ADAM SMITH. 175 



easily the leader, or head of a sect, and lie was looked 

 up to by his disciples with the same reverence that 

 the followers of the ancient sages paid to the objects 

 of their veneration. The Marquis of Mirabeau, father 

 of the famous revolutionary leader ; M. Mercier de la 

 Riviere ; M. Dupont de Nemours ; M. Condorcet, and 

 M. Turgot, for some time Controller General of the 

 Finances, were the most celebrated of this school. 

 Their chief died as early as 1774, but they continued 

 to instruct mankind by their writings, which, however 

 ingenious and learned, were almost all deprived of 

 their full eifect upon the bulk of readers, by the dry, 

 scholastic, and even crabbed style in which they were 

 composed, and the want of that simple arrangement 

 and that plain manner of unfolding their system which 

 forms the first and the essential merit of didactic com- 

 position. 



It must be added that on the structure of govern- 

 ment, the doctrines of the sect were far less enlight- 

 ened than upon its functions. While they held the 

 whole happiness of society to depend upon a wise 

 and honest administration of the supreme power in 

 the state, they never considered how necessary it 

 was to provide a security for that course being pur- 

 sued, by establishing checks upon the rulers. Their 

 doctrine was that what they called a despotisme legale, 

 or an absolute power vested in the sovereign, and 

 exercised according to fixed laws, is the most perfect 

 form of government; and they entirely forgot that 

 either no change whatever can be made in these laws, 

 let ever so great a change happen in the circumstances 

 of the community, or that all laws may be abrogated 

 or altered at the monarch's pleasure, and thus, that the 

 epithet ''-legal" dropt from their definition. In short 

 they forgot, that their theory to be tolerable required 

 the despot to be an angel, in which case, no doubt, 

 their constitution would be perfect, but in no other. 

 It is singular, that with all this, we find in the authen- 



