The year 1766 was a year of exceptional activity in this economist camp. Turgot, as we have seen, was writing an important work, and Mercier de la Riviere another. The other members of the group were busy too, for they had just for the first time secured an organ in the press in the _Journal de l'Agriculture du Commerce et des Finances_, of which their youngest convert, Dupont de Nemours, was made editor in June 1765, and in which Quesnay himself wrote an article almost every month till Dupont's dismissal in November 1766. The Government, moreover, which had thrown Mirabeau into prison for his first book and had suppressed his second only a year or two before, now ceased from troubling, and gave even a certain official countenance to the _Journal de l'Agriculture_, for after the war it no longer shut its eyes to the distress that prevailed, and began to give an ear to remedies. They were making converts too, among others the Abbe Baudeau, who used to write them down in his journal, the _Ephemerides du Citoyen_, but now offered to make it their organ when they lost the _Journal de l'Agriculture_. They were thus in the first flush of their active propaganda, which in a year or two more made political economy, Grimm says, the _science de la mode_ in France, and won converts to the single tax among the crowned heads of Europe. Quesnay too had taken apartments in town in the house of a disciple to be nearer his friends for pushing the propaganda, so that Smith had especially abundant opportunities of seeing him and them that year.