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

V

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 négociant 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 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 objected 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 dictum of Quesnay that “dearness and abundance constitute opulence,” though he does not realise the full force of the paradox. While the Physiocrats stood for laissez-faire, he upheld State regulation; and his official position as Inspector-General of Mints, and as a confidant of the Duc de Choiseul and Silhouette, Comptroller-General of Finance, contributed to cause the Physiocrats to regard him as their most redoubtable adversary. Towards the close of his life he wrote in Du 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 addition of portions of the Principes, in which some of his strictures upon the Physiocrats were repeated. He pays tribute to the originality and substantial value of their speculations, while protesting against the extravagant length to which they were carried.

Widely different from the matter-of-fact Forbonnais, whose bent of mind is comparable to that of the German cameralists, was the Utopian Abbé 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 Sociétés 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 proposés aux Philosophes fconomistes sur f Ordre naturel et essentiel des Sociétés politiques in the form of ten letters addressed “to the author of the Éephémérides 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 accompanied by some misgivings. It was seen that our philosophers had a kind of contempt for the peoples whom we were most accustomed to respect, and exhibited a predilection for the government of China…; but in the fear of blaspheming against unknown truths one waited in silence for the Oracle to speak with less of mystery.” Now that the Oracle has spoken, the reader is unconvinced, and seeks further explanations.

His first letter may be thus summarised. How can property in one's person, in movable things, and in land be “three sorts of property inseparably united”? The first may exist (as in communism) without the second, and (witness the Iroquois, the Hurons, and the Spartans of old) without the third. Landed property is an arbitrary human institution. You will say that property is a stimulus to labour. But has it not introduced idleness into the world? And are avarice and gratification alone capable of stirring the human heart, or might not the love of distinction, honour, and glory produce greater effects than property itself? The Ordre naturel seems, after all, to be contrary to nature. On landed property follow unequal fortunes and all their attendant vices of wealth and poverty, the rich despising the poor, injustice, tyranny, and oppression. Nature meant us to be equal, gave us the same needs, and united us by social qualities which would have made us happy, but wealth and poverty engendered brutality and ferocity. It would be vain to seek to go back to nature, for property creates its own supporters, and an attempt to abolish it would provoke greater disorders than those we fly from. But why not seek palliatives? Why narrow ourselves to extend the culture of the fruits of the earth and not the culture of the social qualities? If avarice, ambition, and vanity were abolished, men would be happier even with less wealth. Property is unnatural and anti-social. True, nature may have given one man greater strength than another, but this is no reason for greater individual wealth, unless force and ruse are to be glorified. Modern philosophers present the abuses of our passions as laws of nature. Admitting that man's physical needs contributed to the establishment of society, surely moral causes have co-operated. Man is not a physical machine, but an inseparable blend of the physical and the moral. No doubt it is physically impossible to live without subsistence, but so it is to live in society without social qualities, and these have contributed the greater share to the establishment of society. Agriculture was designed for society, and not society for agriculture. If we, like animals, concerned ourselves only with subsistence, we should, like them, be incapable of society. Justice, prudence, courage, are as necessary as the fruits of the earth. Without them we should be devastated by foreigners. The cultivation of men and the social virtues is the basis of social happiness: let our fields come after.

The communistic feeling which appears in this first letter becomes stronger and more evident as he proceeds, but his remarks on communism may be omitted without weakening the rest of his criticism, which proceeds as follows: Why are the rulers and magistrates of La 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. Equality alone produces contentment. The pretended union of society is a fiction. Why should I be satisfied to play the miserable rôle 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 maximum production of the fruits of the earth his social ideal. When they deal with him as an intelligent being, he ceases to be a voracious animal and becomes an angel, docile to the manifestations of reason (évidence). Évidence appears and passions are respectfully silent. Would to Heaven it were true! But passions govern the world; and men reck not of évidence, which changes from time to time like other fashions, but are ruled by opinion. Moral and political truths are not like geometrical propositions. Euclid is unassailable, but his terms are simple and clear, while our problems have a hundred different facets, and prejudice and private interest pervert the mind. Do not be too confident in the victory of reason over passion. One error gives way to another, and new passions arise when the old are gone.

Passing next to the constitution of ideal society, he asks: If évidence is so convincing, why trouble about the forms of government? Every government would be equally good. The author would need only to tell us of the necessary public schools, and the doctrinal works which the philosophers should hasten to compose.1 Certainly laws should be just, but no precept was ever better known and more neglected: and the injustice of laws is directly proportioned to the inequality of fortunes. Your magistrates are to be perfectly wise, but such men are rare out of China, where the 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 succession of enlightened Despots in lineal descent? You say that in the last resort the nation itself is the judge, but its organised coercive power is centred in the Despot, who thus by a vicious circle is the check upon himself. The rhapsodies of some writers over the agriculture of China have bewitched the author to such a point that he wished to copy their government.

He now descends into a detailed examination of the reports of missionaries and others upon the history and condition of China, which he finds upon many points to be contrary to reason and experience, and he concludes that the writers have been misled or mistaken. Even if it were not so, a horde of inhabitants, slavishly obedient to custom, free from the fear of foreign wars, and surrounded by no redoubtable enemies, but too timorous and effeminate to make head even against the Tartars, would be no model for the progressive people of France, with whom martial qualities are a condition of national existence. The Emperor's wants are satiated by immense wealth, and he has no need to increase the contributions of his people. But what parallel does this afford for France?1

He criticises vigorously La Rivière's opinions upon the necessity of separating the legislative and the executive power, and of avoiding a democratic or even aristocratic assembly of lawgivers. He points to the example of England, and pleads that until humanity is infallible society must decide upon the probable advantages of contemplated changes by a majority of votes. Morals deserve the principal attention in politics; good or bad, they decide the fate of States.

In conclusion he says: “If I have thought that I find nothing but errors and a sophisticated and dangerous doctrine in the first two parts of the Ordre naturel et essentiel des 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,2 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 évidence, 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 action eager to receive ideas and to put them into practice. The important position of Mably in the history of communism does not fall within our subject1 But it is necessary to add that the Poles begged Mably to frame their laws, and that he went to Poland for this purpose and published in 1771 a work Du gouvernement de la Pologne. Still more important is the fact that the American Congress desired him to draw up a constitution, which led to his Observations sur le gouvernement et les lois des États-Unis d'Amerique, 1784.

The title of Mably's book was very likely suggested by the philosophic doubts of Descartes. The Doutes sur la théorie de limpôt, 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 Hommes 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 l'impôt 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 de Casaux's Absurdité de l'impôt territorial, 1790; Considérations sur l'effets 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 Galitzin1 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 statisticians, theoretical financiers, physiocrats, geologists, doctors, biologists, ecclesiastics, and others; but the Physiocrats are in the forefront. An extract will give the best idea of the form and nature of the attack:—

“I am happy to make known to the universe that I have a piece of land which would be worth 40 crowns1 a year net but for the taxes.

“There appeared several edicts of a few persons who, finding themselves at leisure, govern the State from their fireside. The preamble of these edicts ran that the legislative and executive power is born by divine right co-proprietor of my land, and that I owe it at least the half of what I eat. The enormity of the maw of the legislative and executive power made me cross myself earnestly. What if this power, which presides over the essential order of societies, were to have all my land, which would be still more divine than ever!

“Monsieur the comptroller-general knows that I only used to pay 12 livres in all, that it was a very heavy burden for me. and that I should 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 had me dragged off to gaol and they carried on the war as best they could.

“Coming out of my prison with nothing but my skin on my bones, I met a plump and ruddy man in a carriage with six horses; he had six man-servants, and gave each of them in wages the double of my income. His steward, as ruddy as he, had a salary of 2000 francs, and robbed him of 20,000 a year. His mistress cost him 40,000 crowns in six months: I had known him formerly in the time when he was less rich than I. He told me, to cheer me up, that he had 400,000 livres a year. ‘Then you pay 200,000 to the State’ said I to him, ‘to carry on the advantageous war which we have; for I, who have only my 120 livres, have to pay half of them?’

“‘I?’ said he, ‘I contribute to the needs of the State? You are poking fun, my friend; I have succeeded an uncle who had gained eight millions at Cadiz and Surat; I have not an inch of land: all my property is in securities; I owe the State nothing; it is for you who are a landed gentleman to give half of your subsistence. Do you not see that if the Minister of Finance required of me some assistance for the country he would be a misguided idiot; for everything comes from the land; money and notes are only tokens of exchange; instead of staking at cards a hundred bushels of wheat, a hundred oxen, a thousand sheep, and two hundred sacks of oats, I wager piles of gold which represent these disgusting commodities. If, after putting the 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 require of him again a few oboles over the ten sous he gave you. If twenty nephews like me, whose uncles had gained, in the good time, eight millions at Mexico, Buenos Ayres, Lima, Surat, or Pondicherry, only lent the State 200,000 francs apiece in the urgent need of the country, it would produce four millions. How horrible! Pay, my friend, you who enjoy in peace a clear and net income of forty crowns, serve well your country, and come now and then to dine with my servants.’

“This plausible speech made me think a good deal, but did not console me much.”1

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.2 He wrote to Du Pont in 1774: “J'ose feliciter la France que M. Turgot soit ministre et qu'il ait un homme tel que vous pres de lui.” And in his Fragments sur rhistoire he says: “I have read the Éphtmtrides du Citoyen, a work worthy of its title. This journal, and the good articles upon agriculture in the Encyclopedic, are enough, in my opinion, for the instruction and happiness of a whole nation.... I have written nothing upon agriculture because I should never have been able to do anything better than the Éphémérides” Like Mably, therefore, Voltaire was a partial adherent as well as, in some respects, a formidable opponent of the Physiocrats. The elder Mirabeau hated him heartily. In one terrible sentence he accuses him of breathing a leper on the human race,1 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 surle commerce des blés, Londres, 1770, translated from the Italian by Diderot, Galiani took up a position nearly approaching that of the extreme wing of the modern historical economists. Abstract principles are no safe guide of commercial policy. Corn laws which are good in one time or place may be bad in another. The best policy for France is not necessarily the one which has proved best in England, Holland, or Italy, or even in the France of Colbert's time, which was a different France from that of to-day. The statesman who admired Colbert should not imitate him, but ask himself, “What would Colbert do if he were here now?” Land cannot be the sole source of wealth, because Geneva, Frankfort, Lucca, and other free cities are rich, with little land and that little infertile. The man in the comedy whose mania was to turn the whole of his country into seaports was hardly more foolish than the Physiocrats whose proposed free trade in corn might do very well for a country like Holland, which has to get her corn from abroad. The best of all systems is to have no system. Manufacture is a kind of production, for it adds to the raw material (elle ajoute 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 complicated and artistically-contrived political machine the world has ever seen. She is at once agricultural, manufacturing, martial, commercial, and is really all seaport Everything is peculiar in England—character, manners, soil, climate, products, etc. She takes the treasures of Bengal to stake them at Newmarket, and exercises her troops (sailors) when carrying on her foreign trade. In fine the book is a clever dissertation upon its motto, a line of Horace:

“You are the only sensible man I know,” says the Marquis de Roquemaure, one of his interlocutors, to the Chevalier Zanobi (Galiani), “who is against the export of corn.”— “I am against nothing,” is the repartee, “but the export of common sense.” Galiani complained in later years that no one had understood the purport of his book, and that what he had meant his readers to infer was that free export was impossible under a despot, and therefore impossible in France. This is in keeping with his definition of eloquence as “the art of saying everything without going to the Bastille”: but the reader, even now, will find it difficult to read into the book the intention suggested. The Dialogues met with great success. Voltaire said Plato and 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 17 70 appeared Morellet's Refutation (see p. 97, supra); and Mercier de la Rivière brought out a pamphlet entitled L'IntMt général de I'Etal, ou la liberté du commerce des bits, 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 mockingly proposed for himself a statue on which a Latin inscription was to declare that he had “wiped out the economists, who were sending the nation to sleep” —economistis deletis qui rempublicam obdormie-bant1 Grimm and Bachaumont followed his cue in their literary correspondence, and reviled the Physiocrats for their dulness and their arrogance.

Graslin (1727–1790), a receiver-general of taxes at Nantes, was a serious economical writer, who stood up fairly and squarely against the doctrines of the imp&t 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 Turgot2 The prize was awarded to Saint Péravy,3 but Graslin's essay was given honourable mention. In 1767 appeared his Essai Analytique sur la Rickesse 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 Éloge of Colbert, 1773, and his works Sur la Legislation et le commerce des Grains, 1775, and De I'administration des finances de la France, 1784, lose no opportunity of emphasising his dissent from the doctrines of Laissez-faire and the Tableau Oeconomique. His declamatory appeals to the rights of humanity and attacks upon landed property, though probably incited by an ambitious desire to secure political popularity, bring him into close harmony with State-socialists, who, like himself, desired a large intervention of the Government; and the Physiocrats had always to reckon with him as a determined adversary. His Mémoire 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 lives by the destruction of liberty, as carnivorous beasts live on their prey. This produced a reply from Morellet, the Théorie du paradoxes, 1775. Tinning upon Morellet, Linguet wrote a Théorie 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 l' Économie Politique, 1852.1 He had already assailed them in his Réponse aux docteurs modemes... avec la réfutation du systéme 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 character of their school and doctrines.2 He considered bread a slow poison, and was guillotined in 1794 for having calumniated lepain, 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;3 Pfeiffer, who wrote Der Anti-Physiokrat, 1780; Dohm, the correspondent of Mauvillon, 4 and author of Kurze Darstellung der physiokratische Systems, Cassel, 1778; and Von Sonnenfels, Grundsatze der Polizei, Hand-lung und Finanz, Vienna, 1765.

[1]Mercier de la Rivière responded to this challenge by his book De l'instruction publique, 1775. See supra, p. 88.

[1]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.

[2]This chapter deals with international relations. See supra, p. 73.

[1]It is discussed by A. Sudre, Histoire du Communisme, 1849.

[1]See p. 69.

[1]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 pbyaocratic society.

[1]Condorcet defended the Physiocrats against this sally in his edition of Voltaire. See also A. Batbie, L'homme aux quarante tcus et Us Physiocrates.

[2]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 Target 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.

[1]Iln a soufflé la. lèpre sur le genre humain. Loménie, vol. ii. p. 266.

[1]See for a recent study of Galiani and the Physiocrats, Frank Blei in the Berner Beiträge zur Geschichte der Nationalökonomie, No. 6. Berne, 1895.

[2]Œuvres, Paris, 1844, P 439. Du Pont also replied in his Lettre à Saint-Péravy, Éphémérides, 1768, tome ii.

[3]See p. 76, supra.

[1]s.v. Physiocrats, vol. ii. p. 361.

[2]See the quotations in Note B, Appendix.

[3]A reply to F. N. Vierordt's Von den Ursprung und Fortgang einer neuen Wisssenschaft, Carlsruhe, 1770, 8vo, a German translation of Du Pont's Origine et progrès d'une science nouvelle.

[4]See p. 100.