have
been devised for the express purpose of paralysing both agriculture and
commerce, and exhausting all the sources of the national wealth.[43]
But these speculations had been mainly of a fiscal kind, and pointed not
much further than to a readjustment of taxation and an improvement in
the modes of its collection. The disciples of the New Science, as it was
called, the Physiocrats, or believers in the supremacy of Natural Order,
went much beyond this, and in theory sought to lay open the whole ground
of the fabric of society. Practically they dealt with scarcely any but
the economic circumstances of societies, though some of them mix up with
their reasonings upon commerce and agriculture crude and incomplete
hints upon forms of government and other questions that belong not to
the economical but to the political side of social science.[44]
Quesnay's famous _Maxims_ open with a declaration in favour of the unity
of the sovereign authority, and against the system of counterbalancing
forces in government. Almost immediately he passes on to the ground of
political economy, and elaborates the conditions of material prosperity
in an agricultural realm. With the correctness of the definitions and
principles of economic science as laid down by these writers, we have
here nothing to do. Their peculiar distinction in the present connection
is the grasp which they had of the principle of there being a natural,
and therefore a scientific, order in the conditions of a society; that
order being natural in the sense that they attached to the term, which
from the circumstances of the case is most beneficial to the race. From
this point of view they approach some of the problems of what is now
classified as social statics; and they assume, without any consciousness
of another aspect being possible, that the society which they are
discussing is in a state of equilibrium.

It is evident that with this restriction of the speculative horizon,
they were and must remain wholly unable to emerge into the full light of
the completely constituted science of society, with laws of movement as
well as laws of equilibrium, with definite methods of interpreting past
and predicting future states. They could account for and describe the
genesis of the social union, as Plato and Aristotle had in different
ways been able to do many centuries before; and they could prescribe
some of the conditions of its being maintained in vigour and
compactness. Some