Smith owed much to the Physiocrats, but he had little personal acquaintance with them beyond that afforded by his brief stay in Paris in 1765. Slight as the intimacy was, however, there is no doubt about the influence they had upon him. It is also very improbable that he had read all their works: Turgot’s _Réflexions_, for example, written in 1766, but only published in 1769-70, was probably not known to him. But frequent personal converse with both Turgot and Quesnay had helped him in acquiring precise first-hand knowledge of their views. We can easily guess which ideas would attract him most. On one point at least he had no need to be enlightened, for in the matter of economic liberalism he had long been known as a doughty champion. But the ardent faith of the Physiocrats must have strengthened his own belief very considerably. On the other hand, it appears that he borrowed from the Physiocrats the important idea concerning the distribution of the annual revenue between the various classes in the nation. In his lectures at Glasgow he scarcely mentions anything except production, but in the _Wealth of Nations_ an important place is given to distribution. The difference can hardly be explained except upon the hypothesis of Smith’s growing acquaintance with the _Tableau économique_ and the theory of the “net product.” But admitting that he borrowed what was most characteristic and most suggestive in their teaching, his treatment of its many complicated aspects is altogether superior to theirs. The Physiocrats were so impressed by the importance of agriculture that they utterly failed to see the problem in its true perspective. They scanned the field through a crevice, and their vision was consequently narrow and limited. Smith, on the other hand, took the whole field of economic activity as his province, and surveyed the ground from an eminence where the view was clearest and most extensive. The economic world he regarded as a vast workshop created by division of labour, one universal psychological principle—the desire of everyone to better his lot—supplying unity to its diverse phenomena. Political economy was at last to be based, not on the interests of a particular class, whether manufacturing or agricultural, but upon a consideration of the general interest of the whole community. Such are the directing principles that inspire the whole work, the guiding lines amidst what had hitherto seemed a mere chaos of economic facts. Contemporaries never counted upon the difficulties which the new science was bound to encounter, so great was their enthusiasm at having a fixed standpoint from which for the first time the complex interests of agriculture, industry, and commerce might be impartially surveyed. With Smith the study emerged from the “system” stage and became a science. Our examination of Smith’s views will be grouped around three points: (I) Division of labour.