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'Colonies are like fruits, said Turgot, the eighteenth-century French economist and statesman: 'they cling to the mother-tree only until they are ripe. This generalisation, which represented a view very widely held during that and the next age, seemed to be borne out in the most conclusive way by the events of the sixty years following the Seven Years' War.
The same inspiring effect which so many of the benefactors of mankind have left on record that they had experienced from Plutarch's Lives, was produced on me by Plato's pictures of Socrates, and by some modern biographies, above all by Condorcet's Life of Turgot; a book well calculated to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and noblest of men.
This biographer according to the conscientious and painstaking investigations of the Bollandist Fathers, who examine in their careful way all the guarantees and traditions of the manuscript with a jealousy worthy of the most enlightened historians is not Turgot, who is usually credited with it, but Theodoric, a monk of Durham, who must have shared with Turgot, at some period of his life, the office of spiritual director and confidant to the Queen.
Madame de Grafigny did the same in a less grave shape. She received letters from the precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing eloquence in the pages of Emilius. Grimm had an elaborate scheme for a treatise on education.
Mill's repulse at Westminster with the dismissal of the great minister of Lewis the Sixteenth, he wrote: 'I never received so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to Turgot; it is indeed an honour to me that such an assimilation should have occurred to you. Those who have studied the character of one whom even the rigid Austin thought worthy to be called 'the godlike Turgot, know both the nobleness and the rarity of this type.
Turgot was succeeded in 1776 in the general control of the finances by Clugny, formerly comptroller of Saint Domingo, who, six months after, was himself succeeded by Necker.
Philosophers, nobles, and parliaments all clamored for reform in others; and for the public good, provided their own goods did not suffer. The King meant reform; he, at least, was in earnest. But how to get it? He had sought assistance from the middle classes; had tried Turgot, the political economist, and Necker, the banker, as ministers; but both broke down under the opposition of the nobility.
The other is that the people in the country, when Turgot had his plans laid before them in their parish meetings held after mass on Sundays, listened with the keenest distrust and suspicion to what they insisted on regarding as a sinister design for exacting more money from them.
Moreover the event confirmed the theory. Beginning with the Turgot ministry, an increase of activity and well-being manifested itself in the nation. The test seemed so decisive that it obtained the approval of all legislatures. Liberty of industry and commerce figure in our constitutions on a level with political liberty.
Some of them such as the illustrious Turgot believed that the best way of reaching the desired improvement was through the agency of a benevolent despotism; others such as Rousseau had in view an elaborate, a priori, ideal system of government; but these were exceptions, and the majority of the Philosophes ignored politics proper altogether. This was a great misfortune; but it was inevitable.
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