he establishment of the
Charitable Workshops. Some of the advocates of the famous National
Workshops of 1848 have appealed to this example of the severe patriot,
for a sanction to their own economic policy. It is not clear that the
logic of the Socialist is here more remorseless than usual. If the State
may set up workshops to aid people who are short of food because the
harvest has failed, why should it not do the same when people are short
of food because trade is bad, work scarce, and wages intolerably low? Of
course Turgot's answer would have been that remorseless logic is the
most improper instrument in the world for a business of rough
expedients, such as government is. There is a vital difference in
practice between opening a public workshop in the exceptional emergency
of a famine, and keeping public workshops open as a normal interference
with the free course of industrial activity. For the moment the
principle may appear to be the same, but in reality the application of
the principle means in the latter case the total disorganisation of
industry; in the former it means no more than a temporary breach of the
existing principles of organisation, with a view to its speedier
revival. To invoke Turgot as a dabbler in Socialism because he opened
_ateliers de charite_, is as unreasonable as it would be to make an
English minister who should suspend the Bank Charter Act in a crisis,
into the champion of an inconvertible paper currency. Turgot always
regarded the sums paid in his works, not as wages, but as alms. All that
he urged was that 'the best and most useful kind of alms consists in
providing means for earning them.' To prevent the workers from earning
aid with as little trouble to themselves as possible, he recommended
payment by the piece and not by the day. To check workers from flocking
in from their regular employments, he insisted on the wages being kept
below the ordinary rate, and he urged the propriety of driving as sharp
bargains as possible in fixing the price of the piece of work. To
prevent the dissipation of earnings at the tavern, he paid not in money,
but in leathern tokens, that were only current in exchange for
provisions. All these regulations mark a wide gulf between the Economist
of 1770 and the Socialist of 1848. Nobody was sterner than Turgot
against beggars, the inevitable scourge of every country where the evils
of vicious economic arrangements are aggravated by the mischievous views
of t