both began to emphasize the truth that wealth really consists, not in money alone, but in an abundance of commodities; that countries which have plenty of gold and silver are not wealthier than others, and that money is only a medium of exchange. It was not, however, until 1750 that evidences of any real advance began to appear; for Law's famous scheme (1716-1720) only served as a drag upon the growth of economic truth. But in the middle of the eighteenth century an intellectual revival set in: the “Encyclopædia” was published, Montesquieu wrote his “l'Ésprit des Lois,” Rousseau was beginning to write, and Voltaire was at the height of his power. In this movement political economy had an important share, and there resulted the first school of Economists, termed the Physiocrats.
The founder and leader of this new body of economic thinkers was François Quesnay,17 a physician and favorite at [pg 009] the court of Louis XV. Passing by his ethical basis of a natural order of society, and natural rights of man, his main doctrine, in brief, was that the cultivation of the soil was the only source of wealth; that labor in other industries was sterile; and that freedom of trade was a necessary condition of healthy distribution. While known as the “Economists,” they were also called the “Physiocrats,”18 or the “Agricultural School.” Quesnay and his followers distinguished between the creation of wealth (which could only come from the soil) and the union of these materials, once created, by labor in other occupations. In the latter case the laborer did not, in their theory, produce wealth. A natural consequence of this view appeared in a rule of taxation, by which all the burdens of state expenditure were laid upon the landed proprietors alone, since they alone received a surplus of wealth (the famous net produit) above their sustenance and expenses of production. This position, of course, did not recognize the old mercantile theory that foreign commerce enriched a nation solely by increasing the quantity of money. To a physiocrat the wealth of a community was increased not by money, but by an abundant produce from its own soil. In fact, Quesnay argued that the right of