dealing with the same subject under the same general influences and tendencies of the time, may think nearly alike even without any manner of personal intercommunication, and the idea of natural liberty of trade, in which the main resemblance between the writers in the present case is supposed to occur, was already in the ground, and sprouting up here and there before either of them wrote at all.  Smith’s position on that subject, moreover, is so much more solid, balanced, and moderate than Turgot’s, that it is different in positive character; the extremer form of the doctrine taught by Turgot appears to have been taught also by Smith in earlier years and abandoned.  At least the fragment published by Stewart of Smith’s Society paper of 1755—­eleven years before Turgot wrote his book or saw Smith—­proclaims individualism of the extremer form, and intimates that he had taught the same views in Edinburgh in 1750.  Smith had thus been teaching free trade many years before he met Turgot, and teaching it in Turgot’s own form; he had converted many of the merchants of Glasgow to it and a future Prime Minister of England; he had probably, moreover, thought out the main truths of the work he was even then busy upon.  He was therefore in a position to meet Turgot on equal terms, and give full value for anything he might take, and if obligations must needs be assessed and the balance adjusted, who shall say whether Smith owes most to the conversation of Turgot or Turgot owes most to the conversation of Smith?  The state of the exchange cannot be determined from mere priority of publication; no other means of determining it exist, and it is of no great moment to determine it at all.

Turgot and Smith are said—­on authority which cannot be altogether disregarded, Condorcet, the biographer of Turgot—­to have continued their economic discussions by correspondence after Smith returned to this country; but though every search has been made for this correspondence, as Dugald Stewart informs us, no trace of anything of the kind was ever discovered on either side of the Channel, and Smith’s friends never heard him allude to such a thing.  “It is scarcely to be supposed,” says Stewart, “that Mr. Smith would destroy the letters of such a correspondent as M. Turgot, and still less probable that such an intercourse was carried on between them without the knowledge of Mr. Smith’s friends.  From some inquiries that have been made at Paris by a gentleman of this society[165] since Smith’s death, I have reason to believe that no evidence of the correspondence exists among the papers of M. Turgot, and that the whole story has taken its rise from a report suggested by the knowledge of their former intimacy."[166] Some of Hume’s letters to Turgot—­one from this year 1766, combating among other things Turgot’s principle of the single tax on the net product of the land—­still exist among the Turgot family archives, but none from Smith, for Leon Say examined those archives a few years ago with this purpose among others expressly in view.