[77] Turgot was the author of a work on this subject, entitled Mémoire sur les Prêts d’Argent (1769).
[78] Réflexions sur la Formation des Richesses, §§ lix, lxi, lxxiv.
[79] “Remove all useless, unjust, contradictory, and absurd laws, and there will not be much legislative machinery left after that.” (Baudeau, p. 817.) “It is not a question of procuring immense riches, but simply a question of letting people alone, a problem that hardly requires a moment’s thought.” So wrote Boisguillebert sixty years before.
[80] Quesnay, Maximes, vol. i, p. 390. Mercier de la Rivière writes in much the same style; “The positive laws that are already in existence are merely expressions of such natural rights.” (Vol. ii, p. 61.) It sounds like a preamble to the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
[81] “The Physiocrats had the most absolute contempt for political liberty.” (Esmein, La Science politique des Physiocrates, address at the opening session of the Congress of Learned Societies, Paris, 1906.)
“The Greek republics never became acquainted with the laws of the order. Those restless, usurping, tyrannical tribes never ceased to drench the plains with human blood, to cover with ruins and to reduce to waste the most fertile and the best situated soil in the then known world.” (Baudeau, p. 800.)
“It is evident that a democratic sovereign—i.e. the whole people—cannot itself exercise its authority, and must be content to name representatives. These representatives are merely agents, whose functions are naturally transitory, and such temporary agents cannot always be in complete harmony with every interest within the nation. This is not the kind of administration contemplated by the Physiocrats. The sovereignty of the natural order is neither elective nor aristocratic. Only in the case of hereditary monarchy can all interests, both personal and individual, present and future, be clearly linked with those of the nation, by their co-partnership in all the net products of the territory submitted to their care.” (Dupont, vol. i, pp. 359-360.)
This sounds very much like a eulogy of the House of Hohenzollern, delivered by William II.
Very curious also are Dupont’s criticisms of the parliamentary régime. In his letter to J. B. Say (p. 414) he notes “its tendency to corruption and canker,” which had not then manifested itself in the United States of America. These letters, though very interesting, hardly belong to a history of economic doctrines.
[82] “It is only when the people are ingenuous that we find real despots, because then the sovereign can do whatever he wills.” (Dupont, p. 364.)