Page:Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches by Anne Turgot.djvu/16

xi 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