Page:Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches by Anne Turgot.djvu/13

 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"