The year 1766 was a year of exceptional activity in this economist camp.  Turgot, as we have seen, was writing an important work, and Mercier de la Riviere another.  The other members of the group were busy too, for they had just for the first time secured an organ in the press in the Journal de l’Agriculture du Commerce et des Finances, of which their youngest convert, Dupont de Nemours, was made editor in June 1765, and in which Quesnay himself wrote an article almost every month till Dupont’s dismissal in November 1766.  The Government, moreover, which had thrown Mirabeau into prison for his first book and had suppressed his second only a year or two before, now ceased from troubling, and gave even a certain official countenance to the Journal de l’Agriculture, for after the war it no longer shut its eyes to the distress that prevailed, and began to give an ear to remedies.  They were making converts too, among others the Abbe Baudeau, who used to write them down in his journal, the Ephemerides du Citoyen, but now offered to make it their organ when they lost the Journal de l’Agriculture.  They were thus in the first flush of their active propaganda, which in a year or two more made political economy, Grimm says, the science de la mode in France, and won converts to the single tax among the crowned heads of Europe.  Quesnay too had taken apartments in town in the house of a disciple to be nearer his friends for pushing the propaganda, so that Smith had especially abundant opportunities of seeing him and them that year.

No memorial of all their intercourse, however, has survived except the slight and rather indefinite reminiscence of Dupont de Nemours, to which allusion has been made.  Dupont remembers that Smith used to discuss with them a question, which they no doubt would be often discussing, for they were greatly interested in it,—­the question of the effect upon the wages of labour of a tax upon the commodities consumed by the labourers; and he says that Smith, in the freedom of private intercourse with them, expressed quite a different opinion upon that subject from that which he delivered in the Wealth of Nations, with the fear of vested interests before his eyes.  Dupont could not have read the Wealth of Nations very carefully when he hinted this accusation of timidity before vested interests, for there was scarcely a vested interest existing at the time that has not incurred in its turn most vigorous censure in that work.  But as the alleged difference amounts merely to this, that Smith in his book asserts a principle with a certain specific limitation to it which he used to assert in conversation without the limitation, it probably represents no real change of opinion, but only a difference between the more exact expositions of the book and the less exact expositions of conversation.  The point was this.  Smith held, with Dupont and his friends, that a direct tax on the wages of labour,