In the summer of 1759 Townshend went to see Smith at Glasgow, and apparently prevailed, for in the following September Smith wrote to him about some books which he had been getting for Buccleuch, as if he were already in the position of an educational adviser to the boy. As might have been expected of one whom Burke immortalised as “the delight and ornament of the House, and the charm of every private society which he honoured with his presence,” Townshend captivated Glasgow. “Everybody here remembers you with the greatest admiration and affection.”
Smith was doubtless informed from time to time of the boy’s progress, but we hear no more of the subject for four years. In the early part of 1763 he invited Hume to pay a visit to Glasgow. Hume was then in Edinburgh; he had just brought out two volumes of his History, and was drinking the nectar of general applause. At the end of March he replied with a bantering reference, perhaps, to his friend’s economic studies: “I set up a chaise in May next, which will give me the liberty of travelling about, and you may be sure a journey to Glasgow will be one of the first I shall undertake. I intend to require with great strictness an account how you have been employing your leisure, and I desire you to be ready for that purpose. Woe be to you if the Balance be against you. Your friends here will also expect that I should bring you with me. It seems to me very long since I saw you.” But in the summer Lord Hertford was appointed Ambassador to the Court of France, and Hume accepted the post of Secretary to the British Embassy at Paris, “with great prospects and expectations.” He told his friend not to expect him back for some time; “but we may meet abroad.” And so they did; for, a couple of months later, Smith received the following letter:—
“Dear Sir,—The time now drawing near when the Duke of Buccleugh intends to go abroad, I take the liberty of renewing the subject to you: that if you should still have the same disposition to travel with him I may have the satisfaction of informing Lady Dalkeith and his Grace of it, and of congratulating them upon an event which I know that they, as well as myself, have so much at heart. The Duke is now at Eton; he will remain there till Christmas. He will then spend some short time in London, that he may be presented at Court, and not pass instantaneously from school to a foreign country, but it were to be wished he should not be long in Town, exposed to the habits and companions of London, before his mind has been more formed and better guarded by education and experience.
“I do not enter at this moment upon the subject of establishment, because, if you have no objection to the situation, I know we cannot differ about the terms. On the contrary, you will find me more solicitous than yourself to make the connection with Buccleugh as satisfactory and advantageous to you as I am persuaded it will be essentially beneficial to him.
“The Duke ... has sufficient talents; a very manly temper, and an integrity of heart and reverence for truth, which in a person of his rank and fortune are the firmest foundations of weight in life and uniform greatness. If it should be agreeable to you to finish his education and mould these excellent materials into a settled character, I make no doubt that he will return to his family and country the very man our fondest hopes have fancied him.
“I go to Town next Friday, and should be obliged to you for your answer to this letter.—I am, with sincere affection and esteem, dear sir your most faithful and most obedient humble servant,
C. Townshend.
Adderbury, 25th October 1763.”
The offer was accepted, and an arrangement concluded, in a pecuniary point of view certainly “satisfactory and advantageous.” Smith was to have a salary of £300 a year with travelling expenses, and a pension of £300 a year for life. He was thus to enjoy, as Mr. Rae says, twice his Glasgow income, and to have it assured till death. Altogether, Smith drew more than £8000 from his three years’ tutorship. On November 8th, “Dr. Smith represented,” so runs the record of the Faculty, “that some interesting business would probably require his leaving the College some time this winter”, and he was thereupon granted leave of absence for three months.
For some time, however, Smith heard nothing more. In the middle of December, when he wrote to tell Hume of Townshend’s letter, he was still in uncertainty. But a few days afterwards it was arranged that they should start early in the new year, and on January the 9th Smith told the Faculty that he should make use of his leave of absence, that he should pay his deputy his half-year’s salary commencing from October the 10th, and that he had returned all his students’ fees. This last act of liberality he was only able to carry out by a display of violence at the end of his last lecture. The scene has luckily been reproduced with unusual animation by the pen of Tytler, Lord Kames’s pedestrian biographer. After concluding his last lecture, and describing the arrangements he had made for them, “he drew from his pocket the several fees of the students, wrapped up in separate paper parcels, and beginning to call up each man by his name, he delivered to the first who was called the money into his hand. The young man peremptorily refused to accept it, declaring that the instruction and pleasure he had already received was much more than he either had repaid or ever could compensate; and a general cry was heard from every one in the room to the same effect. But Mr. Smith was not to be bent from his purpose. After warmly expressing his feelings of gratitude and the strong sense he had of the regard shown to him by his young friends, he told them this was a matter betwixt him and his own mind, and that he could not rest satisfied unless he performed what he deemed right and proper. ‘You must not refuse me this satisfaction; nay, by heavens, gentlemen, you shall not’; and seizing by the coat the young man who stood next to him, he thrust the money into his pocket and then pushed him from him. The rest saw it was in vain to contest the matter, and were obliged to let him take his own way.”[21]
Scotch professors at that time often continued to hold their chairs during a temporary appointment like a travelling tutorship, and paid their salaries to a substitute until they returned. But Smith was no friend of absenteeism. The interest of the College was his chief anxiety, and accordingly in the following month he sent his formal letter of resignation to the Lord Rector, immediately on his arrival in Paris. “I never was,” he writes, “more anxious for the good of the College than at this moment; and I sincerely wish that whoever is my successor may not only do credit to the office by his abilities, but be a comfort to the very excellent men with whom he is likely to spend his life, by the probity of his heart and the goodness of his temper.” (February 14, 1764.)
In accepting his resignation the Senate added a few words which may fittingly conclude our account of what Smith always regarded as the most fruitful and honourable period of his life:—“The University cannot help at the same time expressing their sincere regret at the removal of Dr. Smith, whose distinguished probity and amiable qualities procured him the esteem and affection of his colleagues; whose uncommon genius, great abilities, and extensive learning did so much honour to this society; his elegant and ingenious Theory of Moral Sentiments having recommended him to the esteem of men of taste and literature throughout Europe. His happy talents in illustrating abstracted subjects, and faithful assiduity in communicating useful knowledge, distinguished him as a professor, and at once afforded the greatest pleasure and the most important instruction to the youth under his care.”
“Everything I see appears the throwing broadcast of the seed of a revolution,” wrote Voltaire to Chauvelin, a few weeks after Smith landed in France. While the poor grew poorer, administration worse, taxes more oppressive, that thick cloud of conventional darkness which had so long shrouded misgovernment was dispersing, irradiated by the fierce glare of an intellectual illumination such as the world had never seen before. Already the mind of France was undimmed. Voltaire’s search-light had shown the nakedness of Church and State. Diderot’s great lamp was fixed; Rousseau waved his fiery torch, beaconing oppressed civilisation back to the freedom of its cradle. Quesnai was at his patient calculations in the Royal Palace. The great Encyclopædia itself was on the eve of completion.
This gigantic work—in thirty-five folio volumes, of which the first appeared in 1751—was doubly English; for it was inspired by Lord Bacon’s plan for a universal dictionary of sciences and arts, and it began as a mere translation of the Cyclopædia which Ephraim Chambers had published in 1727.
One of the first of our writers to study, perhaps the first to weigh and measure the importance of the Encyclopædia, was Adam Smith. He seems to have read it from the outset. In his letter to the Edinburgh Review he called it the most complete work of the kind ever attempted in any language. He there noticed that D’Alembert’s preliminary discourse upon the genealogy and filiation of arts and sciences was nearly the same as that of Lord Bacon, that the separate articles were not dry abstracts of what is commonly known by a superficial student, but “a compleat, reasoned, and even critical examination of each subject.” Its pages bore testimony to the triumphant progress of English philosophy and science in France. The ideas of Bacon, Boyle, and Newton were explained with that order, perspicuity, and judgment which distinguished all the eminent writers of France. “As since the Union we are apt to regard ourselves in some measure as the countrymen of those great men, it flattered my vanity as a Briton to observe the superiority of the English philosophy thus acknowledged by their rival nation.” It seems, Smith added, “to be the peculiar talent of the French nation to arrange every subject in that natural and simple order which carries the attention without any effort along with it.”
Smith was himself by nature and habit an Encyclopædist, not inferior even to Diderot in his grasp of the whole field of science. Wanting the laborious industry of the compiler, he was the equal perhaps of his French contemporaries in the power of correlating knowledge and combining truth. But he yielded to none in admiration of the Encyclopædia, and commended it to English readers by translating the magnificent eulogy bestowed on it by Voltaire in the conclusion of his account of the artists who lived in the time of Louis the Fourteenth:—
“The last age has put the present in a condition to assemble into one body and to transmit to posterity, to be by them delivered down to remoter ages, the sacred repository of all the arts and all the sciences, all of them pushed as far as human industry can go. This is what a society of learned men, fraught with genius and knowledge, are now labouring upon, an immense and immortal work which accuses the shortness of human life.”
The Encyclopædists’ doctrine of the perfectibility of man was the rational basis of Smith’s incurable optimism, but he did not share the opinion of the French School that an absolute monarchy is the most hopeful if not the only vehicle of human progress. Quesnai and his disciples never dreamed that people could govern themselves; they conjured up an ideal monarch who would let his people live in a state of natural liberty. Adam Smith had faith in men as well as in philosophy, and therefore his politics were not for his own age only but for the time to come. A Whig in practice and a Republican in theory, he was not likely to sympathise with the idea that natural liberty is to be enjoyed under a despot.
One critic expresses surprise that so close an observer had not the sagacity to anticipate the downfall of the French Monarchy. But Turgot’s dismissal, which first made Voltaire despair of a peaceful reformation, occurred two months after the publication of the Wealth of Nations, and ten years after its author’s return to England. Nay, at the time when the finishing touches were being given to that work, it might have been a fair question whether Turgot’s reforms were less likely to save France than Lord North’s policy to enslave England. In any case, it was not for a foreigner to play Cassandra to the Bourbons. But it will be shown that the author of the Wealth of Nations was under no illusions as to the wretched state of the French peasant, the misgovernment of the kingdom, and its fiscal disorganisation.
The tutor and his pupil arrived in Paris on February 13, 1764, and, after ten days with Hume, they proceeded to Toulouse, which still preserved the dignity of a provincial capital, with a parliament, a university, and an archbishopric. The nobility and notables of Languedoc spent the winter there, and it was also a favourite resort of English visitors, probably because it combined a good climate with agreeable society. Its advocates vied with those of Paris. As a social and intellectual centre it might be denominated the Edinburgh of France. Its political importance is marked in the Wealth of Nations, where Adam Smith describes the parliament of Toulouse as being “in rank and dignity the second parliament of the kingdom.” Fortunately for the two Scots, a cousin of Hume, the Abbé Seignelay Colbert, was at that time Vicar-General of the diocese. Colbert was of the same family as the great minister, and doubtless owed his success in the Gallican Church to that connection. Hume’s personal popularity in Paris was enormous, and his letters of introduction, which he wrote or procured, were everywhere of service to the travellers. The Abbé, immediately on their arrival, promised Hume he would do all that he could to make their stay agreeable. After a month he was full of enthusiasm for his new friends:—“Mr. Smith is a sublime man. His heart and his mind are equally admirable.... The Duke, his pupil, is a very amiable spirit, and does his exercises well, and is making progress in French.”
The Abbé was a man of liberal ideas. Promoted to the bishopric of Rodez, he tried to assist the agriculture and manufactures of his diocese, and even had a momentary popularity in Paris in the year of the Revolution (1789), when as a member of the States-General he proposed the union of the clergy with the Third Estate. The Archbishop of Toulouse at this time was the famous Loménie de Brienne, an old friend of Turgot and Morellet, and so far a disciple of their economic principles that he persuaded the States of Languedoc to adopt free trade in corn. But, as Mr. Rae observes, he could not have been very friendly to Smith; for afterwards, when Cardinal and Minister of France, he refused Morellet a hundred louis to defray the cost of printing his translation of the Wealth of Nations. In spite of Colbert’s kindness, the early months at Toulouse dragged heavily, and the Duke proved at first an exacting companion. On July 5th, Smith sent a rather lugubrious and petulant letter to Hume:—
“I should be much obliged to you if you could send us recommendations to the Duke of Richelieu, the Marquis de Lorges, and the Intendant of the Province. Mr. Townshend assured me that the Duc de Choiseul was to recommend us to all the people of fashion here and everywhere else in France. We have heard nothing, however, of these recommendations, and have had our way to make as well as we could by the help of the Abbé, who is a stranger here almost as much as we. The progress indeed we have made is not very great. The Duke is acquainted with no Frenchman whatever. I cannot cultivate the acquaintance of the few with whom I am acquainted, as I cannot bring them to our house, and am not always at liberty to go to theirs. The life which I led at Glasgow was a pleasurable dissipated life in comparison of that which I lead here at Present. I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time.”
The world has no reason to regret this want of gaiety, for the book which Smith had begun in order to “pass away the time” was no other than the Wealth of Nations. At Bordeaux, Adam Smith, his pupil and the Abbé met Colonel Barré who wrote from that town to Hume on September the 4th:—
“I thank you for your last letter from Paris, which I received just as Smith and his élève and l’Abbé Colbert were sitting down to dine with me at Bordeaux. The latter is a very honest fellow, and deserves to be a bishop; make him one if you can.... Smith agrees with me in thinking that you are turned soft by the délices of the French Court, and that you don’t write in that nervous manner you was remarkable for in the more northern climates.”
From this time all went smoothly. Hume got them introductions from his chief, Lord Hertford, the British Ambassador, to the Duc de Richelieu and others.
On the 21st of October they were again in Toulouse, and Smith wrote in good spirits to thank Hume for his kindness and the Ambassador “for the very honourable manner in which he was so good as to mention me to the Duke of Richelieu in the letter of recommendation which you sent us.” He adds:—
“There was, indeed, one small mistake in it. He called me Robinson instead of Smith. I took upon me to correct this mistake myself before the Duke delivered the letter. We were all treated by the Maréchal with the utmost Politeness and attention, particularly the Duke, whom he distinguished in a very proper manner.... Our expedition to Bordeaux and another we have made since to Bagnères has made a great change upon the Duke. He begins now to familiarise himself to French company, and I flatter myself I shall spend the rest of the time we are to live together not only in peace and contentment, but in gayetty and amusement.”
They went to Montpellier to see the meeting of the States of Languedoc, the most important of the six local parliaments still remaining in France. There they met Horne Tooke, who afterwards called the Wealth of Nations wicked and the Moral Sentiments nonsense, and Cardinal Dillon, the Archbishop of Narbonne, another of the band of Gallicised Scots.
In Montpellier and Toulouse they saw many members of the parliament, and obtained an insight into the legal and administrative system of a province which enlightened Frenchmen were fond of citing as a model for the reformation of their country. Smith took rather a favourable view of French justice. The parliaments, he said, “are perhaps, in many respects, not very convenient courts of justice; but they have never been accused, they seem never even to have been suspected, of corruption.”
But, though incorruptible, the Toulouse Court had been guilty of one scandalous act of fanatical injustice. In 1762 it found the unfortunate Jean Calas, a Protestant, guilty of the murder of his son, who had abjured his faith in order to join the Toulouse Bar, and then in an agony of remorse had committed suicide in his father’s house. Characteristically Smith did not allow this foul episode to distort his perspective. In his last edition of the Moral Sentiments the story is told as one of those fatal accidents which “happen sometimes in all countries, even in those where justice is in general very well administered”:—
“The unfortunate Calas, a man of much more than ordinary constancy (broke upon the wheel and burnt at Toulouse for the supposed murder of his own son, of which he was perfectly innocent), seemed with his last breath to deprecate, not so much the cruelty of the punishment, as the disgrace which the imputation might bring upon his memory. After he had been broke, and was just going to be thrown into the fire, the monk, who attended the execution, exhorted him to confess the crime for which he had been condemned. ‘My Father,’ said Calas, ‘can you yourself bring yourself to believe that I am guilty?’”
To such a man, he thinks, “humble philosophy, which confines its views to this life, can afford but little consolation.” He must seek refuge in religion, which alone can offer him a prospect of another world of more candour, humanity, and justice. But justice was not allowed to sleep. For three years Voltaire assailed the ears of France with impassioned argument. Before Smith left Toulouse a new trial was ordered, and fifty judges, among them Turgot, revised the sentence, pronounced Calas innocent, relieved his family from infamy, and awarded them a large sum of money.
A long stay in Languedoc would necessarily give a foreigner more favourable impressions of the social and economic state of France than he would have gained, say, in the Limousin, where Turgot was doing heroic battle against famine and maladministration. Languedoc, with its two millions of inhabitants, is described by Tocqueville as the best-ordered and most prosperous as well as the largest of all the pays d’états. Its roads, made and repaired without a corvée, were among the best in France. Smith was struck by the great canal of Burgundy, constructed some seventy years before by Riquet and kept in good repair by his family, and he saw the province incessantly spending money on developing and improving its roads and rivers. The charitable workhouses established at the royal expense in other parts of France had not been required in this comparatively happy territory. In fiscal system and credit Languedoc was incomparably superior to the rest of the kingdom. A land-tax instead of a poll-tax, few exemptions for the nobles, no farmers-general to collect taxes and fortunes. The contrast between the good local administration of Languedoc, and the fatal results of centralisation in other parts of France, was often in the mind of the author of the Wealth of Nations; and all that he said is fully confirmed by Tocqueville’s study of French society before the Revolution. Here is a passage that sounds like an echo of Turgot: Smith is speaking of the advantages of local administration from local funds. Under such an administration, he says, “a magnificent highroad cannot be made through a desart country where there is little or no commerce, or merely because it happens to lead to the country villa of the intendant of the province, or to that of some great lord to whom the intendant finds it convenient to make his court. A great bridge cannot be thrown over a river at a place where nobody passes, or merely to embellish the view from the windows of a neighbouring palace: things which sometimes happen in countries where works of this kind are carried on by any other revenue than that which they themselves are capable of affording.”
After eighteen months in Toulouse the party went, we are told, “by a pretty extensive tour, through the south of France to Geneva.” There Smith was able to gratify two of his strongest passions: his admiration for the Republican form of government and for Voltaire. The little Republic was then in a constitutional tumult, for the citizens were pressing for a share in what had till then been a narrow aristocracy. In this they had the support of Voltaire, who lived, the literary potentate of Europe, at Ferney, just outside the city bounds, in the feudal seigniory of Gex. To his château by the lake pilgrims resorted from all parts of Europe to pay their court, and were hospitably received. Smith seems to have visited Ferney five or six times during his short stay, and conversation deepened the admiration which his favourite author had inspired.
Samuel Rogers, meeting Smith a year before his death, happened to remark of some writer that he was rather superficial, a Voltaire. “Sir!” cried Smith, incensed by this use of the indefinite article, striking the table with his hand, “there has been but one Voltaire.” Voltaire, on his side, probably thought well of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, for his intimate friend, Dr. Tronchin, the famous physician of Geneva, had sent his son to attend Smith’s classes at Glasgow. Rogers’s visit fell in the year of the French Revolution, and the question of king against parliaments was being debated. Smith mentioned that Voltaire had an aversion to the States, and was attached to the royal authority. Voltaire had talked about the Duke of Richelieu, whom the party had met at Toulouse, as a singular character. The duke had slipped down at Versailles, a few years before his death, “the first faux pas he had ever made at Court.” When Saint-Fond, who visited Edinburgh in 1784, called on Adam Smith, he was shown a fine bust of Voltaire; and Smith discoursed upon the incalculable obligations that Reason owed to the Philosopher of Ferney. “The ridicule and sarcasms which he lavished upon fanatics and hypocrites of all sects have enabled the understandings of men to bear the light of truth,” and prepared them for research. “He has done much more for the benefit of mankind than those grave philosophers whose books are read by a few only. The writings of Voltaire are made for all and read by all.” Smith said he could not pardon Joseph the Second of Austria, “who pretended to travel as a philosopher,” for passing Ferney without doing homage to the historian of Peter the Great. He concluded from this circumstance that Joseph “was but a man of inferior mind.”[22]
Smith kept no journal during his French tour, and as usual wrote as few letters as possible, though he must have made extensive notes. Most of his letters were probably to report progress to Charles Townshend. I have in my possession part of an abstract of one of these, which, though of no importance in itself, serves to show that he took his tutorship very seriously. From sidelights in the correspondence of Charles Bonnet the naturalist, and Le Sage, and Adam Ferguson, we know that he enjoyed the best company in Geneva, particularly at the house of the Duchesse d’Enville, who was there under Dr. Tronchin’s treatment with her son, the ill-fated Duc de la Rochefoucauld. In 1774 Adam Ferguson wrote to Smith that his own bad French reminded the Duchesse d’Enville of her old difficulties with Smith, “but she said that before you left Paris she had the happiness to learn your language.” Two years later Bonnet wished Hume to remember him to “the Sage of Glascow, ... whom we shall always recollect with great pleasure.”
The tutor with his two pupils, for the Duke had been joined at Bordeaux by a younger brother, left Geneva for Paris early in December 1765, promising, however, to return to republican soil before they left the continent. Hume, now a rich man with a pension of £900 a year, was just leaving the Embassy, and relinquishing his sovereignty of philosophy and society; but the two friends had a few days together before he crossed the Channel with poor, wayward, irresolute Rousseau, hunted or haunted by the furies. Adam Smith was soon in a whirlpool of gaiety and philosophy. Friendship with Hume was enough to ensure a friendly reception from Parisian society, where science and letters were still fashionable. But Smith was known and valued for his own sake; his Theory of Moral Sentiments was so much read, praised, and talked about that several translators, among them the young Duc de Rochefoucauld, were competing to repair the badness of the first attempt, published in 1764 by Dous at the instance of Holbach. That of the Abbé Blavet was, Smith thought, but indifferently executed. The best translation, it is said, was that published in 1798 by Condorcet’s widow.
For ten months Smith suffered and enjoyed enough dissipation for a lifetime, if we may judge from the Hume correspondence, which shows that in one week of July 1766 he was at Baron Holbach’s conversing with Turgot, at the Comtesse de Boufflers’, and in the salon of Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse. In fact, as Mr. Rae says, he seems to have been a regular guest in almost all the famous salons of Paris. Thus we find Hume writing in March to the Countess de Boufflers: “I am glad you have taken my friend Smith under your protection. You will find him a man of true merit, though perhaps his sedentary recluse life may have hurt his air and appearance as a man of the world.” She replies in May that she has made the acquaintance of Mr. Smith, and for love of Hume has given him a very hearty welcome; that she is reading the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and believes it will please her. Six years later she talked of translating the book, and said that Smith’s doctrine of Sympathy was supplanting Hume’s philosophy as the fashionable opinion, especially with the ladies! Smith was a keen playgoer in Paris, and made the acquaintance of Madame Riccoboni, who had been a great actress but had abandoned the stage for the novel, and was almost as popular as Richardson. When he left France she gave him a charming letter of introduction to Garrick:—
“Je suis bien vaine, my dear Mr. Garrick, de pouvoir vous donner ce que je perds avec un regret très vif, le plaisir de voir Mr. Smith. Ce charming philosopher vous dira combien il a d’esprit, car je le défie de parler sans en montrer.... Oh ces Écossois! ces chiens d’Écossois! ils viennent me plaire et m’affliger. Je suis comme ces folles jeunes filles qui écoutent un amant sans penser au regret, toujours voisin du plaisir. Grondez-moi, battez-moi, tuez-moi: mais j’aime Mr. Smith, je l’aime beaucoup. Je voudrois que le diable emportât tous nos gens de lettres, tous nos philosophes, et qu’il me rapportât Mr. Smith.”
In a separate letter to Garrick the novelist again describes her friend: “Mr. Smith, un Écossois, homme d’un très grand mérite, aussi distingué par son bon naturel, par la douceur de son caractère que par son esprit et son savoir, me demande une lettre pour vous. Vous verrez un philosophe moral et pratique; gay, riant à cent lieus de la pédanterie des nôtres.”[23] Of the Rochefoucaulds we have already heard at Geneva. They seem to have been at Paris during Smith’s stay there, for “from Madame d’Enville,” writes Dugald Stewart, “the respectable mother of the late excellent and much lamented Duke of Rochefoucauld, he received many attentions which he always recollected with particular gratitude.” A story is told of another lady, a marquise of talent and wit, who was so overcome by his personal charms that she fell in love with him at Abbeville, where Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch stopped on one of their excursions from Paris. A Captain Lloyd, who was with the party, doubtless on a patriotic visit to the field of Creçy, told the story to Dr. Currie, the biographer of Burns. The philosopher could neither endure these addresses nor conceal his embarrassment, for the reason, said Lloyd, that he was deeply in love with an English lady who was also at Abbeville. But Dugald Stewart only mentions an early attachment with a lady who remained single, and at eighty years of age still retained evident traces of her former beauty, and adds that “after this disappointment he laid aside all thoughts of marriage.”
Susan Curchod, that “inestimable treasure” for whom Gibbon sighed as a lover, had married Necker, then only a successful banker, while Smith and his party were at Toulouse. The mother of Madame de Stäel, as we learn from her first admirer, united elegant manners and lively conversation with wit, beauty, and erudition. No wonder then that her new home was already a centre of Parisian life. The Neckers were very hospitable, and were intimate with Morellet and others of the economic sect. Adam Smith’s impressions of Necker are mentioned by Sir James Mackintosh in the ever admirable though recanted Defence of the French Revolution. He had, as we there read, no very high opinion of the future minister, speaking of him as a man probably upright and not illiberal, but narrow, pusillanimous, and entangled by the habit of detail. He predicted that Necker’s fame would fall when his talents should be brought to the test, and always said emphatically, “He is a man of detail.” Mackintosh adds: “At a time when the commercial abilities of Lord Auckland were the theme of profuse eulogy, Dr. Smith characterised him in the same words.”
Dugald Stewart mentions that Smith was also acquainted with D’Alembert, Helvétius, and Marmontel. It was at the house of Helvétius that he first met the great Turgot and the excellent Abbé Morellet. “He talked our language very badly,” writes the Abbé in his memoirs; “but his Theory of Moral Sentiments had given me a great idea of his depth and sagacity, and in fact I still look upon him as one who made most comprehensive observations and analyses of all the questions that he dealt with. M. Turgot, who was as fond of metaphysics as I was, held a high opinion of his genius. We saw him often; he was presented at the house of Helvétius: we discussed the theory of commerce, banking, loans, and many points in the great book he was then composing. He gave me a very pretty pocket-book which he used and which has served me for twenty years.”
Turgot’s Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth, which were written about this time, remained unpublished till 1769, when they began to appear in the Éphémérides du Citoyen. It is noteworthy as bearing upon the question of mutual obligation between Smith and Turgot that it was the Wealth of Nations, not the Reflections, which gave topics for their economic discussions. It has been supposed, on the authority of Condorcet, that a correspondence was subsequently carried on between Smith and Turgot. But the publication quite recently of a letter written by Smith to the young Duke of Rochefoucauld has removed all doubt upon the subject. Rochefoucauld had written to inquire of Smith if he possessed any letters from Turgot, and this is the answer:—
“I should certainly have been very happy to have communicated to your Grace any letters which the ever to be regretted Mr. Turgot had done me the honour to write to me; and by that means to have the distinguished honour of being recorded as one of his correspondents. But tho’ I had the happiness of his acquaintance and, I flattered myself, even of his friendship and esteem, I never had that of his correspondence. He was so good as to send me a copy of the Procès Verbal of what passed at the bed of justice upon the registration of his six edicts which did so much honour to their Author, and, had they been executed without alteration, would have proved so beneficial to his country. But the present (which I preserve as a most valuable monument of a person whom I remember with so much veneration) was not accompanied with any letter.”
Twenty-three years afterwards there is an entry in the diary of Samuel Rogers: “Adam Smith said Turgot was an honest, well-meaning man, but unacquainted with the world and human nature; that it was his maxim (he mentioned it to Hume, but never to Smith) that whatever is right may be done.” This is certainly not Adam Smith’s whole mind about Turgot, for whom he entertained a lively admiration. But undoubtedly he considered that his own obligations to the French School of Political Economy began and ended with Quesnai, and we know that he intended at one time to dedicate his book to the author of the Economic Table. Turgot, Morellet, Rivière, and the rest were interpreters of Quesnai—disciples, not masters.
Quesnai was the inventor of a new system, the founder of a sect, and the wielder of whatever influence that sect exerted on the Wealth of Nations. Smith’s intercourse with Quesnai and the physiocrats, as well as a careful study of their writings, accounts for some important developments of theory which distinguish his book from his lectures, and particularly the attention he there pays to the problem of distribution, as well as a distinct though moderated bias towards agriculture as the most productive of pursuits. He was not a physiocrat. Indeed his criticism of the distinctive doctrine of the school, that all wealth comes from the soil, was felt to be convincing and final. But he went a long way with them, and some of his most important practical conclusions coincided with theirs. No reader of the ninth chapter of Smith’s fourth book could doubt that Smith knew Quesnai as well as Quesnai’s Table, which had been published in 1758 and was regarded with an almost superstitious veneration by the whole sect. If the doubt existed, it would be dispelled by a curious piece of evidence. Of the half-dozen letters he wrote from France that have been preserved, the longest, dated Compiègne, August 26, 1766, is to Charles Townshend, and describes some anxious moments in which he had called in the aid of the king’s physician. The Duke of Buccleuch had been to Compiègne to see the camp and to hunt with the King and the Court, and after hunting had eaten too heartily of a cold supper with a vast quantity of salad and some cold punch. Sickness and fever followed. The faithful tutor begged him to send for a doctor:—
“He refused a long time, but at last, upon seeing me uneasy, consented. I sent for Quenay, first ordinary physician to the King. He sent me word he was ill. I then sent for Senac; he was ill likewise. I went to Quenay myself to beg that, notwithstanding his illness, which was not dangerous, he would come to see the Duke. He told me he was an old infirm man, whose attendance could not be depended on, and advised me as his friend to depend upon De la Saone, first physician to the Queen. I went to De la Saone. He was gone out, and was not expected home that night. I returned to Quenay, who followed me immediately to the Duke. It was by this time seven at night. The Duke was in the same profuse sweat which he had been in all day and all the preceding night. In this situation Quenay declared that it was improper to do anything till the sweat should be over. He only ordered him some cooling ptisane drink. Quenay’s illness made it impossible for him to return next day (Monday), and De la Saone has waited on the Duke ever since, to my entire satisfaction.”
In reading this we are reminded of a passage in the Wealth of Nations where Quesnai is described as “a physician, and a very speculative physician,” who thought the health of the human body could be preserved only by a certain precise regimen of diet and exercise, the slightest violation of which necessarily occasioned some degree of disease or disorder. The letter to Townshend continues:—
“Depend upon hearing from me by every post till his perfect recovery; if any threatening symptom should appear I shall immediately despatch an express to you; so keep your mind as easy as possible. There is not the least probability that any such symptom ever will appear. I never stir from his room from eight in the morning till ten at night, and watch for the smallest change that happens to him. I should sit by him all night too if the ridiculous, impertinent jealousy of Cook, who thinks my assiduity an encroachment upon his duty, would not be so much alarmed, as it gave some disturbance even to his master in his present illness.”
The visit was now drawing to an end, but our account of it would be incomplete if we omitted Smith’s part in one of the most furious squabbles of the century. Rousseau had arrived in Paris almost simultaneously with our travellers, tempted by Hume’s generous promise to find him a refuge in England from his persecutors. The advent of the author of the Social Contract and Émile threw Paris into a tumult of excitement. “People may talk of ancient Greece as they please,” wrote Hume, full of affection and enthusiasm for his protégé, “but no nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much engaged their attention as Rousseau. Voltaire and everybody else are quite eclipsed by him.” The philosophers of Paris predicted a quarrel before they got to Calais, but for some time Hume contrived to manage this wayward, suspicious genius admirably well, procuring him a pension and a comfortable establishment in Derbyshire. At last, in June, Rousseau suddenly lost his head, mastered by the haunting fears of treachery, and wrote to Hume that his horrible designs were at last found out. For once in his life Hume lost his temper, and discretion departed from him. He determined to punish Rousseau’s ingratitude and put himself right in the eyes of the world. But before taking this step he wrote to consult his friends in Paris, and Smith sent the following reply:—
“Paris, 6th July 1766.
“My dear Friend,—I am thoroughly convinced that Rousseau is as great a rascal as you and as every man here believes him to be. Yet let me beg of you not to think of publishing anything to the world upon the very great impertinence which he has been guilty of to you. By refusing the pension which you had the goodness to solicit for him with his own consent, he may have thrown, by the baseness of his proceedings, a little ridicule upon you in the eyes of the court and the ministry. Stand this ridicule; expose his brutal letter, but without giving it out of your own hand, so that it may never be printed; and, if you can, laugh at yourself; and I shall pawn my life that before three weeks are at an end this little affair which at present gives you so much uneasiness shall be understood to do you as much honour as anything that has ever happened to you. By endeavouring to unmask before the public this hypocritical pedant, you run the risk of disturbing the tranquillity of your whole life. By letting him alone he cannot give you a fortnight’s uneasiness. To write against him is, you may depend upon it, the very thing he wishes you to do. He is in danger of falling into obscurity in England, and he hopes to make himself considerable by provoking an illustrious adversary. He will have a great party, the Church, the Whigs, the Jacobites, the whole wise English nation, who will love to mortify a Scotchman, and to applaud a man who has refused a pension from the King. It is not unlikely, too, that they may pay him very well for having refused it, and that even he may have had in view this compensation. Your whole friends here wish you not to write,—the Baron, D’Alembert, Madame Riccoboni, Mademoiselle Riancourt, M. Turgot, etc. etc. M. Turgot, a friend every way worthy of you, desired me to recommend this advice to you in a particular manner as his most earnest entreaty and opinion. He and I are both afraid that you are surrounded with evil counsellors, and that the advice of your English literati, who are themselves accustomed to publishing all their little gossiping stories in newspapers, may have too much influence upon you. Remember me to Mr. Walpole, and believe me to be with the most sincere affection, ever yours,
Adam Smith.”
Within six months Hume was sorry that he had not taken this sage advice, and blamed himself for the “Succinct Exposure,” which had been followed of course by a cloud of pamphlets. We must be careful not to suppose from this letter that Smith really had a mean opinion of Rousseau. He had reviewed with warm but discerning praise the second discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Mankind; and in later days he spoke with reverential emotion of the author of the Social Contract.
Smith was now anxious to return home. To Millar, his publisher, he wrote early in the autumn:—“Though I am very happy here, I long passionately to rejoin my old friends, and if I had once got fairly to your side of the water, I think I should never cross it again. Recommend the same sober way of thinking to Hume. He is light-hearted, tell him, when he talks of coming to spend the remainder of his days here or in France.”
Their return was precipitated by a tragedy. Hew Scott, the Duke’s younger brother, a lad of nineteen, was assassinated in the streets of Paris on October 19th. Smith and the Duke almost immediately left Paris, and were in London at the beginning of November. “We returned,” wrote the Duke to Dugald Stewart, “after having spent near three years together without the slightest disagreement or coolness, and on my part with every advantage that could be expected from the society of such a man. We continued to live in friendship till the hour of his death.” Besides the substantial advantages of independence, Smith, as we learn from many of his contemporaries, had gained vastly in manner, address, and knowledge of the world. Much of his awkwardness had disappeared. In the bustle of travel and society, he almost forgot how to be absent-minded.
We have already mentioned a complaint that Smith failed to realise the utter misery of France or to foresee the Revolution. The second half of the complaint seems to be an impertinence. He was not called upon to write out the past, or present, much less the future of France. The first part of the complaint is more plausible. The Wealth of Nations abounds in illustrations drawn from the French tour, and from these we certainly get a less melancholy picture than from the pages of Arthur Young, or from the correspondence of Voltaire, D’Alembert, Turgot and the rest. But then, Young’s tour was twenty years later, and the French reformers were thinking exclusively of the stagnant condition of France in a moving and progressive age. They felt bitterly the dreadful difference between their France and the France that should have been but for the impoverishing wars and oppressive misgovernment of Louis XIV. and his successors. Smith took France as she was, and found her still one of the richest and most powerful countries of the world. In the ninth chapter of his first book he compares Holland, England, France, and Scotland. The first, “in proportion to the extent of its territory and the number of its people, is a richer country than England.” Its government can borrow at two per cent.; wages of labour are said to be higher than in England, and the Dutch trade upon lower profits than any people in Europe. They have large investments in foreign countries, and “during the late war the Dutch gained the whole carrying-trade of France, of which they still retain a very large share.” England comes next. “France is perhaps in the present times not so rich a country as England.” Its market rate of interest is generally higher, and so are the profits of trade; “and it is no doubt upon this account that many British subjects chuse rather to employ their capitals in a country where trade is in disgrace than in one where it is highly respected.” Then he shows that, though France was still richer than Scotland, Scotland was making far more rapid progress:—
“The wages of labour are lower in France than in England. When you go from Scotland to England, the difference which you may remark between the dress and countenance of the common people in the one country and in the other, sufficiently indicates the difference in their condition. The contrast is still greater when you return from France. France, though no doubt a richer country than Scotland, seems not to be going forward so fast. It is a common and even a popular opinion in the country, that it is going backwards; an opinion which, I apprehend, is ill-founded even with regard to France, but which nobody can possibly entertain with regard to Scotland, who sees the country now, and who saw it twenty or thirty years ago.”
Misgovernment, it is true, had done its worst in pre-revolutionary France, but it could not ruin fertile territory and a thrifty population. At that time the cities of Bordeaux, Lyons, and Marseilles surpassed in wealth and in the number of their inhabitants Copenhagen, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. Several of the provincial parliaments offered as fair a field for legal talent as the Courts of Dublin and Edinburgh. After the landed nobility, the Church, the King, his ministers, intendants, and a host of minor officials had taken their rents and revenues and stipends, fortunes were still left for rapacious financiers and rascally farmers-general. Smith saw all this and explained it with his usual lucidity. But he never mistook wealth for welfare. He applied his favourite test of the condition of the labouring poor. Though France was a much richer country, with a better soil and climate than Scotland, and “better stocked with all those things which it requires a long time to raise up and accumulate, such as great towns and convenient and well-built houses, both in town and country,” yet the poor were worse off. In England the common people all [sic] wore leather shoes, in Scotland the men only; in France both men and women went about sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes barefooted. He finds the reason for these things in unfair and ill-judged taxation, and he devotes many pages to a severe scrutiny of the French system.
Considering that France had some twenty-four millions of people, thrice the number of Great Britain, that it was naturally richer and had been “much longer in a state of improvement and cultivation,” it might have been expected that the French Government could have raised a revenue of thirty millions with as little inconvenience as a revenue of ten millions was raised in Great Britain. In 1765 and 1766 the revenue actually paid into the French Treasury did not amount to fifteen millions sterling. Yet the taxes were so devised and collected that the French people, it was generally acknowledged, were much more oppressed by taxes than the people of Great Britain. “France, however, is certainly the great Empire in Europe which, after that of Great Britain, enjoys the mildest and most indulgent government!” Smith had not only diagnosed the disease; his French studies and his friendship with enlightened men like Turgot, Quesnai, and Morellet had enabled him to propose remedies. “The finances of France,” he observes in the second chapter of his fifth book, “seem in their present state to admit of three very obvious reformations.” First, he would abolish the taille and the capitation, balancing the loss by increasing the number of vingtièmes or land-tax. Second, “by rendering the gabelle, the aides, the traites, the taxes upon tobacco, and all the different customs and excises, uniform in all the different parts of the kingdom, those taxes might be levied at much less expense, and the interior commerce of the kingdom might be rendered as free as that of England.” Thirdly, by subjecting all taxes to the immediate inspection and direction of government, the exorbitant profits of the farmers-general might be added to the revenue of the State. But, he adds, with the same scepticism that colours his view of the prospects of Free Trade in England, the opposition arising from the private interests of individuals would probably be effectual in preventing all three parts of the scheme of reformation. Yet half a century after the appearance of the Wealth of Nations one of its annotators was able to write: “Taxes in France are now placed almost on the footing suggested by Dr. Smith. The taille and capitation have been abolished, and replaced by the contribution foncière; the different taxes have been rendered equal in all the provinces of the kingdom, and they are chiefly collected by officers appointed by the Government.” Nor is the connection between the book and the reforms either fanciful or remote. “It was, I avow—to the shame of my first instructors,” wrote “le bon Mollien,” Napoleon’s favourite minister of finance, “this book of Adam Smith, then so little known, that taught me better to appreciate the multitude of points at which public finance touches every family, and raises judges of it in every household.”