k of an administrator who makes
life materially easier and more hopeful to the half-million of persons
living in the Generality of Limoges or elsewhere, must be pronounced
emphatically the worthier and more justly satisfactory.[44]

[Footnote 44: See vol. i. p. 290.]

Turgot himself, however, found time, in his industry at Limoges, to make
a contribution to a kind of literature which has seriously modified the
practical arrangements and social relations of the western world. In
1766 he published his Essay on the Formation and Distribution of
Wealth--a short but most pithy treatise, in which he anticipated some of
the leading economic principles of that greater work by Adam Smith,
which was given to the world ten years later. Turgot's Essay has none of
the breadth of historic outlook, and none of the amplitude of concrete
illustrations from real affairs, which make the Wealth of Nations so
deeply fertile, so persuasive, so interesting, so thoroughly alive, so
genuinely enriching to the understanding of the judicious reader. But
the comparative dryness of Turgot's too concise form does not blind the
historian of political economy to the merit of the substance of his
propositions. It was no small proof of originality and enlightenment to
precede Adam Smith by ten years in the doctrines of free trade, of free
industry, of loans on interest, of the constitutive elements of price,
of the effects of the division of labour, of the processes of the
formation of capital. The passage on interest will bear reproducing once
more:--'We may regard the rate of interest as a kind of level, below
which all labour, all cultivation, all industry, all commerce ceases. It
is like a sea spreading out over a vast district; the tops of the
mountains rise above the waters and form fertile and cultivated islands.
If the sea by any chance finds an outlet, then in proportion as it goes
down, first the slopes, next the plains and valleys, appear and clothe
themselves with productions of every kind. It is enough that the sea
rises or falls by a foot, to inundate vast shores, or to restore them to
cultivation and plenty.' There are not many illustrations at once so apt
and so picturesque as this, but most of the hundred paragraphs that make
up the Reflections are, notwithstanding one or two of the characteristic
crotchets of Quesnai's school, both accurate and luminous.

V.

In May 1774 Lewis XV. died. His successor was only twenty years ol