John Morley

But Turgot persevered, knowing how useful potatoes would be in a land where scarcity of grain was so common.

When, however, it was seen that the Intendant had the hated vegetable served every day at his own table, the opposition grew more faint; men were at last brought to consent to use potatoes for their cattle, and after a time even for…

In the eyes of the modern economist, with his horror of government encouragement to industry, no matter in what time, place, or circumstance, some of Turgot's actions will seem of doubtful wisdom.

This plea for free trade in money has all the sense and liberality of the brightest side of the eighteenth century illumination.

The royal government was generally willing in the latter half of the eighteenth century to redress a given case of abuse, but it never felt itself strong enough, or had leisure enough, to deal with the general source from which the…

Turgot's Memorial is as cogent an exposure of the mischief of Usury Laws to the public prosperity, as the more renowned pages either of Bentham or J.

If the State may set up workshops to aid people who are short of food because the harvest has failed, why should it not do the same when people are short of food because trade is bad, work scarce, and wages intolerably low?

There is a vital difference in practice between opening a public workshop in the exceptional emergency of a famine, and keeping public workshops open as a normal interference with the free course of industrial activity.

For the moment the principle may appear to be the same, but in reality the application of the principle means in the latter case the total disorganisation of industry; in the former it means no more than a temporary breach of the existing…

To invoke Turgot as a dabbler in Socialism because he opened ateliers de charite, is as unreasonable as it would be to make an English minister who should suspend the Bank Charter Act in a crisis, into the champion of an inconvertible…

All that he urged was that 'the best and most useful kind of alms consists in providing means for earning them.' To prevent the workers from earning aid with as little trouble to themselves as possible, he recommended payment by the piece…

To check workers from flocking in from their regular employments, he insisted on the wages being kept below the ordinary rate, and he urged the propriety of driving as sharp bargains as possible in fixing the price of the piece of work.

To prevent the dissipation of earnings at the tavern, he paid not in money, but in leathern tokens, that were only current in exchange for provisions.

Accordingly he invited the landowners, not merely to contribute sums of money in return for the public works carried on in their neighbourhood, but also, by way of providing employment to their indigent neighbours, to undertake such works…

It was a claim less of humanity than of bare justice, that the landowners should do something for men with whom their relations had been so close as to be almost domestic, and to whose hard toil their masters owed all that they possessed.

The effect of their proceedings now was to increase their revenue fourfold and fivefold out of public calamity and universal misery.

I am perfectly convinced that one may be, through study, a thousand times more useful to men than in any of our subordinate posts.

There we torment ourselves, and often without any compensating success, to secure some small benefits, while we are the involuntary instrument of evils that are by no means small.

Most literature, nearly all literature, is distinctly subordinate and secondary; it only serves to pass the time of the learned or cultured class, without making any definite mark either on the mental habits of men and women, or on the…

It was no small proof of originality and enlightenment to precede Adam Smith by ten years in the doctrines of free trade, of free industry, of loans on interest, of the constitutive elements of price, of the effects of the division of…

Along with the corvees were suppressed the jurandes, or exclusive industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose monopolies and restrictions were so mischievous an impediment to the wellbeing of the country.

The measures we have enumerated were all excellent in themselves, and the state of the kingdom was such as urgently to call for them.

They were steps towards the construction of a fabric of freedom and justice.

But they provoked a host of bitter and irreconcilable enemies, while they raised up no corresponding host of energetic supporters.

I would use my best endeavours to make these States independent in matters of administration.