CHAPTER VIII. Politics and Study, 1766-76

POLITICS AND STUDY, 1766-76

Adam Smith, as we have seen, had begun to write his immortal book at Toulouse in the summer of 1764 “in order to pass away the time.” But even after his return to London, in November 1766, more than nine years were still to pass before the Wealth of Nations could be placed in the publisher’s hands. All this time the book was his chief occupation, and but for the light which an occasional letter throws upon his studies, the story of Smith’s life during these nine years might almost be written in as many lines. For about six months he remained in London, where he mingled with men, collected books and material for his treatise, and saw the third edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments through the press.

In an undated letter to Strahan, who was now a partner in Millar’s publishing firm, about the title-page to this volume, the author desired to be called “simply Adam Smith, without any addition either before or behind.” He had received the honorary degree of LL.D. before leaving Glasgow, but he did not like to be called Dr. Smith, and seldom used the title. But politics, which had just taken a strange turn, soon commanded his attention; and a curious letter from Smith to Shelburne (February 12, 1767) raises for a moment the curtain that divides the spectator from the actors, and allows us to survey the scene behind which the most enlightened member of the Government was working to introduce common sense into the colonial policy of Great Britain. It was a scene, too, in the greatest political drama of Adam Smith’s lifetime, which left deep, decipherable marks on the pages of the Wealth of Nations.

While Smith was discussing the new principles with the philosophers of Paris, an active spirit of dissatisfaction had been spreading in distant communities of men. The spirit of liberty seemed to have walked forth over the face of the earth and to threaten revolutions in every part. The Georgians under the valiant Heraclius had revolted against their ignominious tribute to the Turkish seraglios. The tyrannies of a French governor had provoked insurrections in St. Domingo. The first tramp of a revolutionary march was heard in the Spanish dominions of South America; above all, the long and smouldering discontent in our own American colonies had suddenly been fanned into a blaze. But Europe, whose policy had been the source of all these woes, was for once in a peaceful mood. The Empress of Russia was busy entertaining her savants. The Swede was occupied at home, and the tall Pomeranian was content to drill. A financial crisis in France and England made the two Governments friendly; and though there were bloody feuds and insurrections in Turkey, Poland, and Spain, the historian of Europe, surveying the year 1766 and comparing it with its predecessors, marked it with a white chalk and fancied he could at last spell a drift towards peace in the hollow states and bankrupt empires of the old world. Ambition indeed seldom stoops to calculations, but the most acquisitive imperialist seeing multitudes of unemployed, food at famine prices, and manufactures at a standstill, began to wonder whether after all the conquests of the war had been worth such a price. For once the governing classes were sobered and were ready to make some grudging atonement for one of their worst blunders. The same commercial stress which constrained the French King to pacify his parliaments inclined the parliament of Great Britain to appease the colonial assemblies.

The session of 1766 was one of the longest, most momentous, and stirring within living memory. It had begun, as we have said, with sharp distress at home, and that distress had been aggravated by the disturbances in America; for the colonists, incensed by the Stamp Act, refused to pay for English goods (to the value of several millions) with which their shops and warehouses were stocked. No wonder, then, that in all parts of the realm traders and manufacturers did their best to persuade the Rockingham ministry to adopt conciliatory measures. Parliament was besieged by petitions from the merchants of London, Bristol, Lancaster, Liverpool, Hull, Glasgow, and most of the trading and manufacturing towns in the kingdom, setting forth the great damage done to their trade by the new laws and regulations made for America. They pointed out that the Stamp Act and other harassing legislation had not only sown a crop of discontent in the colonies, but had already produced many bankruptcies at home and were rapidly leading to widespread distress.

A contemporary writer of great power tells us that no matter of debate was ever more ably or learnedly handled in both Houses than the colonial policy which Lord Rockingham and his colleagues laid before Parliament. Those who denied the right of taxing the colonies cited Locke and Selden, Harrington and Puffendorf, to show that the very foundation and ultimate point in view of all government is the good of the society. They inferred from the Magna Charta and Bill of Rights, and from the whole history of our constitution, that no British subject can be taxed save by himself or his own representative; and they further quoted in support of their argument the constitutions of the Tyrian colonies in Africa, and of the Greek colonies in Asia. On this last head the supporters of the Stamp Act (Charles Townshend’s fatal measure) observed, sensibly enough, that arguments about the British colonies drawn from the colonies of antiquity were a mere useless display of learning, for the Tyrian and Greek colonies were planned on a totally different system. Besides, they said, the Romans were the first to form a regular colonial system, and Rome’s jurisdiction over her colonies was “boundless and uncontrollable.” As for Locke, Selden, and Puffendorf, they were only natural lawyers, and their refinements were little to the purpose in arguing the law and practice of a particular constitution.

The Rockinghams carried the Repeal of the Stamp Act; but the effect of this wise and generous policy was marred by a Declaratory Act for better securing the dependence of His Majesty’s dominions in America, which set forth the supremacy of Parliament over all the colonies and its right to impose taxes. At the end of July, after the conclusion of a satisfactory session, the Marquis of Rockingham was suddenly, to the surprise of the nation, ejected from office by the king, and a new ministry of strangely assorted talents, with Chatham at its head, in which Shelburne, Charles Townshend, the Duke of Grafton, and Camden were the leading figures, was pushed into office. Accordingly when Adam Smith returned to England he found not only that those commercial, fiscal, and colonial questions in which he was so deeply versed were the first questions in politics, but also that the two statesmen with whom he was most intimate occupied two of the most important posts—for Charles Townshend was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Shelburne was a Secretary of State.

These events sufficiently explain why a real statesman like Shelburne, one of the leading members of the ministry, was seeking information at the beginning of the session of 1767 upon colonial topics. It seems astonishing to us now that the Roman analogy should have so exercised the minds of practical statesmen; but Greek and Latin were the only subjects in those days with which educated members of the governing classes were sure to be familiar, and it was to these men in Parliament that political arguments were exclusively addressed. Probably Shelburne wanted classical precedents to check his colleagues from reverting to a coercive policy, and was anxious to meet the argument from Rome that had been used in the debates of the previous year. At any rate, he had asked help of Adam Smith, and received the following reply, which was more helpful than it should have been: “Within these two days I have looked over everything I can find relating to the Roman colonys. I have not yet found anything of much consequence.... They seem to have been very independent. Of thirty colonys of whom the Romans demanded troops in the second Carthaginian War, twelve refused to obey. They frequently rebelled and joined the enemies of the republic; being in some measure little independent republics, they naturally followed the interests which their peculiar situation pointed out to them.” His first studies on Roman colonisation had a decidedly whiggish complexion. Further reading led him to the juster view expressed in the Wealth of Nations, that a Roman colony was quite different from the autonomous Greek ἀποικία, “at best a sort of corporation, which, though it had the power of enacting byelaws for its own government, was at all times subject to the correction, jurisdiction, and legislative authority of the mother country.” And this explains why the Greek colonies were so much more prosperous: “As they were altogether independent of the mother city, they were at liberty to manage their own affairs in the way they judged was most suitable to their own interests.” But before the colonial debates of 1767 came on Adam Smith had left London.

On March 25th he wrote from Lower Grosvenor Street to Thomas Cadell, one of the partners in Millar’s firm, which combined bookselling with publishing, to ask him to insure four boxes of books for £200, and despatch them to Kincaid, his publisher in Edinburgh. He probably stayed in London till the third of May, when the Duke of Buccleuch was married. He would then pick up his valuable parcels in Edinburgh and go on without delay to Kirkcaldy to rejoin his mother and his cousin, Miss Jane Douglas, from whom he had been separated for more than two years.

His first letter to Hume (Kirkcaldy, June 9th) describes his daily life. “My business here is study, in which I have been very deeply engaged for about a month past. My amusements are long solitary walks by the seaside. You may judge how I spend my time. I feel myself, however, extremely happy, comfortable, and contented. I never was perhaps more so in all my life.” He goes on to ask about his friends in London, and wishes to be remembered to all, particularly to Mr. Adams the architect, and to Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. He inquires about Rousseau: “Has he gone abroad, because he cannot contrive to get himself sufficiently persecuted in Great Britain?” He also wants to know the meaning of “the bargain that your ministry have made with the India Company,” and rejoices that they have refused to prolong its charter. At the end of August Smith paid a visit to Dalkeith House to help the newly married couple to entertain their tenants and friends on the occasion of the Duke’s birthday. “The Duke and Dutchess of Buccleugh,” he wrote to Hume on September 15th, “have been here now for almost a fortnight. They begin to open their house on Monday next, and I flatter myself, will both be very agreeable to the people of this country. I am not sure that I have ever seen a more agreeable woman than the Dutchess. I am sorry that you are not here, because I am sure you would be perfectly in love with her. I shall probably be here some weeks.”

Dr. Carlyle was among the guests at Dalkeith House, and in his autobiography takes some credit to himself for the success of the proceedings. “Adam Smith,” he says, “was but ill qualified to promote the jollity of a birthday,” and but for Carlyle’s exertions the meeting might have been dissolved without even drinking the proper toasts. His conclusion is that the Duke and Duchess should have brought down a man of “more address,” and he leaves little doubt as to who that man should have been. Incidentally Dr. Carlyle has to admit that the new Duke proved a great credit to his tutor. The Buccleuch family had always been good landlords, but Duke Henry “surpassed them all as much in justice and humanity as he did in superiority of understanding and good sense.” Lord Brougham relates a story which illustrates what Carlyle meant by “want of address.” On one occasion, during dinner at Dalkeith, our philosopher broke out into a discourse on some political matters of the day, and was bestowing a variety of severe epithets on a certain statesman, when he suddenly perceived the statesman’s nearest relative sitting opposite, and stopped; but he was heard to mutter, “Deil care, deil care, it’s all true!”

After two months at Dalkeith he returned to his mother and his studies, and remained for the next six years, so far as we know, uninterruptedly at Kirkcaldy, save for an occasional visit to Edinburgh, whither he was constantly and with much importunity invited by his friend Hume. Dugald Stewart remarks that this retirement “formed a striking contrast to the unsettled mode of life he had been for some time accustomed to, but was so congenial to his natural disposition, and to his first habits, that it was with the utmost difficulty he was ever persuaded to leave it.” He was never happier than now, living with his mother in Kirkcaldy; “occupied habitually in intense study, but unbending his mind at times in the company of some of his old school-fellows, whose sober wishes’ had attached them to the place of their birth. In the society of such men Mr. Smith delighted; and to them he was endeared, not only by his simple and unassuming manners, but by the perfect knowledge they all possessed of those domestic virtues which had distinguished him from his infancy.”

The High Street of Kirkcaldy contained some excellent houses, and that occupied by Smith was one of the best. It was large and substantially built, four stories high, with twenty windows facing into the High Street. It had a frontage of about fifty feet, and a garden of the same width ran back a hundred yards or more eastwards down to the sands. On either side of the garden was a high wall, and on the north side a narrow public footpath divided Smith’s garden from his neighbour’s. This quaint passage, enclosed by two high walls, is still called Adam Smith’s Close.

The house was pulled down in 1844. Robert Chambers, who saw it in the twenties, noticed a mark on the wall of Smith’s study, and was told that the philosopher used to compose standing. As he dictated to his clerk he would rub his wig sideways against the wall, and so left a mark which, says the antiquary regretfully, “remained till lately, when the room being painted anew it was unfortunately destroyed.” Hume, who had just removed to James’s Court, Edinburgh, wrote to his friend in August 1769 to tempt him from his retreat:—

“I am glad to have come within sight of you, and to have a view of Kirkaldy from my windows: but as I wish also to be within speaking terms of you, I wish we could concert measures for that purpose. I am mortally sick at sea, and regard with horror and a kind of hydrophobia the great gulf that lies between us. I am also tired of travelling, as much as you ought naturally to be of staying at home. I therefore propose to you to come hither and pass some days with me in this solitude. I want to know what you have been doing, and propose to exact a rigorous account of the method in which you have employed yourself during your retreat. I am positive you are in the wrong in many of your speculations, especially where you have the misfortune to differ from me. All these are reasons for our meeting, and I wish you would make me some reasonable proposal for that purpose. There is no habitation on the island of Inchkeith, otherwise I should challenge you to meet me on that spot, and neither of us ever to leave the place till we were fully agreed on all points of controversy.”

By the following February the book had made such progress that Hume was expecting to see his friend in Edinburgh for a day or two on his way to London, where Smith already talked of arranging for immediate publication. He changed his mind, however, though he went to Edinburgh in June, where with the Duke of Buccleuch and John Hallam he received the freedom of the city. In January 1772 we find the friends corresponding about Italian literature. Smith recommends Hume to read Metastasio. Hume replies that he is reading Italian prose, again reminds him of the promised visit, and refuses to take the excuse of ill-health, which he calls a subterfuge invented by indolence and love of solitude. “Indeed, my dear Smith, if you continue to hearken to complaints of this nature, you will cut yourself out entirely from human society to the great loss of both parties.”

This year was marked by a severe commercial crisis; nearly all the banks in Edinburgh came to grief, and the Duke of Buccleuch and other friends of Smith were in the greatest difficulty. In a letter to Pulteney (September 5, 1772), Smith says, though he has himself suffered no loss in the public calamities, some of his friends have been deeply concerned, and he has been much occupied about the best method of extricating them. He continues:—

“In the book which I am now preparing for the press, I have treated fully and distinctly of every part of the subject which you have recommended to me; and I intended to send you some extracts from it; but upon looking them over I find that they are too much interwoven with other parts of the work to be easily separated from it. I have the same opinion of Sir James Steuart’s book that you have. Without once mentioning it, I flatter myself that any fallacious principle in it will meet with a clear and distinct confutation in mine.... My book would have been ready for the press by the beginning of this winter, but interruptions occasioned partly by bad health, arising from want of amusement and from thinking too much upon one thing, and partly by the avocations above mentioned, will oblige me to retard its publication for a few months longer.”

It appears that Pulteney had recommended the Directors of the East India Company to appoint Smith as a commissioner to examine their administration and accounts. Smith says he is much honoured and obliged: “You have acted in your old way, of doing your friends a good office behind their backs, pretty much as other people do them a bad one. There is no labour of any kind which you can impose upon me which I will not readily undertake.” He believes he is in agreement with Pulteney as to the proper remedy for the disorders of the coin in Bengal. The commission, however, was not appointed. No reforms worth mentioning were made, and the Wealth of Nations teems with severe criticisms of the Company.

A month after this letter to Pulteney, Hume drafts a little programme for the completion and publication of the work, evidently in reply to one of Smith’s dilatory notes: “I should agree to your reasoning if I could trust your resolution. Come hither for some weeks about Christmas; dissipate yourself a little; return to Kirkcaldy; finish your work before autumn; go to London; print it; return and settle in this town, which suits your studious, independent turn even better than London. Execute this plan faithfully, and I forgive you.”

Before following our hero to London with the fateful manuscript, we must repeat a local tradition belonging to this period which is recorded in Dr. Charles Rogers’s Social Life in Scotland. One Sunday morning Smith, falling into an unusually profound reverie (brought on perhaps by thought upon the disorders of the Bengal currency), walked into his garden in an old dressing-gown. Instead of returning to the house, he made his way by a small path into the turnpike road, and eventually marched into the town of Dunfermline, fifteen miles from his home. The people there were flocking to church, and the bustle restored the philosopher to his wits. In April 1773, after six years of seclusion, he at last left home with his manuscript, intending no doubt to have it printed and published in the course of a few months. He broke his journey at Edinburgh, and there wrote a formal letter constituting Hume his executor:—

“As I have left the care of all my literary papers to you, I must tell you that except those which I carry along with me, there are none worth the publishing but a fragment of a great work which contains a history of the astronomical systems that were successively in fashion down to the time of Descartes. Whether that might not be published as a fragment of an intended juvenile work I leave entirely to your judgment, tho’ I begin to suspect myself that there is more refinement than solidity in some parts of it. This little work you will find in a thin folio paper book in my writing-desk in my book-room. All the other loose paper which you will find either in that desk or within the glass folding-doors of a bureau which stands in my bedroom, together with about eighteen thin paper folio books, which you will likewise find within the same glass folding-doors, I desire may be destroyed without any examination. Unless I die very suddenly, I shall take care that the Papers I carry with me shall be carefully sent to you.”

He reached London in May, and seems to have remained there until after the publication of the Wealth of Nations in March 1776. But the records of his stay are of the slightest. There is left but one important letter, a long and earnest plea against the principle of monopoly in medical education. It was to his friend Dr. Cullen. Some of the Scottish universities had been conferring medical degrees without examination on incompetent men. The Duke of Buccleuch was willing to join in a petition to Parliament to stop the mischief. Smith’s views upon the subject are highly characteristic. He considers that the Scotch universities, though of course capable of amendment, are “without exception the best seminaries of learning that are to be found anywhere in Europe.” A visitation (that is, a Royal Commission) would be the only proper means of reforming them:—

“Before any wise man, however, would apply for the appointment of so arbitrary a tribunal in order to improve what is already, upon the whole, very well, he ought certainly to know with some degree of certainty, first, who are likely to be appointed visitors, and secondly, what plan of reformation those visitors are likely to follow; but in the present multiplicity of pretenders to some share in the prudential management of Scotch affairs, these are two points which, I apprehend, neither you nor I, nor the Solicitor-General nor the Duke of Buccleugh, can possibly know anything about.”

Perhaps in the future a better opportunity might present itself. An admonition, or other irregular means of interference, was out of the question. Dr. Cullen had proposed that no person should be admitted to examination for his degrees unless he brought a certificate of his having studied at least two years in some university. Smith (who was himself at this very time, with Gibbon, attending a course given by Dr. William Hunter) objects: “would not such a regulation be oppressive upon all private teachers, such as the Hunters, Hewson, Fordyce, etc.? The scholars of such teachers surely merit whatever honour or advantage a degree can confer much more than the greater part of those who have spent many years in some universities.... When a man has learnt his lesson very well, it surely can be of little importance where or from whom he has learnt it.”

The last sentence is one that men should lay to heart. It is one of those obvious truths which few have the candour to assert and still fewer the courage to act upon. A very clever person, on reading the Wealth of Nations, complained that it seemed to be little more than a well arranged succession of truisms. Yet for the want of those truths mankind has stumbled along in the dark from the beginning. “The less you restrain trade, the more you will have.” A truism, if you like, but its denial has caused an infinitude of avoidable suffering. “If a man has learnt his lesson well, never mind about his university or his degree.” A truism, without doubt, but one that is constantly neglected and despised to the grave detriment of justice and learning.

Smith held that the effect of degrees injudiciously conferred was not very considerable. “That doctors are sometimes fools as well as other people is not in the present time one of those profound secrets which is known only to the learned.” Apothecaries and old herb-women practised physic without complaint, because they only poisoned the poor people. “And if here and there a graduated doctor should be as ignorant as an old woman, can great harm be done?” Smith rubbed in his moral about university degrees with evident relish, comparing degrees which could only be conferred on students of a certain standing to the statutes of apprenticeship and other corporation laws, which had expelled arts and manufactures from so many boroughs.

In boroughs, monopoly had made work bad and dear; in universities, it had led to quackery, imposture, and exorbitant fees. One remedy for the inconveniences of town corporations had been found in the outgrowth of manufacturing villages; and, in a similar way, the private interest of some poor professors of physic had done something to check the exorbitance of rich universities, which made a course of eleven or even sixteen years necessary before a student could become a Doctor of Law, Physic, or Divinity. The poor universities could not stipulate for residence, and sold their degrees to any one who would buy them, often without even a decent examination. “The less trouble they gave, the more money they got, and I certainly do not pretend to vindicate so dirty a practice.” Nevertheless these cheap degrees, though extremely disagreeable to graduates whose degrees had cost much time and expense, were of advantage to the public in that they multiplied doctors, and so sunk fees. “Had the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge been able to maintain themselves in the exclusive privilege of graduating all the doctors who could practise in England, the price of feeling a pulse might by this time have risen from two and three guineas, the price which it has now happily arrived at, to double or triple that sum; and English physicians might, and probably would, have been at the same time the most ignorant and quackish in the world.”

This trenchant reasoning seems to have prevailed. At any rate, the idea of obtaining governmental interference was dropped. Some time afterwards, however, Dr. Cullen took an opportunity of pointing out that there is a good deal more to be said for the corporate regulation of medicine than for ordinary trade guilds. Adam Smith probably pushed his argument for free trade in medical degrees to this extreme mainly from anxiety to prevent the interference of an unwise Government in his favourite universities, though partly no doubt because he thought fraudulent competition better than none, partly again for love of maintaining a paradox. A more spacious handling of this theme is found in the Wealth of Nations, more especially in the famous tenth chapter of the first book, with its account of “Inequalities occasioned by the Policy of Europe,” and in a later criticism of universities.

During his stay in London Smith was in close intercourse with the ruling kings of art, science, and letters, as well as with some of the leading statesmen. We hear of him in January 1775 with Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon at a dinner given by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In December, Horace Walpole met him at Beauclerk’s. With Gibbon, as we have seen, he attended Dr. William Hunter’s lectures on Anatomy. Hume’s letters to him were addressed to the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street, a club kept by a clever sister of Bishop Douglas and much favoured by Scots in London, though Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, and Richard Cumberland were also members. In 1775 he was elected a member of the famous Literary Club which met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street. The members present on the night of his election were Gibbon, Reynolds, Beauclerk, and Sir William Jones, three of whom appear in Dean Barnard’s lines:—

“If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em, Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em In form select and terse; Jones teach me modesty and Greek, Smith how to think, Burke how to speak, And Beauclerk to converse.”

The still small voice of a detractor was heard: Boswell wrote to a friend that with Smith’s accession the club had “lost its select merit.”

All this time the fatal quarrel with America was drawing near. Upon this, as upon all other economical questions, Smith was in full sympathy with Burke, “the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us.” This compliment, as we know, was highly valued by the author of the speech on American Taxation. But Smith had another friend and counsellor for his critical chapter on the colonies and their administration. Dr. Franklin is reported to have said, that “the celebrated Adam Smith when writing his Wealth of Nations was in the habit of bringing chapter after chapter as he composed it to himself, Dr. Price, and others of the literati”; that he would then patiently hear their observations, sometimes submitting to write whole chapters anew, and even to reverse some of his propositions. Franklin’s remark has probably been inaccurately reported. We know from one of Smith’s letters that he had not a high opinion of Dr. Price as an economist; but Parton, Franklin’s biographer, justly points to the countless colonial illustrations with which the Wealth of Nations abounds, and to that intimate knowledge of American conditions which Franklin was of all men the best fitted to impart. And there is internal evidence in the text itself that the important chapter on the colonies in Book IV. was written, or at least considerably enlarged, in the years 1773 and 1774. Franklin’s papers contained problems which seemed to have been jotted down at meetings of philosophers, and no doubt Price as well as Smith would take a prominent part. At Glasgow Smith must have heard a good deal about the colonial trade; but colonial policy did not become the question of the day until after he left, and in the lectures there is nothing about the colonies. We may conjecture that the idea of devoting a large section of the book to the history and economics of colonial dominions did not strike him until after his return from France. The great debates of 1766 and of the early seventies, the intimate acquaintance with British policy and finance in large outline and in official detail, which his friendships with Burke and Franklin, with Oswald, Pulteney, and Shelburne helped him to acquire, and his eagerness to prevent war and to discredit expenditure on colonial establishments, or indeed upon any provinces which could not support themselves, conspired to make colonial policy and imperial expenditure large and imposing themes in the Wealth of Nations.