Page:Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches by Anne Turgot.djvu/17

 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