 to
the impôt 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 impôt unique, a percentage of the produit net varying of
course in its total yield with the state of the harvests, was “the discour-
agement which it might... give to the improvement of land.... The land-
lord 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 in-
citement 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
The Physiocrates/71
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 sys-
tem awaits its scientific refutation.96 This is the language of an enthusi-
ast, justified only in part even if we confine our attention to the criti-
cisms of Adam Smith. The Earl of Lauderdale (1752–1839), a consci-
entious and sympathetic student of the French economists, quotes and
translates numerous passages from their writings, the Tableau
Oeconomique, the Physiocratie, the Philosophie Rurale, the
Éphémérides, and from Turgot and Morellet; but he attacks their view
that “even the labour of the artificer and the manufacturer is totally
unproductive.”97 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 ste-
rility 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 pub-
lished under his real name in 1815 The Happiness of States, by Simon
Gray, expresses opinions similar to Lauderdale’s in All Classes Pro-
ductive 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
72/Henry Higgs
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 abso-
lutely necessary to man, directly or indirectly, in all his operations in
producing wealth, that heat is the sole source of wealth! What the econo-
mist 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.98 The impôt 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 propri-
etor who produces for his own consumption, and has but a small sur-
plus 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, nei-
ther 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,99 would, in many States, present a yawning deficit even after ap-
propriating 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 sugges-
tions 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 impôt 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.100 But it is in the main on principles like theirs that
Mill proposed the taxation of the unearned increment of land, and that
The Physiocrates/73
philosophers like Professor Sidgwick regard unearned increment of ev-
ery 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 prac-
tice 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 maxi-
mum production of the means of subsistence.101 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 un-
qualified 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 econo-
mists were more nearly right than their great critic. Sometimes, he ad-
mits, 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 meta-
physical 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.102 Among minor economic writers we find Paley making
the following statement in his Moral Philosophy: “Let it be remem-
bered, then, that agriculture is the immediate source of human provi-
sion, that trade conduces to the production of provision only as it pro-
motes agriculture; that the whole, system of commerce, vast and vari-
ous 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 Inde-
pendent 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
74/Henry Higgs
Economy, 1822. Spence endeavoured to show that even if Napoleon
succeeded in ruining the foreign trade of the country we might still main-
tain 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 de-
pends is the class of land proprietors. He urges that all taxes are finally
paid out of the neat produce of the soil. Adam Smith has, he says, virtu-
ally 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. 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 Réflexions. 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.103 But in the long retreat at Kirkcaldy he carefully sifted
The Physiocrates/75
their doctrines, and definitely rejected some of them. An “agricultural
system” seems, as it were, to spring from the soil in a mainly agricul-
tural 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 us104
that it had an independent birth in Japan; while the analogy of China so
forcibly impressed the Physiocrats that they were seized with an enthu-
siasm even for the Celestial government, derided by de Tocqueville as
imbécile et barbare.105 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,106 and even some portions of it which
he accepted have since been discarded. But much remains. The younger
Mill’s chapter on Unproductive Labour in which he classes as “unpro-
ductive” 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 rudimen-
tary analysis of capital into avances foncières, 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 com-
menced to reduce economic phenomena to organised science. And their
other scientific contributions of temper and method almost evade spe-
cial 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
76/Henry Higgs
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.
Stateregulation was excessive. Laissez faire! Their economic plea for
liberty is buttressed by an appeal to Nature, greater than kings or min-
isters, 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 con-
tract. 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 “advanta-
geous to the nation” or consonant with reason (l’ordre naturel), 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 En-
gland 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 en-
lightened self-interest. In diametrical opposition to Mandeville’s Pri-
vate Vices Public Benefits they consider that every vice is a public in-
jury. 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 ridicu-
lous 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
The Physiocrates/77
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 condi-
tions. 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 dis-
tribution of its burdens, and, above all, that the economic welfare of a
nation may be stifled by excessive restrictions. Their impôt unique might
have proved, as Voltaire said, an impot unique; but in probity and hon-
esty 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 corvées, 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 para-
doxical, but rendering great service to future ages by their luminous and
penetrating theories, which spread like a wave over the whole Conti-
nent. 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.
Appendix
Note A
Louis XV, who himself chose Quesnay’s arms and gave him three pan-
sies (pensées) with the motto propter cogitationem mentis, was accus-
tomed to refer familiarly to him as man penseur. But, to say nothing of
the dates, these facts do not justify us in assuming that the roi faineant
took any interest in Quesnay’s economic studies. The phrase man penseur
appears to the present writer to be a mere royal pun upon his pensive
physician. The French verb panser, to give medical (and especially sur-
78/Henry Higgs
gical) assistance, lent itself to a play upon penser. On one occasion the
king turned to a young seigneur who had returned from England with
an affectation of British phlegm, and playfully asked, “Eh bien! qu’est-
ce que vous avez appris en Angleterre?” “Sire,” was the pompous re-
ply, “j’y ai appris à penser.” “Des chevaux sans doute,” added the
king—a parallel jest. This form of wit was very common at the Court of
Louis XV. A blood- letting barber was styled le seigneur (saigneur)
barbier.
Note B
The Reponse aux Docteurs modernes, ou apologie pour I’Auteur de la
Thiorie des Loix, et des Lettres sur cette Théorie. Avec la réfutation du
systême des Philosophes economistes. Par Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet.
MDCCLXXI, 12mo, vol. i. 300 pp., vol. ii. 259 pp., is so rare that some
further reference to it may be found useful. A copy of the book will be
found in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, press mark R. 21096–7.
Linguet takes for his motto an extract from the Éphémérides of his
adversaries, 1769, vol. iii., Avertissement, p. 16: “Il faut faire la guerre
aux foux même quand ils deviennent furieux, et la leur faire bonne et
vive, jusqu’à ce qu’on les ait mis dans l’impuissance de nuire.”
He says: “Les économistes, c’est-à-dire des abbés, des gentilhommes,
des horlogers [a hit at Du Pont, the son of a watchmaker], des juges de
provinces etc. sont venus apprendre tout d’un coup aux meuniers qu’ils
ne savoient pas meudre [a reference to the moulins économiques], au
peuple qu’il avoit trop d’appetit, aux bourgeois qu’ils laissoient trop de
gruau dans leur son; et l’on a battu des mains.
“De leur boulangerie, ils ont passé à la jurisprudence et aux loix.
D’une main toute blanche encore de leur pâte et de leur mouture, ils se
sont avisés de vouloir repâitrir notre législature; de derrière des meules
bien ou mal repiquées, on a été fort surpris de voir sortir des Solons
enfarinés, qui ont prétendu réformer toute la machine politique; et l’on a
encore battu des mains” (p. 9). As for himself, who has studied juris-
prudence, he will expose this imperious sect which has spoken so much
of destroying prejudices, and has created so many. The encyclopaedic
yeast of thirty years ago stirred the nation with a certain Anglican effer-
vescence. When the great dictionary appeared began the epoch of fa-
naticism. And when the Government suppressed the Encyclopédie, then
the buzzing insect since called Economics took its place, but, unlike the
caterpillar turned butterfly, it was a butterfly turned caterpillar, losing
The Physiocrates/79
its metaphysic wings and grovelling on the earth, crawling on the bread
it gnaws (p. 13). Better old errors which left us alive, than new ones like
these which are murderous (p. 14). The Physiocrats are a dangerous
sect, powerful, popular, and much read, unlike himself who has not had
the precaution to form a sect or dress up his writings with an ecstatic
and philosophic varnish. In vain does Du Pont protest they are not a
sect. Linguet says: Not a sect? Evidence shows it: your mysterious words,
physiocratie, produit net; your mystic jargon, ordre, science, le maitre;
your titles of honour showered on your patriarchs; your wreaths scat-
tered through the provinces on obscure if excellent persons—the “cel-
ebrated” Le Trosne, the “admirable” Saint-Peravy, the “excellent”
Treilhard, etc. (p. 120). Not a sect? You have a rallying cry, banners, a
march, a trumpeter [Du Pont], a uniform for your books, and a sign like
freemasons (p. 121). Not a sect? One cannot touch one of you but all
rush to his aid. You all laud and glorify each other, and attack and
intimidate your opponents in unmeasured terms. You affect an inspired
tone and seriously discuss on what particular day the symbol of your
faith, the masterpiece, the Tableau Oeconomique was born,—a symbol
so mysterious that huge volumes cannot explain it. It is like the Koran
of Mohamet. You burn to lay down your lives for your principles, and
talk of your apostleship (p. 125). You attack Galiani and me because we
have no reverence for that ridiculous hieroglyphic which is your holy
Gospel. Confucius drew up a table, the Y-King, of sixty-four terms,
also connected by lines, to show the evolution of the elements, and your
Tableau Oeconomique is justly enough compared to it, but it comes
three hundred years too late. Both alike are equally unintelligible. The
Tableau is an insult to common sense, to reason, and philosophy, with
its columns of figures of reproduction nette terminating always in a
zero, striking symbol of the fruit of the researches of any one simple
enough to try in vain to understand it.
The Physiocrats are the anabaptists of philosophy, who propose to
kill men to make them happy. Starvation is their best protection. Every-
thing comes from the land. Therefore, the political ideal is the cultiva-
tion of corn. But to farm with the greatest advantage requires large
capitals. Therefore favour opulence. Opulence will result from high
prices, which will come from rarity. Therefore export corn, and thus
starve the people.
Linguet prints side by side the Tableau Oeconomique and the Y-
King. It is hardly necessary to point out that he fails to understand the
80/Henry Higgs
economic doctrines he satirises.
Dr. Bauer has quoted some of Linguet’s invectives from the Annales
Politiques, 1778, in his article on Quesnay’s Tableau Oeconomique,
Economic Journal, vol. v. p. 19, March 1895.
Note C
Since these lectures were delivered, “Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jus-
tice, Police, Revenue, and Arms, delivered in the University of Glasgow
by Adam Smith, reported by a student in 1763, and edited with an intro-
duction and notes by Edwin Cannan, Oxford, 1896,” have been pub-
lished by the Clarendon Press. The editor thinks these lectures “dispose
finally of the Turgot myth” (that Adam Smith was indebted to Turgot’s
Reflexions), and that they enable us “to distinguish positively between
what the original genius of its author created out of British materials on
the one hand, and French materials on the other.” Mr. Cannan says: “It
is plain that Smith acquired the idea of the necessity of a scheme of
distribution from the Physiocrats, and that he tacked his own scheme
(very different from theirs) on to his already existing theory of prices”
(p. xxxi.).
The present writer has briefly discussed the bearing of this volume
upon the relations between Adam Smith and the Physiocrats in the Eco-
nomic Journal, December 1896.
Authorities
Lecture I
H. Taine, L’Ancien Régime, bk. v., Le Peuple, 1875; R. Stourm, Les
finances de fancien régime; C. Knies, Introduction to Carl Friedrichs
von Baden brieflicher Verkehr mit Mirabeau und Du Pont (Heidelberg,
1892, 2 vols.); articles on Cantillon by W. S. Jevons in Contemporary
Review, Jan. 1881, and by H. Higgs in Economic Journal, June 1891,
and in Quarterly Journal of Economics (Harvard, U.S.A.), July 1892;
L. de Loménie, Les Mirabeau (Paris, 1889–1891, 5 vols.); L. de
Lavergne, Les économistes français du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1870).
Lecture II
Tableau Oeconomique (printed for the British Economic Association,
London, 1894); G. Kellner, Zur Geschichte des Physiocratismus
(Göttingen, 1847); A. Oncken, Œuvres de Quesnay (Frankfort), 1888;
do., Die Maxims Laissez-faire et Laissez-passer, ihr Ursprung, ihr
The Physiocrates/81
Werden (Berne, 1886); do., Zur Geschichte der Physiokratie in
Schmoller’s Jahrbuch for 1893; S. Bauer, Zur Entstehung der
Physiokratie in Conrad’s Jahrbücher for August 1890; do., Quesnay’s
Tableau Oeconomique in Economic Journal for March 1895; W.
Hasbach, Die allgemeinen philosophischen Grttndlagen der van
François Quesnay und Adam Smith begründeten politischen Oekonomie
(Leipzig, 1890).
Lecture III
A. Stern, Das Leben Mirabeaus (Berlin, 1889); A. Oncken, Der ältere
Mirabeau und die ökonomische Gesellschaft in Bern (Berne, 1886); G.
Schelle, Du Pont de Nemours et l’École physiocratique (Paris, 1888);
E. Daire, Les Physiocrates (Paris, 1846, 2 vols.); R. Reuss, Ch. de
Butré (Strasburg, 1890); L. Say, Turgot (Paris, 1887), translated by G.
Masson (London, 1888).
Lecture IV
A. Emminghaus in Conrad’s Jahrbuch for 1872; J. Rae, Life of Adam
Smith (London, 1893); A. Oncken, Ludwig XVI und das physiokratische
System, in Zeitschrift für Litteratur und Geschichte der
Staatswissenschaften, 1893; A. von Miaskowski, Isaak Iselin (Basle,
1875); W. B. Hodgson, Turgot: his Life, Times, and Opinions (London,
1870).
Lecture V
L. Cossa, Guide to the Study of Political Economy (London, 1890); J.
Kautz, Die geschichtliche Entwickelung der Nationalökonomik (Leipzig,
1868); J. Ingram, History of Political Economy (London, 1888); W.
Roscher, Geschichte der Nationalökonomie in Deutschland (Leipzig,
1874); also the articles Physiocrates arid Physiokratische Schule in the
French and German Dictionaries of Political Economy, and, generally,
under the names of all the authors mentioned in the Lectures, the articles
in these Dictionaries and in the English Dictionary of Political Economy
now approaching completion.
Lecture VI
Gomel, Les causes financieres de la revolution française; A. De
Tocqueville, L’Ancien Regime (1859); L. Blanc, Histoire de la revolu-
tion française, vol. i.; G. Conn, History of Political Economy (1894);
82/Henry Higgs
Hector Denis in Annales de l’institut des sciences sociales (Bruxelles,
Jan. 1896); S. Feilbogen, Smith und Turgot (Vienna, 1892); J. Bonar,
Philosophy and Political Economy (London, 1893); W. Hasbach, Les
fondements philosophiques de l’économie politique de Quesnay et de
Smith in Révue d’économie Politique (September, 1893).
Notes
1. Levasseur, Recherches historiques sur le système de Law, Paris,
1854, p. 1.
2. Lavergne, Les économistes français du XVIIIe siècle, 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 de-
clined the offer.— Lemontey, Histoire de la Régence, 1832,.vol. i. p.
342.
5. Weath of Nations, bk. v. ch. ii.
6. See P. Clément’s Colbert. Lettres et Instructions, ii. 2, 787–796.
7. Taine, L’Ancien Régime, 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 dime royals, Paris, 1875. The official papers there
printed prove how much Vauban took to heart the arrêts against his
book, and how rigorously they were carried out; while they disprove
the allegation that the Abbé de Beaumont, as alleged by Voltaire and
others, was its real author. The arrêt which proscribed the Dixme
Royale was followed the same day, 14th March 1707, by another
suppressing Boisguillebert’s Factum de la France as seditious.
11. Vauban had made his personal acquaintance.
12. Hist, of Civilisation in England, vol. ii. p. 291, ed. 1868.
13. In the house of President Renault. A full account of the club was
written by D’Argenson, Mémoires, 1825, pp. 247–269. The chatterbox
The Physiocrates/83
Abbe de Pomponne was the cause of its suppression. Lavergne’s his-
tory of its foundation is erroneous.
14. Sainte-Beuve devoted two of his Causeries du Lundi to D’Argenson
(3rd and 10th Nov. 1853), vol. xii p. 93. edition of 1857. He tells us
that the Considérations of 1764 were a very defective edition of the
original manuscript, and that the edition of 1784, “which passes for
better,” is still imperfect and inaccurate. The title designed by
D’Argenson himself was Jusques oú la démocratic feut être admise
dans le gouvernement.
15. A farmer-general, and grandfather of Georges Sand. His tract on
the corn trade, separately printed under the title Mémoire sur les
Bleds, 1748, is the first plea for free trade in corn by a French writer.
It formed a chapter of his Oeconomiques, Carlsruhe, 1745, 3 vols.,
rigidly suppressed, and now extant in only three copies.
16. See the fascinating essay of Jevons on Cantillon in Contemporary
Revieiw, 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 are to be
found in Asgill, Several Assertions Proved in Order to Create An-
other Species of Money than Gold and Silver, 1696, and in Vanderlint,
Money Answers all Things, 1734. It would be easy to multiply such
references, but there is no evidence that the Physiocrats were ac-
quainted with them.
17. On Barbon see the articles of Dr. Stephan Bauer, by whom his
importance was first fully recognised, in Palgrave’s Dict, of Pol. Econ.
s.v., and in Conrad’s Jahrbücher fur Nationalökonomie und Statistik,
xxi. Bd. N.F. pp. 561–590 (1890).
18. Cf. Higgs, “Cantillon’s Place in Economics,” in Quarterly Journal
of Economics (Harvard, U.S.A.), July 1892. An analysis of Cantillon’s
essay is given in Espinas, —Histoire des doctrines économiques,
Paris, 1891.
19. A fact first noticed by Mr. Edwin Cannan. See Economic Journal,
March 1896, p. 165.
20. Cf. Leibnitz in Dutens, G. G. Leibnitii Opera omnia, Geneva,
1768, vol. v. p. 577.—Quesnay, art. “Grains” in Encyclopédie, 1757.
This became a favourite figure with the Physiocrats, see e.g. Le Trosne,
De l’ordre social, 1777.
21. According to Grand Jean de Fouchy, Éloge de Quesnay, 1774, and
84/Henry Higgs
the Comte d’Albon’s Éloge, 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, Quesnay’s early child-
hood 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.
23. See Note A, Appendix. The common assertion that this was a rec-
ognition of his economic studies is clearly unfounded. These had not
yet seen the light.
24. This article was largely due to his study of Malebranche, Recher-
che de la Vérité, 1675; Traité de Morale, 1684. It is to be noted that
the ordre de la nature of this article differs entirely from the benefi-
cent ordre naturel of Quesnay’s later economic writings, which was,
in Professor Hasbach’s opinion, borrowed from Cumberland,
Disquisitio de legibus naturae philosophica, London, 1672, 4to,
translated by Barbeyrac, Traité des loix naturelles, 1744.
25. Under the later influence of Turgot these terms came to mean, in a
more general sense, high farming (a liberal application of capital) as
against low farming.
26. A little later he adds the corvée to the list of abuses needing aboli-
tion.
27. He makes some trifling allowances for taxation, but his arithmetic
is often inexact.
28. This is a noteworthy early use of an economic term whose origin is
sometimes attributed to J. B. Say.
29. He refers here to Remarqnes sur les avantages et les disavantages
de la France et de la Grande Bretagne par rapport au Commerce et
aux autres sources de la Puissance des États. Traduit de l’Anglois
du Chevalier John Nickolls, Leyden and Paris, 1754. This work,
which owes something to Tucker’s Brief Essay on Trade, 1750, was
constantly present to Quesnay’s mind in writing this article and was
quoted in the course of it. The real author of the pretended translation
was Plumart D’Angeul; and the book was done into English and pub-
lished at London in 1754 after its appearance at Paris. Daire, by an
extraordinary blunder, attributes it to Thomas Mun, and gives the
date as 1700. Physiocrates, vol. i. pp. 264, 285.
30. Cf. a distinguished modern writer in 1882. “It seems certain that in
twenty-five years’ time, and probably before that date, the limitation
of area in the United States will be felt.”—Giffen in Statistical Jour-
The Physiocrates/85
nal, vol. xlv. p. 543.
31. By J. B. Naveau, Paris, 1757, 2 vols. 12mo.
32. Wealth of Nations, bk. iv. ch. ix.
33. The original, rather freely translated by Adam Smith, will be found
in the Philosophie Rurale, 1763, vol. i. p. 19.
34. L’homme aux quarante écus, p. 1.
35. The tradition that the king helped to print it must be dismissed as
mythical. See Note A, Appendix.
36. Die allgemeinen philosophischen Grundlagen, etc., 1890, pp. 59,
67.
37. A footnote refers to Malebranche, French economists have shown
great fondness for synoptic tables, from Vauban to Fourier.
38. E.g. Vérités géometriques, Amsterdam, 1773.
39. Wealth of Nations, bk. iv. ch. ix.
40. 28th May 1752, before he commenced writing on economic sub-
jects. Mr. Robert Harrison, assistant secretary of the Royal Society,
informs me that his candidature was backed by Buffon, Walmesley,
D’Alembert, La Condamine, Grand Jean de Pouchy, Sallier, Bernard
de Jussieu, Lieutaud; and W. Watson, Samuel Sharp, N. Munckley.
41. A statue of Quesnay has, since the date of this lecture, been erected
at Mere, where he was born. There are several portraits of Quesnay
in existence. To one of these Dr. Hodgson owed his interest in eco-
nomics. See his lectures on Turgot, London, 1870, p. 66.
42. Les Mirabeau, vol. i. p. 335.
43. The Physiocrats pretended that Quesnay resembled Socrates in per-
sonal appearance. A lady-in- waiting to Mme. de Pompadour, Mme.
du Hausset, whose Mémoires furnish some biographical details of
the doctor, respected his probity and his learning (which she did not
understand), but irreverently calls him a monkey-face!
44. The speech, which was printed in the Nouvelles Éphémérides, 1775,
vol. i, maybe read in Oncken’s Quesnay, pp. 1 sqq. Another éloge of
Quesnay was published in vol. v. the same year, by the Comte d’Albon.
45. He says of Quesnay, “I, like posterity, owe everything to him. He
owes me nothing but his repute.” And de Lomenie justly adds, “In
effect he did owe it to Mirabeau.”
46. Du Pont says by Quesnay, Éphémérides, 1768, vol. ii. p. 191.
Daire says by Quesnay and Marivelt, Physiocrates, vol. ii. p. 340.
47. His father had lost 200,000 livres in the “system” of Law, and he
always held financiers in abhorrence.
86/Henry Higgs
48. Quesnay’s article “Grains” had put the number at 16,000,000; see
p. 34 supra. Mirabeau probably here makes a concession to Messance,
whose Recherches sur la population, 1766, was designed to refute
L’Ami des Homines, so far as it alleged depopulation.
49. She had little sympathy with Mirabeau himself, but was much at-
tached to Quesnay, who had twice saved her life.
50. Du Pont de Nemours et l’École physiocratique, par G. Schelle,
Paris, 1888, 8vo, p. 25.
51. According to Schelle. De Lomenie tells us it was due to Morellet.
52. As a representative of Nemours. There was another Du Pont in the
Assembly. This led to his being distinguished as Du Pont de Nemours.
He acted for some time as President of the Assembly.
53. The title of this volume, designed to indicate “government in conso-
nance with nature,” is accountable for the name Physiocrats which J.
B. Say conferred upon the school, known to their contemporaries as
Économistes. Du Pont has long been regarded as the inventor of the
title, but there is more reason for the belief that it was due to Quesnay.
54. It was really an endeavour to present to the public at Diderot’s
suggestion a succinct account of Mercier de la Rivière’s Ordre naturd
et essentiel des sociétés politiques, 1767, 1 vol. 4to, 3 vols. 12mo.
M. Schelle imagines that Adam Smith may have mistaken it for the
larger treatise, which he calls “a little book.” Adam Smith was, how-
ever, too well acquainted with the Physiocrats to make a mistake of
this kind; and we know that he possessed the work of Mercier de la
Rivière himself. See Economic Journal, vol. iv. p. 706 (Dec. 1894).
55. He translated Child and Culpeper into French.
56. See Professor Oncken’s Die Maxime Laissez-faire et Laissez-passer,
ihr Ursprung, ihr Werden, —Berne, 1886. The erudite professor of
history, Lord Acton, in his introductory lecture at the University of
Cambridge, refers to “the economic precept Laissez-faire, which the
eighteenth century derived from Colbert” (The Study of History, 1895,
p. 30), and quotes from the Comptes rendus de l’Institut, vol. xxxix.
p. 93, in support of this statement; but, as stated above, the phrase
was really a remonstrance against the settled policy of Colbert, which
was, except for the aim at economic unification of the nation, directly
opposed to this precept.
57. Mr. John Rae has misunderstood the significance of this statement
in his Life of Adam Smith, p. 218.
58. Les Physiocrates, vol. ii. pp. 429, 430.
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59. See Schelle, p. 24, note.
60. Levallois, J. J. Rousseau, ses amis et ses ennemis, Paris, 1865, vol.
ii. p. 385.
61. Knies, Carl Friedrichs von Baden brieflicher Verkehr mit Mirabeau
und Du Pont, Heidelberg, 1892, vol. ii. p. 289.
62. Vol. i. p. 743, s.v. Éphémérides, London, 1894.
63. The Journal existed from 1751 to 1783.
64. The Comte d’Albon assisted Baudeau to edit this series.
65. Loc. cit.
66. See Éphémérides, 1776, vol. i.; Daire, vol. i. p. 649, note; and the
authorities there cited. The butchers had to pay 6 per cent for a fort-
night on their purchases of cattle, whether they borrowed the money
or not. The sale of cattle at Paris was interdicted except at Sceaux
and Poissy.—See Lomenie, vol. ii. p. 249. Turgot abolished the caisse
in 1776.
67. Wealth of Nations, bk. iv. ch. ix.
68. See the account given by Emminghaus in Hildebrand’s Jarhbücher,
1872, vol. ii. p. I. Also the Éphémérides, 1771, vols. iv. to vii.
69. Souvenirs de Berlin, vol. iii. pp. 167, 168, 2nd edition.
70. See Knies, Brieflicher Verkehr, vol. i. p. 74.
71. E.g. in a letter to Du Pont, “Les économistes sont trop confiants
pour combattre un si adroit ferailleur “ as Galiani. Œuvres de Turgot,
vol. ii. p. 800.
72. Œuvres, 1808, vol. vi. p. 158.
73. Œuvres, vol. v. p. 332.
74. Introduction to the Study of Political Economy, 1893, p. 264.
75. The book was translated into German by Mauvillen, who was con-
verted by the task into an ardent Physiocrat.
76. Loménie, vol. ii. p. 416.
77. Kautz, referring to J. J. Rousseau’s article Économie politique in
the Encyclopédie, strangely describes him as a follower of the
Physiocrats. The truth is that this article was written before their
“school” was founded, and Mirabeau’s efforts in later years to con-
vert Rousseau, or even to capture his attention to their doctrines,
proved fruitless.
78. Abriss der Staats-Oekonomie, Berlin, 1808.
79. See A. von Miaskowski, Isaak Iselin, Basle, 1875.
80. Mercier de la Rivière responded to this challenge by his book De
l’instruction publique, 1775.
88/Henry Higgs
81. 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. Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur.
What China was to the Physiocrats, Sparta was to Mably. Moreover,
Spartan society was based on slavery.
82. This chapter deals with international relations.
83. It is discussed by A. Sudre, Histoire du Communisme, 1849.
84. The écu of 3 livres: 40 écus = 120 livres was the sum which Mercier
de la Rivière considered sufficient for the existence of each citizen in
a physiocratic society.
85. Condorcet defended the Physiocrats against this sally in his edition
of Voltaire. See also A. Batbie, L’homme aux quarante écus et les
Physiocrates.
86. See L’épitre à un homme, written on Turgot’s fall, his letters and
memoirs addressed to Turgot, and especially his Diatribe à l’auteur
des Éphémérides (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.
87. Il a soufflé la lèpre sur le genre humain. Loménie, vol. ii. p. 266.
88. See for a recent study of Galiani and the Physiocrats, Frank Blei in
the Berner Beiträge zur Geschichte der Nationalökonomie, No. 6.
Berne, 1895.
89. Œuvres, Paris, 1844, p. 439. Du Pont also replied in his Lettre à
Saint-Péravy, Éphémérides, 1768, tome ii.
90. s. v. Physiocrates, vol. ii. p. 361.
91. See the quotations in Note B, Appendix.
92. A reply to F. N. Vierordt’s Von den Ursprung und Fortgangfilter
neum Wissenschaft, Carlsruhe, 1770, 8vo, a German translation of
Du Pont’s Origine et progrès d’une science nouvelle.
93. Adam Smith has himself been described as “the great founder of the
industrial system, as distinguished from the mercantile and agricul-
tural systems.” Twiss, View of the Progress of Political Economy in
Europe since the Sixteenth Century, 1847, p. 160.
94. “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.”
95. Wealth of Nations, bk. v. ch. ii.
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96 . Œuvres de Quesnay, 1888, p. xix.
97. 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.
98. 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.
99. The impôt unique was never to exceed 6/20, or at most 1/3, 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.”Hist, of England in
18th century, and ed. 1887, vol. v. p. 370.
100. 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.”
101. 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” (Es-
say on Population, edition 1803, p. 435).
102. Lectures on Political Economy, vol. i. p. 306. The whole discus-
sion 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.
103. The statement often made that he kept up an active correspon-
dence with Turgot has now been disproved. See Economic Journal,
March 1896, p. 166.
104. Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1895.
105. In modern times M. Le Play has held up to the admiration of
“unstable” France the morality of China as a basis of material solid-
ity and social permanence.
106. See Note C, Appendix.