ADAM SMITH. 95 



appeared his excellent papers on the Corn Trade in the 

 Encyclopaedia.* His celebrated ' Tableau Economique' 

 in which the accumulation and distribution of wealth is 

 stated with great ingenuity and originality, though in a 

 somewhat abstruse form, appeared in 1758 ; and his 

 greatest work, the ' Physiocratie,' ten years later. His 

 doctrine was, that the cultivation of the soil alone adds 

 to the wealth of any state ; that they alone who till the 

 ground are entitled to be called productive labourers ; 

 that their industry alone yields a net or clear produce 

 ('produit net') in the shape of rent over and above the 

 expense of raising it by paying the workman's wages, 

 and replacing with the ordinary profit the capital ex- 

 pended ; that all other labour, as that of manufacturers 

 who fashion the raw produce, of merchants or retail 

 dealers who distribute it, whether raw or worked up, 

 and professional men who do not operate upon produce 

 at all, are, though highly useful, yet wholly and all 

 equally unproductive, because those classes only receive 

 their wages, or the profit of their stock, from the produc- 

 tive class the agriculturists. From this theory he 

 deduced practical inferences all of great importance, but 

 of different degrees of value or accuracy ; that all com- 

 merce, both external and internal, both in the raw and 

 manufactured produce of any country, should be left 

 entirely free ; that all industry of every class should be 

 alike unfettered ; that all men should be left to employ 

 their capital and their labour as their own view of their 

 own interest directs them ; that no tax should be im- 



* The article 'Fermier' appeared in 1756; 'Grains' in 1757; 

 M. Turgot's able articles appeared in 1756. 



