Smith's own
lips in the unreserved intercourse of private life. "Smith at
liberty," he says, "Smith in his own room or in that of a friend, as I
have seen him when we were fellow-disciples of M. Quesnay, would not
have said that."[180]

Though Smith met with them, and was indeed their very close scientific
as well as personal associate, it is of course impossible, strictly
speaking, to count him, as Dupont does, among the disciples of
Quesnay. He was no more a disciple of Quesnay than Peter was a
disciple of Paul, although, it is true, Paul wrote first. He neither
agreed with all the creed of the French economists, nor did he
acquire the articles he agreed with from the teaching of their master.
He had been for sixteen years before he met them teaching the two
principal truths which they set themselves to proclaim: (1) that the
wealth of a country does not consist in its gold and silver, but in
its stock of consumable commodities; and (2) that the true way of
increasing it is not by conferring privileges or imposing restraints,
but by assuring its producers a fair field and no favour. He had
taught those truths in 1750, and Quesnay had not written anything
bearing on them till 1756. Moreover, much in their system on which
they laid most stress he has publicly repudiated. Still he speaks both
of their system and of their master with a veneration which no
disciple could easily surpass. He pronounces the system to be, "with
all its imperfections, perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth
that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy,"
and the author of the system to be "ingenious and profound," "a man of
the greatest simplicity and modesty, who was honoured by his disciples
with a reverence not inferior to that of any of the ancient
philosophers for the founders of their respective systems."[181] He
might not, like the Marquis de Mirabeau, call Quesnay a greater than
Socrates, or the _Economic Table_ a discovery equal to the invention
of printing or of money, but he thought him so clearly the head of the
economic inquirers of the world that he meant to have dedicated the
_Wealth of Nations_ to Quesnay had the venerable French economist been
alive at the time of its publication. Smith was therefore a very
sympathetic associate of this new sect, though not a strict adherent.

It may be well to explain in a word to the general reader that this
sect were patriots and practical social and political r