Adam Smith

It is indeed to be wished that the notes on Jurisprudence could have been worked up into an ample study after the manner of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws; but probably all that would have been gained by retirement would have been the publication of his lectures on belles lettres; and it is certain that some of the most instructive additions to the Wealth of Nations could never have been written, had Smith declined the office of Commissioner.

At any rate, a problematical loss to the world was a great gain to Edinburgh. Smith, though personally the most frugal, was also the most hospitable, genial, and charitable of men. Hume’s death, indeed, left a gap that could not be filled. But every city in Europe might still envy Edinburgh her Republic of Letters. Robertson the historian, who formed with Hume and Gibbon what Gibbon proudly called the Triumvirate, and Adam Ferguson, a little jealous at this time of his greater rival, lived outside the town. Black, too, who had taken Hume’s place as Smith’s dearest living friend, had what was in those days a country house, now the Royal Blind Asylum in Nicolson Street. Kames, Hailes, and Monboddo, Sir John Dalrymple and Dugald Stewart, and many other minor celebrities, lived close at hand. Smith seems to have kept something like open house. His Sunday suppers were remembered long after his death, and many distinguished visitors to Edinburgh enjoyed the hospitality of Panmure House.

He loved good conversation. In Glasgow and in London he had belonged to several dining-clubs, and he now helped to found another. Swediaur, a Parisian doctor, wrote from Edinburgh in 1784 to Jeremy Bentham: “we have a club here which consists of nothing but philosophers.” They met every Friday at two o’clock in a Grassmarket tavern, and the Frenchman found it “a most enlightened, agreeable, cheerful, and social company.” Smith, Black, and Hutton, the fathers of the three modern sciences of political economy, modern chemistry, and modern geology, were the illustrious founders of this society. All three, wrote another member, Professor John Playfair, had enlarged views and wide information, “without any of the stateliness which men of letters think it sometimes necessary to affect; ... and as the sincerity of their friendship had never been darkened by the least shade of envy, it would be hard to find an example where everything favourable to good society was more perfectly united, and everything adverse more entirely excluded.” Henry Mackenzie, who wrote the Man of Feeling, and Dugald Stewart were also members.

The club was called the Oyster Club, though Hutton was an abstainer, Black a vegetarian, and Smith’s only extravagant taste was for lump sugar.

“We shall never,” wrote Sir Walter Scott in some recollections of these “old Northern Lights,” which appeared in an early number of the Quarterly Review, “forget one particular evening when he [Smith] put an elderly maiden lady who presided at the tea-table to sore confusion by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walking round and round the circle, stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his uneconomical depredations. His appearance mumping the eternal sugar was something indescribable.” Sir Walter was a schoolfellow of young David Douglas; and the incident no doubt took place in Panmure House, where Miss Douglas would naturally preside at the tea-table.

Scott had a vivid recollection of Black and Hutton. The former used the English pronunciation, and spoke with punctilious accuracy of expression. He wore the formal full-dress habit then imposed on members of the medical faculty. Dr. Hutton’s dress had the simplicity of a Quaker’s, and he used a broad Scotch accent which often heightened his humour. Sir Walter told an amusing anecdote which may, perhaps, explain why the dining society, founded by the three philosophers, was called the Oyster Club. It so chanced that Black and Hutton had held some discourse together upon the folly of abstaining from feeding on the crustaceous creatures of the land, when those of the sea were considered as delicacies. Snails were known to be nutritious and wholesome, even “sanative” in some cases. The epicures of ancient Rome enumerated the snails of Lucca among the richest and rarest delicacies, and the modern Italians still held them in esteem. So a gastronomic experiment was resolved on. The snails were procured, dieted for a time, then stewed.

“A huge dish of snails was placed before them; but philosophers are but men after all; and the stomachs of both doctors began to revolt against the proposed experiment. Nevertheless if they looked with disgust on the snails, they retained their awe for each other; so that each, conceiving the symptoms of internal revolt peculiar to himself, began with infinite exertion to swallow, in very small quantities, the mess which he loathed. Dr. Black at length ‘showed the white feather,’ but in a very delicate manner, as if to sound the opinion of his messmate. ‘Doctor,’ he said in his precise and quiet style, ‘Doctor, do you not think that they taste a little—a very little green?’ ‘D——d green, d——d green indeed!—tak’ them awa’, tak’ them awa’!’ vociferated Dr. Hutton, starting up from table and giving full vent to his feelings.”

One of Smith’s younger friends was John Sinclair, a Scotch laird of much ability and immense industry, whose History of the Public Revenue is still a standard work. It owed much to the Wealth of Nations; for when Smith saw how competent Sinclair was, he helped him in every possible way. In 1777 he dissuaded the young man from printing a pamphlet against the Puritanical observance of the Sabbath, saying, “Your work is very ably written, but I advise you not to publish it; for rest assured that the Sabbath as a political institution is of inestimable value independently of its claim to divine authority.” Late in the following year, when Sinclair brought him the news of Saratoga, and declared that the nation must be ruined, Smith answered coolly, “Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” About the same time he let Sinclair have the use (so long as he did not take it out of Edinburgh) of his own much-prized copy of the Mémoires concernant les Impositions, a contemporary survey of European systems of taxation, which he had obtained “by the particular favour of Mr. Turgot, the late Comptroller-General of the Finances.” In one of his letters to Sinclair he expressed his dislike of “all taxes that may affect the necessary expenses of the poor.”

“They, according to different circumstances, either oppress the people immediately subject to them, or are repaid with great interest by the rich, i.e. by their employers in the advanced wages of their labour. Taxes on the luxuries of the poor, upon their beer and other spirituous liquors, for example, as long as they are so moderate as not to give much temptation to smuggling, I am so far from disapproving, that I look upon them as the best of sumptuary laws.”[43]

Sinclair, who had entered Parliament in 1780, discussed foreign policy with Smith in the autumn of 1782, soon after the surrender at Yorktown, when the fortunes of Great Britain had sunk to their lowest ebb. The American colonies were lost; Ireland was almost in revolt; Gibraltar was besieged by the Spanish and French fleets; and the Northern powers were arrayed in an unfriendly armed neutrality. Sinclair had drafted a tract suggesting that we should seek to draw the Northern powers into an alliance against the House of Bourbon by offering them a share in our colonial monopoly. Again Smith advised his young friend not to go into print. The proposal, he thought, would not find favour with the neutrals, and there seemed to be a moral inconsistency in the argument. “If it be just to emancipate the continent of America from the dominion of every European power, how can it be just to subject the islands to such dominion; and if the monopoly of the trade of the continent be contrary to the rights of mankind, how can that of the islands be agreeable to those rights?”

In the following year peace was concluded with America and France; and the Prime Minister boasted to Morellet that all the treaties of that year were inspired by “the great principle of free trade.”

The necessity for resuming commercial intercourse with the United States raised in an acute form the problem of the colonial monopoly. Should the States be allowed to trade with Canada on the same terms as with Great Britain? William Eden (afterwards Lord Auckland) was afraid of abandoning the differential principle, and in his perplexity wrote to Smith, who replied that if the Americans really meant to subject the goods of all nations to the same import duties, they would “set an example of good sense which all other nations ought to imitate.” He had little anxiety—and his confidence was completely justified by the event—about the loss of the American monopoly. “By an equality of treatment of all nations, we might soon open a commerce with the neighbouring nations of Europe infinitely more advantageous than that of so distant a country as America.” As he hopes to see Eden in a few weeks’ time, he will not write a tedious dissertation, but contents himself with saying that “every extraordinary, either encouragement or discouragement, that is given to the trade of any country, more than to that of another, may, I think, be demonstrated to be in every case a complete piece of dupery, by which the interest of the State and the nation is constantly sacrificed to that of some particular class of traders.” He ends with warm praise of the East India Bill, and of the decisive judgment and resolution with which it had been introduced and triumphantly carried through the House of Commons by Fox.[44]

It is worth while here to note Smith’s steady devotion to Fox and Burke, who represented the Rockingham branch of the Whig party. He was faithful found among innumerable false, for he approved alike of Fox’s resignation in 1782 rather than serve under Shelburne, and of his fatal coalition with Lord North in the following year.[45] It may seem strange to those who think of Adam Smith only as the founder of free trade that he should have been a Foxite, and especially that he should have remained one in the last decade of his life, when commercial questions were uppermost, and when Shelburne first, and then Pitt, set themselves to translate the Wealth of Nations into laws and treaties. But, as we have tried to show, he never allowed economical considerations to weigh in the scale with political liberty; and the clue to his distrust of Shelburne and Pitt is his dislike of the King as a corrupter of politics, and of the Court as a corrupter of morals. Shelburne and Pitt exalting the King and the executive would have depressed the House of Commons. Rockingham, Fox, and Burke sought manfully, and not unsuccessfully, so to maintain and glorify constitutional usages as to check and limit the power of the King. This single consideration was enough to determine the allegiance of a truly republican heart.

Burke, moreover, was in every way a sympathetic figure. His measure of economical reform had docked the resources of patronage, and sensibly relieved the burdens of the taxpayer. And his views about commercial liberty coincided with Smith’s own. About this time a happy chance brought the two friends together. In the autumn of 1783 Burke was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, and early in the following April, during the general election which overwhelmed the Whigs, Burke, having saved his own seat at Malton, paid a visit to Scotland. He stayed a few days in Edinburgh, and then, accompanied by Adam Smith, Lord Maitland,[46] and others, went on to Glasgow to be installed in his new office. On the day of their arrival (Friday, April 9) they supped with that stalwart Whig, John Millar, the Professor of Law. On Sunday, Smith and Maitland took Burke to see Loch Lomond, and made their way back by Carron to Edinburgh, which they reached on the following Wednesday. Next day Burke, with a company of Smith’s Edinburgh friends, dined at Panmure House. On Friday the great orator returned to England extremely pleased by his reception in Scotland, and leaving behind him many friends and admirers. One of these has preserved some particulars of the visit. “Smith, Dugald, and I,” wrote Dalzel, “had more of his company than anybody in this country, and we got a vast deal of political anecdote from him and fine pictures of political characters both dead and living.” Burke advised Lord Maitland, if he had ambition and wanted office, to abandon the Whig party. “Shake us off: give us up.” Smith said cheerfully that “in two years things would come about again.” “Why,” cried Burke, “I have already been in a minority nineteen years, and your two years, Mr. Smith, will make me twenty-one years, and it will surely be high time for me then to be in my majority!”

Before the end of May a dark cloud came over Smith’s life, for his mother passed away in her ninetieth year. Four years later her death was followed by that of his cousin, Miss Douglas. Their loss was irreparable. “They had been the objects of his affection for more than sixty years, and in their society he had enjoyed from his infancy all that he ever knew of the endearments of a family.”[47]

Late in the autumn of 1784 Faujas de Saint-Fond, the geologist, visited Edinburgh after some adventurous discoveries in the Hebrides. During his fortnight’s stay “that venerable philosopher Adam Smith” was one of those whom he visited most frequently. “He received me on every occasion in the kindest manner, and studied to procure for me every kind of information and amusement that the town afforded.” Smith’s library, he says, bore evidence of his tour in France and his stay in Paris. “All our best French authors occupied prominent places on his shelves. He was very fond of our language.”

On one occasion when Saint-Fond was at tea in Panmure House, Smith spoke of Rousseau “with a kind of religious respect,” and compared him with Voltaire. “The latter,” he said, “sought to correct the vices and follies of mankind by laughing at them, and sometimes by treating them with severity; but Rousseau catches his reader in the net of reason by the attraction of sentiment and the force of conviction. His Social Contract may well avenge him one day for all his persecutions.” Smith’s features became very animated when he spoke of Voltaire, “whom he had known and greatly loved.”

One day Adam Smith asked his visitor if he liked music, and said, on hearing that he did: “I am very glad of it; I shall put you to a proof which will be very interesting for me, for I shall take you to hear a sort of music of which it is impossible you can have formed any idea, and I shall be delighted to find how it strikes you.” The annual bagpipe competition was to take place next day, and Smith came to Saint-Fond’s lodgings next morning at nine o’clock, and conducted him to a spacious concert-room full of people; but neither musicians, nor orchestra, nor instruments were to be seen. A large space was reserved in the middle of the room and occupied by gentlemen only, who, said his guide, were Highlanders come to judge of the performances. The prize was for the best executed piece of Highland music, and the same air was to be played successively by all the competitors. After some delay a door opened and a kilted Highlander advanced into the hall:—

“He walked up and down the vacant space with rapid steps and a martial air, blowing his bagpipes. The tune was a kind of sonata divided into three parts. Smith requested me to pay my whole attention to the music, and to explain to him afterwards the impression it made upon me. But I confess that at first I could not distinguish either air or design in the music. I was only struck with a piper marching backward and forward with great rapidity, and still presenting the same warlike countenance. He made incredible efforts with his body and his fingers to bring into play the different reeds of his instrument, which emitted sounds that were to me almost insupportable. He received much applause from all parts of the hall.”

Then came a second piper, who seemed to excel the first, judging from the clapping and cheers. Having heard eight in succession, the Professor began to discover that the first part represented a warlike march, the second a battle, and the last part the wailing over the slain—which drew tears from the eyes of many fair ladies in the audience. The séance ended with a “lively and animated dance, accompanied by suitable airs, though the union of so many bagpipes produced a most hideous noise.” The Frenchman’s verdict was highly unfavourable. He concluded that the pleasure given by the music was due to historical associations. Though he admired the impartiality of the audience and judges, who showed no special favour even to a laird’s son unless he played well, he could not himself admire the artists. “To me they were all equally disagreeable. The music and the instrument alike reminded me of a bear’s dance.”[48]

Burke revisited Glasgow in August 1785. Windham was with him. They stopped on their way in Edinburgh and dined with Smith—Robertson, Henry Erskine, and Dr. Cullen being among the guests. On September 13th, when they returned to Edinburgh, Windham makes this entry in his diary: “After dinner walked to Adam Smith’s. Felt strongly the impression of a family completely Scotch. House magnificent and place fine.” They stayed one more day in Edinburgh, and dined at Panmure House. Burke found time to visit John Logan, the author of the lovely Ode to the Cuckoo. Dr. Carlyle says that Smith was “a great patron” of this persecuted poet; and when Logan was hounded out of the ministry, and went to London to seek a living by his pen, he took a letter of introduction from Smith to Andrew Strahan the publisher, who was about to issue a fourth edition of the Wealth of Nations.[49]

In the following year (1786) Smith was suffering much from ill-health, but his mind and pen were busy. T. Christie, Nichols’s Edinburgh correspondent, informed his friend in August that Dr. Smith was writing “the history of Moral Philosophy.” This may only mean that he was engaged in preparing the enlarged (6th edition) of the Moral Sentiments; for in a letter to the Duke of Rochefoucauld that recently came to light, dated November 1, 1785, he speaks of an edition of the Theory “which I hope to execute before the end of the ensuing winter.” But it may refer to one of two much larger and more ambitious schemes which he goes on to mention in the same letter: “I have likewise two other great works upon the anvil; the one is a sort of philosophical history of all the different branches of literature, of philosophy, poetry, and eloquence; the other is a sort of theory and history of law and government. The materials of both are in a great measure collected, and some part of both is put into tolerable good order. But the indolence of old age, though I struggle violently against it, I feel coming fast upon me, and whether I shall ever be able to finish either is extremely uncertain.” At the same time he was in correspondence with William Eden, whom he was helping to refute Dr. Price’s alarmist theories about the decrease of the population.

In the spring of 1787 he went to London, partly to consult John Hunter, Sir William’s younger brother, partly perhaps from curiosity to see the boy Premier, who was so rapidly and skilfully carrying out his fiscal policy. Pitt had just carried Smith’s favourite project of a commercial treaty with France, and was now engaged in the far more laborious task of simplifying the chaos of customs and excise rates in a gigantic Consolidation Bill. The economist had many conferences with the statesman. It is said that he was much with the ministry; and that the clerks of the public offices had orders to furnish him with all papers, and to employ if necessary additional hands to copy for him. One incident has been preserved that is worth recording. At a dinner given by Dundas, Smith came in late, and the company rose to receive him. He begged them to be seated. “No,” said Pitt, “we will stand till you are seated, for we are all your scholars.” On another occasion, finding himself next to Addington, he exclaimed: “What an extraordinary man Pitt is; he understands my ideas better than I do myself!” He stayed several months in London, and though his disorders did not admit of cure, the physicians operated with success, and pronounced in July that he “might do some time longer.”

At the end of this month Thomas Raikes had a talk with him about the Sunday-school movement, and was much delighted by the old man’s enthusiastic approval: “No plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity since the days of the Apostles.” But towards another philanthropic scheme, for planting fishing-villages along the Highland coast, he displayed, wrote Wilberforce, “a certain characteristic coolness,” observing that “he looked for no other consequence from the scheme than the entire loss of every shilling that should be expended on it, granting, however, with uncommon candour, that the public would be no great sufferer, because he believed the individuals meant to put their hands only in their own pockets.” Mr. Rae, who has traced the scheme down to 1893 when it was finally wound up, shows that the shareholders lost half their original capital of £35,000, and wasted besides £100,000 of taxpayers’ money, which a foolish Government improvidently provided for one of their ill-conceived projects. After all, philanthropy cannot afford to neglect the cool precepts of political economy, nor is moral fervour the worse for a pinch of common sense. In November, having returned to Edinburgh, he heard with “heartfelt joy” the news that he had been elected Rector of his old University, and he was installed in the following month. “No preferment,” he wrote in a graceful letter of thanks, “could have given me so much real satisfaction.”

“No man can own greater obligations to a Society than I do to the University of Glasgow. They educated me, they sent me to Oxford, soon after my return to Scotland they elected me one of their own members, and afterwards preferred me to another office to which the abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson had given a superior degree of illustration. The period of thirteen years which I spent as a member of that Society, I remember as by far the most useful and therefore as by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life; and now, after three-and-twenty years’ absence, to be remembered in so very agreeable a manner by my old friends and protectors gives me a heartfelt joy which I cannot easily express to you.”

A year later, the death of his cousin, Miss Jane Douglas, left him, says Stewart, “alone and helpless,” and though he bore his loss bravely, and regained apparently his former cheerfulness, yet his health and strength gradually declined, until in the summer of 1790 he passed away. A few particulars have been preserved of these last two years by those who enjoyed his friendship and hospitality; but of his correspondence there is only a short letter thanking Gibbon, with whom he had long been on very affectionate terms, for the last three volumes of the Decline and Fall. “I cannot,” he writes, “express to you the pleasure it gives me to find that by the universal consent of every man of taste and learning whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe.”[50] In July 1789, Samuel Rogers, then a young man of twenty-three, came to Edinburgh with an introduction to Adam Smith from Price. On the morning after the storming of the Bastille he called on the economist, and found him breakfasting, with a dish of strawberries before him. Smith said they were a northern fruit, at their best in Orkney and Sweden. The conversation passed to Edinburgh, its high houses, dirt, and overcrowding. Smith spoke slightingly of the old town, and said he would like to remove to George Square. Then he talked of the scenery, soil, and climate of Scotland, and of the corn trade, which led him to denounce Pitt’s Government for refusing to supply France with a quantity of corn so small that it would not have fed Edinburgh for one day.

He invited Rogers to dine with him next day at the Oyster Club; but a tedious laird (brother of the Thibetan traveller) monopolised the conversation. “That Bogle,” said Smith afterwards, apologetically, “I was sorry he talked so much. He spoiled our evening.” Next Sunday Smith took an airing in his sedan chair, while his young friend went to hear Robertson and Blair preach. At nine o’clock, Blair having concluded, Rogers supped at Panmure House, and found the Oyster Club minus Bogle and plus a gentleman from Göttingen. The conversation was personal, and perhaps the only item now worth recalling is Smith’s reason for identifying Junius with “Single Speech Hamilton.” Hamilton once told the Duke of Richmond at Goodwood—the story came to Smith from Gibbon—of “a devilish keen letter” from Junius in that day’s Public Advertiser. But when the Duke got the paper he found not the letter, but an apology for its non-appearance; after this Hamilton was suspected of the authorship, and no more Junius was published. The inference Smith drew was that so long as suspicion pointed to the wrong man the letters continued to appear, and only stopped when the true author was named. Next day Rogers again dined with Smith, and Henry Mackenzie told them stories of second-sight. Hutton came in to tea, and then they went on to a meeting of the Royal Society to hear a paper by Dr. James Anderson on “Debtors and the Revision of the Laws that respect them.” Rogers says it was portentously long and dull. “Mr. Commissioner Smith fell asleep, and Mackenzie touched my elbow and smiled.” Altogether Rogers gives us a very pleasing picture of a serene and bright old age. “He is a very friendly, agreeable man, and I should have dined and supped with him every day if I had accepted all his invitations.” He did not notice any trace of absentmindedness, but thought that, compared with Robertson, Smith was a man of the world.

In the same summer William Adam, a nephew of the architect, conversed with Smith upon Bentham’s letters on usury. The economist is reported to have said that “the Defence of Usury was the work of a very superior man, and that though he had given him some hard knocks, it was done in so handsome a way that he could not complain.”[51] It is quite possible that had Smith lived to see another edition of the Wealth of Nations through the press, he would have responded to Bentham’s invitation by admitting the futility of fixing interest by law. But at this time he was still busy with the sixth edition of the Moral Sentiments, which at last appeared early in the following year. In the preface he referred to the promise he had made in 1759 of a treatise on Jurisprudence. That promise had been partially fulfilled in the Wealth of Nations; but what remained, the theory of Jurisprudence, he had hitherto failed to execute. “Though my very advanced age leaves me,” he acknowledged, “very little expectation of ever being able to execute this great work to my own satisfaction, yet, as I have not altogether abandoned the design, and as I wish still to continue under the obligation of doing what I can, I have allowed the paragraph to remain as it was published more than thirty years ago, when I entertained no doubt of being able to execute everything which it announced.”

These words were probably written late in the year 1789. In February 1790 he told Lord Buchan, “You will never see your old friend any more. I find that the machine is breaking down.” From this time he rapidly wasted away, and in June his friends knew, as well as he did, that there was no hope of recovery. His intellect remained perfectly clear, and he bore his sufferings with the utmost fortitude and resignation.

But he could not be easy about his papers. In 1773, when he consigned their care to Hume, he had instructed him to destroy without examination all his loose manuscript, together with about eighteen thin paper folio books containing his lectures. When he went to London in 1787 he had given similar instructions to Black and Hutton. Now that he had become very weak, and felt that his days were numbered, he spoke again to them on the same subject. They entreated him to make his mind easy, as he might depend upon their fulfilling his desire. He was satisfied for a time. But some days afterwards—this is Hutton’s account—finding his anxiety not entirely removed, he begged one of them to destroy the volumes immediately. This accordingly was done; and his mind was so much relieved that he was able to receive his friends in the evening with his usual cheerfulness. They had been used to sup with him every Sunday, and that evening there was a pretty numerous company of them. The old man not finding himself able to sit up with them as usual, retired to bed before supper; and as he went away took leave of his friends by saying, “I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place.” He died a very few days afterwards, on July the 17th, 1790, and was buried in the Canongate Churchyard, in an obscure spot which must have been overlooked by some of the windows of Panmure House.

In his will he had made his cousin, David Douglas (the youngest son of Colonel Douglas of Strathendry), his heir, with instructions to dispose of his manuscripts in accordance with the advice of Black and Hutton.

A small but choice library of four or five thousand volumes, and a simple table, to which his friends were always welcome without the formality of an invitation, were, says Dugald Stewart, “the only expenses that could be considered his own.” His acts of private generosity, though sedulously concealed, were on a scale “much beyond what might have been expected from his fortune,” and those who knew only of his frugality were surprised to find how small, in comparison with the income he had long enjoyed, was the property he left behind him.

His friends were indignant that the death of so great a thinker made but little stir. They might have been consoled had they been able to look forward twenty years, and read a letter which a German student, Alexander von der Marwitz, wrote to a friend on reading the Wealth of Nations. It was on the eve of Jena, and the form of Napoleon stood out a gigantic menace to all that the young patriot held dear. Yet he did not hesitate to compare the victorious author with the conqueror of Europe. “Next to Napoleon he is now the mightiest monarch in Europe.”

In the emancipation of thought and dispersion of knowledge which mark the century that divides the English from the French Revolution, Adam Smith takes his place in the order of time after Locke, Montesquieu, Newton, and Voltaire, with Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Turgot, and Burke. With all of them he agreed in abhorring religious intolerance; with each of them he had some special affinity. Like the first and the last, he had a truly English reverence for law and order. A Newtonian in his patient and tranquil research for the hidden secrets of Nature, he had Voltaire’s love of Justice, while he resembled Rousseau, the only democrat of the French school, in a new sentiment for popular government, and in what may be called either the Social or Republican instinct. He vied with Diderot in an universal curiosity and an encyclopædic grasp of all the sciences, but surpassed him in originality and creative power. He combined in an extraordinary degree the faculties of observation, meditation, and abstraction. His achievements are not accidents. If the architect’s plans are compared with history, they will be found to have been executed in large part by the builders of the nineteenth century. Of the great Frenchmen who synchronised with him and moved along parallel lines of thought, it cannot be said that any one, or that all together, destroyed the Church or the government, or even the social system of France. It may even be questioned whether they swayed the fortunes of France with an influence so potent as Smith’s sceptre has wielded over the destinies of Europe. The criticisms of Voltaire had mighty consequences, no doubt, but those consequences were not deliberately planned, or even descried. Hume’s scepticism went far deeper than Voltaire’s, tore up by the roots whole systems of debased philosophy, and roused Kant from his dogmatic slumbers. But Hume and Voltaire had little to sow on the land they ploughed and harrowed. In all their anxiety to humble and ridicule religion, they would retain the Church as a useful instrument of the State. In all their appeals to public opinion, they never thought of resting government on a broad basis of popular right. Their view of society was conventional; they were rather satirists than reformers. It has been a commonplace of criticism to compare Adam Smith with Locke. He is supposed to have done for a particular branch of politics what Locke did for the whole science. But Locke’s main achievement, after all, was to find philosophic sanction for a revolution accomplished by others, and to establish in the minds of the Whig aristocracy an unlimited respect for a limited constitution. Smith was the single-handed contriver and sole author of a revolution in thought which has modified the governing policy and prodigiously increased the welfare of the whole civilised world.

Of his contemporaries, the nearest perhaps in spirit are Turgot and the younger Burke, the Burke of the American Revolution and of Free Trade and Economical Reform. But Burke and even Turgot were in a certain sense men of the past. Though their radiance can never fade, their influence wanes. But Smith has issued from the seclusion of a professorship of morals, from the drudgery of a commissionership of customs, to sit in the council-chamber of princes. His word has rung through the study to the platform. It has been proclaimed by the agitator, conned by the statesman, and printed in a thousand statutes.

FOOTNOTES