Progress, therefore, is natural and necessary, and to criticise or condemn it by appealing to nature is only to divide the house of nature against itself.
If d'Holbach had pressed his logic further, he would have taken a more indulgent and calmer view of the past history of mankind. He would have acknowledged that institutions and opinions to which modern reason may give short shrift were natural and useful in their day, and would have recognised that at any stage of history the heritage of the past is no less necessary to progress than the solvent power of new ideas. Most thinkers of his time were inclined to judge the past career of humanity anachronistically. All the things that had been done or thought which could not be justified in the new age of enlightenment, were regarded as gratuitous and inexcusable errors. The traditions, superstitions, and customs, the whole "code of fraud and woe" transmitted from the past, weighed then too heavily in France to allow the school of reform to do impartial justice to their origins. They felt a sort of resentment against history. D'Alembert said that it would be well if history could be destroyed; and the general tendency was to ignore the social memory and the common heritage of past experiences which mould a human society and make it something very different from a mere collection of individuals.
Belief in Progress, however, took no extravagant form. It did not beguile d'Holbach or any other of the leading thinkers of the Encyclopaedia epoch into optimistic dreams of the future which might await mankind. They had a much clearer conception of obstacles than the good Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Helvetius agrees with d'Holbach that progress will be slow, and Diderot is wavering and sceptical of the question of indefinite social improvement. [Footnote: De l'esprit, Disc. ii. cc. 24, 25.]
6.
The reformers of the Encyclopaedia group were not alone in disseminating the idea of Progress. Another group of thinkers, who widely differed in their principles, though some of them had contributed articles to the Encyclopaedia, [Footnote: Quesnay and Turgot, who, though not professedly a Physiocrat, held the same views as the sect.] also did much to make it a power. The rise of the special study of Economics was one of the most significant facts in the general trend of thought towards the analysis of civilisation. Economical students found that in seeking to discover a true theory of the production, distribution, and employment of wealth, they could not avoid the consideration of the constitution and purpose of society. The problems of production and distribution could not be divorced from political theory: production raises the question of the functions of government and the limits of its intervention in trade and industry; distribution involve questions of property, justice, and equality. The employment of riches leads into the domain of morals.
The French Economists or "Physiocrats," as they were afterwards called, who formed a definite school before 1760—Quesnay the master, Mirabeau, Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest—envisaged their special subject from a wide philosophical point of view; their general economic theory was equivalent to a theory of human society. They laid down the doctrine of a Natural Order in political communities, and from it they deduced their economic teaching.
They assumed, like the Encyclopaedists, that the end of society is the attainment of terrestrial happiness by its members, and that this is the sole purpose of government. The object of a treatise by Mercier de la Riviere [Footnote: L'ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiqes, 1767.] (a convenient exposition of the views of the sect) is, in his own words, to discover the natural order for the government of men living in organised communities, which will assure to them temporal felicity: an order in which everything is well, necessarily well, and in which the interests of all are so perfectly and intimately consolidated that all are happy, from the ruler to the least of his subjects.
But in what does this happiness consist? His answer is that "humanly speaking, the greatest happiness possible for us consists in the greatest possible abundance of objects suitable to our enjoyment and in the greatest liberty to profit by them." And liberty is necessary not only to enjoy them but also to produce them in the greatest abundance, since liberty stimulates human efforts. Another condition of abundance is the multiplication of the race; in fact, the happiness of men and their numbers are closely bound up together in the system of nature. From these axioms may be deduced the Natural Order of a human society, the reciprocal duties and rights whose enforcement is required for the greatest possible multiplication of products, in order to procure to the race the greatest sum of happiness with the maximum population.
Now, individual property is the indispensable condition for full enjoyment of the products of human labour; "property is the measure of liberty, and liberty is the measure of property." Hence, to realise general happiness it is only necessary to maintain property and consequently liberty in all their natural extent. The fatal error which has made history what it is has been the failure to recognise this simple fact; for aggression and conquest, the causes of human miseries, violate the law of property which is the foundation of happiness.
The practical inference was that the chief function of government was to protect property and that complete freedom should be left to private enterprise to exploit the resources of the earth. All would be well if trade and industry were allowed to follow their natural tendencies. This is what was meant by Physiocracy, the supremacy of the Natural Order. If rulers observed the limits of their true functions, Mercier thought that the moral effect would be immense. "The public system of government is the true education of moral man. Regis ad exemplum totus componitur orbis." [Footnote: The particulars of the Physiocratic doctrine as to the relative values of agriculture and commerce which Adam Smith was soon to criticise do not concern us; nor is it necessary to repeat the obvious criticisms on a theory which virtually reduced the science of society to a science of production and distribution.]