Adam Smith

we can easily see that tu refers to recubans, and patulae to fagi, though the related words are separated from one another by the intervention of several others. But if we translate the line literally into English, Tityrus, thou of spreading reclining under the shade beech, Œdipus himself could not make sense of it, because there is no difference in termination to assist us in tracking out the meaning. In the same way Milton’s exquisite translation of Horace, “Who now enjoys thee, credulous all gold,” etc., can only be interpreted by aid of the original. We may dissent when he goes on to denounce “the prolixness, constraint, and monotony of modern languages.” Yet it would be as unfair to estimate the scientific value of these speculations by the accumulated achievements of modern philologists, as to sneer at his essay on the Imitative Arts or at Burke’s treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, because Lessing has helped inferior men to see so much further.

CHAPTER V
IN THE GLASGOW CHAIR—THE LECTURES ON JUSTICE AND POLICE

The finding of Adam Smith’s lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms, 133 years at least after their last delivery and 105 years after the author had had his own folio notes of them destroyed, is not only one of the curiosities of literature, it is also the most important aid that has been afforded to the study of Smith’s economic, social, and juristic ideas since the appearance in 1793 of Dugald Stewart’s biographical sketch. From 1793 to 1896, hundreds of German students big with their epoch-making theses “über Smiths Entwicklung,” scores of Frenchmen eager to prove the superiority of Quesnai and Turgot, and perhaps half a dozen English critics had whetted their ingenuity on a brief account of the Glasgow lectures which was supplied to Dugald Stewart by Adam Smith’s old pupil and friend, John Millar. According to Millar, Smith’s course, while he occupied the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, fell into four parts, the first two of which consisted, as we have seen, of Natural Theology and Ethics. In the third part he treated at more length of that branch of morality which relates to justice. Here he followed the plan suggested by Montesquieu, “endeavouring to trace the gradual progress of jurisprudence, both public and private, from the rudest to the most refined ages.” This important branch of his labours he also intended to give to the public, but he did not live to fulfil his intention.

In the last part of his lectures he examined those political regulations which are founded not upon justice, but expediency, and considered the political institutions relating to commerce, to finance, to ecclesiastical and military establishments. “What he delivered on these subjects contained the substance of the work he afterwards published under the title of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”

This was all that the world knew of Adam Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence and political economy, save that at the end of his Theory of Moral Sentiments he promised “another discourse” dealing with the general principles of law and government, and with the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society, “not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else in the subject of law.” On the first section of his lectures Adam Smith never even promised a book. He had no ambition to bring the kirk about his ears. The second section took shape, as we have seen, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, after the publication of which in 1759 the plan of the lectures underwent a change, the ethical part being compressed and the economical part extended. The Wealth of Nations covers the subject of police, revenue, and arms, and so executes the promise in part. “What remains,” he wrote in 1790, “the theory of Jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been hindered from executing.” In the lectures now discovered and published we have therefore a first draft of the Wealth of Nations and also a first draft of the projected work on Justice, or Jurisprudence, “a sort of theory and history of law and government,” as he called it in a letter of 1785.

How, then, comes it to pass that we possess these legal and economic lectures just as Smith delivered them to his class at Glasgow, in spite of Dugald Stewart’s express statement that no part of them had been preserved “excepting what he himself published in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and in The Wealth of Nations”?

When Smith left Glasgow in 1764 his fame stood high, and probably there were many note-books containing his lectures floating about in the college. A good manuscript of useful lectures would pass from one student to another and might from time to time be found on a bookstall. In the session of 1762-3, or possibly of the previous year, an intelligent and attentive student took down Smith’s lectures with unusual accuracy. At least one copy was taken of it after Smith had left the University; for the manuscript so happily preserved is dated 1766, is clear, well written, and free from abbreviations, while some of the mistakes are evidently misreadings and not mishearings. That this fair copy was not made by the student who took the original notes is further shown, says the editor, “by the fact that, though the original note-taker must have been able and intelligent, the transcription is evidently the work of a person who often did not understand what he was writing.”

The manuscript consists of 192 leaves octavo size, bound in calf, with the signature of “J. A. Maconochie, 1811,” on the front cover. This Maconochie, or perhaps his father Allan, the first Lord Meadowbank, who was appointed professor of Public Law at Edinburgh in 1779, must have picked up the book, and it has remained in the possession of the family ever since. In 1876 Mr. Charles C. Maconochie rescued it from a garret-room, and in 1895 happened to mention it to Mr. Edwin Cannan, who thereupon undertook the task of editing it for the press—a task which he has performed to perfection. One result of this lucky discovery is to dispose of the legend that Adam Smith was little more than a borrower from the French school, a mere reflector of the Reflexions of Turgot. By examining the lectures we shall inform ourselves in the political wisdom which Adam Smith used to teach his fortunate class at Glasgow long years before he met Quesnai or Turgot, and longer still before the Reflexions began to appear in the Éphémérides du Citoyen.

“Jurisprudence” was the title Adam Smith gave to this course of lectures, and he divided it under four heads: Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms, taken in the order named. Natural Jurisprudence, he begins, is the science that inquires into the general principles which ought to be the foundation of the laws of all nations. It is, he says elsewhere in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, “of all sciences by far the most important, but hitherto perhaps the least cultivated.” Grotius’s treatise on the Laws of War and Peace—“a sort of casuistical book for sovereigns and states”—was still, he thought, the most complete work on this subject. After Grotius came Hobbes, who, from an utter abhorrence of ecclesiasticism and bigotry, sought to establish a system of morals by which men’s consciences might be subjected to the civil power. Then after a few words on Puffendorf and Cocceii, Adam Smith explained his own classification as follows:—

“Jurisprudence is the theory of the general principles of law and government. The four great objects of law are justice, police, revenue, and arms.

“The object of justice is the security from injury, and it is the foundation of civil government.

“The objects of police are the cheapness of commodities, public security and cleanliness, if the two last were not too minute for a lecture of this kind. Under this head we will consider the opulence of a state.

“For defraying the expenses of government, some fund must be raised. Hence the origin of revenue.... In general, whatever revenue can be raised most insensibly from the people ought to be preferred; and in the sequel it is proposed to be shown, how far the laws of Britain and of other European nations are calculated for this purpose.

“As the best police cannot give security unless the government can defend themselves from foreign attacks, the fourth thing appointed by law is for this purpose; and under this head will be shown the different species of arms, the constitution of standing armies, militias, etc.

“After these will be considered the laws of nations.”

Having thus divided his whole course, Adam Smith proceeded further in an introductory lecture to subdivide his first part, Justice. The end of justice is to secure from injury; and a man may be injured as a member of a state, as a private individual (in his body, reputation, or property), or as a member of a family. Adam Smith therefore treats of justice under the three heads of Public Jurisprudence, Domestic Law, and Private Law. Many of his juristic ideas are evidently derived from Grotius, Locke, Montesquieu, Hutcheson, and Hume; but the effect produced is that of a powerful and original thinker in close touch with the best minds of his day, who draws his illustrations freely and easily alike from ancient and modern history. He finds that men were induced to enter civil society by two principles, authority and utility, that is to say, by the instinct of obedience and the instinct of self-preservation.

“In a monarchy the principle of authority prevails, and in a democracy that of utility. In Britain, which is a mixed government, the factions formed some time ago, under the names of Whig and Tory, were influenced by these principles; the former submitted to government on account of its utility and the advantages they derived from it, while the latter pretended that it was of divine institution, and to offend against it was equally criminal, as for a child to rebel against its parent. Men in general follow these principles according to their natural dispositions. In a man of a bold, daring, and bustling turn the principle of utility is predominant, and a peaceable, easy turn of mind usually is pleased with a tame submission to superiority.”

In the same chair Hutcheson had taught that society is founded on an original contract. Adam Smith discards the theory for various reasons:—

“In the first place, the doctrine of an original contract is peculiar to Great Britain, yet government takes place where it was never thought of, which is even the case with the greater part of people in this country. Ask a common porter or day-labourer why he obeys the civil magistrate, he will tell you that it is right to do so, that he sees others do it, that he would be punished if he refused to do it, or perhaps it is a sin against God not to do it. But you never hear him mention a contract as the foundation of his obedience.”

Smith was as fond as his master Aristotle of testing fine-spun theories by the coarse wear of daily life. He loved to march an army of common-folk through the cobwebs of political philosophy. A second objection was that, although a government may be entrusted to certain persons on certain conditions, the contract cannot bind their posterity. “It may indeed be said that by remaining in the country you tacitly consent to the contract, and are bound by it. But how can you avoid staying in it? You were not consulted whether you should be born in it or not. And how can you get out of it? Most people know no other language nor country, are poor, and obliged to stay not far from the place where they were born, to labour for a subsistence. They cannot therefore be said to give any consent to a contract, though they may have the strongest sense of obedience.”

In a remarkable book on English Government (1803), John Millar expresses his indebtedness to the “ingenious and profound author of the Wealth of Nations.” “I am happy,” he says, “to acknowledge the obligations I feel myself under to this illustrious philosopher by having at an early period of life had the benefit of hearing his lectures on the History of Civil Society, and of enjoying his unreserved conversation on the same subject.”[15] And this indeed was the spacious topic which occupied most of the course on public jurisprudence. Nations of hunters and fishers, he began, had properly no government at all. They lived according to the laws of nature. Then he came to the patriarchs of the Old Testament and of the Homeric age, and compared the growth of republican government in Greece, Rome, and modern Italy. How liberty was lost is the next theme. The students were reminded of Cæsar and Cromwell, of the contrast between Western and Oriental despotisms, of the improvements in law which have often been introduced by military conquerors. They were then led to see by the history of the fall of the Roman Empire how “military monarchy came to share that fated dissolution that awaits every state and constitution.” After describing the fall of the Roman Empire, Smith gave an account of the origin of the modern governments of Europe.

Smith had Burke’s “salutary prejudice.” Despite a private partiality for republican institutions, he saw, like Montesquieu, in our constitution “a happy mixture of all the different forms of government properly restrained, and a perfect security to liberty and property.” The Commons in a great measure manage all public affairs, as no money-bill can take its rise except in that House. The judges are quite independent of the king. The Habeas Corpus Act and the methods of election are further securities of liberty. Lastly, “the law of England, always the friend of liberty, deserves praise in no instance more than in the careful provision of impartial juries.”

The first division of Justice concludes with an excellent description of the struggle between the English nation and King James II., who “on account of his encroachments on the body politic was with all justice and equity in the world opposed and rejected.”

In the second division of Justice, called Domestic Law, he examined the legal relations that had subsisted at different times and in different countries between husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, guardian and ward. The treatment is concise without being dry. Philosophy corrects curiosity; humanity peeps through law, and humour spices humanity. We come upon his favourite proposition that “love, which was formerly a ridiculous passion,” has become “grave and respectable,” the proof being that love now influences all public entertainments, whereas no ancient tragedy turned upon it. He counters Montesquieu’s statement that at Bantam, in the East Indies, there are ten women born for one man, by a broad doctrine: If the laws of nature are the same everywhere, the laws of gravity and attraction the same; why not the laws of generation? He reminds his class that slavery is still “almost universal”; for a small part of Western Europe is “the only portion of the globe that is free from it.” Upon the evils of slavery he spoke as strongly as he wrote before in the Theory of Moral Sentiments or afterwards in the Wealth of Nations (Book I. chap. viii.). It is almost needless, he says, to prove that slavery is a bad institution. “A free man keeps as his own whatever is above his rent, and therefore has a motive to industry. Our colonies would be much better cultivated by free men.” That slavery is a disadvantage appears, he adds, from the state of colliers and salters in Scotland. These poor wretches indeed, whom he must have seen daily in Kirkcaldy (where Pennant noticed them with indignation thirty years afterwards), had some privileges which slaves had not. Their property after maintenance was their own, and they could only be sold with their work. They were allowed to marry and to choose their religion, and their wages were half a crown a day, as compared with the sixpence or eightpence earned by the ordinary day-labourers in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless “colliers often leave our coal-works” and run away to Newcastle, preferring liberty on tenpence or a shilling a day to slavery on half a crown.

The third division (nearly fifty pages in all), on Private Law, summarises the Roman law of property, and compares the usages of Scotland and England. Smith had evidently consulted many law reports and statutes as well as some of the standard authorities in both kingdoms, such as Lord Kames’s Law Tracts, Dalrymple’s Feudal Property, Bacon’s New Abridgment of the Law, and Hawkins’s Pleas of the Crown. Smith was wonderfully free from legal obsessions. He condemned the excessive punishments of his time, and explained that they were founded not upon regard to public utility, but upon the spectator’s resentment against the offender and his sympathy with the injured party. The English laws of real property he regarded as unnatural and mischievous. He had mastered the theory of entail without being fascinated by it. “Upon the whole, nothing can be more absurd than perpetual entails. Piety to the dead can only take place when their memory is fresh in the minds of men; a power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity; such extension of property is quite unnatural.”

A similar but less pithy condemnation appears in the Wealth of Nations, and was one of the passages which led Cobden to declare shortly before his death that if he were a young man he would take Adam Smith in hand, and preach free trade in land as he had formerly preached free trade in corn.

Having considered “man as a member of a state, as a member of a family, and as a man,” Smith turned to Police, which is “the second general division of Jurisprudence.” At that time the word “police” was only half-way on its voyage from Greece. It “properly signified the policy of civil government, but now it only means the regulation of the inferior parts of government, viz. cleanliness, security, and cheapness or plenty.” “Cleanliness,” ninety years before the first Public Health Act, was only “the proper method of carrying dirt from the street,” while the term “security” exactly corresponded with police in the modern sense, being defined by Adam Smith as “the execution of justice, so far as it regards regulations for preventing crimes or the method of keeping a city guard.”

But cleanliness and security, “though useful,” were “too mean to be considered in a general discourse” of the kind which Adam Smith was delivering. Accordingly, after briefly comparing the amount of crime then prevalent in Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow—a comparison favourable to Glasgow and London—and inferring that the establishment of commerce and manufactures is the best police for preventing crimes, he passes to the consideration of cheapness or plenty—“or, which is the same thing, the most proper way of procuring wealth and abundance.” Then follows in a hundred pages what Mr. Cannan has well called a rough draft of the Wealth of Nations, containing (with some noteworthy exceptions) the main arguments and many of the illustrations which appeared a dozen or more years later in the book. By the student who would trace the growth of an idea and the history of a theory the value of the report can hardly be exaggerated. In Mr. Cannan’s words, “it enables us to follow the gradual construction of the work from its very foundation, and to distinguish positively between what the original genius of its author created out of British materials on the one hand, and French materials on the other.”

When we consider that this course of political economy was necessarily brief, and could not possibly contain all the arguments and illustrations he had already hammered out in the great workshop of his mind, we are inclined to wonder not that the lectures, when compared with the full body of doctrine, show many gaps, but rather that they correspond so closely with the final treatise evolved after twelve or fourteen years more of meditation, study, and travel. When we reach the crowning year of Adam Smith’s life with its laureate wreath we shall have something to say upon later accretions, such as his colonial policy, his view of expenditure, and that intensely practical theory of taxation which taught so many wholesome lessons to contemporary and succeeding statesmen. Oddly enough, the lecturer began by supplying the very thing his critics have missed in the Wealth of Nations—a theory of consumption. He had therefore, if we combine the lectures with the treatise, mapped out in his mind the entire scope of economic science in its natural order. First there is the demand that leads to productive labour, the desire which is satisfied by and therefore induces toil. Then comes his central theme, the division of labour and the subsidiary topic of its distribution (almost ignored in the lectures), with an appendix on revenue or taxation.

Looking now only at the lectures, we find that of the hundred pages into which this first discourse on the Wealth of Nations falls, eighty, or four-fifths, are concerned with “cheapness or plenty,” in other words, with “the most proper way of procuring wealth or abundance.” Cheapness is synonymous with plenty, as dearness is synonymous with dearth. Water is only cheap because it is plentiful, diamonds are costly only because they are scarce. If we wish to find wherein opulence consists, we must first consider what are the natural wants of mankind which are to be supplied; “and if we differ from common opinions, we shall at least give the reasons for our nonconformity.” So he sets about his task with a theory of consumption simple, intelligible, and adequate. Food, clothes, and lodgings are the threefold necessities of animal life. But most animals find these wants sufficiently provided by nature. Man alone has so delicate a constitution that no object is produced to his liking. So he improves his food by cookery, and protects himself by fire, clothes, and huts from the inclemency of the weather.

But as man’s physical delicacy requires much more provision than that of any other animal, so does the same, or rather the much greater, delicacy of his mind. Such is the nicety of his taste, that the very colour of an object hurts or pleases. He is tired by uniformity, and loves variety and change. The Indians gladly barter gems for the cheap toys of Europe. Thus besides the threefold necessities of life a multitude of wants and demands spring up to which agriculture, manufactures, arts, commerce, and navigation are subservient; while the establishment of law and government, “the highest effort of human prudence and wisdom,” enables the different arts to flourish in peace and security.

Thus Smith arrives at the point from which the Wealth of Nations was to start. In an uncivilised nation, where labour is undivided, the natural wants of mankind are provided for. But as civilisation advances with the division of labour, the provision becomes more liberal, so that “a common day-labourer in Britain has more luxury in his way of living than an Indian sovereign.” The labourer’s comfort, indeed, is nothing to that of the noble. Yet a European prince does not so far exceed a commoner as the latter does the chief of a savage nation. “In a savage nation,” he added, with a prophetic glance at Marx, “every one enjoys the whole fruit of his own labour.” It is therefore the Division of Labour that increases the opulence of a country. This is the kernel of political economy, the inner keep round which this great architect of a new science has built a fortress strong enough to protect society and to preserve the fruit of men’s toil from the well-meaning unwisdom of their governments. Not that Smith was insensible to the hardness of economic laws, to the cruel inequalities of industry:—

“In a civilised society,” he reminds his class, “though there is a division of labour, there is no equal division, for there are a good many who work none at all. The division of opulence is not according to the work. The opulence of the merchant is greater than that of all his clerks, though he works less; and they again have six times more than an equal number of artisans who are more employed. The artisan who works at his ease within-doors has far more than the poor labourer who trudges up and down without intermission. Thus, he who, as it were, bears the burden of society, has the fewest advantages.”

Division of labour multiplies the product of labour and so creates opulence. He takes a pin manufactory as an illustration. If one man made all the parts of a pin it would take him a year, and the pin would cost at least six pounds. By dividing the process of manufacture into eighteen operations, each man employed can make 2000 pins a day. When labour is thus divided, a much larger surplus is left over and above the labourer’s maintenance, and of this surplus the labourer will get a share. “The commodity becomes far cheaper and the labour dearer.” The less the labour that can procure abundance, the greater the opulence of society. But coin is not a safe criterion of wages. Twopence in China will buy more than five shillings in the sugar colonies. By dividing labour you increase dexterity. A boy nailmaker will easily make 2000 good nails while a country smith unaccustomed to the job is making 400 bad ones. You also save time; for time is always lost in going from one kind of work to another. “When a person has been reading, he must rest a little while before he begin to write”; and a country weaver with a small farm will saunter as he goes from the loom to the plough. By fixing each man to an operation the product is sure to be increased. Again, the quantity of work done is much augmented by the invention of machinery. Two men and three horses can do more with a plough than twenty men with spades. The miller and his servant will do more with the water-mill than a dozen men with the hand-mill. Horse-power and water-power had been brought to the assistance of man by philosophic invention; and even fire had been called in to aid him by the mechanical and chemical discoverers. The lecturer was doubtless thinking of his colleague Joseph Black, and of James Watt, who was at this time working within the precincts of Glasgow College, and was just developing what Smith calls “the philosopher’s invention of the fire machine.”

Smith puts forward a queer idea—and he stood to it in the Wealth of Nations—that what gives occasion to the division of labour is not a perception of the advantage to be gained thereby, but a direct propensity in human nature for one man to barter with another. This love of barter is one of those natural instincts which distinguish us from animals. The division of labour and the material wealth of society are greatly perfected by improvements of communication which extend markets; for division of labour must always be proportioned to extent of commerce. “If ten people only want a certain commodity, the manufacture of it will never be so divided as if a thousand wanted it.” But where communications are bad the cost of transit hinders the distribution of goods. If roads are “deep” or infested with robbers, the progress of commerce is stopped. “Since the mending of roads in England forty or fifty years ago, its opulence has increased extremely.” Water carriage also effectively promotes public opulence; for five or six men will convey three hundred tons by water more quickly than a hundred men with a hundred wagons and six hundred horses can take the same weight by land.[16]

A distinction is drawn between the natural and market price of commodities. A man has the natural price of his labour when he has enough to maintain him during its continuance, to defray the cost of his education, and to compensate the risk of failure or of premature death. When a man can get this natural price he will have sufficient encouragement and will produce in proportion to the demand. The market is regulated by the momentary demand for a thing, by its abundance or scarcity. When a thing is very scarce the price depends upon the fortune of the bidders. “As in an auction, if two persons have an equal fondness for a book, he whose fortune is the largest will carry it.” The conclusion drawn from these and other arguments is that whatever “police” (i.e. policy) tends to raise the market price above the natural, tends also to diminish public opulence. The cheaper the conveniences of life, the greater is the purchasing power of the poor and the happier will a society be. Any policy which raises and keeps the market price of goods above their natural price, and so raises the national, as it were, above the international price, diminishes the nation’s opulence. This impoverishing policy took various forms, which admitted of a triple classification:—

1. Taxes on industry and necessities.

2. Monopolies.

3. Exclusive privileges of corporations, and combinations, like those of bakers and brewers, which kept the price of bread and beer above the natural level.

Further, as taxes or regulations which raise the market price above the natural price diminish public opulence, so do bounties like those upon corn and coarse linen, which depress the market price below the natural price. A bounty stimulates the production of a particular commodity, and makes it cheaper for foreigners at the expense of the public at home. Another serious objection to the system is that people are diverted from other employments, and thus “what may be called the natural balance of industry” is disturbed. “Upon the whole, therefore, it is by far the best police to leave things to their natural course and allow no bounties nor impose taxes on commodities.”

In a subsequent lecture he arrived at the same conclusion by an analysis of the true nature of money. At that time money was almost universally identified with wealth. Though Hume had exposed the fallacy ten years before, his essay had not affected national policy.[17] Treaties of commerce were always based upon the theory of the balance of trade, which again rested on the notion that if a country’s exports could be made to exceed its imports, it would receive the balance in gold and so become wealthy. By way of refuting this strange dogma of the mercantilists, Smith used a very felicitous illustration. He compared money to the highroads of a country “which bear neither corn nor grass themselves but circulate all the corn and grass in the country.” If we could save some of the ground taken up by highways without diminishing the facilities of carriage and communication, we should add to the wealth of the country; and the case would be the same if by such a device as paper-money we could reduce the stock of coin required without impairing its efficiency as a medium of exchange. For the ground saved could be cultivated, and the money saved could be sent abroad in exchange for useful commodities. Thus the nation would be enriched; for its opulence “does not consist in the quantity of coin, but in the abundance of commodities which are necessary for life.”

In deference to the mercantilists the government had prohibited the exportation of coin, “which prohibition has been extremely hurtful to the commerce of the country,” for every unnecessary accumulation of money is a dead stock. The same idea that wealth consists in money had also led to fiscal discrimination against France and in favour of Spain and Portugal. Why was this policy absurd? The reason, said Smith, will appear on the least reflection, and he thereupon put to the students in a few telling sentences those elementary truths about the nature of foreign trade which seem too simple even to have been discovered, yet are still sometimes but imperfectly applied by the most enlightened statesmen, and have not always been apprehended by trained economists:—

“All commerce that is carried on betwixt any two countries must necessarily be advantageous to both. The very intention of commerce is to exchange your own commodities for others which you think will be more convenient for you. When two men trade between themselves it is undoubtedly for the advantage of both. The one has perhaps more of one species of commodities than he has occasion for, he therefore exchanges a certain quantity of it with the other, for another commodity that will be more useful to him. The other agrees to the bargain on the same account, and in this manner the mutual commerce is advantageous to both. The case is exactly the same betwixt any two nations. The goods which the English merchants want to import from France are certainly more valuable to them than what they give for them. Our very desire to purchase them shows that we have more use for them than either the money or the commodities which we give for them. It may be said, indeed, that money lasts for ever, but that claret and cambrics are soon consumed. This is true. But what is the intention of industry if it be not to produce those things which are capable of being used, and are conducive to the convenience and comfort of human life?”

In short, imports are just as advantageous as exports, and one is the necessary complement of the other. All jealousies and wars between nations are extremely bad for commerce. If preferential trade is to be established at all, it should be with France, a much richer and more populous country than Spain, and also our nearest neighbour. “It were happy both for this country and France that all national prejudices were rooted out and a free and uninterrupted commerce established.” Foreign trade, if wisely and prudently carried on, can never impoverish a country.

“The poverty of a nation proceeds from much the same causes with those which render an individual poor. When a man consumes more than he gains by his industry, he must impoverish himself unless he has some other way of subsistence. In the same manner, if a nation consume more than it produces, poverty is inevitable; if its annual produce be ninety millions and its annual consumption an hundred, then it spends, eats and drinks, tears, wears, ten millions more than it produces, and its stock of opulence must gradually go to nothing.”

He proceeds to uproot that hardy perennial of fiscal culture—the opinion that no expenditure at home can be injurious to public opulence. Let us suppose, he says, that my father leaves me a thousand pounds’ worth of the necessaries and conveniences of life. “I get a number of idle folks around me, and eat, drink, tear and wear till the whole is consumed. By this I not only reduce myself to want, but certainly rob the public stock of a thousand pounds, as it is spent and nothing produced for it.” In the same way money spent on war is wasted wherever the war is waged and wherever the money employed in preparations is laid out. Finally, he sums up for free imports in language that could not be strengthened:—

“From the above considerations it appears that Britain should by all means be made a free port, that there should be no interruptions of any kind made to foreign trade, that if it were possible to defray the expenses of government by any other method, all duties, customs, and excise should be abolished, and that free commerce and liberty of exchange should be allowed with all nations, and for all things.”

Holding, then, that all taxes upon exports and imports, as well as all excise duties,[18] hinder commerce, discourage manufactures, and hamper the division of labour, Smith was inclined in his rather meagre treatment of taxation to favour direct imposts. He was not one of those who think that taxation is the royal road to prosperity, and insist that the only way to save the nation is by picking its pocket. On the contrary, believing that the best method of raising revenue is to save it, he introduced taxation as one of the causes that retard the growth of opulence. But as the thriftiest government has some expenses, and therefore some taxes, an economist was bound to weigh the merits and demerits of each. Though in comparison with the corresponding chapters in the Wealth of Nations his paragraphs on taxation seem raw, the doctrine is already far in advance of Hume’s. He dwells on the immense advantage of the land-tax, which only cost the government about eight or ten thousand pounds to collect, over the customs and excise, which produce such immense sums, but “are almost eaten up by the legions of officers that are employed in collecting them.” Another advantage of the land-tax over taxes on consumption was that it did not raise prices; and it was better than a tax on capital or income (“stock or money”), in that, land being visible property, the sum required could be assessed without very arbitrary proceedings. “It is a hardship upon a man in trade to oblige him to show his books, which is the only way we can know how much he is worth. It is a breach of liberty, and may be productive of very bad consequences by ruining his credit.” Yet Smith was far from being a single taxer. “If on account of this difficulty you were to tax land, and neither tax money nor stock, you would do a piece of very great injustice.”

The only advantage to taxpayers of taxes on commodities is that they are paid in small sums at a time, whereas taxes on possessions are paid in large lump sums. But to the government there is the all-important fact that they are paid insensibly and are not so much murmured against. “When we buy a pound of tea we do not reflect that the most part of the price is a duty paid to the government, and therefore pay it contentedly, as though it were only the natural price of the commodity. In the same manner, when an additional tax is laid upon beer, the price of it must be raised, but the mob do not directly vent their malice against the government, who are the proper objects of it, but upon the brewers, as they confound the tax price with the natural one.”

In Holland the consumer first paid the price to the merchant and then (separately) the tax to the excise officer. “We in reality do the very same thing, but as we do not feel it immediately we imagine it all one price, and never reflect that we might drink port wine below sixpence a bottle were it not for the duty.” His general objection to duties on imports is that they divert capital and industry into unnatural channels, while the effects of export duties are still more pernicious in confining consumption and diminishing industry. Uztariz, a well-known Spanish writer of that day, had observed in his book on commerce:—

“I have found ministers and others, both in their conversation and writings, maintain the erroneous maxim that high duties are to be laid upon commodities exported, because foreigners pay them; and, on the contrary, very moderate ones on such as are imported, because his majesty’s subjects are at the charge of them.”[19] This policy, says Smith, is one great cause of the poverty of Spain. Yet the Spaniards were wiser than some moderns who have sought to persuade the public that both export and import duties are paid by the foreigner.

Apart from their extraordinary power and originality as contributions to a new science, we are struck in these lectures by two qualities, freedom from prejudice, with the accompanying desire for reformation, and a tolerance of things that are tolerable. Even when he is exposing the absurdities of the Mercantile System, and the evils of the scheme of taxation which it had produced in England, he readily concedes that things might have been far worse, and is glad to confess that upon the whole “the English are the best financiers in Europe, and their taxes are levied with more propriety than those of any country whatever.” Elsewhere, indeed, he shows that the fiscal system of Holland was in some important respects superior; and in the Wealth of Nations his language cooled:—“Our state is not perfect, but it is as good or better than that of most of our neighbours.”

Yet neither tolerance, nor patriotic bias, nor the improbability of reform prevented him from criticising bad institutions. He saw how evil was the system of unpaid magistracies which Bentham burned and Gneist adored. He saw how advantageous was the famous excise scheme which ruined Walpole. He objected to large farms and entailed estates, and was not afraid to declare that a thousand acres ought to be purchased as easily as a thousand yards of cloth. He laughed at the notion, still strangely prevalent, that agriculture is injured by manufactures. “It is always a sign,” he says, “that the country is improving, when men go to town. There are no parts of the country so well inhabited nor so well cultivated as those which lie in the neighbourhood of populous cities.” He described how Philip IV. went to the plough himself to set the fashion, and did everything for the farmers except bringing them a good market; how he conferred the titles of nobility upon several farmers, and very absurdly endeavoured to oppress manufacturers with heavy taxes in order to force them to the country.

Smith concluded his discourse upon Cheapness or Plenty with a few remarks on the influence of commerce on manners; and having thus laid the foundations of a new science, a true system of political economy, he went on to “Arms” (Part IV.), and treated of Militias, Discipline, and Standing Armies. His course ended with a survey (Part V.) of the Laws of Nations. The rules, he remarks, which nations ought to observe, or do observe, with one another cannot be stated with precision. It is true that the rules of property and of justice are pretty uniform in the civilised world. But with regard to international law, what Grotius had said was still true. It was hard to mention a single regulation that had been established with the common consent of all nations and was observed as such at all times. Smith, as usual, sought for the reason, and as usual found it. “This must necessarily be the case; for where there is no supreme legislative power nor judge to settle differences we may always expect uncertainty and irregularity.”

The pope, indeed, as the common father of Christendom, had introduced more humanity into warfare; but except for this hint Smith seems to have made no proposal for filling up the blank. We can only imagine how one who so loved peace and hated war would have rejoiced to see nations moving slowly but surely towards the idea of an international judge, and learning that, as the Duel is not the last word of civilisation in individual quarrels, so the Battle is not the last or the best trial of disputes between nations.

CHAPTER VI
GLASGOW AND ITS UNIVERSITY

Mr. Rae’s diligent researches have disposed of the idea that Smith was one of those profound philosophers who are helpless in the practical affairs of life. It appears from the records of the Glasgow University, that during his thirteen years’ residence he did more college business than any other professor. He audited accounts, inspected drains and hedges, examined encroachments on college land, and served as college quæstor, or treasurer, with the management of the library funds, for the last six years of his professorship. He was Dean of Faculty from 1760 to 1762, when he was appointed Vice-Rector. As such, in the frequent absence of the Rector, he had to preside over all University meetings, including the Rector’s Court, which had judicial as well as administrative powers, and could even punish students by imprisonment in the college steeple. He went frequently to Edinburgh, and at least once to London, on college business; and altogether we may discredit the remark made by one of Smith’s Edinburgh neighbours and reported by Robert Chambers: “It is strange that a man who wrote so well on exchange and barter had to get a friend to buy his horse-corn for him.”

There is one picturesque incident in the history of Smith’s connection with the college. The imposition of octroi duties on food coming into the city was still the principal means of raising municipal revenue in Glasgow as in most other towns of Scotland. But the students of the University were so far exempt from the tribute that they were allowed at the beginning of each session to bring in with them as much oatmeal as would keep them till the end of it. In 1757 this ancient privilege was contested, and the students were obliged by the “tackman” of the meal market to pay duty on their meal. Smith and another professor were sent to the Provost to protest against this infraction of University privileges, and to demand repayment. At the next meeting of the Senate, “Mr. Smith reported that he had spoken to the Provost of Glasgow about the ladles, exacted by the town from students, for meal brought into the town for their own use, and that the Provost promised to cause what had been exacted to be returned, and that accordingly the money was offered by the town’s ladler to the students.”

The intellectual level of the professors and lecturers in the University of Glasgow was already high when Smith joined them, and the place was free from the monopolistic spirit which dulled and enervated the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1752, a year after his arrival, Smith took part in founding what was called the Literary Society of Glasgow. Besides the professors a number of outsiders were admitted—David Hume, Sir John Dalrymple the historian, John Callander the antiquary, Robert Foulis the famous printer, and others. In one of the first papers read to this society (January 1753) Adam Smith reviewed Hume’s Essays on Commerce. He had no doubt read the essays in proof, as there is a letter from Hume in the previous September, asking him for criticisms towards a new edition he was then preparing of his Essays, Moral and Political, in which these new Commercial Essays were to be incorporated.

Another and more convivial club was presided over by Simson, the professor of Mathematics, whose genius and amiability had impressed Adam Smith from his student days. When Simson died in 1768 he had spent half a century in the college. He divided each day with precision between work, sleep, refection in the tavern at the gate, and a measured walk in the gardens. Every Friday evening his club supped in the tavern, and every Saturday the members walked out a mile to the neighbouring village of Anderston, and there feasted on the customary one-course dinner of chicken broth, with a tankard of claret followed by whist and punch. Ramsay of Ochtertyre says that Smith was a bad partner. If an idea came to him in the middle of the game he would renounce or neglect to call. After cards they would talk, or Simson, who was the soul of gaiety, would sing Greek odes to modern airs. A more distinguished circle than this of plain livers and high thinkers could hardly have been found in Europe. Besides the editor of Euclid it included the founders of political economy and modern chemistry, and the inventor of the steam engine. For Joseph Black and his young assistant, James Watt, sat round the same fireside with Simson and Adam Smith. To the conversation of the club, said Watt, “my mind owed its first bias towards such subjects [literature, philosophy, etc.], in which they were all my superiors, I never having attended college, and being then but a mechanic.” In 1756 young Watt had come from London to Glasgow, and being refused permission by the close corporation of hammermen to set up as a mechanic in the town, he was welcomed by the professors, who appointed him maker of mathematical instruments to the University, and gave him a workshop and saleroom within its precincts. It is easy to imagine the delight with which Smith joined in rescuing Watt from the tyranny of a close corporation. The workshop was one of his favourite resorts, and the two became fast friends. More than half a century afterwards, one of the first works which the “young” artist of eighty-three executed with his newly invented “sculpture machine” was a bust of Smith in ivory.

In another part of the college space had been found for Robert Foulis’s printing-office. Encouraged by Hutcheson, Foulis had begun his business in Glasgow just before Smith left for Oxford. His “immaculate” Horace, the famous duodecimo, appeared in 1744, the proof-sheets having been hung up in the college and a reward offered for the detection of any inaccuracy. Adam Smith was a subscriber for two sets of Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy, two beautifully printed quarto volumes issued by the Foulis press in 1755. The type used by the press came from Alexander Wilson’s typefoundry at Camlachie. But in 1760 the college built an observatory, and with the aid of the Crown founded a new chair of Astronomy. Thereupon Wilson, being appointed to the chair, asked to be allowed to transfer his foundry to the college, and the authorities, on the motion of Adam Smith, resolved to build a foundry in the grounds. Thus during Smith’s residence there were set up within the precincts of the University Watt’s workshop, Foulis’s printing-press, Wilson’s observatory and foundry, and last but not least, Cullen’s laboratory, where Black his assistant discovered the existence of latent heat.

The professors even started a series of lectures on natural science to a class of working men. In 1761 Smith and others sought to establish a school for dancing, fencing, and riding. But this project failed; and in the following year Smith is found as an active opponent of a proposal started in the town for the erection of a permanent theatre. He presides at a meeting which resolves that the University should join forces with the magistracy against this innovation. Shortly after his departure the opposition dropped and the theatre was built. But it was burned down by a mob of zealots, and in the Wealth of Nations Smith not only lashes those “fanatical promoters of popular frenzies,” who have always made the theatre an object of their peculiar abhorrence, but demands that the State should give “entire liberty to all those who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing, by all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions.” Such public diversions would easily dissipate “that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm,” and would, with the aid of science and philosophy, correct whatever was unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of the country. By then he had learned to admire the French theatre as well as the French dramatists. A true liberal, he was always open to new ideas, and this last stump of Scottish prejudice was rooted out by his continental tour.

In the fifties Smith and Black helped Foulis to start an institution called the Academy of Design, said to have been the first of its kind in Great Britain. The authorities of the University found rooms for the purpose in the college, and they may therefore claim to have been the fathers, not only of the University extension movement, but also of technical instruction. Painting, sculpture, and engraving were the principal arts taught in this Academy. Tassie and David Allan were among the students; and Lord Buchan, who boasted of walking “after the manner of the ancients in the porticoes of Glasgow with Smith and with Millar,” learned to etch in Foulis’s studio. A shop was started in Edinburgh for the sale of works of art produced in the Academy, and Sir John Dalrymple, writing to Foulis in 1757, begs him to take the advice of Mr. Smith and Dr. Black, who are the best judges of what will sell. He also advises Foulis to have a circular drafted showing the advantages of the Academy. “Mr. Smith is too busy or too indolent, but I flatter myself Dr. Black will be happy to make out this memorial for you.” He invites Foulis and Smith to visit him in the Christmas vacance.

There is no doubt, from the amount of business they laid on his shoulders, and their choice of him as “Præses” in 1762, that Smith’s colleagues had a high opinion of his practical abilities. His public spirit and loyalty to the University were unbounded. The warmest and most generous of friends, he was also one of those rare spirits, especially rare in the reign of George the Third, who never let private interests turn the scale against the common good. He made three protests against a professor exercising the legal right of voting for himself in an election to an office of profit. When Rouet, the professor of History, asked for leave of absence, so that he might travel abroad as Lord Hope’s tutor without relinquishing his professorship, Smith voted with a majority for refusing the leave, and on a later occasion for depriving him of office. This led to a quarrel with the Lord Rector, but the pressure of college opinion eventually forced Rouet to resign. We shall see that Smith on a similar occasion was careful to practise as he had preached.

From this reformed and progressive University the economist often issued forth to breathe the eager air of a thriving mart. The town was remarkably free from poverty and crime. In his lectures he said that in Glasgow there was less crime than in Edinburgh, because it had more commerce and independence, fewer servants and retainers. When he first went to Glasgow as a student it was still poor; when he returned as a professor, its commercial prosperity had fairly begun. Its loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty had cost it heavily in 1745, but that loyalty is intelligible enough; for the Act of Union which deprived Edinburgh of its Parliament, and of much of its resident aristocracy, opened up the colonial markets to Glasgow, and enabled its enterprising merchants to participate in the profitable monopoly of the American trade. By the middle of the century it was already the emporium for colonial tobacco. A tannery employed several hundred men; linen, copper, tin, and pottery became staple manufactures in the forties; carpets, crape, and silk in the fifties. Gibson, in his history of the town, tells us that after 1750 (when the first Glasgow Bank was opened) “not a beggar was to be seen in the streets.” When he adds that “the very children were busy,” we think of the early history of factories and shudder. “I have heard it asserted,” says Smith in the Wealth of Nations (Book II. chap. ii.), “that the trade of the city of Glasgow doubled in about fifteen years after the first erection of the banks there, and that the trade of Scotland has more than quadrupled since the first erection of the two public banks at Edinburgh.” He will not vouch for the figures, and holds such an effect “too great to be accounted for by the sole operation of this cause,” but says it cannot be doubted that the trade of Scotland did increase very considerably during the period, and that the banks contributed a good deal to this increase.

All these external marks of enterprise and progress indicated the truth of another of Smith’s sayings, that a few spirited merchants are a much better thing for a town than the residence of a court. According to Sir John Dalrymple, the three leading merchants of that time were together worth a quarter of a million of money. Measured by modern standards these are petty figures; but Mr. Rae says that commercial men in Glasgow still look back to John Glassford and Andrew Cochrane as perhaps the greatest merchants the Clyde had ever seen. Cochrane, who was Provost when the Young Pretender paid his unwelcome visit, founded a weekly club, the express design of which, according to Dr. Carlyle, was to inquire into the nature and principles of trade. Smith, who joined the club, became intimate with Cochrane, and afterwards, in Dr. Carlyle’s words, “acknowledged his obligations to this gentleman’s information when he was collecting materials for his Wealth of Nations.” The junior merchants, adds the Doctor, who flourished after Cochrane, “confess with respectful remembrance that it was Andrew Cochrane who first opened and enlarged their views.” In Humphrey Clinker he is described as “one of the first sages of the Scottish Kingdom.”

Dugald Stewart, who drew his information from James Ritchie, an eminent merchant of Glasgow, tells us that Smith’s intimacy with its most respected inhabitants gave him the commercial information he needed; and he adds: “It is a circumstance no less honourable to their liberality than to his talents, that notwithstanding the reluctance so common among men of business to listen to the conclusions of mere speculation and the direct opposition of his leading principles to all the old maxims of trade, he was able before he quitted his situation in the University to rank some very eminent merchants in the number of his proselytes.” That Provost Cochrane and his brethren were well inclined to these doctrines is probable, as they suffered severely from the duties on American iron; and that interest in economic subjects was strong is proved by the printing of several important books at Glasgow about this time.

The merchants were, however, much under the influence of an economist of the old school, Sir James Steuart, who lived in the neighbourhood, and the progress of Smith’s opinions was more rapid in the University. It was the students, as Dugald Stewart tells us, “that first adopted his system with eagerness and diffused a knowledge of its fundamental principles over this part of the kingdom.”

During these thirteen years at Glasgow Smith kept up his connection with Edinburgh by pretty constant visits. Shorn of royalty by the union of crowns, and of its parliament by the union of parliaments, Edinburgh was slowly recovering in trade what it had lost in political significance. It had kept its Courts of Justice, and its boards of customs and excise. Above all, it was the centre of an intellectual activity which gave Scotland for the first time a name and a fame in European philosophy and letters.

The social and intellectual leader of the new movement was Smith’s early friend and benefactor, Henry Home, who was raised to the bench as Lord Kames in 1752, a man of very liberal and progressive ideas, full of patriotic schemes for the improvement of Scottish art, manufactures, and agriculture. His writings, though highly praised for their learning, have long been forgotten, for sufficient reason. “I am afraid of Kames’s Law Tracts,” Hume once wrote to Smith. “The man might as well think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and aloes as an agreeable combination by joining metaphysics and Scottish Law.” Robertson, already a prominent preacher and ecclesiastical politician, was feeling his way towards Edinburgh and literary fame. John Home, a brother minister, was composing the Tragedy of Douglas, counted by Hume, so he told Smith in 1756, “the best, and by French critics the only tragedy in our language.” Another member of this circle, quite a fashionable oddity, who ploughed his own glebe like a peasant, and startled a passer-by with apt quotations from Theocritus, was Wilkie, the author of the Epigoniad, a particular friend and admirer of our philosopher. Then there were the two Dalrymples, both historians, and the gossipy autobiographer, Dr. Carlyle. Three politicians of distinction often adorned Edinburgh society at this time: brilliant Charles Townshend, who was to make a revolution in Smith’s life, James Oswald, his old friend and neighbour, and William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney). Among the relics of Smith’s correspondence is an introductory letter, dated January 19, 1752, to Oswald, then at the Board of Trade, which “will be delivered to you by Mr. William Johnstone, son of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall, a young gentleman whom I have known intimately these four years, and of whose discretion, good temper, sincerity, and honour, I have had during all that time frequent proof.” The young gentleman was to give a further signal proof of his discretion by bestowing his affections on a Pulteney, whose vast fortune doubtless consoled him for the surrender of his name. The letter continues:—

“You will find in him too, if you come to know him better, some qualities which from real and unaffected modesty he does not at first discover; a refinement and depth of observation and an accuracy of judgment, joined to a natural delicacy of sentiment, as much improved as study and the narrow sphere of acquaintance this country affords can improve it. He had, first when I knew him, a good deal of vivacity and humour, but he has studied them away. He is an advocate; and though I am sensible of the folly of prophesying with regard to the future fortune of so young a man, yet I could almost venture to foretell that if he lives he will be eminent in that profession. He has, I think, every quality that ought to forward, and not one that should obstruct his progress, modesty and sincerity excepted, and these, it is to be hoped, experience and a better sense of things may in part cure him of. I do not, I assure you, exaggerate knowingly, but could pawn my honour upon the truth of every article.”

A cluster of these and many other stars formed, in 1754, a constellation known as the Select Society, an institution, as we learn from Dugald Stewart’s life of Robertson, “intended partly for philosophical inquiry, and partly for the improvement of the members in public speaking.” It was projected, he says, by Mr. Allan Ramsay, the painter, and a few of his friends—Dr. Robertson, Mr. David Hume, Mr. Adam Smith, Mr. Wedderburn (afterwards Lord Chancellor), Lord Kames, Mr. John Home, Dr. Carlyle, and Sir Gilbert Elliot. Hailes, Monboddo, and Dalrymple were also members. In the Select Society, writes Stewart, “the most splendid talents that have ever adorned this country were roused to their best exertions by the liberal and ennobling discussions of literature and philosophy.”

When the projectors met in May 1754, Smith, who had come from Glasgow, was required to explain the proposals. At the second meeting, as appears from the minutes now preserved in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh, he was “Præses,” and gave out as subjects for the next debate (1) whether a general naturalisation of Foreign Protestantism would be advantageous to Britain; and (2) whether bounties on the exportation of corn would be advantageous to manufactures as well as to agriculture.

Many economic questions such as pauperism, slavery, hiring, banking, export bounties on linen, rent, leases, highways, the relative advantages of large and small farms, were discussed by a society which, in Stewart’s words, contributed so much to the fame and improvement of Scotland. A year after its foundation Hume wrote to Allan Ramsay that it had grown to be a national concern. “Young and old, noble and ignoble, witty and dull, laity and clergy, all the world are ambitious of a place amongst us, and on each occasion we are as much solicited by candidates as if we were to choose a member of Parliament.” The society did more than debate. Adam Smith and eight others were appointed managers to carry out a scheme for the promotion of Scottish arts, sciences, manufactures, and agriculture. Executive committees were formed. Contributions poured in; and prizes and premiums large in those days were offered and awarded for every subject under the sun. From the researches of Mr. Rae we learn, for example, that twenty-six prizes were offered in the first year (1755), including three gold medals for the best discovery in science, the best essay on taste, and the best on vegetation. Six silver medals were given, including one for the best and most correctly printed book, another for the best imitation of English blankets, and a third for the best hogshead of strong ale. Four years later the number of prizes given had increased to 142, and they included one for the person who cured most smoky chimneys.

The society sank as suddenly as it rose. After only a decade of brilliant usefulness, the meteor fell, and expired, it is said, in a flash of Townshend’s wit. “Why,” he asked, after listening to a debate rich in eloquence, but unintelligible to a southern ear, “why can you not learn to speak the English language as you have already learned to write it?” So the society died, and Thomas Sheridan, father of the statesman, came to Edinburgh with a course of lectures on English elocution, which he delivered to about three hundred eminent gentlemen in Carrubber’s Close.

Upon the ashes of this famous society arose an equally patriotic but perhaps less beneficent organisation. The Poker Club, as its name indicated, was intended to be an instrument for stirring opinion. The cause to be agitated was the establishment of a Scotch Militia on national lines, to be followed, as some of its radical members hoped, by a parliamentary reform which would “let the industrious farmer and manufacturer share at last in a privilege now engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener bailie.”

Adam Smith was one of the original members of the Poker Club, which gathered in most of the Select Society; but before 1776 he had changed his opinions, for, in the Wealth of Nations, he comes to the conclusion that “it is only by means of a well regulated standing army that a civilised country can be defended.” If it relied for its defence on a militia, it would be exposed to conquest. The militia movement is mentioned by Smith in a letter to Strahan (April 4, 1760), in the course of some reflections suggested by the Memoirs of Colonel Hooke. The passage is interesting as a Scotch Whig’s explanation and defence of the disaffection which prevailed north of the Tweed in the early part of the eighteenth century:—

“Apropos to the Pope and the Pretender, have you read Hook’s Memoirs? I have been ill these ten days, otherwise I should have written to you sooner, but I sat up the day before yesterday in my bed and read them thro’ with infinite satisfaction, tho’ they are by no means well written. The substance of what is in them I knew before, tho’ not in such detail. I am afraid they are published at an unlucky time, and may throw a damp upon our militia. Nothing, however, appears to me more excusable than the disaffection of Scotland at that time. The Union was a measure from which infinite good has been derived to this country. The Prospect of that good, however, must then have appeared very remote and very uncertain. The immediate effect of it was to hurt the interest of every single order of men in the country. The dignity of the nobility was undone by it. The greater part of the gentry who had been accustomed to represent their own country in its own Parliament were cut out for ever from all hopes of representing it in a British Parliament. Even the merchants seemed to suffer at first. The trade to the Plantations was, indeed, opened to them. But that was a trade which they knew nothing about; the trade they were acquainted with, that to France, Holland, and the Baltic, was laid under new embar[r]assments, which almost totally annihilated the two first and most important branches of it. The Clergy, too, who were then far from insignificant, were alarmed about the Church. No wonder if at that time all orders of men conspired in cursing a measure hurtful to their immediate interest. The views of their Posterity are now very different; but those views could be seen by but few of our forefathers, by those few in but a confused and imperfect manner.”

In the same letter he asks to be remembered to Benjamin Franklin (who had lately visited Glasgow), and also to Griffiths, the editor of the Monthly Review, which had just paid a handsome tribute to the Theory.

In the notes of lectures, given as we have seen about the time when the Poker Club was established, Smith admitted the necessity of a standing army, but seems to have thought that its abuse should be guarded against by a militia. The Poker Club proved little more than a convivial society, and felt the scarcity and dearness of claret more than the want of a national army. Lord Campbell says that when the duty on French wine was raised to pay for the American War, they “agreed to dissolve the ‘Poker,’ and to form another society which should exist without consumption of any excisable commodity.” When the duties were again reduced by Pitt’s French Treaty in 1786, a Younger Poker Club arose, but Pitt’s master, who had contributed so substantially to this revival of patriotism, was too old or too indifferent to become a member.

In one other important Edinburgh project the Glasgow professor played a prominent part. In 1755 an Edinburgh Review was started to supply the rising authors of North Britain with the stimulus of sympathetic criticism. Wedderburn, then a young advocate, was chosen editor; Robertson and Smith were contributors in chief. But only two numbers appeared of this precursor in name and in intention of the most famous and successful review ever launched in our islands. Smith’s two articles are of considerable, although of unequal, interest. The first and less important is a review of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. “When we compare this book with other dictionaries,” writes the critic, “the merit of its author appears very extraordinary.” In previous English dictionaries the chief purpose had been to explain hard words and terms of art; “Mr. Johnson has extended his views much further, and has made a very full collection of all the different meanings of each English word, justified by examples from authors of good reputation.” The defects of the work consisted chiefly in the plan, which was not sufficiently grammatical. To show what he meant he took Johnson’s articles on but and humour, appending more philosophical and lucid articles of his own. Johnson seems to have taken no notice of these criticisms in later editions of the dictionary. We may observe in passing that Smith’s but is better than his humour. He seems singularly mistaken when he observes that “a man of wit is as much above a man of humour as a gentleman is above a buffoon.” In Scotland, he thinks, the usefulness of the Dictionary will soon be felt, “as there is no standard of correct language in conversation.”

A far more remarkable contribution is a letter to the editors, which appeared in the second number. It is a protest against the reviewers confining themselves to accounts of books published in Scotland, a country “which is but just beginning to attempt figuring in the learned world.” He proposes therefore that they should enlarge their scope, and observe with regard to Europe the same plan that was being followed with regard to England, that is to say, examine all books of permanent value while contriving to take notice “of every Scotch production that is tolerably decent.” Smith illustrated his plea by a very luminous and masterly survey of French literature, and a comparison of the French, German, and Italian genius with the English.

The review was intended to appear every six months, but it never reached a third number, either because it was not well received by the public, or because a formidable theologian spied heresy lurking in its pages.

It was at this time that the General Assembly was proposing to pass a censure on Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, and to excommunicate the author. Hume wrote to Allan Ramsay in Rome: “You may tell that reverend gentleman the Pope, that there are men here who rail at him, and yet would be much greater persecutors had they equal power. The last Assembly sat on me. They did not propose to burn me, because they cannot, but they intended to give me over to Satan. My friends prevailed, and my damnation has accordingly been postponed a twelve-month, but next Assembly will surely be upon me.” Lord Kames was also attacked; but Smith seems to have escaped, though his turn was to come later.

The pupil of Hutcheson was also in many ways the philosophical disciple and ally of Hume. Their intercourse during all these years was close and constant. They paid mutual visits, and interchanged many letters, too few of which have been preserved. Hume had been abroad, or at Ninewells, during most of Smith’s stay in Edinburgh, and had only just made Edinburgh his home when Smith obtained the professorship at Glasgow; but, as Mr. Rae notes, before a year was out, Smith’s “dear sir” had ripened into “my dearest friend,” and on these terms the two philosophers remained until death parted them.

We have seen how in the spring of 1759 Charles Townshend was much taken with the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and told Oswald he would put his young ward the Duke of Buccleuch under the author’s care. Hume did not at first believe that Townshend would persevere, or if he did, that he would offer such terms as would tempt Smith from Glasgow. But on this occasion he was in earnest and never relinquished the idea, anxious, it is said, to connect the fleeting fame of a parliamentarian with the lasting renown of a philosopher. Townshend had married the widowed Countess of Dalkeith. Her eldest son, the Duke of Buccleuch, was then a boy at Eton, under Hallam, father of the historian. The time when his stepson would leave school was still distant, but Townshend had made up his mind to send the boy abroad. In England it was becoming more and more the fashion for the sons of the nobility to travel abroad when they left school, instead of going to one of the universities. It was thought that they returned home much improved by their travels, and with some knowledge of one or two living languages, whereas if they went to Oxford or Cambridge they would learn nothing but idleness and dissipation. Adam Smith himself afterwards came to the conclusion that foreign travel was no substitute for a sound university training. The schoolboy, he wrote after his continental tour, “commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application either to study or business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home.... Nothing but the discredit into which the universities had fallen could ever have brought into repute so very absurd a practice.”[20]