Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune

“ The price of labour will always depend on the quantity of offers of labour and the quantity of the demand, [4] and not upon the taxes. Tradesmen [5] who manufacture stuffs [6] to be exported cannot augment the price of their labour; because, in that case, the stuffs would cost too much to be able to be sold in foreign markets. And tradesmen who manufacture stuffs for consumption within the country are equally unable to raise their price, because there cannot be two prices for the same sort of labour. This applies to all commodities whereof part is exported,—i.e. to almost all commodities. ”

“ What happens when corn goes up in price? Does not the poor man live more meagrely and work harder? A tax has the same effect.
I beg you to remember, also, that besides landed proprietors and poor labourers, there is, in every civilized nation, a very considerable and very opulent body of persons, which employs its capitals in commerce, and which enjoys a large revenue while giving work to the poorer class. ”

“ The workman, as you say, taxes his ingenuity to work more or consume less; but all this is only temporary. [21] Doubtless there is no man who works as much as he could. But it is no more natural for men to work as much as they can than for a cord to be stretched as much as it can be. There is a degree of relaxation necessary in every machine, without which it would run the risk of breaking at any moment. This degree of relaxation in the case of labour is fixed by a thousand causes which continue to operate after the tax is imposed ”

“ Wants are always the same. [22] That kind of superfluity out of which retrenchment can, strictly speaking, be made, is nevertheless a necessary element in the usual subsistence of the workmen and their families. Molière's miser says that when dinner is laid for five, a sixth can always make a meal; but by pushing this reasoning a little further one would quickly fall into absurdity. I add that the diminution of consumption has another effect upon the revenue of the proprietor which is very serious,—through the diminution of the value of commodities and of the products of his land. ”

“ Valuation of lands in accordance with the proportion which the revenue bears to the amount of moveable wealth, or the value, for which they are exchanged: this proportion is what is called the penny of the price of lands 49 LVIII.
Every capital in money, or every sum of value whatever it may be, is the equivalent of a piece of land producing a revenue equal to a definite fraction of that sum. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If wages [11] have been reduced by competition to their just price, they cannot go up; and as they cannot go up except at the expense of those who pay them, one part falls ultimately upon the proprietor for the expenditure he engages in with his net product, the other part increases the expenditure of the cultivators, who are consequently obliged to give less to the proprietor. It is, therefore, in all cases the proprietor who pays. ”

“ Every commodity is a pledge representing all the articles of Commerce; but it is more or less convenient in practice, according as it is more or less easy to transport & to keep without alteration 35 XXXIX.
Every commodity has the two essential properties of money, those of measuring and representing all value ”

“ I should be glad to think you are right in maintaining that slavery is for no one's advantage, for it is an abominable and barbarous injustice; but I very much fear that you are mistaken, and that this injustice may sometimes be useful to the man that perpetrates it. ”

“ I well know that the practice of no government at all conforms to the principle; but, in the first place, you know, as well as I do, that the principles put into practice by all the governments do not change as easily as speculative principles. ”

“ The total wealth of a nation is composed: 1st, of the net revenue of all the estates in land multiplied by the rate at which land is sold; 2d of the sum of all the moveable riches existing in the nation 86 XCII.
The amount of capitals on loan cannot be included in this total without being reckoned twice over 88 XCIII.
In which of the three classes of the Society the capitalist lenders of money are to be placed 90 XCIV.
The capitalist lender of money belongs to the disposable class, so far as his person is concerned 90 XCV. ”

“ The price of interest depends immediately upon the relation between the demand of the borrowers and the offer of the lenders; & this relation depends chiefly on the quantity of moveable riches accumulated, by the saving of revenues & of annual products, to form capitals withal, whether these capitals exist in money or in any other kind of effects having a value in commerce 78 LXXXI.
The spirit of economy in a nation continually augments the sum of capitals ”

“ 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. ”

“ I highly approve of your prize; yet why so much restrict the essays of the competitors, by assuming, as a recognized truth, that all taxes fall on the proprietors of land? You know that no government of any age or country has ever relied on this hypothesis: it has always been supposed that taxes fell on those who paid them upon consuming the products ”

“ The object is, as the saying goes, to pluck the hen without making it cry out; but it is the proprietors who cry out, and the government has always preferred to attack them indirectly, because then they do not perceive the harm until after the matter has become law; and, moreover, intelligence is not widely enough distributed, and the principles involved are not clearly enough proved, for them to attribute the evil they suffer to its true cause. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The financial system of all the peoples was formed in periods when men gave little thought to these matters; and, although people might be quite convinced that it was established on weak foundations, it would still be a good deal of trouble, and take a good deal of time, to remove a machine in full working and substitute another for it. ”

“ The wages of the Workman are limited to his subsistence by the competition among the Workmen. He gets only his livelihood 8 VII.
The Husbandman is the only person whose labour produces something over and above the wages of the labour. He is therefore the sole source of all wealth 9 VIII.
First division of the society into two classes: the one productive, or that of the Cultivators; the second stipendiary, or that of the Artisans 10
SECTION
PAGE
IX.
In the first ages the Proprietor cannot have been distinguished from the Cultivator 10 X.
Progress of the society ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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) ”

“ 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" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Third method; alienation of the estate in return for a fixed payment 21 XXV.
Fourth method: the metayer system 22 XXVI.
Fifth method: farming or the letting-out of land 23 XXVII.
This last method is the most advantageous of all, but it presupposes a country already rich 24 XXVIII. ”