When Guizot called Lamennais a malefactor,
because he threw off his cassock and became a freethinker, Scherer,
whose course had been some way parallel, observed: "He little knows
how much it costs." The abrupt transition seems to have been
accomplished by Turgot without a struggle. The _Encyclopaedia_, which
was the largest undertaking since the invention of printing, came out
at that time, and Turgot wrote for it. But he broke off, refusing to
be connected with a party professedly hostile to revealed religion;
and he rejected the declamatory paradoxes of Diderot and Raynal. He
found his home among the Physiocrats, of all the groups the one that
possessed the most compact body of consistent views, and who already
knew most of the accepted doctrines of political economy, although
they ended by making way for Adam Smith. They are of supreme
importance to us, because they founded political science on the
economic science which was coming into existence. Harrington, a
century before, had seen that the art of government can be reduced to
system; but the French economists precede all men in this, that
holding a vast collection of combined and verified truths on matters
contiguous to politics and belonging to their domain, they extended it
to the whole, and governed the constitution by the same fixed
principles that governed the purse. They said: A man's most sacred
property is his labour. It is anterior even to the right of property,
for it is the possession of those who own nothing else. Therefore he
must be free to make the best use of it he can. The interference of
one man with another, of society with its members, of the state with
the subject, must be brought down to the lowest dimension. Power
intervenes only to restrict intervention, to guard the individual from
oppression, that is from regulation in an interest not his own. Free
labour and its derivative free trade are the first conditions of
legitimate government. Let things fall into their natural order, let
society govern itself, and the sovereign function of the State will be
to protect nature in the execution of her own law. Government must not
be arbitrary, but it must be powerful enough to repress arbitrary
action in others. If the supreme power is needlessly limited, the
secondary powers will run riot and oppress. Its supremacy will bear no
check. The problem is to enlighten the ruler, not to restrain him; and
one man is more easily enlightened than many. Gove