Anyone examining the table in a non-Physiocratic fashion, but simply viewing it in the modern spirit, must at once feel surprised and disappointed to find that the class which enjoys two-fifths of the national revenue does nothing in return for it. We should not have been surprised if such glaring parasitism had given to the work of the Physiocrats a distinctly socialistic tone. But they were quite impervious to all such ideas. They never appreciated the weakness of the landowners’ position, and they always treated them with the greatest reverence. The epithet “sterile” is applied, not to them, but to manufacturers and artisans! Property is the foundation-stone of the “natural order.” The proprietors have been entrusted with the task of supplying the staff of life, and are endued with a kind of priestly sacredness. It is from their hands that all of us receive the elements of nutrition. It is a “divine” institution—the word is there.[46] Such idolatry needs some explanation. One might have expected—even from their own point of view—that the premier position would have been given to the class which they termed productive, _i.e._ to the cultivators of the soil, who were mostly farmers and _métayers_. The land was not of their making, it is true. They had simply received it from the proprietors. This latter class takes precedence because God has willed that it should be the first dispenser of all wealth.[47] There is no need to insist on this strange aberration which led them to look for the creator of the land and its products, not amid the cultivators of the soil, but among the idlers.[48] Such was the logical conclusion of their argument. We must also remember that the Physiocrats failed to realise the inherent dignity of all true labour simply because it was not the creator of wealth. This applied both to the agricultural labourer and the industrial worker, and though the former alone was considered productive it was because he was working in co-operation with nature. It was nature that produced the wealth and not the worker. Something must also be attributed to their environment. Knowing only feudal society, with its economic and political activities governed and directed by idle proprietors, they suffered from an illusion as to the necessity for landed property similar to that which led Aristotle to defend the institution of slavery.[49] Although they failed to foresee the criticisms that would be levelled against the institution of private property, they were very assiduous—especially the Abbé Baudeau—in seeking an explanation of its origin and a justification of its existence. The reasons which they advanced are more worthy of quotation than almost any argument that has since been employed by conservative economists.