Twenty-three years afterwards there is an entry in the diary of Samuel Rogers: “Adam Smith said Turgot was an honest, well-meaning man, but unacquainted with the world and human nature; that it was his maxim (he mentioned it to Hume, but never to Smith) that whatever is right may be done.” This is certainly not Adam Smith’s whole mind about Turgot, for whom he entertained a lively admiration. But undoubtedly he considered that his own obligations to the French School of Political Economy began and ended with Quesnai, and we know that he intended at one time to dedicate his book to the author of the _Economic Table_. Turgot, Morellet, Rivière, and the rest were interpreters of Quesnai—disciples, not masters. Quesnai was the inventor of a new system, the founder of a sect, and the wielder of whatever influence that sect exerted on the _Wealth of Nations_. Smith’s intercourse with Quesnai and the physiocrats, as well as a careful study of their writings, accounts for some important developments of theory which distinguish his book from his lectures, and particularly the attention he there pays to the problem of distribution, as well as a distinct though moderated bias towards agriculture as the most productive of pursuits. He was not a physiocrat. Indeed his criticism of the distinctive doctrine of the school, that all wealth comes from the soil, was felt to be convincing and final. But he went a long way with them, and some of his most important practical conclusions coincided with theirs. No reader of the ninth chapter of Smith’s fourth book could doubt that Smith knew Quesnai as well as Quesnai’s _Table_, which had been published in 1758 and was regarded with an almost superstitious veneration by the whole sect. If the doubt existed, it would be dispelled by a curious piece of evidence. Of the half-dozen letters he wrote from France that have been preserved, the longest, dated Compiègne, August 26, 1766, is to Charles Townshend, and describes some anxious moments in which he had called in the aid of the king’s physician. The Duke of Buccleuch had been to Compiègne to see the camp and to hunt with the King and the Court, and after hunting had eaten too heartily of a cold supper with a vast quantity of salad and some cold punch. Sickness and fever followed. The faithful tutor begged him to send for a doctor:—