All would be well if trade and industry were allowed to follow their natural tendencies.

This is what was meant by Physiocracy, the supremacy of the Natural Order.

If rulers observed the limits of their true functions, Mercier thought that the moral effect would be immense.

"The public system of government is the true education of moral man.

Regis ad exemplum totus componitur orbis." [Footnote: The particulars of the Physiocratic doctrine as to the relative values of agriculture and commerce which Adam Smith was soon to criticise do not concern us; nor is it necessary to repeat the obvious criticisms on a theory which virtually reduced the science of society to a science of production and distribution.] While they advocated a thorough reform of the principles which ruled the fiscal policy of governments, the Economists were not idealists, like the Encyclopaedic philosophers; they sowed no seeds of revolution.