ABSTRACT
For a century, the mercantile system was universally adopted by cabinets; universally favoured by traders and chambers of commerce; universally expounded by writers, as if it had been proved by the most unexceptionable demonstration, no one deeming it worth while to establish it by new proofs; when after the middle of the eighteenth century, Quesnay opposed to it his Tableau Economique, afterwards expounded by Mirabeau and the Abbé de Riviere, enlarged by Dupont de Nemours, analyzed by Turgot, and adopted by a numerous sect which arose in France, under the name of Economists. In Italy too this sect gained some distinguished3 partisans. Its followers have written more about the science than those of any other sect, yet they admitted Quesnay’s principles with such blind confidence, and maintained them with such implicit fidelity, that one is at a loss to discover any difference of principle, or any progress of ideas in their several productions.
