commodities often got together from remote climes.... This distribution
of professions necessarily leads to inequality of conditions.'

So early was the rational answer ready for those socialistic sophisms
which for so many years misled the most generous part of French
intelligence. We may regret perhaps that in demolishing the vision of
perfect social equality, Turgot did not show a more lively sense of the
need for lessening and softening unavoidable inequalities of condition.
However capable these inequalities may be of scientific defence, they
are none the less on that account in need of incessant and strenuous
practical modification; and it is one of the most serious misfortunes of
society, and is unhappily long likely to remain so, that since the
absorbing question of the reformation of the economic conditions of the
social union has come more and more prominently to the front, gradually
but irresistibly thrusting behind both its religious and its political
conditions, zeal for the amelioration of the common lot has in so few
auspicious instances been according to knowledge; while the professors
of science have been more careful to compose narrow apologies for
individual selfishness, than to extend as widely as possible the limits
set by demonstrable principle to the improvement of the common life.

We may notice too in this Letter, what so many of Turgot's allies and
friends were disposed to complain of, but what will commend him to a
less newly emancipated and therefore a less fanatical generation. There
is a conspicuous absence of that peculiar boundlessness of hope, that
zealous impatience for the instant realisation and fruition of all the
inspirations of philosophic intelligence, which carried others
immediately around him so excessively far in the creed of
Perfectibility. 'Liberty! I answer with a sigh, maybe that men are not
worthy of thee! Equality! They would yearn after thee, but cannot
attain!' Compared with the confident exultation and illimitable sense of
the worth of man which distinguished that time, there is something like
depression here, as in many other places in Turgot's writings. It is
usually less articulate, and is rather conveyed by a running undertone,
which so often reveals more of a writer's true mood and temper than is
seen in his words, giving to them, by some unconscious and inscrutable
process, living effects upon the reader's sense like those of eye and
voice and accompanying ges