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BOOK I: THE FOUNDERS
I
II
THE LAW OF POPULATION 121
BOOK II: THE ANTAGONISTS
BOOK IV: THE DISSENTERS
BOOK V: RECENT DOCTRINES
CONCLUSION 643
INDEX 649
BOOK I: THE FOUNDERS
But the counsels given and the recipes offered for attaining the desired end were as diverse as they were uncertain. One school, known as the Mercantilist, believed that a State, like an individual, must secure the maximum of silver and gold before it could become wealthy. Happy indeed was a country like Spain that had discovered a Peru, or Holland, which, in default of mines, could procure gold from the foreigner in exchange for its spices. Foreign trade really seemed a quite inexhaustible mine. Other writers, who were socialists in fact though not in name--for that term is of later invention--thought that happiness could only be found in a more equal distribution of wealth, in the abolition or limitation of the rights of private property, or in the creation of a new society on the basis of a new social contract--in short, in the foundation of the Utopian commonwealth.
It was at this juncture that Quesnay appeared. Quesnay was a doctor by profession, who now, when on the verge of old age, had turned his attention to the study of "rural economy"--the problem of the land and the means of subsistence. Boldly declaring that the solution of the problem had always lain ready to hand, needing neither inventing nor discovering, he further maintained that all social relations into which men enter, far from being haphazard, are, on the contrary, admirably regulated and controlled. To those who took the trouble to think, the laws governing human associations seemed almost self-evident, and the difficulties they involved no greater than the difficulties presented by the laws of geometry. So admirable were these laws in every respect that once they were thoroughly known they were certain to command allegiance. Dupont de Nemours cannot be said to have exaggerated when, in referring to this doctrine, he spoke of it as "very novel indeed."
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