Page:The wealth of nations, volume 1.djvu/38

 abeau wrote several works explaining the system, from one of which, "La Philosophie Rurale" (1763), we take the following: "The artisans who weave stuffs, the merchants who trade in them, the carriers who transport them, the tailors who make them into clothes, the lawyer who pleads a cause, the servant who attends him, all these people can consume only because of the recompense which is paid to them by those who employ them, or who buy their products. For their labor and their goods produce for them nothing beyond this recompense, which is itself an expense for those who pay. If this payment be traced to its source … it will be found to come solely from the earth, which alone produces all the commodities we use" (p. 15).

It is Turgot who gives perhaps the most complete and systematic exposition of the system of the economists or physiocrats. In his "Réflexions sur la formation et la Distribution des Richesses" (1766), he supplies a brief but fairly complete survey of the whole of the science of political economy, and begins, like Adam Smith, by showing the advantage and necessity of the division of labor and how from it results a systematic exchange of commodities.

"Every one attaching himself to a particular species of labor, succeeds much better therein. The husbandman draws from his field the greatest quantity it is able to produce, and procures for himself, with greater facility, all the other objects of his wants, by an exchange of his superflux than he could have done by his own labor. The shoemaker by making shoes for the husbandman, secures to himself a portion of the harvest of the latter. Every workman labors for the wants of the workmen of every other trade who, on their side, toil also for him" (§ 4).

He then goes on to show that the labor of the husband-