Quotations from the Physiocrats in support of this view might easily be cited.[12] This interpretation has the further distinction of being in accord with the spirit of the age. The worship of the “noble savage” was a feature of the end of the eighteenth century. It pervades the literature of the period, and the cult which began with the tales of Voltaire, Diderot, and Marmontel reappears in the anarchist writers of to-day. As an interpretation of the Physiocratic position, however, it must be unhesitatingly rejected, for no one bore less resemblance to a savage than a Physiocrat. They all of them lived highly respectable lives as magistrates, _intendants_, priests, and royal physicians, and were completely captivated by ideas of orderliness, authority, sovereignty, and property—none of them conceptions compatible with a savage state. “Property, security, and liberty constitutes the whole of the social order.”[13] They never acquiesced in the view that mankind suffered loss in passing from the state of nature into the social state; neither did they hold to Rousseau’s belief that there was greater freedom in the natural state, although its dangers were such that men were willing to sacrifice something in order to be rid of them, but that nevertheless in entering upon the new state something had been lost which could never be recovered.[14] All this was a mere illusion in the opinion of the Physiocrats. Nothing was lost, everything was to be gained, by passing from a state of nature into the civilised state. In the second place, the term “natural order” might be taken to mean that human societies are subject to natural laws such as govern the physical world or exercise sway over animal or organic life. From this standpoint the Physiocrats must be regarded as the forerunners of the organic sociologists. Such interpretation seems highly probable because Dr. Quesnay through his study of “animal economy” (the title of one of his works) and the circulation of the blood was already familiar with these ideas. Social and animal economy, both, might well have appeared to him in much the same light as branches of physiology. From physiology to Physiocracy was not a very great step. At any rate, the Physiocrats succeeded in giving prominence to the idea of the interdependence of all social classes and of their final dependence upon nature. And this we might almost say was a change tantamount to a transformation from a moral to a natural science.[15]