The confession of faith of the Économistes is embodied in Quesnay’s Tableau Économique , which one of them described as worthy of being ranked, along with writing and money, as one of the three greatest inventions of the human race. It is reprinted on the next page from the facsimile of the edition of 1759, published by the British Economic Association (now the Royal Economic Society) in 1894.
Those who are curious as to the exact meaning of the zigzag lines may study Quesnay’s Explication , which the British Economic Association published along with the table in 1894. For our present purposes it is sufficient to see (1) that it involves a conception of the whole annual produce or reproduction of a country; (2) that it teaches that some labour is unproductive, that to maintain the annual produce certain “ avances ” are necessary, and that this annual produce is “distributed.” Adam Smith, as his chapter on agricultural systems shows, did not appreciate the minutiæ of the table very highly, but he certainly took these main ideas and adapted them as well as he could to his Glasgow theories. With those theories the conception of an annual produce was in no way inconsistent, and