Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches/Foreword
REFLECTIONS
ON
THE FORMATION
AND THE DISTRIBUTION
OF RICHES
BY
TURGOT
1770
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1898
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1898,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Norword Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, baron d'Aulne, was born in Paris on May 10, 1727. He came of a branch of an old noble family of Normandy, which had for two or three generations furnished the state with able administrative officials: his grandfather had served as an Intendant; his father had occupied high judicial positions, and presided for a time over the municipal government of Paris as Prévôt des Marchands. He received his early education at the Collège Louis-le-Grand and the Collège du Plessis; and then, being destined as a younger son for the ecclesiastical profession, he entered upon his theological studies at the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, and received the degree of bachelor of theology in 1747. In 1748 he was admitted to residence in the Maison de Sorbonne; and, in December 1749, he was elected to the honorary office of Prieur for the ensuing year. Early in 1751 he changed his plans, and determined to enter the judicial and administrative service. In January 1752 he was appointed Substitut du Procureur Général; in December, Conseiller au Parlement de Paris; in March 1753, Maître des Requêtes. His duties for the next eight years were chiefly judicial; but in 1755 and 1756 he accompanied Gournay, the Intendant du Commerce, in his official tours of inspection through the south and west of the kingdom.
In August 1761 he was appointed Intendant of the Généralité of Limoges, and held that office till the middle of 1774. During his administration he reformed the method of collecting the Taille, substituted a money payment for the forced labour of the Corvée, brought about the free circulation of corn within the Généralité, and established a system of poor relief. In his occasional visits to Paris, he contracted a friendship with David Hume (secretary to the English Embassy from 1763 to 1766), and made the acquaintance of Adam Smith (in Paris from Christmas 1765 to October 1766). It was during 1766 that Turgot wrote his Reflections (for which see infra).
Upon the accession of Louis XVI, Turgot was invited to join the new reforming ministry. After a brief tenure of the Ministry of Marine (July 20-August 24, 1774), he was appointed Contrôleur Général des Finances. His short ministry of two years forms one of the best known episodes in the history of France. The most important of his measures were the establishment of freedom in the internal corn-trade, the substitution for the Corvée of a tax to which the privileged classes were also to contribute, and the abolition of the Jurandes, or corporations of crafts. Turgot's edicts aroused the most determined opposition from the nobility, the magistracy, and all those interested in the maintenance of existing conditions; and Louis yielded to the remonstrances of the court and of Marie Antoinette, and dismissed Turgot, May 12, 1776. His measures were at once recalled,—to be re-enacted by the legislatures of the Revolution. Turgot devoted the years of retirement to literary labours; and died on March 18, 1781.
The only economic writings of Turgot, other than the Reflections, published during his lifetime, would seem to have been the Questions importantes sur le commerce, 1755 (translated from the English of Tucker), and two articles on Foires et Marchés and Fondations in the Encyclopædie, 1756. He drew up, however, a large number of Mémoires on various economic topics, some of them addressed to his official superiors apropos of his government of Limoges: his measures of reform while Intendant were all explained and justified by him in circular letters and other papers addressed to the public: and the edicts of his ministry were preceded by elaborate expositions of the principles involved. All these, together with his Éloge de Gournay, written in 1759, were published, under the editorship of Du Pont de Nemours, in the Œuvres de Turgot, in 9 vols., 1809-1811; and reprinted with additions in the 2-volume edition of his Œuvres, edited by Daire and Dussard, in 1844, for the Guillaumin Collection des Principaux Economistes. The volume entitled Turgot: Administration et Œuvres Économiques, edited by M. Robineau, 1889, in the Petite Bibliothèque Économique, contains the Réflexions, the Éloge, the Édit de Suppression des Corvées, and the Édit de Suppression des Jurandes. In Mr. W. Walker Stephens' Life and Writings of Turgot, 1895, will be found a translation of the Éloge, and of a good many miscellaneous extracts from Turgot's writings.
The main source for the biography of Turgot is Du Pont de Nemours, Mémoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. Turgot, 1782. The Vie de Turgot, by his friend Condorcet, 1786, (translated into English 1787), gives some additional particulars. Of writings concerning Turgot a list will be found in Dr. Lippert's article in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, vol. vi. Among the most notable of these, from the eminence of the writers, are the articles of M. Léonce de Lavergne in Les Économistes Français du dix-huitième siècle, 1870, and of Mr. John Morley in Critical Miscellanies 1877, and the brief life by M. Léon Say, 1887, translated into English by Mr. Gustave Masson, 1888. Among the very few really impartial estimates of Turgot's place in French history, the reader may be referred to M. Albert Sorel's L'Europe et la Révolution Française, 1885, i, pp. 209-213.
The Reflections on the Production and the Distribution of Riches were written towards the close of 1766 for the benefit of two young Chinese, who having been educated in France were returning to their country with a pension from the crown. China was commonly regarded by the French economists of the time as the peculiar home of enlightened government (compare de Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime, livre III, ch. 3); and these young men were expected to keep their European patrons informed upon the internal affairs of their country. Turgot drew up a list of questions for them to answer, and prepared the Reflections to enable them the better to understand the purpose of his interrogations (see Appendix, Excerpt 6). In 1769 he yielded to the insistence of Du Pont de Nemours, then editing the Éphémérides du Citoyen, the organ of the Physiocratic party, who was in chronic want of copy, and gave him the Reflections to print. They appeared in the numbers for November and December 1769, and January 1770; which, however, were not actually issued till January, February and April 1770.
It has recently been shewn by M. G. Schelle (in his Du Pont de Nemours et l'école physiocratique, 1888, pp. 126-129, and in an article in the Journal des Economistes for July 1888), that Du Pont took upon himself, without consulting the author, to modify the text in more than one direction. In § xvii (infra, p. 16) the adjectives "human" and "civil" were omitted before "conventions" and "laws"; and to the words "after they ceased to cultivate them" were added, "And this as the price of the original agricultural advances, by which they have brought these soils into a condition to be cultivated, and which, so to speak, are incorporated with the soil" ("Et cela pour prix des avances foncières par les quelles ils ont mis ces terreins en état d'être cultivées, et qui se sont pour ainsi dire incorporées au sol même"). Out of Turgot's one section (xxi) on cultivation by slaves. Du Pont made three; his additions (more than equal in extent to Turgot's own text) not only emphasizing the moral evil of slavery, but also maintaining that slave labour was unprofitable even to the masters: and from the heading and opening sentences of § lv Du Pont omitted altogether the enumeration of slaves among moveable riches. Turgot was exceedingly annoyed (see Appendix, Excerpts 7, 8); and remonstrated in time to prevent the third instalment from being tampered with. But Du Pont could not allow Turgot's language in § lxxviii, about saving ("l'épargne") as the source of capital, to pass uncriticised; and accordingly he appended a long note, urging that "the formation of capitals arises much less from saving out of the expenditure of revenues than from the wise employment of the expenditure" (see Appendix, Excerpt 9), and added one or two other fussy notes. Throughout he touched-up the style in minute points.
Turgot insisted that in the separate issue of the Reflections which was about to be made, the text should be corrected, and an erratum inserted drawn up by himself. This was done; but according to M. Schelle only 100 or 150 copies were struck off, and scarcely one has survived. A corrected reprint, issued in 1788, is equally rare. Strangest of all is the fact that when, in 1808, Du Pont edited Turgot's Œuvres, he boldly reprinted his old text of the Éphémérides; and this was copied by Daire in his edition of 1844. Not till 1889 were the Reflections accessible as originally written. M. Schelle and M. Robineau have both announced that in the Reflections, as printed by the latter in the Turgot volume of the Petite Bibliothèque Économique, the original text has been re-established. In every essential point this is doubtless the case; but a comparison of the Robineau text with that of the Éphémérides and with the English translation of 1793 about to be mentioned, raises a good many curious little questions as to Turgot's exact language which cannot at present be answered. A really critical edition of the Reflections would come with good grace from the inheritors of the Turgot tradition,—the group of Parisian economists associated with the Journal des Économistes and the house of Guillaumin. It must be observed, also, that unless the manuscript of Turgot's other writings published posthumously by Du Pont can be recovered, they must remain under some suspicion.
An anonymous English translation, made, as is clear from internal evidence, from the edition of 1788, appeared in London in 1793; and this was reprinted by J. R. McCulloch in 1859 in one of the Overstone volumes, (A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Economical Tracts). The original intention of the present editor was merely to reprint this translation; but upon examination this was quickly seen to be out of the question. The 1793 translation is fairly good for the first few paragraphs; but soon gross blunders begin to make their appearance, e.g. in § XXV, where the heading "Colonage partiaire" is translated "Partial Colonization"! As it proceeds it becomes worse, until in the second half there are many paragraphs which are absolutely unintelligible. It was evidently a piece of hack-work, done by a man who had little understanding of the course of Turgot's argument. McCulloch can hardly have read it.
The present editor has, accordingly, ventured on a new translation, following M. Robineau's text, and comparing it with that of the Éphémérides,— for the loan of a copy of which he is indebted to his friend, Professor E. R. A. Seligman. He has attempted to produce something like the effect of Turgot's style; which is, indeed, inelegant and sometimes rugged, and also very limited in vocabulary, but yet direct and clear, the style pre-eminently of a man of affairs. Turgot's thought is, of course, abstract, like that of the group to which he belonged; but his language is not as abstract as that of economic writing has since become; and, in spite of the occasional awkwardness of the result, the translator has sought to retain as much as possible of the concreteness of Turgot's expressions. In this attempt some help has been derived from the usage of Adam Smith. Thus "richesses" has been rendered "riches," "la société" commonly by "the society," and so on. Sometimes a word like "denrée" is used first in a narrower and then in a wider sense, and therefore differently rendered. To avoid misrepresenting our author, the original French has been given in a note, when it is either a technical term, or used with more than one shade of meaning, or for any other reason noticeable. The punctuation in the Éphémérides, (connecting, for instance, two or three sentences with the colon or semi-colon) often suggests the connection of ideas more clearly than the modern texts, and it has been usually followed here, except where a printer's blunder could be fairly supposed. In the use of capital letters (which, it will be noticed, are far fewer in the third instalment), and in various trifles of typography, the printing of the Éphémérides has also been here imitated, in the hope of keeping something of the eighteenth-century flavour.
The Excerpts from Turgot's Correspondence, given in the Appendix, will be found to throw a good deal of light on his economic theory. Those numbered 1, 3, 5, were printed as long ago as 1849 by J. H. Burton in Letters of Eminent Persons to David Hume; while the letters of Hume, from which 2 and 4 are taken, have only of late years seen the light, in M. Léon Say's David Hume: Œuvre Économique, 1888, (in Petite Bibliothèque Economique). The economic passages form a small part of the whole correspondence between Turgot and Hume, which is chiefly concerned with the affairs of Rousseau. Hume's interesting letter to Morellet, (of which excerpt 10 is a fragment) is also printed in M. Say's Hume. Excerpts 6-9 are taken from previously unprinted letters of Turgot given by M. Schelle in the article in the Journal des Économistes and the book on Du Pont de Nemours already mentioned. The latter is an indispensable source of information for all students of the Physiocratic school.
The translator may be permitted to add two observations at the end of his work. The first is that, in spite of Turgot's dislike for the narrow sectarian spirit of the circle that surrounded Quesnay, and the freedom with which he expressed his dissent from them on minor points of doctrine, nevertheless his whole economic thought was dominated by the fundamental Physiocratic ideas; and these find in the Reflections their briefest and most lucid expression. The second is suggested by the recent discussion as to the relation between Adam Smith on the one side, and Turgot, or the whole Physiocratic school, on the other. This discussion, though it has received of late some valuable contributions, (S. Feilbogen, Smith und Turgot, 1892; E. Cannan, Introduction to his edition of Smith's Lectures, 1896; H. Higgs in Economic Journal, December 1896; and W. Hasbach in Political Science Quarterly, January 1898) cannot be regarded as concluded. It is now generally recognized that there are not inconsiderable portions of Adam Smith's treatise of a distinctly Physiocratic character. And it will probably be found that the contribution of Physiocracy to the production of the Wealth of Nations was even greater in two other ways,—in raising questions in Adam Smith's mind, which left to himself he would never have put, and in providing him with a phraseology which of himself he would never have hit upon.