that it is different in positive character; the extremer form of the
doctrine taught by Turgot appears to have been taught also by Smith in
earlier years and abandoned. At least the fragment published by
Stewart of Smith's Society paper of 1755--eleven years before Turgot
wrote his book or saw Smith--proclaims individualism of the extremer
form, and intimates that he had taught the same views in Edinburgh in
1750. Smith had thus been teaching free trade many years before he met
Turgot, and teaching it in Turgot's own form; he had converted many of
the merchants of Glasgow to it and a future Prime Minister of
England; he had probably, moreover, thought out the main truths of the
work he was even then busy upon. He was therefore in a position to
meet Turgot on equal terms, and give full value for anything he might
take, and if obligations must needs be assessed and the balance
adjusted, who shall say whether Smith owes most to the conversation of
Turgot or Turgot owes most to the conversation of Smith? The state of
the exchange cannot be determined from mere priority of publication;
no other means of determining it exist, and it is of no great moment
to determine it at all.

Turgot and Smith are said--on authority which cannot be altogether
disregarded, Condorcet, the biographer of Turgot--to have continued
their economic discussions by correspondence after Smith returned to
this country; but though every search has been made for this
correspondence, as Dugald Stewart informs us, no trace of anything of
the kind was ever discovered on either side of the Channel, and
Smith's friends never heard him allude to such a thing. "It is
scarcely to be supposed," says Stewart, "that Mr. Smith would destroy
the letters of such a correspondent as M. Turgot, and still less
probable that such an intercourse was carried on between them without
the knowledge of Mr. Smith's friends. From some inquiries that have
been made at Paris by a gentleman of this society[165] since Smith's
death, I have reason to believe that no evidence of the correspondence
exists among the papers of M. Turgot, and that the whole story has
taken its rise from a report suggested by the knowledge of their
former intimacy."[166] Some of Hume's letters to Turgot--one from this
year 1766, combating among other things Turgot's principle of the
single tax on the net product of the land--still exist among the
Turgot family archives, but none from Smith, for Leon Say ex