Adam Smith

_English Men Of Letters_

Adam Smith

By Francis W. Hirst

London: Macmillan & Co., Limited Nineteen Hundred And Four

_Copyright in the United States of America, 1904_

Prefatory Note

Early in 1793 Dugald Stewart read at two meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh his “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith.” Written with the sympathetic pen of a friend and disciple in the Corinthian style that Stewart loved, the memoir was too good to be superseded. A century passed, and in 1895 appeared Mr. John Rae’s exhaustive _Life of Adam Smith_. Mr. Rae’s comprehensive researches cropped the ground so close that little seemed to have been left for his successors to glean. But the discovery of Smith’s _Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms_, edited by Mr. Edwin Cannan and published in 1896, has furnished new and important materials.

Of Smith’s innumerable critics and commentators, Bagehot, Oncken, Ingram, and Hasbach seem to me to have understood him best. The misdirected erudition of some others has only proved the importance of allowing him to be his own interpreter.

Dr. David Murray of Glasgow has very kindly read portions of my proofs, and has contributed most generously from his wonderful store of learning.

F. W. H.

Contents

PAGE CHAPTER I Early Years 1 CHAPTER II The Beginning of a Career 23 CHAPTER III Theology and Religious Establishments 36 CHAPTER IV “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” 46 CHAPTER V In the Glasgow Chair—The Lectures on Justice And Police 68 CHAPTER VI Glasgow and its University 94 CHAPTER VII The Tour in France, 1764-66 118 CHAPTER VIII Politics and Study, 1766-76 144 CHAPTER IX The “Wealth of Nations” and its Critics 164 CHAPTER X Free Trade 188 CHAPTER XI Last Years 205 Index 237

Adam Smith

Chapter I Early Years

Adam Smith was born on June 5, 1723, in the “lang toun” of Kirkcaldy. It was one of the “mony royal boroughs yoked on end to end like ropes of ingans, with their hie-streets and their booths, and their kraemes and houses of stane and lime and forestairs,” which led Andrew Fairservice to contrast “the kingdom of Fife” with the inferior county of Northumberland; nay, it furnished him with a special boast, “Kirkcaldy, the sell o’t, is langer than ony toun in England.” It had been a royal borough from the time of Charles I., and had declined, like many other Scotch towns, in the religious wars of the seventeenth century. Many of its citizens who had fought for the Covenant had fallen on the fatal field of Tippermuir. But it still contained about 1500 inhabitants, who were variously employed as colliers, fishermen, salters, nailmakers, and smugglers. From the harbour you might walk a mile or more westward along the High Street, enjoying from time to time a glimpse of the sea and shelving beach, where the line of shops opened for a narrow “wynd,” or a still narrower “close” threaded the high-walled gardens of a few substantial houses. In one of these Adam Smith wrote the _Wealth of Nations_, and probably in one of these he was born. The father, who died a few weeks before the birth of his only child, had been a leading townsman. Adam Smith the elder was a man of note in his own day. From 1707 to his death he was a Writer,[1] _i.e._ solicitor, and Judge Advocate for Scotland. He had acted as private secretary to Lord Loudon, then Minister for Scotland; and Loudon, on leaving office in 1713, obtained for his secretary the Comptrollership of Customs at Kirkcaldy—a post worth about £100 a year.

His widow lived to a great age, and saw her boy rise step by step to the fulness of fame. She is said to have been an over-indulgent mother; but her devotion was repaid by the life-long love of a most tender son. Mrs. Smith’s maiden name was Margaret Douglas, and she was the daughter of the Laird of Strathendry, in the county of Fife. At Strathendry the future economist had a narrow escape; for one day as he played at the door he was picked up and carried off by a party of vagrant tinkers. Luckily he was soon missed, pursued and overtaken in Leslie Wood; and thus, in the grandiose dialect of Dugald Stewart, there was preserved to the world “a genius, which was destined, not only to extend the boundaries of science, but to enlighten and reform the commercial policy of Europe.”

The next landmark in the boy’s history is a copy of _Eutropius_, on the fly-leaf of which is inscribed in a childish hand, “Adam Smith, his book, May 4th, 1733.” Before his tenth birthday, therefore, he had already made some progress in Latin. The Burgh School of Kirkcaldy, which he attended, was a good grammar school of the kind that already abounded in Scotland. It was patronised by the Oswalds of Dunnikier, the principal people of the neighbourhood. James Oswald, who soon made a mark in politics, was Smith’s senior by some years, but they became life-long friends. Robert Adams, the architect who planned Edinburgh University, was another friend and schoolfellow; and so was John Drysdale, who twice held the helm of the Scotch Church as Moderator of its General Assembly. In 1734 the schoolboys played a moral piece written for the purpose by the head master, David Millar. As a teacher he had a considerable reputation, but as a dramatist he will be judged by the title of his play, “A Royal Counsel for Advice; or Regular Education for Boys the Foundation of all other Improvements.” Adam Smith soon attracted notice at school “by his passion for books and by the extraordinary powers of his memory.” Too weak and delicate to join in active games, he was yet popular with his schoolfellows; for his temper, “though warm, was to an uncommon degree friendly and generous.” In company his absentmindedness was often noticed, and this habit, with a trick of talking to himself, clung to him to the end.

In his fourteenth year Smith left the Grammar School of Kirkcaldy for the University of Glasgow, where he was to remain until the spring of 1740. He entered, probably, in October 1737, at the beginning of the session. As the full course extended over four sessions and Smith only attended three, he did not take his degree; but he had the good fortune to study Greek under Dunlop, mathematics under Simson, the editor of Euclid, and morals under Hutcheson, perhaps the greatest philosopher of his generation, and certainly the most eloquent.

Glasgow, though still but a small place, was already the most prosperous and progressive of Scotch towns. After a century of decay it had found salvation in the Act of Union, which gave it free trade with England and a share in the colonial monopoly. Readers of _Rob Roy_ will remember how the inimitable Jarvie enlarged upon these advantages and on the facilities Glasgow possessed “of making up sortable cargoes for the American market.” It was very loyal, therefore, to the House of Hanover. In the rising of 1745, Charles Edward got considerable support from Edinburgh, and even from Manchester, but none from Glasgow, which, indeed, soon afterwards obtained a parliamentary vote of £10,000 in recognition of its exertions and as compensation for its losses. Glasgow was the only town in Scotland, as a learned writer has observed, to exhibit the same kind of visible progress in the first half of the eighteenth century which the rest of the country developed in the second. Its shipping, sadly cramped by the Navigation Act, began to expand after the Union. In 1716 the “first honest vessel in the West India trade” sailed from the Clyde, and in 1735, two years before Smith’s arrival, Glasgow owned sixty-seven vessels with a total burden of 5600 tons, nearly half of the total Scotch, though only one-eightieth of the total English tonnage.

In this rising mart Smith learned to value the English connection, and as he trod its busy streets and watched the merchandise of the West pouring into its warehouses, the boy saw that a new world had been called in to enrich the old. With the new sights and sounds came new ideas that had not yet penetrated the gloom of Holyrood or the rusty pride of the Canongate. From the lips of his master, Hutcheson, he heard that fruitful formula which his own philosophy was to interpret and develop, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” His mind was opened at once to the wisdom of the ancients and to the discoveries of the moderns. He learned from Bacon, and Grotius, and Locke, and Newton to discern through the obscuring mists of mediæval philosophy the splendid dawn of science. To the end of his life he loved to recall “the abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson.” Unorthodox yet not irreligious, radical yet not revolutionary, receptive yet inspiring, erudite yet original, Hutcheson was one of those rare reformers whose zeal is fertilised by knowledge and enforced by practical devotion. In early manhood he had refused to seek an easy advancement by subscribing to the tenets of the Church of England in Ireland, and while Smith was at Glasgow he braved the resentment of the Presbytery by teaching moral principles which were supposed to contravene the Westminster Confession. He was also the first in the University to abandon the practice of lecturing in Latin; and Dugald Stewart tells us that his old pupils were all agreed about his extraordinary talent as a public speaker. His pen was so unequal to his tongue that Stewart applies to Hutcheson what Quintilian said of Hortensius: “apparet placuisse aliquid eo dicente quod legentes non invenimus.”—“He gave a pleasure to his hearers which his readers miss.”

Hutcheson’s work in Glasgow (1730-1746) was of the utmost importance to Scotland. “I am called the New Light here,” he said. He stood for reform of the universities, for the criticism of abuses and privileges, for free thought, free speech, and the spirit of inquiry. He took a lively interest in his pupils, and tried to keep them abreast of the times. He set Adam Smith to write an analysis of Hume’s _Treatise of Human Nature_ as soon as it appeared, and the lad of seventeen did his exercise so well that Hume got it printed in London and had a copy of the _Treatise_ sent him by way of reward. Hutcheson has been called an eclectic. Certainly he had read widely and thought deeply upon the difficulties and perplexities of a new age, an age of scientific discovery and philosophic doubt, an age tired of the syllogism, disdainful of divine right, eager to find natural principles of morality, law, and government. From the _System of Moral Philosophy_, published after his death, we get a clear notion of the range of his lectures. He considered man as a social animal, and accordingly refused to divorce the science of individual ethics from the science of politics. He followed Aristotle in including chapters on jurisprudence and economics in his scheme of moral philosophy. It has been well said that the same natural liberty and optimism which served Smith as assumptions were the theses of Hutcheson, who himself learned much from Shaftesbury. Hutcheson and Smith were both reformers, and were more hopeful, if less cheerful, than Hume. Hume was a genial cynic without any zeal for reform, who found repose in Butler’s doctrine that things are what they are, and that their consequences will be what they will be.

But with Hutcheson and Smith it was a real religion to see that society should be better governed; they made it the supreme object of their lives to increase the happiness of mankind by diffusing useful truths and exposing mischievous errors. In the scope of his philosophy, in temper and practical aim, Smith may be called the spiritual descendant of Hutcheson. There are also marked resemblances in their subject matter and even in some minor points of doctrine, as a careful comparison recently instituted by a very competent writer abundantly shows.[2] We find Smith using the same authorities as his predecessor and quoting them to much the same purpose. Even Hutcheson’s crude and fragmentary economics offered many suggestions that were afterwards developed and harmonised by Smith in his lectures. The Sunday lectures on Natural Theology, by which Hutcheson sought to reduce the intolerance and soften the harshness of Scottish orthodoxy, made a lasting impression upon the mind of his great pupil.

Besides his work with Hutcheson, Smith laid at Glasgow the foundation of an early mastery of the classics, and prepared himself for a wide course of reading in the literature and wisdom of the ancients. But mathematics and natural philosophy are said to have been his favourite pursuits at this time—indeed he seems to have attained in both a considerable proficiency, which never escaped the tenacious grip of his memory. Matthew Stewart, Dugald’s father, was one of his fellow-students. Long afterwards, when Professor of Mathematics in Edinburgh, he was heard discussing with Smith “a geometrical problem of considerable difficulty,” which had been set them as an exercise by Simson. Matthew Stewart, who died in 1785, is commemorated with Simson in the sixth edition of Smith’s _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, published fifty years after this time. After observing that “mathematicians who may have the most perfect assurance of the truth and of the importance of their discoveries, are frequently very indifferent about the reception which they may meet with from the public,” Adam Smith cites Dr. Robert Simson of Glasgow, and Dr. Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, “the two greatest mathematicians that I ever had the honour to be known to, and I believe, the two greatest that have lived in my time,” as men who never seemed to feel the slightest uneasiness from the neglect with which some of their most valuable works were received. For several years, he adds, even Sir Isaac Newton’s _Principia_ fell flat, but his tranquillity did not suffer for a single quarter of an hour. Newton always stood at the very top of Smith’s calendar.

Smith left Glasgow at the early age of seventeen. His mother, acting on the advice of her relatives, had destined the boy for the Church of England, which then opened the door to so many lucrative positions. Perhaps they hoped from his talents for a career like that of his famous countryman, Bishop Burnet, who indeed had himself been a Professor of Divinity at Glasgow. The intention went so far that in his third year Smith sought and obtained one of those exhibitions which have taken so many distinguished Scots from the University of Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford. The Snell Exhibitions, as they are called, were founded by an old Glasgow student of that name in 1679, with a view to educating Scots for the service of the Episcopalian Church. It chanced, however, that during his residence at Oxford, an application made by the Oxford authorities to compel the Snell Exhibitioners “to submit and conform to the doctrines of the Church of England and to enter into holy orders” was refused by the Court of Chancery; so that when the time came Smith was able to choose his own career and to strike off from the easier road which took his Fifeshire friend Douglas in due time to a bishopric. The change from Glasgow to Oxford was immense. It was more than exile; it was transmigration from a living to a dead society, from the thrill of a rising and thriving community, where men lived and moved and thought, to a city of dreaming spires and droning dons. In June 1740 he rode on horseback to Oxford and matriculated on the 17th of July, entering himself in a round schoolboy hand as “Adamus Smith, e Coll. Ball. Gen. Fil. Jul. 7mo. 1740.”

It will be remembered that when Captain Waverley crossed the border, five years later, on his way to join the Young Pretender, the houses of Tully Veolan seemed miserable in the extreme, “especially to an eye accustomed to the smiling neatness of English cottages.” Smith rode through Carlisle, and he told Samuel Rogers in 1789 that he recollected being much struck as he approached that town by the richness of England and by the superiority of English agriculture. England indeed was then remarkably prosperous, thanks to a long peace, low taxes, and good harvests. Food was generally cheap and plentiful. Trade was good; and better means of transit by road and canal were being developed. But the land of the Scots, “during fifty generations the rudest perhaps of all European nations, the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled,” was still unimproved. The roads were almost impassable for wheeled vehicles. Coaches were unknown.[3] Many of the most fertile tracts were waste, and there is respectable authority for the opinion that some parts of the Lowlands were worse cultivated than in the thirteenth century. Under such conditions, rude beyond conception, poverty was universal. Even the gentry could seldom afford such bare comforts as half a century later their own farmers possessed. As for the common people, clothed in the coarsest garb and starving on the meanest fare, they dwelt in despicable huts with their cattle. It is significant that in those days Scotland had no fatted kine. There was no market for good meat, and the taste only grew with the means for gratifying it. Adam Smith was fond of telling at his own table in after years, how on the first day he dined in the hall of Balliol, having fallen into one of his fits of absent-mindedness, he was roused by the servitor who told him to “fall to, for he had never seen such a piece of beef in Scotland.”

Of the hundred undergraduates then at Balliol about eight came from Scotland, and four of these were Snell Exhibitioners. Their peculiarities of manner and dialect marked them off from the rest of the college, and they were treated as foreigners. Their relations with the authorities were unpleasant. In 1744, Smith and the other Exhibitioners stated their grievances to the Senate of Glasgow University, and explained how their residence might be made “more easy and commodious.” A few years afterwards, one of them told the Master that what the Exhibitioners wanted was to be transferred to some other college on account of their “total dislike of Balliol.” The friction between Balliol and Glasgow lasted long, and it was no doubt his own unsatisfactory experience that drew from Adam Smith thirty years afterwards a strong condemnation of close scholarships.[4]

The University of Oxford was at that time and for the rest of the century sunk deep in intellectual apathy, a muddy reservoir of sloth, ignorance, and luxury from which men sank as by a law of gravitation into the still lower level of civil and ecclesiastical sinecures. In the colleges there were only degrees of badness; but the charity of Snell had been rather unkind to Smith, for Balliol being Jacobite was particularly rowdy and intolerant. It has been mentioned that in his last year at Glasgow, Smith wrote for Hutcheson an abstract of David Hume’s _Treatise of Human Nature_ which brought him a presentation copy from the author. This copy he seems to have carried south with him; for the Balliol authorities, it is recorded, caught Smith in the act of reading the godless work, censured him severely, and confiscated a book which more than a century afterwards was to be sumptuously edited by two honoured alumni of the same college.

The narrow spirit which this incident illustrates seems to have made a painful impression upon the student’s memory. In the _Wealth of Nations_ he complains bitterly of the compulsory “sham-lecture,” and visits with severe censure the casuistry and sophistry by which the ancient course of philosophy had been corrupted. This completed course, he says, was meant to train ecclesiastics, and “certainly did not render it more proper for the education of gentlemen or men of the world, or more likely either to improve the understanding or to mend the heart.” At Oxford “the greater part of the public professors have for many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.” College discipline was in general contrived “not for the benefit of the students, but for the interests, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.”

In England the public schools were “much less corrupted than the universities; for in the schools a boy was taught, or at least might be taught Greek and Latin,” whereas “in the universities the youth neither are taught, nor always can find any proper means of being taught, the sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to teach.” It is only fair to add that Gibbon’s experiences of Magdalen, Bishop Butler’s of Christ Church, and Bentham’s of Queen’s, were equally adverse. And Balliol could at least offer its undergraduates the advantage of an excellent library. When such a cloud lay heavy upon that ancient seat of learning, it is no wonder if Smith with his sedentary disposition and frugal habits—he probably lived on his exhibition of £40—should have spent his six years at Balliol in the society of its books rather than of its tipsy undergraduates. Oxford, it has been observed by the most diligent of his biographers, is the only place he lived in which failed to furnish him with friends. But he never displayed towards it the lively antipathy of Gibbon; far from regretting his residence there, he mentioned it with gratitude many years afterwards. In Oxford he certainly gained the liberal knowledge of ancient and modern literature that enriches and adorns all his writings. The bookshops must have introduced him to his favourite Pope, to Swift and Addison, and the fashionable writers of the day. He employed himself frequently, he used to say, in the practice of translations, especially of French authors, in order to improve his style.

“How intimately,” writes Dugald Stewart, “he had once been conversant with more ornamental branches of learning, in particular with the works of the Roman, Greek, French, and Italian poets, appeared sufficiently from the hold they kept of his memory after all the different occupations and inquiries in which his maturer faculties had been employed.” He had an extraordinary knowledge of English poetry, and could quote from memory with a correctness which, says the same grave Scot, “appeared surprising even to those whose attention had never been directed to more important acquisitions.” What little intellectual activity outside politics still lingered on at Oxford was probably connected with philological speculations such as those of James Harris, the learned, if somewhat priggish, author of _Hermes_. At any rate, Smith went deeply into every branch of grammar. Andrew Dalzel, who was Professor of Greek at Edinburgh in Adam Smith’s old age, often remarked on “the uncommon degree in which Mr. Smith retained possession even to the close of his life of different branches of knowledge which he had long ceased to cultivate,” and particularly mentioned to his colleague Dugald Stewart, “the readiness and correctness” of his memory on philological subjects and his acuteness in discussing the _minutiæ_ of Greek grammar.

Dugald Stewart failed to collect any information about Smith’s Oxford days, but a few relics have been preserved by Lord Brougham in the appendix to the discursive and rather disappointing essay upon Adam Smith that appears in his _Lives of the Philosophers_. “I have now before me,” says Brougham, “a number of Dr. Smith’s letters written when at Oxford between the years 1740 and 1746 to his mother: they are almost all upon mere family and personal matters; most of them indeed upon his linen and other such necessaries, but all show his strong affection for his parent.” The few quotations Brougham gives are barely worth recording. On November 29, 1743, Adam Smith writes: “I am just recovered of a violent fit of laziness, which has confined me to my elbow chair these three months.” Again on July 2, 1744: “I am quite inexcusable for not writing to you oftener. I think of you every day, but always defer writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or company, but oftener laziness, hinders me.” He speaks of “an inveterate scurvy and shaking of the head” which have been perfectly cured by tar water, “a remedy very much in vogue here for all diseases.”

His college contemporaries, says Mr. Rae, “were a singularly undistinguished body,” with the exception of a Fifeshire man, John Douglas, who had gone direct to Oxford from the Grammar School at Dunbar. Douglas at first had a small exhibition at St. Mary’s Hall, but after fighting at Fontenoy, he obtained a Snell Exhibition. He distinguished himself later as a pamphleteer and was rewarded with the Bishopric of Salisbury. With this exception, Adam Smith seems to have made no friends at Oxford. Besides his books he must have enjoyed from time to time walks and excursions into the surrounding country. In the _Wealth of Nations_ he was able to make close comparisons of the condition of the labouring classes in England and Scotland, and there is a passage, about the use of coal and wood by the common people in Oxfordshire, to show that he had certainly acquired as an undergraduate the faculty of minute and picturesque observation which he afterwards turned to such account.[5] What Smith did in the vacations we do not know. He could not have had much money to spare, and there is no indication that he ever returned home or even visited London.

At last, in August 1746, after taking his degree as a Bachelor of Arts, he retraced his steps to Scotland, and gave up all thought of a clerical career. In the words of his biographer, “he chose to consult in this instance his own inclinations in preference to the wishes of his friends; and abandoning at once all the schemes which their prudence had formed for him, he resolved to return to his own country and to limit his ambition to the uncertain prospect of obtaining, in time, some one of those moderate preferments to which literary attainments lead in Scotland.” He was now in 1746 again in his mother’s house at Kirkcaldy, “engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life.” So far as I am aware, none of Adam Smith’s biographers has definitely assigned to this period any of the writings which he either published or left to his executors. In the latter class, however, there is a group of fragments dealing with the history of Astronomy, of Ancient Physics, and of Ancient Logic and Metaphysics, and an elaborate essay on _The Imitative Arts_, which are collectively described by his executors in an advertisement as “parts of a plan he once had formed for giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts.”[6]

The essay on _The Imitative Arts_ belongs to a different design and to a slightly later period. But it seems clear that the _History of Astronomy_ was composed at this time.[7] There is no other period of his life in which he would have been so well able to collect the materials for an examination of the systems of the Greek, the Arabian, and the mediæval astronomers as in the six years of Oxford study, or so likely to shape them into a finished treatise as in the two quiet years spent at Kirkcaldy immediately after his return, when, we are told, he was “engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life.” The _History of Astronomy_, which takes us from the schools of Thales and Pythagoras through the systems of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes to that of Sir Isaac Newton, is complete in itself, though from certain notes and memoranda which accompanied it Smith’s executors were led to believe that he contemplated some further extension.[8] It ends very appropriately with an enthusiastic description of Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery as the greatest ever made by man. He had acquired “the most universal empire that was ever established in philosophy,” and was the only natural philosopher whose system, instead of being a mere invention of the imagination to connect otherwise discordant phenomena, appeared to contain in itself “the real chains which nature makes use of to bind together her several operations.” In attributing the _History of Astronomy_ to Oxford and Kirkcaldy I except the concluding pages, which must have been added in the last years of his life; for in a letter to Hume (1773) he spoke of it as a history of Astronomical Systems to the time (not of Newton but) of Descartes.

Although complete in itself, this masterly essay was plainly meant by its author to form only one book in a great history of philosophy. It begins with three short introductory sections, the first on surprise, the second on wonder, and the third on the origin of philosophy. It is the function of philosophy, he says, to discover the connecting principles of nature, and to explain those portents which astonish or affright mankind. He then shows that celestial appearances have always excited the greatest curiosity, and describes with extraordinary learning and vivacity the long series of attempts that had been made to account for “the ways of the sky and the stars”—

“How winter suns in ocean plunge so soon, And what delays the timid nights of June.”

_The History of Ancient Physics_, a much shorter fragment, is placed in his collected works immediately after the _History of Astronomy_. It evidently belongs to the same early period, but is of little interest. Upon _The History of Ancient Logics and Metaphysics_ we shall have something to say in our next chapter.

After two years of waiting, Adam Smith got his opportunity. His neighbour, James Oswald of Dunnikier, had become Kirkcaldy’s representative in Parliament, and was now a Commissioner of the Navy. Through Oswald Smith seems to have been introduced to Henry Home (Lord Kames), a leader of the Edinburgh Bar, and arbiter of Scottish elegancies. Home was a warm patron of English literature, and was busily importing it along with English ploughs and other Southern improvements into his native land. What a contrast between this typical Scotch patriot of 1750 and grim old Fletcher of Saltoun, the corresponding type of 1700, whose remedy for Scottish ills was to restore slavery, and place all labourers in the situation of salters and colliers! Finding that Smith had acquired the accent and was well read in the prose and poetry of England, Home encouraged him to give what we should now call extension lectures in Edinburgh. Accordingly the young Oxford graduate delivered a course of lectures on English literature in the winter of 1748-9, adding in the following year a course on political economy in which he preached the doctrines of natural liberty and free trade. The English lectures were attended by Henry Home, Alexander Wedderburn, and William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney), and proved no mere success of esteem; for they brought in a clear £100, and were so popular that they were repeated in the two following winters. The manuscript of these lectures was burnt shortly before his death, and the world is probably not much the poorer. Smith shared the opinions of his age, and set up Dryden, Pope, and Gray on pedestals from which they were soon to be thrown down by the children of nature and romance. He gave these lectures afterwards at Glasgow, and Boswell, who attended them in 1759, told Johnson that Smith had condemned blank verse. Johnson was delighted, and cried out: “Sir, I was once in company with Smith, and we did not take to each other; but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have hugged him.” One cannot help wondering what would have been said if Boswell had repeated another of our author’s critical opinions, that Johnson was “of all writers ancient and modern the one who kept off the greatest distance from common sense.”

The most valuable part of Adam Smith’s critical lectures has been preserved in an essay on the _Imitative Arts_, which I should judge from internal evidence to have been drafted at this time, but to have been revised and improved in later years. Considering that neither Burke’s essay on the _Sublime and Beautiful_ nor Lessing’s _Laocoon_ had then appeared, we cannot but admire the originality he displayed in analysing the different effects produced by sculpture, painting, music, and dancing, and in distinguishing the different pleasures that attend the various kinds and degrees of imitation. He works out with much ingenuity the theory of the _difficulté surmontée_ by which Voltaire accounted for the effect of verse and rhyme. Smith extends this principle to other arts, and seeks, always cleverly, often successfully, to show that much of our delight in art arises from our admiration for the artist’s skill in overcoming difficulties. He declares that a disparity between the imitating and the imitated object is the foundation of the beauty of imitation. The great masters of statuary and painting never produce their effects by deception. To prove this, he refers to the rather unpleasing effect produced by painted statues and by the reflections of a mirror. Photography would have supplied him with another illustration.

It may here be said that, though judged by modern standards of criticism Smith’s taste was faulty, yet all his favourite authors are in the first rank, and there is no instance recorded of his having bestowed praise on anything bad either in prose or poetry. “You will learn more as to poetry,” he once said, “by reading one good poem than by a thousand volumes of criticism.” Wordsworth in one of his prefaces calls him most unjustly “the worst critic, David Hume excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced.” The Lake Poet, who did not distinguish between the quality of the “Ode on the Intimations” and “Peter Bell,” was probably thinking of some literary anecdotes that appeared in _The Bee_ in 1791 after Smith’s death. The writer, who may or may not be trustworthy, is only repeating table talk. He mentions that Smith depreciated Percy’s _Reliques_ and some of Milton’s minor poems. With regard to blank verse, Smith said: “they do well to call it blank, for blank it is. I myself, even I, who never could find a single rhyme in my life, could make blank verse as fast as I could speak.” From this censure he always excepted Milton; but he thought the English dramatists should have used rhyme like the French. Racine’s _Phèdre_ appealed to him as the finest of all tragedies. Voltaire was his literary pope. Oddly enough, his first publisher’s commission was to collect and edit (anonymously, of course) for the Foulis Press an edition of the poems of a well-known Jacobite, Hamilton of Bangour. The book was published in 1748, and contained the “Braes of Yarrow,” which Wordsworth called an exquisite ballad. Hamilton had played poet laureate to the Young Pretender in 1745, and was still an exile in France. In 1750, when the poet was pardoned, he struck up a warm friendship with his anonymous editor, and (according to Sir John Dalrymple) Smith spent with him “many happy and flattering hours.”

It has been said that in addition to his lectures on English literature Smith also delivered a course on Economics. This we know from a manuscript by which Dugald Stewart vindicates Adam Smith’s claim to have been the original discoverer of the leading principles of political economy. This manuscript, a paper read by Smith to a learned society some years later, proves that he wrote, or rather dictated, his economic lectures in 1749, and delivered them in the following winter.

At this time David Hume and James Oswald were corresponding on commercial topics. In 1750 Hume, who was then abroad, sent Oswald his famous essay on the _Balance of Trade_, and asked for criticism. Oswald replied in a long letter which shows that he too held very enlightened views on public finance, and we may be pretty certain that Smith as well as Hume derived at this time much benefit from intercourse with Oswald. In fact, in his preface to Oswald’s correspondence, Oswald’s grandson boasts that he has heard Adam Smith, then the renowned author of the _Wealth of Nations_, “dilate with a generous and enthusiastic pleasure on the qualifications and merits of Mr. Oswald, candidly avowing at the same time how much information he had received on many points from the enlarged views and profound knowledge of that accomplished statesman.” Some allowance should be made for the natural exaggeration of a Scotch kinsman; but Smith certainly rated Oswald high, describing him in the paper above mentioned as one who combined a taste for general principles with the detailed information of a statesman. Stewart adds that “he was one of Mr. Smith’s earliest and most confidential friends.” They must have seen a great deal of one another both in Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh in the five years between his return from Oxford and the appointment we have now to record.

Chapter II The Beginning Of A Career

By his Edinburgh lectures Smith had proved that he could be at once learned and popular, and the fact that he was probably the only Scottish savant who had thoroughly acquired the English accent at a time when English had suddenly become highly fashionable north of the Tweed, would do him no harm in loyal Glasgow, where the English connection, with all its solid advantages, was well esteemed. Accordingly in 1750, when a vacancy occurred in the chair of Logic at Glasgow, Adam Smith’s candidature proved very acceptable, and he was unanimously appointed by the Senate. A week later he read a Latin dissertation on the Origin of Ideas, signed the Westminster Confession of Faith before the Presbytery of Glasgow, and took the usual oath of fidelity to the authorities. So far as I am aware, it has not been noticed hitherto that the substance of Smith’s inaugural dissertation, _De Origine Idearum_, has been preserved in a fragment published by his literary executors after his death. _The History of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics_, as the piece is called, deserves notice not only as one of the earliest specimens of Smith’s extraordinary power of reasoning, but because it proves his interest in some metaphysical questions which are suppressed or ignored in his larger treatises, and at the same time exhibits the range and accuracy of his classical scholarship.

In describing the ancient dialectic Smith had to give an explanation of what Plato meant by “ideas.” The later Platonists imagined their master to mean no more than that “the Deity formed the world after what we would now call an idea or plan conceived in his own mind, in the same manner as any other artist.” Against them the young philosopher proceeded to turn the formidable battery of ratiocination that was one day to demolish a living and formidable foe. It is characteristic of Adam Smith that whether he is attacking the harmless errors of an extinct school of thought, or the noxious fallacies of an established policy, he tries every mode of assault. He “swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies”:—

“If Plato had meant to express no more than this most natural and simple of all notions, he might surely have expressed it more plainly, and would hardly, one would think, have talked of it with so much emphasis, as of something which it required the utmost reach of thought to comprehend. According to this representation, Plato’s notion of species, or Universals, was the same with that of Aristotle. Aristotle, however, does not seem to understand it as such; he bestows a great part of his Metaphysics upon confuting it, and opposes it in all his other works.”

Again, this notion of the separate existence of Species is the very basis of Plato’s philosophy; and there is not a single dialogue in all his works which does not refer to it. Can Aristotle, “who appears to have been so much superior to his master in everything but eloquence,” wilfully have misinterpreted Plato’s fundamental principle when Plato’s writings were in everybody’s hands and his disciples were spread all over Greece; when Speusippus, the nephew and successor of Plato, as well as Xenocrates, who continued the school in the Academy, at the same time as Aristotle held his in the Lyceum, must have been ready at all times to expose and affront him for such gross disingenuity? Aristotle’s interpretation had been followed by Cicero, Seneca, and every classical authority down to Plutarch, “an author who seems to have been as bad a critic in philosophy as in history, and to have taken everything at second-hand in both.”

Whether Smith either then or at any time arrived at metaphysical certainty is very doubtful. “To explain the nature, and to account for the origin of general Ideas is,” he says, “even at this day, the greatest difficulty in abstract philosophy.”

“How the human mind when it reasons concerning the general nature of triangles, should either conceive, as Mr. Locke imagines it does, the idea of a triangle, which is neither obtusangular, nor rectangular, nor acutangular; but which was at once both none and of all those together; or should, as Malbranche thinks necessary for this purpose, comprehend at once, within its finite capacity, all possible triangles of all possible forms and dimensions, which are infinite in number, is a question to which it is not easy to give a satisfactory answer.”

He suggests that notions like those of Plato, or Cudworth, or Malebranche, depend a good deal upon the vague and general language in which they are expressed. So long as a philosophy is not very distinctly explained, it “passes easily enough through the indolent imagination accustomed to substitute words in the room of ideas.” Platonism vanishes indeed, and is discovered to be altogether incomprehensible upon an attentive consideration. It did, however, require attentive consideration, and but for Aristotle “might without examination have continued to be the current philosophy for a century or two.” This early and unnoticed composition proves that Smith had thought deeply on metaphysics though he deliberately avoided them in his masterpieces.

He found time to translate and read part of the essay as a Latin dissertation; but his engagements in Edinburgh prevented him from taking up his new work before the autumn. When October came he found his task doubled. Craigie, the Professor of Ethics, had fallen ill, and had been ordered to Lisbon for his health. Smith was informed of this by Dr. Cullen, one of his new colleagues, and was requested to undertake Craigie’s duties. It was further suggested that he should pay particular attention to jurisprudence and politics, which were held to fall within the province of moral philosophy. Smith replies (3rd September 1751) that he will gladly relieve Craigie of his class, and will willingly undertake to lecture on natural jurisprudence and politics.

The session began on the 10th of October, and soon afterwards came the news of Craigie’s death. Smith detested the sophisms of what he called “the cobweb science” of Ontology, and cared little for the Logic of the schools. He was anxious, therefore, to be transferred to the chair of Ethics, and at the same time formed a design with other friends to procure the appointment of his friend David Hume to the chair of Logic. But the prejudice against Hume proved too strong. “I should prefer David Hume to any man for the college,” Smith wrote privately to Cullen, “but I am afraid the public would not be of my opinion, and the interest of the society will oblige us to have regard to the opinion of the public.” This was from Edinburgh, whither Smith had made what was then (incredible as it may seem) a two-days’ journey from Glasgow, in order to wait upon Archibald, Duke of Argyll, nicknamed King of Scotland, because he exercised a sort of royal influence over all Scottish appointments. At the duke’s levee Smith was duly introduced, and his application was successful. The transfer was effected, and in April Smith was appointed to the chair which he was to adorn for twelve years. It was perhaps the most important event of his life. For a temperament like his, so prone to study and reflection, so averse to the toil of the pen, required some constant external stimulus, some congenial inducement to undertake the task of exposition. His gifts might have remained idle, his talents buried, had not the warm and sympathetic atmosphere of a full, eager, and admiring class-room set his tongue and his more reluctant pen in motion. We need not brood over the might-not-have-beens; but when we think of the power that fortune exercises over men’s lives, we may thank her for assigning Adam Smith at this critical moment to the town and University of Glasgow. By that propitious act she lent powerful aid to the construction of a science that must ever be associated with the prosperity and peaceful progress of mankind.

Smith himself has indicated in a general statement the advantages he derived from this professorship:—

“To impose upon any man the necessity of teaching, year after year, any particular branch of science, seems, in reality, to be the most effectual method for rendering him completely master of it himself. By being obliged to go every year over the same ground, if he is good for anything he necessarily becomes, in a few years, well acquainted with every part of it: and if upon any particular point he should form too hasty an opinion one year, when he comes in the course of his lectures to reconsider the same subject the year thereafter, he is very likely to correct it. As to be a teacher of science is certainly the natural employment of a mere man of letters, so is it likewise perhaps the education which is most likely to render him a man of solid learning and knowledge.”

He regarded the profession of teacher as an education, and for that very reason he never ceased to be a learner and a discoverer. Instead of sticking in the muddy ruts of dogma, he drove on gathering facts and opinions till he reached the goal. To vary a well-known inscription, he might have written over the door of his class-room, “Deverticulum philosophi ad veritatem proficiscentis,”—the resting-place of a philosopher on march to truth. Assuredly a happier appointment was never made, whether we look at the true interests of the Professor himself or at those of the University. Smith always thought the years at Glasgow the happiest and most useful of his life. Besides his strong preference for Morals over Logic, he had carnal reasons to rejoice in the transference, for it gave a rather better income. Altogether the chair of Morals at Glasgow seems to have yielded about £170 a year—a fine income in Scotland at a time when, as Mr. Rae observes, the largest stipend in the Presbyterian Church was £138.

In addition to salary and fees, Smith was allotted a good house in the Professors’ Court, which he shared with his mother and cousin (Miss Jane Douglas), who came from Kirkcaldy to live with him. The manses in the old Professors’ Court were held by the professors in order of seniority, and Smith removed three times in order to take full advantage of his privileges, obtaining the best in 1762, when Leechman, Hutcheson’s biographer, was appointed Principal. In 1761, when a second edition of the _Moral Sentiments_ appeared, with a newly inserted passage describing the view from his study window, he was in the house previously occupied by Dr. Dick, Professor of Natural Philosophy. To this house nature seems to have been especially kind,—though in reading Smith’s description of his view we must recollect that Glasgow, the garden city, was then famous for the clearness of its atmosphere and the beauty of its surroundings. “In my present situation,” that is to say, looking from the window of his study, he sees “an immense landscape of lawns and woods and distant mountains.” The landscape illustrates the philosophy of the mind: it “seems to do no more than cover the little window which I write by and to be out of all proportion less than the chamber in which I am sitting.” He can form a just comparison between the great objects of the remote scene and the little objects in the room only by transporting himself to a different station from whence both could be surveyed at nearly equal distances. The image, it will be seen, is introduced by Adam Smith to illustrate his theory of “the impartial spectator,” the judge within the breast, whom we must consult if we are to see the things that concern ourselves and others in their true shape and proportions. Just as a man must in some measure be acquainted with the philosophy of vision before he can be thoroughly convinced how small is his own room compared with the mountains he sees from his window, so to the selfish and original passions of human nature, unschooled by experience, unassisted by scale or measure, “the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own appears to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or sorrow than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connection.”[9]

With the failure of Hume’s candidature for the Logic chair was lost a golden opportunity of associating two of the first philosophers of that age on the staff of a small provincial college in one of the poorest, rudest, and least frequented kingdoms of Western Europe. The legend that Burke (four years before he published his _Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful_) was another candidate has been adjudged apocryphal, though it was formerly accepted by good authorities. Many of the Glasgow students were Irish Presbyterians, and an Irishman might well have been encouraged to seek a chair in the University of Hutcheson.

George Jardine, a student in 1760 and Professor of Logic from 1774, dated the first radical reform in the teaching of philosophy at Glasgow, from a royal visitation of 1727, after which each professor was restricted to a particular department instead of being required to lecture for three successive years in logic, ethics, and physics. He adds that the improvements thus introduced were greatly promoted by fortunate appointments. First came Dr. Francis Hutcheson, whose “copious and splendid eloquence” illustrated an amiable system of morality, and at the same time popularised the use of English as the medium of instruction. Hutcheson’s reforms were not suspended by his death. But the Logic class continued to be conducted in Latin until Adam Smith, being rather unexpectedly called to the office in 1750, “found it necessary to read in the English language a course of lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres which he had formerly delivered in Edinburgh.” The last department in the University to abandon Latin was Law, and the innovator was Smith’s pupil and friend, John Millar.

After Smith’s brief tenure of the chair, Logic fell back for a time to its old subject-matter, but the Latin medium could not be revived. “From the time that the lectures began to be delivered in English the eyes of men were opened,” writes Jardine. It was felt that the old logic of the schools, even when perfectly understood, had little or no connection with modern thought, and none with the active business of life. The local situation, too, of the University in a great commercial city, where men had a quick perception of utility, and looked for a clear adaptation of means to ends, helped to promote reform. But dislike of Logic and Ontology was not peculiar to Smith or to Glasgow. They were discountenanced by the most popular philosopher of that age. “Had the craftiest men,” wrote Shaftesbury in his _Characteristics_, “for many ages together been employed in finding out a method to confound reason and to degrade the understandings of men, they could not perhaps have succeeded better than by the establishing of this mock science.” Hutcheson had ignored logic and avoided metaphysical problems. In his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, Smith renounced “the abstruse syllogisms of a quibbling dialectic”; but he never made the mistake of confounding Aristotle with the Aristotelians.

There is in the _Wealth of Nations_ a highly interesting digression upon the Universities, to explain how Greek conceptions of philosophy were debased in the Middle Ages, and how its ancient division into three parts was altered for another into five in most of the academies of Europe. In the ancient philosophy, whatever was taught concerning the nature either of the human mind or the deity made a part of the system of physics. Whatever reason could conclude or conjecture upon the human and the divine mind, made two chapters of “the science which pretended to give an account of the origin and revolutions of the great system of the universe.” But in the universities of Europe, “where philosophy was taught only as subservient to theology,” it was natural to dwell upon these two chapters and to make them distinct sciences. And so Metaphysics or Pneumatics were set up in opposition to Physics.

The result was, in Adam Smith’s view, disastrous. While on the one hand, subjects requiring experiment and observation, and capable of yielding many useful discoveries, were almost entirely neglected; on the other a subject, in which “after a few very simple and obvious truths the most careful attention can discover nothing but obscurity and uncertainty, and can consequently produce nothing but subtleties and sophisms, was greatly cultivated.” Metaphysics having thus been set up in opposition to physics, the comparison between them naturally gave birth to a third, called ontology, or the science which treated of the qualities and attributes common to both. “But if subtleties and sophisms composed the greater part of the Metaphysics or Pneumatics of the schools, they composed the whole of this cobweb science of Ontology.” Holding these views, it is not surprising that Smith welcomed an escape from this chair to one which proposed as its object an inquiry of a very different nature: wherein consists the happiness and perfection of a man, considered not only as an individual, but as the member of a family, of a state, and of the great society of mankind. Here was a stepping-stone to the _Wealth of Nations_. Meanwhile he did what he could to unsettle the cobweb sciences.

Of Smith as a logician, John Millar, a member of his class in 1751-2, wrote that he “saw the necessity of departing widely from the plan that had been followed by his predecessors, and of directing the attention of his pupils to studies of a more interesting and useful nature than the logic and the metaphysics of the schools.” Accordingly, says Millar, “after exhibiting a general view of the powers of the mind, and explaining so much of the ancient logic as was requisite to gratify curiosity with respect to an artificial method of reasoning which had once occupied the universal attention of the learned, he dedicated all the rest of his time to the delivery of a system of rhetoric and belles lettres.” Another of those who attended his classes at Glasgow says that even after he became Professor of Moral Philosophy he would from time to time give lectures on taste and literature, and it must have been one of these that Boswell heard in 1759. Art, the drama, and music were always favourite objects of his speculations, and doubtless the substance of his essay on the _Imitative Arts_ was delivered from time to time in the University. Millar says Smith never appeared to greater advantage than as a lecturer:—

“His manner, though not graceful, was plain and unaffected, and as he seemed to be always interested in the subject, he never failed to interest his hearers. Each discourse consisted commonly of several distinct propositions, which he successively endeavoured to prove and illustrate. These propositions when announced in general terms had, from their extent, not unfrequently something of the air of a paradox. In his attempts to explain them, he often appeared at first not to be sufficiently possessed of the subject, and spoke with some hesitation. As he advanced, however, the matter seemed to crowd upon him, his manner became warm and animated, and his expression easy and fluent. In points susceptible of controversy you could easily discern that he secretly conceived an opposition to his opinions, and that he was led upon this account to support them with greater energy and vehemence. By the fulness and variety of his illustrations the subject gradually swelled in his hands and acquired a dimension which, without a tedious repetition of the same views, was calculated to seize the attention of his audience, and to afford them pleasure as well as instruction in following the same subject through all the diversity of shades and aspects in which it was presented, and afterwards in tracing it backwards to that original proposition or general truth from which this beautiful train of speculation had proceeded.”

Another old pupil dwelt upon his “animated and extemporaneous eloquence,” especially when he was drawn into digressions in the course of question and answer. Smith himself attributed his success very largely to the vigilant care with which he watched his audience; for he depended very much upon their sympathy. “During one whole session,” he is reported to have said, “a certain student with a plain but expressive countenance was of great use to me in judging of my success. He sat conspicuously in front of a pillar: I had him constantly under my eye. If he leant forward to listen all was right, and I knew that I had the ear of my class; but if he leant back in an attitude of listlessness I felt at once that all was wrong, and that I must change either the subject or the style of my address.”

Chapter III Theology And Religious Establishments

The age into which Adam Smith was born was an age of religious doubt and philosophic curiosity. During his lifetime the governing classes in England, undisturbed by enthusiasms, were little disposed to entertain revolutionary ideas in politics or religion. It seemed to be the function of philosophic thinkers to leave the constitution of a tolerably liberal State and a tolerably lax Church, and to advance in other directions. The fierce storms that bent the course of Selden and Milton and Hobbes had abated. Men tried to forget

“The lifted axe, the agonising wheel, Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s bed of steel.”

No one believed that the Deity created kings; many doubted whether there was a Deity at all. Since the great days of Athens, philosophy had seldom reaped a richer harvest than in Great Britain during the eighty years that followed the Act of Union. Newton’s _Principia_, and the philosophy of Shaftesbury, Clarke, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler, as well as of Hume and Adam Smith, all fall within this period. Speculative discovery went hand in hand with mechanical invention. The poetry of enthusiasm, religious and political fervour, persecution, martyrdom, with all their heroic and squalid accompaniments, preceded and followed this prosaic illumination. It was a chapter of dry light between two of heat and fire and smoke. Reason reigned; and as reason seldom wears an air of originality, we need not wonder if later ingenuity has discovered that all these philosophers borrowed their doctrines either from the ancients or from one another or from foreigners.

But though there appears to be just now a tendency to carry the search for the genealogy and pedigree of ideas rather too far, it is certainly not our purpose to show that Adam Smith was a solitary conqueror who founded a kingdom entirely for himself, and peopled it with the creatures of his imagination. Every great thinker holds the past in fee, as he levies a perpetual tribute on the future. We may see how in the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ and in his lectures on Justice and Police Smith selected and used his materials; how, with the aid of Hutcheson and Mandeville and Hume, he invented a new doctrine of sympathy, and how he worked up the Platonic idea of the division of labour, and the Aristotelian theory of money, into a true science of national wealth. Nothing is left of the first part of the lectures, which dealt (briefly, no doubt) with natural theology and, in the earliest years of his professorship, very fully with moral philosophy. His pupil and friend Millar says that under the head of Natural Theology, the first part of his course, Smith considered the proofs of the being and attributes of God, and those principles of the human mind upon which religion is founded.

In the _Moral Sentiments_ and his other writings there are plenty of passages to indicate that he was a theist with a belief rather more active and definite than that of his friend Hume or of his master Aristotle, but few or none that he was a Christian. As professor he had to sign the Westminster Confession of Faith, a perfunctory act which even Hume would readily have performed without the scandal that surrounded Jowett’s cynical subscription a century later. But it was noticed by the orthodox that he was sadly wanting in zeal. Hutcheson, doubtless with the purpose of naturalising theology, had conducted a Sunday class on Christian evidences. Adam Smith discontinued this practice, and it was even whispered that he had applied to the authorities shortly after his appointment to be excused from opening his class with prayer. The request was refused, but the results were not satisfactory; for according to a contemporary, John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, his opening prayers “savoured strongly of natural religion,” while his theological lectures, though shorter, were no less flattering to human pride than those of Hutcheson, and led “presumptuous striplings” to draw the unwarranted conclusion “that the great truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to God and his neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature without any special revelation.” He was also, they say, often seen to smile openly during divine service in his place in the college chapel. When one remembers what orthodox Scottish sermons at that time meant, it is safe to conjecture that the smile was not always due (as Ramsay would have it) to an absent thought.

Although the lectures on Natural Theology have disappeared, the lectures on Morals were elaborated and published in 1759 as _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_. From this, his first important work, we may sufficiently ascertain how far Smith’s philosophy of life was based upon religious conceptions. Fortune governs the world. Nature intended the happiness and perfection of the species. Every part of nature, when attentively surveyed, equally demonstrates the providential care of its Author. Smith’s own scepticism is so carefully phrased and so disguised in soft language, that a stupid reader is never perplexed, a devout one never offended. Take, for example, his reflections upon the doctrine of a future life. That there is a world to come, he says in a passage of striking eloquence, “is a doctrine in every respect so venerable, so comfortable to the weakness, so flattering to the grandeur of human nature, that the virtuous man, who has the misfortune to doubt of it, cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and anxiously to believe it. It could never have been exposed to the derision of the scoffer, had not the distribution of rewards and punishments, which some of its most zealous assertors have taught us was to be made in that world to come, been too frequently in direct opposition to all our moral sentiments.” Smith had no great respect for the devout. To him the ritual and worship of the Deity seemed like the service and courtship of kings. He refuses to believe that an all-wise Deity would have a mind for adulation or would offer heavenly rewards to those who consecrate their lives to His worship:—

“That the assiduous courtier is often more favoured than the faithful and active servant; that attendance and adulation are often shorter and surer roads to preferment than merit or service; and that a campaign at Versailles or St. James’s is often worth two either in Germany or Flanders, is a complaint which we have all heard from many a venerable, but discontented, old officer. But what is considered as the greatest reproach even to the weakness of earthly sovereigns, has been ascribed, as an act of justice, to divine perfection; and the duties of devotion, the public and private worship of the Deity, have been represented even by men of virtue and abilities, as the sole virtues which can either entitle to reward or exempt from punishment in the life to come.”

His indignation flames out against celebrated doctors, both civil and ecclesiastical, who have questioned whether faith should be kept with rebels and heretics (“those unlucky persons who, when things have come to a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker party”). Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, “faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest.”

Morality is natural, but its rules have been sanctioned by the rudest forms of religion. Whether our moral faculties depend upon a modification of reason, upon a moral sense, or upon some other principle of our nature, they carry with them the most evident badges of authority, and were plainly set up within us to superintend our passions and appetites and to be the supreme arbiters of our actions. They are described in religious language as the vice-regents of God within us; they never fail to punish sin by the torments of inward shame and self-condemnation; they reward obedience with tranquillity and contentment. Oncken thinks that Smith’s eloquent vindication of conscience helped to form Kant’s moral idealism; but it puts us more in mind of the Roman satirist’s great line—

“Nocte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem.”

Moral judgments likewise help to correct in some measure the course of this world. “The industrious knave cultivates the soil; the indolent good man leaves it uncultivated. Who ought to reap the harvest?” Here the natural course of things decides against the natural sentiments of mankind. Human laws therefore often punish the knave or traitor though industrious, and reward the good citizen though improvident. Thus man is by nature prompted to correct nature; but even so his endeavours are often impotent; the current is too strong. Our natural sentiments are often shocked. We see great combinations oppress small. We see the innocent suffer. Despairing of earthly forces to check the triumph of injustice, we naturally appeal to heaven, “and thus we are led to a belief in the future state by the love of virtue,” and moral rules acquire new sanctity by being regarded as the laws of an all-powerful Deity. As religion in this way enforces an innate sense of duty, mankind is generally disposed to place great confidence in the probity of those who seem to be deeply religious.

And where religion has not been corrupted, “wherever men are not taught to regard frivolous observances, as more immediate duties of religion, than acts of justice and beneficence; and to imagine, that by sacrifices, and ceremonies, and vain supplications, they can bargain with the Deity for fraud, and perfidy, and violence, the world undoubtedly judges right in this respect, and justly places a double confidence in the rectitude of the religious man’s behaviour.”

Upon the dangerous question of religious establishments and dissenting sects he wrote afterwards in the _Wealth of Nations_ (Book v. i.) with a boldness and an air of detachment that might well startle even that age of tolerant indifference. He contrasts the teachers of new religions with the clergy of an ancient system, who are frequently possessed of learning, eloquence, and all the gentlemanly virtues. “Such a clergy, when attacked by a set of popular and bold though perhaps stupid and ignorant enthusiasts, feel themselves as perfectly defenceless as the indolent, effeminate, and full-fed nations of the southern parts of Asia, when they were invaded by the active, hardy, and hungry Tartars of the north.” Commonly, the only resource of such a clergy upon such an emergency is to summon the government to persecute or expel their adversaries. “It was thus that the Roman Catholic clergy called upon the civil magistrate to persecute the Protestants, and the Church of England to persecute the Dissenters.”

An established church may have a superiority of learning, but in the art of gaining popularity the advantage is always with its adversaries. He finds that, as dissenting bodies grow richer, their zeal and activity abate. The Independents, for instance, had many learned, ingenious, and respectable men; but the Methodists, without half the learning of the Dissenters, were more in vogue. The strength of the Church of Rome he attributed to the fact that the industry of its inferior clergy was better fostered by motives of self-interest than in the case of any established Protestant church; for many of the parish priests subsisted largely on voluntary gifts, “a source of revenue which confession gives them many opportunities of improving.” He notes also Machiavelli’s observation, that the establishment of the begging orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis revived, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the languishing faith and devotion of the Catholic Church. Upon the question of the value of a State Church, Smith quotes from a certain passage of Hume’s _History_, referring to his friend as “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age.” Hume had come to the conclusion that the civil magistrate who neglects to establish a religion will find he has dearly paid for his frugality, “and that in reality the most decent and advantageous composition which he can make with the spiritual guides, is to bribe their indolence by assigning stated salaries to their profession,” so that ecclesiastical establishments, “though commonly they arose at first from religious views, prove in the end advantageous to the political interests of society.”

But Smith, with the same dislike for “zeal,” had too much respect for liberty, too much love of honesty in politics, to adopt Hume’s cynical solution. He would find security in numbers. A State should extend toleration to all; society would naturally divide itself into hundreds of small sects, none of which could be considerable enough to disturb the public tranquillity. The teachers of each sect would be forced to learn a candour and moderation which is seldom to be found among an established clergy; and in this way, by mutual concessions, their doctrine would probably be reduced in time “to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established, but such as positive law has perhaps never yet established in any country.” This plan of ecclesiastical government, he adds, or more properly no ecclesiastical government, was what the Independents, “a sect no doubt of very wild enthusiasts,” proposed to establish in England towards the end of the Civil War. “If it had been established, though of a very unphilosophical origin, it would probably by this time have been productive of the most philosophical good temper and moderation with regard to every sort of religious principle.” Such is the plan favoured by Adam Smith, and he observes that in Pennsylvania, where it had been adopted, experience justified his opinion.

Smith was so popular with his orthodox contemporaries that they tried to parry charges of infidelity by saying either that he had adopted Hume’s opinions out of the intense affection he felt for him, or that he had been perverted by French atheists. “In the course of his travels,” says one of the most broad-minded of his Presbyterian contemporaries (John Ramsay), “he became acquainted with Voltaire and the other French philosophers who were then labouring with unhallowed industry in the vineyard of infidelity.” What impression they made upon him, adds this cautious man, “cannot be precisely known, because neither before nor after this period was his religious creed ever properly ascertained.”

Twenty years after Adam Smith’s death, Archbishop Magee, in a controversy with Unitarian theologians, cited a passage from the _Moral Sentiments_ on the doctrine of atonement, in which Smith had said that the doctrines of revelation coincide in every respect with the original anticipations of nature. “Such,” wrote the divine, “are the reflections of a man whose powers of thinking and reasoning will surely not be pronounced inferior to those of any even of the most distinguished champions of the Unitarian school.” The rejoinder was at once made that in the sixth edition, which Smith prepared for the press in 1790, the passage was omitted; whereupon the prelate (forgetting that Hume died in 1776, after four editions had appeared with this presentation of the reasonableness of an atonement) deftly turned a new moral: “It adds one proof more to the many that already existed of the danger, even to the most enlightened, from a familiar contact with infidelity.”

Chapter IV _The Theory Of Moral Sentiments_

In 1759, the seventh year of his professorship, Smith completed the first of his two capital achievements. His scholiasts are still curiously hazy about its early editions, partly perhaps because neither the first, second, nor third is to be found in the library of the British Museum. The first edition is a single octavo volume of 551 pages, printed in good large type.[10] The title-page runs as follows:—

The Theory Of Moral Sentiments

by Adam Smith

Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.

London: Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand and A. Kincaid and J. Bell in Edinburgh. MDCCLIX.

Andrew Millar was then at the head of the London publishers. He had shown some time before, when Hume’s _History_ fell into his hands, that he knew how to push a good book, and on this occasion too the firm lived up to its reputation.

Early in April, Hume, who was in London, received some copies, and wrote to thank Smith “for the agreeable present.” Always zealous in the service of friendship and Scottish literature, he employed all the wiles of diplomacy to promote the success of the book. “Wedderburn and I,” he writes, “made presents of our copies to such of our acquaintances as we thought good judges and proper to spread the reputation of the book. I sent one to the Duke of Argyle, and Lord Lyttelton, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, and Bourke, an English gentleman who wrote lately a very pretty treatise on the Sublime. Millar (the publisher) desired my permission to send one in your name to Dr. Warburton.” Hume had delayed writing till he could tell how the book had been received and “could prognosticate with some probability whether it should be finally damned to oblivion, or should be registered in the Temple of Immortality.” Though it has only been out for a few weeks, he thinks he can now foretell its fate. But instead of gratifying an author’s impatience, Hume pretends to have been interrupted by an impertinent visitor, and digresses upon vacancies in the Scottish Universities, upon a new edition of Ferguson’s _Treatise on Refinement_, on Wilkie’s _Epigoniad_, and Lord Kames’s _Law Tracts_. At last he seems to be coming to the point:—

“But to return to your book and its success in this town. I must tell you——

“A plague to interruptions!—I ordered myself to be denied, and yet here is one that has broken in upon me again.” The second visitor was a man of letters, and Hume goes off on a new scent. He advises Smith to read Helvetius’s new book _De L’Esprit_, and adds, “Voltaire has lately published a small work called _Candide ou L’Optimisme_. I shall give you a detail of it.”

At last the badinage comes to an end with a warning that popularity is no test of merit. A wise man should rather be disquieted than elated by the approbation of the multitude:—

“Supposing, therefore, that you have duly prepared yourself for the worst by all these reflections, I proceed to tell you the melancholy news that your book has been very unfortunate, for the public seem disposed to applaud it extremely. It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises. Three bishops called yesterday at Millar’s shop in order to buy copies, and to ask questions about the author. The Bishop of Peterborough said he had passed the evening in a company where he heard it extolled above all books in the world. The Duke of Argyle is more decisive than he used to be in its favour. I suppose he either considers it as an exotic, or thinks the author will be very serviceable to him in the Glasgow elections. Lord Lyttelton says that Robertson and Smith and Bower are the glories of English literature. Oswald protests he does not know whether he has reaped more instruction or entertainment from it, but you may easily judge what reliance can be placed on his judgment. He has been engaged all his life in public business, and he never sees any faults in his friends. Millar exults and brags that two-thirds of the edition are already sold, and that he is now sure of success. You see what a son of the earth that is, to value books only by the profit they bring him. In that view, I believe, it may prove a very good book.

“Charles Townshend, who passes for the cleverest fellow in England, is so much taken with the performance, that he said to Oswald he would put the Duke of Buccleugh under the author’s care, and would make it worth his while to accept of that charge. As soon as I heard this, I called on him twice with a view of talking with him about the matter, and of convincing him of the propriety of sending that young gentleman to Glasgow, for I could not hope that he could offer you any terms which would tempt you to renounce your professorship; but I missed him. Mr. Townshend passes for being a little uncertain in his resolutions, so perhaps you need not build much on his sally.”

On this occasion, as will appear in a later chapter, Townshend proved true to his resolve and false to his reputation.

Burke, who afterwards became one of Smith’s most intimate friends, was at this time known for his philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). He was also a principal contributor to the _Annual Register_; and that publication, in its admirable account of books published during the year 1759, quotes a long passage from the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, with a prefatory tribute from Burke’s pen, which might quench the thirst of the thirstiest author. Smith is praised for having struck out a new, and at the same time a perfectly natural, road of ethical speculation.

“The theory is in all its essential parts just, and founded on truth and nature. The author seeks for the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in our most common and most allowed passions; and making approbation and disapprobation the tests of virtue and vice, and shewing that those are founded on sympathy, he raises from this simple truth, one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory, that has perhaps ever appeared. The illustrations are numerous and happy, and shew the author to be a man of uncommon observation. His language is easy and spirited, and puts things before you in the fullest light; it is rather painting than writing.”

“Perhaps there is no ethical work since Cicero’s _Offices_,” wrote Sir James Mackintosh, “of which an abridgment enables the reader so inadequately to estimate the merit, as the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_. This is not chiefly owing to the beauty of diction, as in the case of Cicero, but to the variety of explanations of life and manners which embellish the book often more than they illuminate the theory.”

This criticism has been adopted by Mr. Farrer in his luminous account of Smith’s moral philosophy, and its justice may be conceded. With all its faults, the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ is still one of the most instructive and entertaining of all our English treatises on ethics. There is plenty of warmth and colour. The argument is never bare; you follow its thread through a wondrous maze, till your perplexities are solved, and you finally congratulate yourself as well as the author on having rejected all the errors and collected all the wisdom of the ages. When the main theme threatens to be tedious he entertains you with an imaginary portrait, or digresses into some subsidiary discussion upon fortune, or fashion, or some other of the currents that turn men from their purpose. It has been observed that the strongest antagonists of Smith’s central doctrine are enthusiastic in praising his skill in the analysis of human nature. The truth is, that the most absent-minded was also the most observant of men. He seems to have watched the actions and passions of his acquaintances with extraordinary precision. Motives interested him at least as much as conduct; he rather blames philosophers for having of late years given too much attention to the tendency of affections, and too little to the relationship in which they stand to their causes.

His immediate predecessors and contemporaries in the field of ethics were principally concerned with the origin and authority of right and wrong. Why does mankind generally agree as to what is right and what is wrong; whence are the notions of “ought” and “ought not” derived if not from the church or the Bible? At the time Smith wrote, English moralists were divided upon this point into two main schools. Of the first, who derived all moral rules from self-interest, Hobbes, Mandeville, and Hume were the principal exponents. The second school sought for a less variable standard, and have been called Intuitionalists, because they believed either with Clarke and Price that moral truths are perceived like axioms of Euclid, by the intellect, or with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, that there is innate in us a moral sense or taste (developed by Bishop Butler into conscience) which prompts us to do right and tells us the difference between good and evil.

Moralists were equally divided upon the question, “In what does virtue consist?” His old teacher Hutcheson had answered that it consisted in benevolence; others thought that prudence was the true mark of the good man. In Adam Smith’s view, prudence and benevolence are equally essential ingredients in the constitution of a perfectly virtuous character. With virtue he associates happiness, and his individual view of both is based partly upon the Greek philosophy of an independent leisure, partly upon the Christian conception of doing good to others; and we feel that he does not always succeed in reconciling the new ideal with the old. “Happiness,” he says, “consists in tranquillity and enjoyment. Without tranquillity there can be no enjoyment.” Tranquillity, he thinks, is “the natural and usual state of a man’s mind.” But the tranquillity to be desired was as far removed from indolence or apathy as from avarice or ambition. It was the active tranquillity of a well furnished mind and a benevolent heart.

Peace of mind, family peace, a country free from civil, religious, and foreign strife,—these he thought in their order the things most momentous to happiness. Yet he would not allow the leisurely philosopher to bask in the selfish sunshine of tranquillity. “The most sublime contemplation of the philosopher will scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest act of virtue.” The study of politics tends to promote public spirit, and political disquisitions are therefore the most useful of all speculations. The trade of the vulgar politician was often ignoble and deceitful; but the best happiness attended the patriotism and public spirit of those who sought to improve government and extend trade. The leader of a successful party may do far more for his country than the greatest general. He may re-establish and reform its constitution, and from the doubtful and ambiguous character of a party leader he may assume “the greatest and noblest of all characters, that of the reformer and legislator of a great state,” who by the wisdom of his institutions secures the international tranquillity and happiness of his fellow-citizens for many succeeding generations.

For the man of system in politics Smith has no liking. Wise in his own conceit, such a man “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard.” He forgets that “in the great chessboard of human society every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”

A true son of Oxford in his admiration for Aristotle, he was fond, as we have seen, of appealing to common life and popular opinion. But another of Aristotle’s methods, that of the eclectic who arrives at the truth by choosing out and combining what is good in other philosophers, may almost be said to be the foundation of _The Moral Sentiments_. When, after explaining his system, he comes in his last (seventh) part to describe and criticise his predecessors, it is apparent that he considers his own theory to be an assemblage or reconciliation in one harmonious whole of all the happiest efforts of ethical speculation:—

“If we examine the most celebrated and remarkable of the different theories which have been given concerning the nature and origin of our moral sentiments, we shall find that almost all of them coincide with some part or other of that which I have been endeavouring to give an account of; and that if everything which has already been said be fully considered, we shall be at no loss to explain what was the view or aspect of nature which led each particular author to form his particular system. From some one or other of those principles which I have been endeavouring to unfold, every system of morality that ever had any reputation in the world has, perhaps, ultimately been derived.”

A good example of this eclecticism is his treatment of Mandeville, an author from whom Smith no less than Rousseau derived many fruitful ideas. In the first edition of _The Moral Sentiments_ (p. 474) he writes:—

“There are, however, some other systems which seem to take away altogether the distinction between vice and virtue, and of which the tendency is upon that account wholly pernicious: I mean the systems of the Duke of Rochefoucauld and Dr. Mandeville. Though the notions of both these authors are in almost every respect erroneous, there are, however, some appearances in human nature which, when viewed in a certain manner, seem at first sight to favour them. These, first slightly sketched out with the elegance and delicate precision of the Duke of Rochefoucauld, and afterwards more fully represented with the lively and humorous, though coarse and rustic, eloquence of Dr. Mandeville, have thrown upon their doctrine an air of truth and probability which is very apt to impose upon the unskilful.”

Bishop Butler, more justly, classed Rochefoucauld with Hobbes. But in Smith’s sixth edition (1790) the name of Rochefoucauld was omitted, at the instance of the Duke’s grandson, who pointed out that the author of the Maxims is not really in the same category with Mandeville. Coarse and licentious, but entertaining and ingenious, the author of the _Fable of the Bees_ hit human nature hard. He traced virtuous actions to vanity, and whittled away the distinction between vice and virtue, until he reached the paradox that private vices are public benefits. But this profligate system could never have caused so much stir and alarm in the world “had it not in some respects bordered upon the truth.” We are very easily imposed upon by the most absurd travellers’ tales about distant countries. But falsehoods about the parish we live in must, if they are to deceive us, bear some resemblance to the truth, nay, “must even have a considerable mixture of truth in them.” A natural philosopher has an analogous advantage over the speculator in ethics. The vortices of Descartes passed for nearly a century as a most satisfactory account of the revolutions of heavenly bodies, though they neither existed nor could possibly exist, and though if they did exist they could not produce such effects as were ascribed to them. But the moral philosopher is no better off than the parish liar. He is giving an account of things that are constantly before us, around us, and within us. “Though here, too, like indolent masters who put their trust in a steward that deceives them, we are very liable to be imposed upon, yet we are incapable of passing any account which does not preserve some little regard to the truth.”

In describing those systems which make virtue consist in propriety, Smith displays a profound knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, and the later schools of Greek philosophy. His admiration of Zeno and Epictetus is almost unbounded, especially when he contemplates their confident opinion that a man should always be able to support worldly misfortunes. “They endeavour to point out the comforts which a man might still enjoy when reduced to poverty, when driven into banishment, when exposed to the injustice of popular clamour, when labouring under blindness, deafness, in the extremity of old age, upon the approach of death.” He holds that the few fragments which have been preserved of this philosophy are among the most instructive remains of antiquity. “The spirit and manhood of their doctrines make a wonderful contrast with the desponding, plaintive, and whining tone of some modern systems.” Chrysippus, on the other hand, did but reduce stoicism into a scholastic or technical system of artificial definitions, divisions, and subdivisions, “one of the most effectual expedients, perhaps, for extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral or metaphysical system.”

Admirable as were the best stoics and epicureans and those Roman writers who, like Cicero and Seneca, direct us to the imperfect but attainable virtues, they quite misunderstood nature. “By nature, the events which immediately affect that little department in which we ourselves have some little management and direction, which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events which interest us the most and which chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows.” Here and in similar passages he follows his favourite, Pope:—

“God loves from whole to parts; but human soul Must rise from individual to the whole. Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake; The centre mov’d, a circle straight succeeds, Another still, and still another spreads; Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace; His country next; and next all human race.”

Every moralist’s, even Epictetus’s, description of virtue is just as far as it goes. But Smith claims to have been the first to give any precise or distinct measure by which the fitness or propriety of affection can be ascertained and judged. Such a measure he finds in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well-informed spectator. Here, then, we have the central and peculiar doctrine that stamps with originality Adam Smith’s _Theory of Moral Sentiments_.[11]

That sympathy or fellow-feeling is a primary instinct of man appears from the commonest incidents of life. Do we not shrink when a blow is aimed at another, do not the spectators wriggle as they follow a rope-dancer’s contortions, are we not moved by tears, is not laughter infectious? Sympathy is agreeable. We like to give it, and we long for it. It is too instinctive to be explained (though some would do so) by a refinement of self-love. Yet it is not a mere reflection or shadow. Generally speaking, we only sympathise when our sentiments and feelings correspond with those of another. Sympathy means approval. To give it is to praise, to withhold it to blame. How, then, does Adam Smith account for the growth of moral sentiments in the man, and for the progress of morality in mankind? He holds that what we call conscience, or the sense of duty, arises from a certain reflex action of sympathy. We apply to ourselves the moral judgments we have learned to pass on others. We imagine what they will say and think about our own thoughts and words and actions. We try to look at ourselves with the impartial eyes of other people, and seek to anticipate that judgment which they are likely to pass upon us. This is the first stage. But men have very different degrees of morality and wisdom. One man’s praise or blame carries infinitely more weight than another’s. Thus what is called conscience, that is our idea of the impartial spectator, insensibly develops. The impartial spectator becomes more and more our ideal man, and we come to pay more homage to his still small voice than to the judgment of the world. The pangs of conscience are far more terrible than the condemnation of the market-place. Praiseworthiness comes to be better than praise; blameworthiness comes to be worse than blame. The true hell is the hell within the breast; the worst tortures are those that follow the sentence of the impartial spectator. One feature in the phenomena of sympathy, which Smith points out, perhaps constitutes a weak point in his theory. The spectator’s emotions are apt to fall short of the sufferer’s. Compassion is never exactly the same as original sorrow.

Smith, like Kant, has his own way, and a curious one it is, of putting the rule of Christ. “As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.” Our philosopher readily admits that there are passions, like love, which, “though almost unavoidable in some part of life,” are not at first sight very agreeable to his theory. He says we cannot enter into the eagerness of a lover’s emotions. They are always “in some measure ridiculous.” “The passion appears to everybody but the man who feels it entirely disproportioned to the value of the object.” Ovid’s gaiety and Horace’s gallantry are pleasant enough, but you grow weary of the “grave, pedantic, and long-sentenced love of Cowley and Petrarca.”

Resentment provides him with a better illustration. The counterpart of gratitude, it is a very difficult passion to realise in a proper degree. “How many things,” he exclaims, “are requisite to render the gratification of resentment completely agreeable and to make the spectator thoroughly sympathise with our revenge?” First, the provocation must be such that if unresented we should become contemptible and be exposed to perpetual insults. Second, smaller offences had better be neglected. Third, we should resent from a sense of propriety and of what is expected of us. Above all, we should diligently consider what would be the sentiments of the cool and impartial spectator.

Though the love of the lover has to be belittled for the purpose of this theory, friendship and all the social and benevolent affections are dear to sympathy and “please the indifferent spectator upon almost every occasion.” True friendship is one of the virtues which prove the limitations of the utilitarian theory: “There is a satisfaction in the consciousness of being beloved which to a person of delicacy and sensibility is of more importance to happiness than all the advantage which he can expect to derive from it.”

As Smith goes through the list of virtues and vices his “Impartial Spectator” constantly reminds us of Aristotle’s theory that every virtue is a mean between two extremes. The impartial spectator dislikes excess. The rise of the upstart, for example, is too sudden an extreme, nor does his behaviour often conciliate our affections:—

“If the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved, as I believe it does, those sudden changes of fortune seldom contribute much to happiness. He is happiest who advances more gradually to greatness, whom the public destines to every step of his preferment long before he arrives at it, in whom, upon that account, when it comes, it can excite no extravagant joy, and with regard to whom it cannot reasonably create either any jealousy in those he overtakes or any envy in those he leaves behind.”

The Impartial Spectator is rather a fickle and illogical person; he does not like unexampled prosperity, but he is always ready to sympathise with trivial joys. “It is quite otherwise with grief. Small vexations excite no sympathy, but deep affliction calls forth the greatest.” It takes a great grief to enlist our sympathy, for “it is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter it with reluctance.” So when we hear a tragedy we struggle against sympathetic sorrow as long as we can, and when we finally give way, carefully conceal our tears! In a letter of July the 28th, 1759, from which we have already quoted, Hume made some objections to this part of Smith’s theory:—

“I am told that you are preparing a new edition, and propose to make some additions and alterations in order to obviate objections. I shall use the freedom to propose one; which, if it appears to be of any weight, you may have in your eye. I wish you had more particularly and fully proved that all kinds of sympathy are agreeable. This is the hinge of your system, and yet you only mention the matter cursorily on p. 20. Now it would appear that there is a disagreeable sympathy as well as an agreeable. And, indeed, as the sympathetic passion is a reflex image of the principal, it must partake of its qualities, and be painful when that is so....

“It is always thought a difficult problem to account for the pleasure from the tears and grief and sympathy of tragedy, which would not be the case if all sympathy was agreeable. An hospital would be a more entertaining place than a ball. I am afraid that on p. 99 and 111 this proposition has escaped you, or rather is interwoven with your reasoning. In that place you say expressly, ‘It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance.’ It will probably be requisite for you to modify or explain this sentiment, and reconcile it to your system.”

In the following spring (April 4th) Smith wrote from Glasgow to Strahan, Millar’s young and very able partner, about the second edition, for which he had sent “a good many corrections and improvements.” He asks Strahan to take care that the book is printed “pretty exactly according to the copy I delivered to you.” Strahan, it seems, had offered his services as a critic, and Smith was a little afraid that he might find unauthorised alterations in the text. He will be much obliged to his publisher for suggestions, but cannot consent to surrender “the precious right of private judgment, for the sake of which your forefathers kicked out the Pope and the Pretender. I believe you to be much more infallible than the Pope, but as I am a Protestant, my conscience makes me scruple to submit to any unscriptural authority.”

The second edition was issued soon afterwards. It has been erroneously described as a reprint of the first.[12]

As a matter of fact, the corrections and alterations made in it were very numerous and it was set up in much smaller type, so that the 551 pages of the first edition are compressed, in spite of some enlargements of the text, into 436 pages. What is particularly noteworthy is that the author, without altering any of the passages criticised by Hume, does make what we conceive to be a perfectly satisfactory answer in an important footnote on page 76 of the second edition after the sentence, “It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance.” We give the note in full in order that the reader may judge for himself:—

“It has been objected to me that as I found the sentiment of approbation, which is always agreeable, upon sympathy, it is inconsistent with my system to admit any disagreeable sympathy. I answer, that in the sentiment of approbation there are two things to be taken notice of: first, the sympathetic passion of the spectator; and secondly, the emotion which arises from his observing the perfect coincidence between this sympathetic passion in himself, and the original passion in the person principally concerned. This last emotion, in which the sentiment of approbation properly consists, is always agreeable and delightful. The other may either be agreeable or disagreeable, according to the nature of the original passion, whose features it must always, in some measure, retain. Two sounds, I suppose, may each of them, taken singly, be austere, and yet, if they are perfect concords, the perception of their harmony and coincidence may be agreeable.”

Of modern philosophers, those to whom Smith is most indebted are certainly Mandeville, his old master Hutcheson, and his friend Hume, “an ingenious and agreeable philosopher who joins the greatest depth of thought to the greatest elegance of expression, and possesses the singular and happy talent of treating the abstrusest subjects not only with the most perfect perspicuity, but with the most lively eloquence.” (Was it the religious prejudice against Hume that left his name unmentioned in the _Theory_?) All four were in a greater or less degree utilitarians. But Smith denies that the perception of a distinction between virtue and vice originates in the utility of the one and the disadvantageousness of the other. Hume would explain all virtues by their usefulness to oneself or society. But Smith only regards utility as a powerful additional reason for approving virtue and virtuous actions. It influences our ideas of virtue, as custom and fashion influence our ideas of beauty. Usefulness is seldom the first ground of approval, and “it seems impossible that we should have no other reason for praising a man than that for which we commend a chest of drawers.” Even our approval of public spirit arises at first rather from a feeling of its magnificence and splendour than of its utility to the nation, though a sense of utility greatly strengthens our approval. Adam Smith notes, by the way, what Hume had not observed, that the fitness of a thing to produce its end is often more admired than the end itself. Most people prefer order and tidiness to the utility which they are intended to promote.

Buckle has remarked on a contrast between Smith’s theory of morals and his theory of economics. In the first, sympathy is the premise, and he works out the principle of sympathy to its logical conclusions. In the _Wealth of Nations_, on the contrary, the word sympathy scarcely occurs. He assumes self-interest as the sole motive of the economic man, and works out all the consequences without troubling about that other-regarding principle which is the foundation and measure of morality, though he shows, it is true, that the motive of self-interest, if sufficiently enlightened, will result in the general good. Without denying that Buckle’s contention is suggestive, we may observe that Smith distinctly refuses to confine virtue to benevolence, and parts company on this very point from “the amiable system” of Hutcheson. “Regard to our own private happiness, and interest too, appear,” says he, “upon many occasions very laudable principles of action. The habits of economy, industry, discretion, attention, and application of thought are generally supposed to be cultivated from self-interested motives, and at the same time are apprehended to be very praiseworthy qualities, which deserve the esteem and approbation of everybody.”[13] Benevolence may perhaps be the sole principle of action in the Deity, but an imperfect creature like man must and ought often to act from other motives.

To the third edition of the _Moral Sentiments_ (1767) was appended an essay on the formation of Languages and the different genius of original and compounded languages. It is the fruit of his philological studies, and contains no doubt the substance of lectures that he had read in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He starts with the proposition that names of objects, that is to say, nouns substantive, must have been the first steps toward the making of a language. Two savages who had never been taught to speak would naturally begin to make their mutual wants intelligible by uttering certain sounds, as cave, tree, fountain, whenever they wanted to denote particular objects. What was at first a proper name would thus be extended to similar objects, by the same law which leads us to call a great philosopher a Newton. Similarly, “a child that is just learning to speak calls every person who comes into the house its papa or its mamma.” Smith could call to mind a clown “who did not know the proper name of the river which ran by his own door.” It was “_the_ river.” This process of generalisation explains the formation of those classes and assortments called genera and species in the schools, “of which the ingenious and eloquent M. Rousseau of Geneva finds himself so much at a loss to account for the origin.”[14] In his account of the dual number, which he finds in all primitive and uncompounded languages, he says that in the rude beginnings of society, _one_, _two_, and _more_, might possibly be all the numerical distinctions which mankind would have any occasion to take notice of. But these words, though custom has rendered them familiar to us, “express perhaps the most subtle and refined abstractions which the mind of man is capable of forming.” His purpose through all this ingenious train of reasoning was to suggest a new mode of approaching a subject which, in itself so fascinating, had been reduced to a dull routine. He is very severe on the Minerva of Sanctius and on some other grammarians who, neglecting the progress of nature, had expended all their industry in drawing up a number of artificial rules so as to exclude exceptions. He sees that languages are the products not of art but of nature or circumstance. He explains how the modern dialects of Europe arose from conquest, migration, and mixture—through Lombards trying to speak Latin, or Normans trying to speak Saxon. In this way the older tongues were decomposed and simplified in their rudiments while they grew more complex in composition. The processes of linguistic development provoke a comparison of philology with mechanics:—

“All machines are generally, when first invented, extremely complex in their principles, and there is often a particular principle of motion for every particular movement which, it is intended, they should perform. Succeeding improvers observe, that one principle may be so applied as to produce several of those movements, and thus the machine becomes gradually more and more simple, and produces its effects with fewer wheels, and fewer principles of motion. In Language, in the same manner, every case of every noun, and every tense of every verb, was originally expressed by a particular distinct word, which served for this purpose and for no other. But succeeding observation discovered that one set of words was capable of supplying the place of all that infinite number, and that four or five prepositions, and half a dozen auxiliary verbs, were capable of answering the end of all the declensions, and of all the conjugations in the antient Languages.”

The comparison, however, suggests a contrast. The simplification of machines renders them more perfect, but the simplification of languages renders them more and more imperfect, and less proper (in his opinion) for many of the purposes of expression. Thus in a decomposed and simple language, he observes, we are often restrained from disposing words and sounds in the most agreeable order. When Virgil writes

“Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,”

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