culture as productive, and of all manufacturers and commercial men as sterile, he is not considering the means of procuring the necessaries and conveniences of life; he is pointing to a source from which in the progress of the society, an agricultural state may derive a permanent revenue with the least possible inconvenience to the citizens in their ordinary avocations. He points to an unearned 'increment from land,' though economic science had not so far advanced as to enable him to name it quite definitely. Adam Smith assumes in his criticism that Quesnay is really discussing the causes of the increase of national wealth—the necessaries and conveniences of life—as they act in any country, and that he represents the produce of the land as the sole source; but Quesnay's maxima were avowedly devised for an agricultural realm,[1] and he explicitly notes that the scheme would be inapplicable to small maritime states which are dependent on commerce.[2] He was not discussing the growth of riches, but the most convenient source of taxation in a special community. But Adam Smith's criticism was not less damaging because it was quite irrelevant.
The misrepresentations of both these systems are glaring, and of course it can never be possible to decide with certainty how far Adam Smith mistook the purport of these writers and how far he was unfair. But when we take account of the acumen and character of the man, it is as difficult to the historian as it was to contemporaries in Paris to believe that his misrepresentations were unconscious.[3] The story of Adam Smith's relations with Hume,[4] shows that he was neither distinguished for frankness nor moral courage; and there is little reason to plead for him as a judicial critic, if an adequate motive can be assigned for the misrepresentation of his predecessors; and the motive is not far to seek. His treatise was thoroughly practical; he may well have believed as others had done, that the whole scheme of Government interference, and the whole fiscal policy which rested on it, was bad. Under the circumstances he rightly desired to sweep it away and to have the revenue system altered in accordance with the maxims which he had adopted from M. Moreau de Beaumont.[5] But by attacking the mercantile principles on which our existing system was founded, and by discrediting the Physiocratic principles which
- ↑ Quesnay, Œuvres, edition by Oncken, 328.
- ↑ Ibid. 338.
- ↑ See M. Oncken's Preface to his edition of Quesnay.
- ↑ Haldane, Life of Adam Smith, 37.
- ↑ Adam Smith's celebrated maxims about taxation are improved in form, but in substance they are found in the Avertissement to the splendid Mémoires which were compiled and printed for the French government in 1768.
