The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface
• I. Rise of the School
• II. The School and Its Doctrines
• III. The School and Its Doctrines (contd.)
• IV. Activities of the School
• V. Opponents of the School
• VI. Influence of the School
• Appendix
• Note a
• Note B
• Note C
• Authorities
• Lecture I
• Lecture Ii
• Lecture Iii
• Lecture Iv
• Lecture V
• Lecture Vi

IV

The meeting referred to in the last chapter (p. 49) 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 economists 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 interesting letter to Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom he vainly attempted to convert to physiocracy.1 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-Isle, the Duc de Nivernois, Turgot, Malesherbes, Mme. de Pailly, a number of other ladies, and many distinguished foreigners and notabilities, attracted sometimes by mere curiosity rather than by scientific sympathy or economic interest. It was there, says Mirabeau, that Galitzin, the ambassador of Russia, came to tell Mercier de la Riviére that the Empress 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,” replied 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 commenced. 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,1 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.1 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 post2 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 number dated March 1772). It is usually stated that it was then suppressed by the comptroller-general, the Abbé Terray. But Mirabeau throws further 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 persecution.” 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 Bibliothèque raisonnée de l'Histoire et de la Politique1 of which eighteen further volumes appeared, twelve in 1775, and six in 1776. This was suppressed in 1776, after the fall of Turgot The Abbe Roubaud now (1775) began to edit the Journal de PAgriculture, once more a l'hysiocratic review (1775–1783). Baudeau attempted to revive his Nouvelles Éphémérides in 1788, but only a few numbers appeared before he went mad, and the publication ceased. Both the Éphémérides and the Nouvelles Éphémerides 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 richest 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, arbitrary assessment, and lavish public expenditure... and by inducing monarchs, 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.”1 Among the contributors were Quesnay, Mirabeau, Du Pont, Mercier de la Rivière, 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 Tonane, 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 practical 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 konnêtes gens gui veulent bieun 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 economical flour-mills, and bakeries (fours tconomiques), 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 banalityé 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 example; 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 malignantly 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,1 who had advanced money to the Government. 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 advocate Gerbier, and was borne home in triumph by the victorious butchers 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), enrolled 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 friendship” (a delicate allusion to L'Ami des Hommes), and he says that without being personally acquainted with Mirabeau he feels entitled to seek his counsel. God had brought him into the world to govern a country whose climate and soil held out the prospect of a good return to industry, 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 practically 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 Théorie de l'mpôt, for the publication of which his own sovereign had cast him into prison. The correspondence thus begun ripened into friendship, and continued to the time of Mirabeau's death twenty years later.1 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.”1 The experiment was abandoned at Theningen and Balingen in 1776, but was maintained at Dietlingen till 1792.2 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 Les Économiques. It first appeared in the Éphémérides, and was separately printed and seen through the press by Du Pont in 1772 under the title Abrégé de l'Économie Politique. It forms a commendable précis 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'étal): “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 Éphémérides were suppressed, Gustavus joined with his fellow-disciple the Margrave of Baden in commissioning 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 education, De l' instruction publique, 1775.

Mention has already been made of the advances of Catherine of Russia to Mercier de la Riviere, 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 Thiébault reports as follows:1 “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, 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.1 A tribute to the fashionable craze for the “Agricultural System” was the ceremony performed by the Dauphin 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 Riviére 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, izmo, 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 Reflexions to editorial amendment and “improvement,” to bring them into harmony with the sacrosanct doctrines of Quesnay, when there appeared to be any departure from them. In his early writings in the Encyclopédie 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 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 always speaks of the economists as an outsider,1 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 supported 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 ftaille. He boldly abolished the corvé 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 Comptroller-General, 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,1 and took numerous steps to secure the last of these objects throughout the country, 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 corvée 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 corvte, and the jurandes. the jurandes were finally abolished in 1789, and the coruées in 1791, while all internal duties or local tolls except the octroi were 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 Encydopédie, 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 disappeared 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.”1 And he expressly builds his policy upon Quesnay's estimates in the article “Grains.”2 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 Angoulême 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.1 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 science, 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.”2 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. Commerce, 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 equivalent of the produce which he gives in exchange. Competition forces artisans' 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 (classes disponible). The evolution of labour on the land is traced from (1) labourers to (2) slaves, (3) serfs, (4) metayers, (5) farmers. He proceeds 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 country capitalised, plus the movable wealth in the country, gives the sum of the national riches,—excluding loans, for they would otherwise count twice over. The capitalist, who lends at interest, does not form part of the classe disponible, 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 première et l'unique source de toute richesse.” “Il n'y a de revenu que le produit net des terres”—a frankly physiocratic conclusion.1 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 disdain—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 encyclopédiste car je crois en Dieu. Je ne suis point économiste car je ne voudrais pas de roi.”1

Other writers who were, like Turgot (himself known as an abbé—the Abbé de Laulne—in his Sorbonne days), in virtual but not unreserved accord with the Physiocrats, were the Abbé Morellet and the Abbé 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 advantages 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 desgrains, Brussels and Paris, 1764. He published in 1769 a memoir against the monopoly 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 Réfutation of Galiani, London, 1770, his Prospectus d'un nouveau Dictionnaire du Commerce followed by a bibliography of economics, Paris, 1769, and his Mémoires sur le XVIII^esiècle 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 XVIII^e 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 modifications.

Condillac (1714–1780), better known as a philosopher, is remarkable by his treatise, Du commerce et du Gouvernement considérés relativement fun l'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 Encyclopédie (arts. “Monopole” and “Monopoleur”), and in his Lettres sur le commerce des grains, Paris, 1775; Reflexions 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 Germany, 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,1 and Cossa. Schlettwein (1731–1802), Professor at the University 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 1770,2 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 cameralists, nor his own father Johann Jakob von Moser1 —was an adherent of the Ami des Hommes. Mauvillon (1743–1794) became a Physiocrat through translating into German the Réflexions 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 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 various 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 ultimately fall, and is therefore the only proper object of taxation.2 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 Versuck 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.1

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 Galitzin3 (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 économistes, ou les économistes justifiés d'avoir post 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.

[1]Levallois, /. J. J. Rousseau, ses amis et ses ennemis, Paris, 1865, vol. ii. p. 385.

[1]Knies, Carl Friedrich von Baden brieflicher Verkehr mit Mirabeau und Du Pont, Heidelberg, 1892, vol. ii. p. 289.

[1]Vol. i. p. 743, s.v. Éphémérides, London, 1894.

[2]The Journal existed from 1751 to 1783.

[1]The Comte d'Albon assisted Baudeau to edit this series.

[1]Loc. cit.

[1]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 fortnight 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 Loménie, vol. ii. p. 249. Turgot abolished the caisse in 1776.

[1]See the work referred to at p. 79 note, supra.

[1]Wealth of Nations, bk. iv. ch. ix.

[2]See the account given by Emminghaus in Hildebrand's Jahrbücher, 1872, vol. it. p. i. Also the Éphémérides, 1771, vols. iv. to vii.

[1]Souvenirs de Berlin, vol. iii. pp. 167, 168, 2nd edition.

[1]See Knies, Brieflicher Verkehr, vol. i. p. 74.

[1]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. it p. 800.

[1]See supra, p. 62.

[1]Œuvres, 1808, vol. vi. p. 158.

[2]See pp. 29–35, supra.

[1]Œuvres, vol. v. p. 332.

[2]Introduction to the Study of Political Economy, 1893, p. 264.

[1]The book was translated into German by Mauvill–1, who was converted by the task into an ardent Physiocrat. See p. 100, fast.

[1]Loménie, vol. ii. p. 416.

[1]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 Mirabean's efforts in later years to convert Rousseau, or even to capture his attention to their doctrines, proved fruitless.

[2]See p. 86, supra.

[1]See post, p. 122.

[2]Abriss dtr Staats-Oekonomie, Berlin, 1808.

[1]See A. von Miaskowski, Isaak Iselin, Basle, 1875.

[2]Page 58, supra.

[3]Pages 69, 79.