eformers quite
as much as theoretical economists. They believed the condition of the
French people to have grown so bad as to be a grave danger to the
State, and they preached their system as a revelation of the only way
of salvation. They were too earnest for the Paris wits. Voltaire
always sneered at them till he came to know Turgot. Grimm calls them
"the pietists of philosophy," and Hume, bantering Morellet, wonders
how a man like Turgot could herd with such cattle, "the most
chimerical and the most arrogant that now exist since the annihilation
of the Sorbonne." But they were grappling with living problems, and
seeing into the real situation so much further than their
contemporaries, that an historian like de Tocqueville thinks the best
key to the Revolution is to be found in their writings. The malady of
the age, they held, was the ever-increasing distress of the
agricultural population. The great nobles, the financiers, the
farmers-general, the monopolists, were very rich; but the
agriculturists--the vast body of the people--were sinking into a
hopeless impoverishment, for between tithes and heavy war taxes and
farmer-generals' extortions, and the high rents which, to Turgot's
despair, the smaller peasantry would persist in offering without
reflecting in the least on the rise in their burdens,--between all
these things, the net product of agriculture--what was left in the
hands of the cultivator after all expenses were paid away--was getting
less and less every year, and the ruin of the peasantry meant the ruin
of the nation. "Poor peasants, poor kingdom," said they; "poor
kingdom, poor king."

And the remedy was plain: the net product of agriculture must somehow
be made to rise instead of fall. They supported their contention with
a certain erroneous theory that agriculture is the sole source of
wealth, but the error made little practical difference to the
argument, for agriculture is always a sufficiently important source of
wealth to make its improvement a national concern. How then was the
net product to be increased? By better methods of cultivation, by
removal of legal and official interferences, and by lightening the
public burdens through the abolition of all existing taxes and of the
existing system of collecting them through farmers-general, and the
institution instead of a single tax on the net product of the soil, to
be collected directly by responsible officials. According to the
reminiscences of st