The French Economists or “Physiocrats,” as they were afterwards called, who formed a definite school before 1760—­Quesnay the master, Mirabeau, Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest—­envisaged their special subject from a wide philosophical point of view; their general economic theory was equivalent to a theory of human society.  They laid down the doctrine of a Natural Order in political communities, and from it they deduced their economic teaching.

They assumed, like the Encyclopaedists, that the end of society is the attainment of terrestrial happiness by its members, and that this is the sole purpose of government.  The object of a treatise by Mercier de la Riviere [Footnote:  L’ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiqes, 1767.] (a convenient exposition of the views of the sect) is, in his own words, to discover the natural order for the government of men living in organised communities, which will assure to them temporal felicity:  an order in which everything is well, necessarily well, and in which the interests of all are so perfectly and intimately consolidated that all are happy, from the ruler to the least of his subjects.

But in what does this happiness consist?  His answer is that “humanly speaking, the greatest happiness possible for us consists in the greatest possible abundance of objects suitable to our enjoyment and in the greatest liberty to profit by them.”  And liberty is necessary not only to enjoy them but also to produce them in the greatest abundance, since liberty stimulates human efforts.  Another condition of abundance is the multiplication of the race; in fact, the happiness of men and their numbers are closely bound up together in the system of nature.  From these axioms may be deduced the Natural Order of a human society, the reciprocal duties and rights whose enforcement is required for the greatest possible multiplication of products, in order to procure to the race the greatest sum of happiness with the maximum population.

Now, individual property is the indispensable condition for full enjoyment of the products of human labour; “property is the measure of liberty, and liberty is the measure of property.”  Hence, to realise general happiness it is only necessary to maintain property and consequently liberty in all their natural extent.  The fatal error which has made history what it is has been the failure to recognise this simple fact; for aggression and conquest, the causes of human miseries, violate the law of property which is the foundation of happiness.

The practical inference was that the chief function of government was to protect property and that complete freedom should be left to private enterprise to exploit the resources of the earth.  All would be well if trade and industry were allowed to follow their natural tendencies.  This is what was meant by Physiocracy, the supremacy of the Natural Order.  If rulers observed the limits of their true functions,