Life of Adam Smith
by John Rae · English · Gutenberg #17196 · 945,176 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Life of Adam Smith
Author: John Rae
Release date: December 2, 2005 [eBook #17196]
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Language: English
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Life of Adam Smith
By
JOHN RAE
London
MACMILLAN & CO.
AND NEW YORK
1895
PREFACE
The fullest account we possess of the life of Adam Smith is still the
memoir which Dugald Stewart read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on
two evenings of the winter of 1793, and which he subsequently
published as a separate work, with many additional illustrative notes,
in 1810. Later biographers have made few, if any, fresh contributions
to the subject. But in the century that has elapsed since Stewart
wrote, many particulars about Smith and a number of his letters have
incidentally and by very scattered channels found their way into
print. It will be allowed to be generally desirable, in view of the
continued if not even increasing importance of Smith, to obtain as
complete a view of his career and work as it is still in our power to
recover; and it appeared not unlikely that some useful contribution to
this end might result if all those particulars and letters to which I
have alluded were collected together, and if they were supplemented by
such unpublished letters and information as it still remained possible
to procure. In this last part of my task I have been greatly assisted
by the Senatus of the University of Glasgow, who have most kindly
supplied me with an extract of every passage in the College records
bearing on Smith; by the Council of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
who have granted me every facility for using the _Hume
Correspondence_, which is in their custody; and by the Senatus of the
University of Edinburgh for a similar courtesy with regard to the
_Carlyle Correspondence_ and the David Laing MSS. in their library. I
am also deeply indebted, for the use of unpublished letters or for the
supply of special information, to the Duke of Buccleuch, the Marquis
of Lansdowne, Professor R.O. Cunningham of Queen's College, Belfast,
Mr. Alfred Morrison of Fonthill, Mr. F. Barker of Brook Green, and Mr.
W. Skinner, W.S., late Town Clerk of Edinburgh.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS AT KIRKCALDY
Birth and parentage, 1. Adam Smith senior, 1; his death and funeral,
3. Smith's mother, 4. Burgh School of Kirkcaldy, 5. Schoolmaster's
drama, 6. School-fellows, 6. Industries of Kirkcaldy, 7.
CHAPTER II
STUDENT AT GLASGOW COLLEGE
Professors and state of learning there, 9. Smith's taste for
mathematics, 10. Professor R. Simson, 10. Hutcheson, 11; his influence
over Smith, 13; his economic teaching, 14. Smith's early connection
with Hume, 15. Snell exhibitioner, 16. College friends, 17.
CHAPTER III
AT OXFORD
Scotch and English agriculture, 18. Expenses at Oxford, 19. Did Smith
graduate? 20. State of learning, 20; Smith's censure of, 20. His
gratitude to Oxford, 22. Life in Balliol College, 22. Smith's devotion
to classics and belles-lettres, 23. Confiscation of his copy of Hume's
_Treatise_, 24. Ill-health, 25. Snell exhibitioners ill-treated and
discontented at Balliol, 26. Desire transference to other college, 27.
Smith's college friends, or his want of them, 28. Return to Scotland,
28.
CHAPTER IV
LECTURER AT EDINBURGH
Lord Kames, 31. Smith's class on English literature, 32. Blair's
alleged obligations to Smith's lectures, 33. Smith's views as a
critic, 34. His addiction to poetry, 35. His economic lectures, 36.
James Oswald, M.P., 37. Oswald's economic correspondence with Hume,
37. Hamilton of Bangour's poems edited by Smith, 38. Dedication to
second edition, 40.
CHAPTER V
PROFESSOR AT GLASGOW
Admission to Logic chair, 42. Letter to Cullen about undertaking Moral
Philosophy class, 44. Letter to Cullen on Hume's candidature for Logic
chair and other business, 45. Burke's alleged candidature, 46. Hume's
defeat, 47. Moral Philosophy class income, 48. Work, 50. Professor
John Millar, 53. His account of Smith's lectures, 54; of his qualities
as lecturer, 56. Smith's students, 57. H. Erskine, Boswell, T.
Fitzmaurice, Tronchin, 58, 59. Smith's religious views suspected, 60.
His influence in Glasgow, 60. Conversion of merchants to free trade,
61. Manifesto of doctrines in 1755, 61. Its exposition of economic
liberty, 62. Smith's alleged habitual fear of the plagiarist, 64. This
manifesto not directed against Adam Ferguson, 65.
CHAPTER VI
THE COLLEGE ADMINISTRATOR
Smith's alleged helplessness in business transactions, 66; his large
participation in business at Glasgow, 67. Appointed Quæstor, 68; Dean
of Faculty, 68; Vice-Rector, 68. Dissensions in the University, 69;
their origin in the academic constitution, 70. Enlightened educational
policy of the University authorities, 71. James Watt, University
instrument-maker; Robert Foulis, University printer, 71. Wilson,
type-founder and astronomer. The Academy of Design. Professor
Anderson's classes for working men, 72. Smith and Watt, 73. Smith's
connection with Foulis's Academy of Design, 74. Smith and Wilson's
type-foundry, 77. Proposed academy of dancing, fencing, and riding in
the University, 79. Smith's opposition to the new Glasgow theatre, 80;
his generally favourable views on theatrical representations, 81. His
protests against Professor Anderson voting for his own translation to
Natural Philosophy chair, 83. Joins in refusing Professor Rouet leave
to travel abroad with a pupil, and in depriving him of office for his
absenteeism, 84.
CHAPTER VII
AMONG GLASGOW FOLK
Glasgow at period of Smith's residence, 87; its beauty, 88; its
expanding commerce and industry, 89; its merchants, 90. Andrew
Cochrane, 91. The economic club, 92. Duty on American iron and foreign
linen yarns, 93. Paper money, 94. The Literary Society, 95. Smith's
paper on Hume's Essays on Commerce, 95. "Mr. Robin Simson's Club," 96.
Saturday dinners at Anderston, 97. Smith at whist, 97. Simson's ode to
the Divine Geometer, 98. James Watt's account of this club, 99.
Professor Moor, 99.
CHAPTER VIII
EDINBURGH ACTIVITIES
Edinburgh friends, 101. Wilkie, the poet, 102. William Johnstone
(afterwards Sir William Pulteney), 103. Letter of Smith introducing
Johnstone to Oswald, 103. David Hume, 105. The Select Society, 107;
Smith's speech at its first meeting, 108; its debates, 109; its great
attention to economic subjects, 110; its practical work for
improvement of arts, manufactures, and agriculture, 112; its
dissolution, 118. Thomas Sheridan's classes on elocution, 119. The
_Edinburgh Review_, 120; Smith's contributions, 121; on Wit and
Humour, 122; on French and English classics, 123; on Rousseau's
discourse on inequality, 124. Smith's republicanism, 124. Premature
end of the _Review_, 124; Hume's exclusion from it, 126. Attempt to
subject him to ecclesiastical censure, 127. Smith's views and
Douglas's _Criterion of Miracles Examined_, 129. Home's _Douglas_,
130. Chair of Jurisprudence in Edinburgh, 131. Miss Hepburn, 133. The
Poker Club, 134; founded to agitate for a Scots militia, 135. Smith's
change of opinion on that subject, 137. The tax on French wines, 139.
CHAPTER IX
THE "THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS"
Letter from Hume, 141. Burke's criticism, 145. Charles Townshend, 146.
Letter from Smith to Townshend, 148. Second edition of Theory, 148.
Letter from Smith to Strahan, 149. The union of Scotland with England,
150. Benjamin Franklin, 150.
CHAPTER X
FIRST VISIT TO LONDON
Conversion of Lord Shelburne to free trade, 153. Altercation with Dr.
Johnson, 154. Boswell's account, 155; Sir Walter Scott's, 156; Bishop
Wilberforce's, 157.
CHAPTER XI
LAST YEAR IN GLASGOW
Letter on Rev. W. Ward's Rational Grammar, 159. Letter to Hume
introducing Mr. Henry Herbert, 161. Smith's indignation at Shelburne's
intrigues with Lord Bute, 162. On Wilkes, 163. Letter from Hume at
Paris, 163. Letter from Charles Townshend about Buccleugh tutorship,
164. Smith's acceptance, 165. Salary of such posts, 165. Smith's poor
opinion of the educational value of the system, 166. Smith's
arrangements for return of class fees and conduct of class, 167.
Letter to Hume announcing his speedy departure for Paris, 168. Parting
with his students, 169. Letter resigning chair, 172.
CHAPTER XII
TOULOUSE
Sir James Macdonald, 174. Toulouse, 175. Abbé Colbert, 175. The
Cuthberts of Castlehill, 176. Archbishop Loménie de Brienne, 177.
Letter to Hume, 178. Trip to Bordeaux, 179. Colonel Barré, 179.
Toulouse and Bordeaux, 180. Sobriety of Southern France, 180. Duke of
Richelieu, 181. Letter to Hume, 181; letter to Hume, 183. Visit to
Montpellier, 183. Horne Tooke, 183. The States of Languedoc, 183. The
provincial assembly question, 184. Parliament of Toulouse, 185. The
Calas case, 186.
CHAPTER XIII
GENEVA
Its constitution, 188. Voltaire, 189; Smith's veneration for, 190;
remarks to Rogers and Saint Fond on, 190. Charles Bonnet, G.L. Le
Sage, 191. Duchesse d'Enville and Duc de la Rochefoucauld, 192. Lord
Stanhope, Lady Conyers, 193.
CHAPTER XIV
PARIS
Arrival, 194. Departure of Hume, 196. Smith's reception in society,
197. Comtesse de Boufflers, 198. Baron d'Holbach, 199. Helvetius, 200.
Morellet, 200. Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, 201. Turgot and
D'Alembert, 202. Question of literary obligations, 203. Alleged
correspondence, 204. Smith's opinion of Turgot, 205. Necker, 206.
Dispute between Rousseau and Hume, 206. Letter to Hume, 208. Madame
Riccoboni, 210; letter from her to Garrick introducing Smith, 211.
Visit to Abbeville, 212. A marquise, 213. The French theatre, 214.
Smith's love of music, 214. The French economists, 215. Dupont de
Nemours's allusion, 215. Quesnay, 216. Views of the political
situation, 217. Mercier de la Rivière and Mirabeau, 218. Activity of
the sect in 1766, 219. Smith's views of effect of moderate taxation on
wages, 220. Illness of Duke of Buccleugh at Compiègne, 222. Letter of
Smith to Townshend, 222. Hume's perplexity where to stay, 225. Death
of Hon. Hew Campbell Scott, 226. Duke of Buccleugh on the tutorship,
226. Smith's merits as tutor, 227. His improvement from his travels,
227; their value to him as thinker, 228. Did he foresee the
Revolution? 229. His views on condition of French people, 230. His
suggestion for reform of French taxation, 231.
CHAPTER XV
LONDON
Arrival in November 1766, 232. On Hume's continuing his _History_,
233. Third edition of _Theory_, 233. Letter to Strahan, 234. Letter to
Lord Shelburne, 233. Alexander Dalrymple, hydrographer, 235. Colonies
of ancient Rome, 236. Anecdote of Smith's absence of mind, 237.
F.R.S., 238.
CHAPTER XVI
KIRKCALDY
Count de Sarsfield, 240. Letter from Smith to Hume, 241. His daily
life in Kirkcaldy, 242. Letter to Hume from Dalkeith, 243. Bishop
Oswald, 243. Captain Skene, 243. The Duchess of Buccleugh, 243.
Home-coming at Dalkeith, 244. The Duke, 245. Stories of Smith's
absence of mind, 246. Letter to Lord Hailes on old Scots Acts about
hostellaries, 247. On the Douglas case, 248. Reported completion of
_Wealth of Nations_ in 1770, 251. Smith receives freedom of Edinburgh,
251. Letter to Sir W. Pulteney on his book and an Indian appointment,
253. Crisis of 1772, 254. The Indian appointment, 255; Thorold Rogers
on, 256. Work on _Wealth of Nation_ after this date, 257. Tutorship to
Duke of Hamilton, 258. Anecdote of absence of mind, 259. Habits in
composing _Wealth of Nations_, 260.
CHAPTER XVII
LONDON
Letter to Hume appointing him literary executor, 262. Long residence
in London, 263. Assistance from Franklin, 264. Recommendation of Adam
Ferguson for Chesterfield tutorship, 266. Hume's proposal as to Smith
taking Ferguson's place in the Moral Philosophy chair, 266. The
British Coffee-House, 267. Election to the Literary Club, 267. Smith's
conversation, 268. His alleged aversion to speak of what he knew, 269.
Attends William Hunter's lectures, 271. Letter to Cullen on freedom of
medical instruction, 273. Hume's health, 280. Smith's zeal on the
American question, 281. Advocacy of colonial incorporation, 282.
CHAPTER XVIII
"THE WEALTH OF NATIONS"
Terms of publication and sales, 285. Letter from Hume, 286. Gibbon's
opinion, 287; Sir John Pringle's, 288; Buckle's, 288. General
reception, 288. Fox's quotation, 289. Fox and Lauderdale's
conversation on Smith, 289. Quotations in Parliament, 290. Popular
association of economics with "French principles," 291. Prejudice
against free trade as a revolutionary doctrine, 291. Editions of the
book, 293. Immediate influence of the book on English taxation, 294.
CHAPTER XIX
THE DEATH OF HUME
Smith and John Home meet Hume at Morpeth, 295. The _Dialogues on
Natural Religion_, 296. Letter from Hume, 297. Hume's farewell dinner,
299. Correspondence between Hume and Smith about the _Dialogues_, 300.
Hume's death and monument in Calton cemetery, 302. Correspondence of
Smith with Home or Ninewells, 302. Correspondence with Strahan on the
_Dialogues_, 305. Copy money for _Wealth of Nations_. Strahan's
proposal to publish selection of Hume's letters, 309. Smith's reply,
310. Clamour raised by the letter to Strahan on Hume's death, 311.
Bishop Horne's pamphlet, 312. Was Hume a Theist? 313. Mackenzie's "La
Roche," 314.
CHAPTER XX
LONDON AGAIN--APPOINTED COMMISSIONER OF CUSTOMS
Mickle's translation of the _Lusiad_, 316. His causeless resentment
against Smith, 317. Governor Pownall, 318. Letter of Smith to Pownall,
319. Appointed Commissioner of Customs, 320. Lord North's indebtedness
to the _Wealth of Nations_, 320. Salary of post, 321. Correspondence
with Strahan, 321.
CHAPTER XXI
IN EDINBURGH
Panmure House, Canongate, 325; Windham on, 326. Sunday suppers, 327.
Smith's library, 327. His personal appearance, 329. Work in the Custom
House, 330. Anecdotes of absence of mind, 330. Devotion to Greek and
Latin classics, 333. The Oyster Club, 334. Dr. Black and Dr. Hutton,
336.
CHAPTER XXII
VARIOUS CORRESPONDENCE IN 1778
Letter from Duc de la Rochefoucauld, 339. Letter to Lord Kames, 341.
Sir John Sinclair's manuscript work on the Sabbath, 342. The surrender
at Saratoga, 343. Letter to Sir John Sinclair on the _Mémoires
concernant les Impositions_, 343. Smith's view of taxes on the
necessaries and on the luxuries of the poor, 345.
CHAPTER XXIII
FREE TRADE FOR IRELAND
Commercial restrictions on Ireland, 346. Popular discontent, 347.
Demand for free trade, 347. Grattan's motion, 348. Smith consulted by
Government, 349. Letter to Lord Carlisle, 350. Letter from Dundas to
Smith, 352. Smith's reply, 353. Smith's advocacy of union, 356.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE "WEALTH OF NATIONS" ABROAD AND AT HOME
Danish translation, 357. Letter of Smith to Strahan, 357. French
translations, 358; German, 359; Italian and Spanish, 360. Suppressed
by the Inquisition, 360. Letter to Cadell, 361. Letter to Cadell on
new edition, 362. Dr. Swediaur, 362. The additional matter, 363.
CHAPTER XXV
SMITH INTERVIEWED
Reminiscences in the _Bee_, 365. Opinion of Dr. Johnson, 366; Dr.
Campbell of the _Political Survey_, 366; Swift, 367; Livy, 367;
Shakespeare, 368; Dryden, 368; Beattie, 368; Pope's _Iliad_, Milton's
shorter poems, Gray, Allan Ramsay, Percy's _Reliques_, 369; Burke,
369; the Reviews, 370. Gibbon's _History_, 371. Professor Faujas Saint
Fond's reminiscences, 372. Voltaire and Rousseau, 372. The bagpipe
competition, 372. Smith made Captain of the Trained Bands, 374.
Foundation of Royal Society of Edinburgh, 375. Count de
Windischgraetz's proposed reform of legal terminology, 376.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE AMERICAN QUESTION AND OTHER POLITICS
Smith's Whiggism, 378. Mackinnon of Mackinnon's manuscript treatise on
fortification, 379. Letter from Smith, 380. Letter to Sir John
Sinclair on the Armed Neutrality, 382. Letter to W. Eden (Lord
Auckland) on the American Intercourse Bill, 385. Fox's East India
Bill, 386.
CHAPTER XXVII
BURKE IN SCOTLAND
Friendship of Burke and Smith, 387. Burke in Edinburgh, 388. Smith's
prophecy of restoration of the Whigs to power, 389. With Burke in
Glasgow, 390. Andrew Stuart, 391. Letter of Smith to J. Davidson, 392.
Death of Smith's mother, 393. Burke and Windham in Edinburgh, 394.
Dinner at Smith's, 394. Windham love-struck, 395. John Logan, the
poet, 396. Letter of Smith to Andrew Strahan, 396.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE POPULATION QUESTION
Dr. R. Price on the decline of population, 398. Dr. A. Webster's lists
of examinable persons in Scotland, 399. Letter of Smith to Eden, 400.
Smith's opinion of Price, 400. Further letter to Eden, 400. Henry Hope
of Amsterdam, 401. Letter to Bishop Douglas, introducing Beatson of
the _Political Index_, 403.
CHAPTER XXIX
VISIT TO LONDON
Meeting with Pitt at Dundas's, 405. Smith's remark about Pitt, 405.
Consulted by Pitt, 406. Opinion on Sunday schools, 407. Wilberforce
and Smith, 407. The British Fisheries Society, 408. Smith's
prognostication confirmed, 409. Chosen Lord Rector of Glasgow
University, 410. Letter to Principal Davidson, 411. Installation, 412.
Sir John Leslie, 412. Letter of Smith to Sir Joseph Banks, 413. Death
of Miss Douglas, 414. Letter to Gibbon, 414.
CHAPTER XXX
VISIT OF SAMUEL ROGERS
Smith at breakfast, 416. Strawberries, 417. Old town of Edinburgh,
417. Loch Lomond, 417. The refusal of corn to France, 417. "_That_
Bogle," 418. Junius, 429. Dinner at Smith's, 420. At the Royal Society
meeting, 421. Smith on Bentham's _Defence of Usury_, 422.
CHAPTER XXXI
REVISION OF THE "THEORY"
Letter from Dugald Stewart, 426. Additional matter in new edition of
_Theory_, 427. Deletion of the allusion to Rochefoucauld, 427.
Suppressed passage on the Atonement, 428. Archbishop Magee, 428.
Passage on the Calas case, 429.
CHAPTER XXXII
LAST DAYS
Declining health, 431. Adam Ferguson's reconciliation and attentions,
433. Destruction of Smith's MSS., 434. Last Sunday supper, 434. His
words of farewell, 435. Death and burial, 435. Little notice in the
papers, 436. His will and executors, 436. His large private charities,
437. His portraits, 438. His books, 439. Extant relics, 440.
CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS AT KIRKCALDY
1723-1737
Adam Smith was born at Kirkcaldy, in the county of Fife, Scotland, on
the 5th of June 1723. He was the son of Adam Smith, Writer to the
Signet, Judge Advocate for Scotland and Comptroller of the Customs in
the Kirkcaldy district, by Margaret, daughter of John Douglas of
Strathendry, a considerable landed proprietor in the same county.
Of his father little is known. He was a native of Aberdeen, and his
people must have been in a position to make interest in influential
quarters, for we find him immediately after his admission to the
Society of Writers to the Signet in 1707, appointed to the
newly-established office of Judge Advocate for Scotland, and in the
following year to the post of Private Secretary to the Scotch
Minister, the Earl of Loudon. When he lost this post in consequence of
Lord Loudon's retirement from office in 1713, he was provided for with
the Comptrollership of Customs at Kirkcaldy, which he continued to
hold, along with the Judge Advocateship, till his premature death in
1723. The Earl of Loudon having been a zealous Whig and Presbyterian,
it is perhaps legitimate to infer that his secretary must have been
the same, and from the public appointments he held we may further
gather that he was a man of parts. The office of Judge Advocate for
Scotland, which was founded at the Union, and which he was the first
to fill, was a position of considerable responsibility, and was
occupied after him by men, some of them of great distinction.
Alexander Fraser Tytler, the historian, for example, was Judge
Advocate till he went to the bench as Lord Woodhouselee. The Judge
Advocate was clerk and legal adviser to the Courts Martial, but as
military trials were not frequent in Scotland, the duties of this
office took up but a minor share of the elder Smith's time. His chief
business, at least for the last ten years of his life, was his work in
the Custom-house, for though he was bred a Writer to the Signet--that
is, a solicitor privileged to practise before the Supreme Court--he
never seems to have actually practised that profession. A local
collectorship or controllership of the Customs was in itself a more
important administrative office at that period, when duties were
levied on twelve hundred articles, than it is now, when duties are
levied on twelve only, and it was much sought after for the younger,
or even the elder, sons of the gentry. The very place held by Smith's
father at Kirkcaldy was held for many years after his day by a Scotch
baronet, Sir Michael Balfour. The salary was not high. Adam Smith
began in 1713 with £30 a year, and had only £40 when he died in 1723,
but then the perquisites of those offices in the Customs were usually
twice or thrice the salary, as we know from the _Wealth of Nations_
itself (Book V. chap. ii.). Smith had a cousin, a third Adam Smith,
who was in 1754 Collector of Customs at Alloa with a salary of £60 a
year, and who writes his cousin, in connection with a negotiation the
latter was conducting on behalf of a friend for the purchase of the
office, that the place was worth £200 a year, and that he would not
sell it for less than ten years' purchase.[1]
Smith's father died in the spring of 1723, a few months before his
famous son was born. Some doubt has been cast upon this fact by an
announcement quoted by President M'Cosh, in his _Scottish
Philosophy_, from the Scots Magazine of 1740, of the promotion of Adam
Smith, Comptroller of the Customs, Kirkcaldy, to be Inspector-General
of the Outports. But conclusive evidence exists of the date of the
death of Smith's father in a receipt for his funeral expenses, which
is in the possession of Professor Cunningham, and which, as a curious
illustration of the habits of the time, I subjoin in a note below.[2]
The promotion of 1740 is the promotion not of Smith's father but of
his cousin, whom I have just had occasion to mention, and who appears
from Chamberlayne's _Notitia Angliæ_ to have been Comptroller of the
Customs at Kirkcaldy from about 1734 till somewhere before 1741. In
the _Notitia Angliæ_ for 1741 the name of Adam Smith ceases to appear
as Comptroller in Kirkcaldy, and appears for the first time as
Inspector-General of the Outports, exactly in accordance with the
intimation quoted by Dr. M'Cosh. It is curious that Smith, who was to
do so much to sweep away the whole system of the Customs, should have
been so closely connected with that branch of administration. His
father, his only known relation on his father's side, and himself,
were all officials in the Scotch Customs.
On the mother's side his kindred were much connected with the army.
His uncle, Robert Douglas of Strathendry, and three of his uncle's
sons were military officers, and so was his cousin, Captain Skene, the
laird of the neighbouring estate of Pitlour. Colonel Patrick Ross, a
distinguished officer of the times, was also a relation, but on which
side I do not know. His mother herself was from first to last the
heart of Smith's life. He being an only child, and she an only parent,
they had been all in all to one another during his infancy and
boyhood, and after he was full of years and honours her presence was
the same shelter to him as it was when a boy. His friends often spoke
of the beautiful affection and worship with which he cherished her.
One who knew him well for the last thirty years of his life, and was
very probably at one time a boarder in his house, the clever and
bustling Earl of Buchan, elder brother of Lord Chancellor Erskine,
says the principal avenue to Smith's heart always was by his mother.
He was a delicate child, and afflicted even in childhood with those
fits of absence and that habit of speaking to himself which he carried
all through life. Of his infancy only one incident has come down to
us. In his fourth year, while on a visit to his grandfather's house at
Strathendry on the banks of the Leven, the child was stolen by a
passing band of gipsies, and for a time could not be found. But
presently a gentleman arrived who had met a gipsy woman a few miles
down the road carrying a child that was crying piteously. Scouts were
immediately despatched in the direction indicated, and they came upon
the woman in Leslie wood. As soon as she saw them she threw her burden
down and escaped, and the child was brought back to his mother. He
would have made, I fear, a poor gipsy. As he grew up in boyhood his
health became stronger, and he was in due time sent to the Burgh
School of Kirkcaldy.
The Burgh School of Kirkcaldy was one of the best secondary schools of
Scotland at that period, and its principal master, Mr. David Millar,
had the name of being one of the best schoolmasters of his day. When
Smith first went to school we cannot say, but it seems probable that
he began Latin in 1733, for _Eutropius_ is the class-book of a
beginner in Latin, and the _Eutropius_ which Smith used as a
class-book still exists, and contains his signature with the date of
that year.[3] As he left school in 1737, he thus had at least four
years' training in the classics before he proceeded to the University.
Millar, his classical master, had adventured in literature. He wrote a
play, and his pupils used to act it. Acting plays was in those days a
common exercise in the higher schools of Scotland. The presbyteries
often frowned, and tried their best to stop the practice, but the town
councils, which had the management of these schools, resented the
dictation of the presbyteries, and gave the drama not only the support
of their personal presence at the performances, but sometimes built a
special stage and auditorium for the purpose. Sir James Steuart, the
economist, played the king in _Henry the Fourth_ when he was a boy at
the school of North Berwick in 1735. The pupils of Dalkeith School,
where the historian Robertson was educated, played _Julius Cæsar_ in
1734. In the same year the boys of Perth Grammar School played _Cato_
in the teeth of an explicit presbyterial anathema, and again in the
same year--in the month of August--the boys of the Burgh School of
Kirkcaldy, which Smith was at the time attending, enacted the piece
their master had written. It bore the rather unromantic and uninviting
title of "A Royal Council for Advice, or the Regular Education of Boys
the Foundation of all other Improvements." The _dramatis personæ_ were
first the master and twelve ordinary members of the council, who sat
gravely round a table like senators, and next a crowd of suitors,
standing at a little distance off, who sent representatives to the
table one by one to state their grievances--first a tradesman, then a
farmer, then a country gentleman, then a schoolmaster, a nobleman, and
so on. Each of them received advice from the council in turn, and
then, last of all, a gentleman came forward, who complimented the
council on the successful completion of their day's labours.[4] Smith
would no doubt have been present at this performance, but whether he
played an active part either as councillor or as spokesman for any
class of petitioners, or merely stood in the crowd of suitors, a
silent super, cannot now be guessed.
Among those young actors at this little provincial school were several
besides Smith himself who were to play important and even
distinguished parts afterwards on the great stage of the world. James
Oswald--the Right Hon. James Oswald, Treasurer of the Navy--who is
sometimes said to have been one of Smith's schoolfellows, could not
have been so, as he was eight years Smith's senior, but his younger
brother John, subsequently Bishop of Raphoe, doubtless was; and so was
Robert Adam, the celebrated architect, who built the London Adelphi,
Portland Place, and--probably his finest work--Edinburgh University.
Though James Oswald was not at school with Smith, he was one of his
intimate home friends from the first. The Dunnikier family lived in
the town, and stood on such a footing of intimacy with the Smiths
that, as we have seen, it was "Mr. James of Dunnikier"--the father of
the James Oswald now in question--who undertook on behalf of Mrs.
Smith the arrangements for her husband's funeral; and the friendship
of James Oswald, as will presently appear, was, after the affection of
his mother, the best thing Smith carried into life with him from
Kirkcaldy. The Adam family also lived in the town, though the father
was a leading Scotch architect--King's Mason for Scotland, in
fact--and was proprietor of a fair estate not far away; and the four
brothers Adam were the familiars of Smith's early years. They
continued to be among his familiars to the last. Another of his school
companions who played a creditable part in his time was John Drysdale,
the minister's son, who became one of the ministers of Edinburgh,
doctor of divinity, chaplain to the king, leader of an ecclesiastical
party--of the Moderates in succession to Robertson--twice Moderator of
the General Assembly, though in his case, as in so many others, the
path of professional success has led but to oblivion. Still he
deserves mention here, because, as his son-in-law, Professor Dalzel
tells us, he and Smith were much together again in their later
Edinburgh days, and there was none of all Smith's numerous friends
whom he liked better or spoke of with greater tenderness than
Drysdale.[5] Drysdale's wife was a sister of the brothers Adam, and
Robert Adam stayed with Drysdale on his visits to Edinburgh.
A small town like Kirkcaldy--it had then only 1500 inhabitants--is a
not unfavourable observatory for beginning one's knowledge of the
world. It has more sorts and conditions of men to exhibit than a rural
district can furnish, and it exhibits each more completely in all
their ways, pursuits, troubles, characters, than can possibly be done
in a city. Smith, who, spite of his absence of mind, was always an
excellent observer, would grow up in the knowledge of all about
everybody in that little place, from the "Lady Dunnikier," the great
lady of the town, to its poor colliers and salters who were still
bondsmen. Kirkcaldy, too, had its shippers trading with the Baltic,
its customs officers, with many a good smuggling story, and it had a
nailery or two, which Smith is said to have been fond of visiting as a
boy, and to have acquired in them his first rough idea of the value of
division of labour.[6] However that may be, Smith does draw some of
his illustrations of the division of labour from that particular
business, which would necessarily be very familiar to his mind, and it
may have been in Kirkcaldy that he found the nailers paid their wages
in nails, and using these nails afterwards as a currency in making
their purchases from the shopkeepers.[7]
At school Smith was marked for his studious disposition, his love of
reading, and his power of memory; and by the age of fourteen he had
advanced sufficiently in classics and mathematics to be sent to
Glasgow College, with a view to obtaining a Snell exhibition to
Oxford.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Original letter in possession of Professor Cunningham, Belfast.
[2]
A COUNT OF MONEY DEBURSED ABOUT MR. SMITH'S FUNERALL
To eight bottles of ale £0 12 0
To butter and eggs to the seed cake 1 4 0
To four bottles of ale 0 6 0
To three pounds fresh butter for bread 0 14 0
To one pound small candles 0 4 6
To two pounds bisquet 1 4 0
To sixteen bottles of ale 1 4 0
To money sent to Edinr. for bisquet,
stockings, and necessars 25 4 0
To three expresses to Edinburgh 2 14 0
To a pair of murning shous to Hugh 1 10 0
To horse hyre with the wine from Kinghorn 0 15 0
To the poor 3 6 0
To six bottles and eight pints of ale
to the beadels, etc. 1 10 4
To pipes and tobacco 0 4 0
To four pints of ale to the workmen 0 12 8
To the postage of three letters 0 6 0
To making the grave 3 0 0
To caring the mourning letters thro'
the town and country 1 10 0
To the mort cloth 3 12 0
To Robert Martin for his services 1 4 0
To Deacon Lessels for the coffin and ironwork 28 4 0
To Deacon Sloan for lifting the stone 1 11 0
--------
Summa is £80 16 6
On the back is the docquet, "Account of funeral charges, Mr. Adam
Smith, 1723," and the formal receipt as follows: "Kirkaldie, Apl. 24,
1723. Received from Mr. James of Dunekier eighty pund sexteen shilling
six penes Scots in full of the within account depussd by me.
MARGRATE DOUGLASS."
"Mr. James of Dunekier" is Mr. James Oswald of Dunnikier, the father
of Smith's friend, the statesman of the same name, and he had
apparently as a friend of the family undertaken the duty of looking
after the funeral arrangements.
[3] In possession of Professor Cunningham.
[4] Grant's _Burgh Schools of Scotland_, p. 414.
[5] Drysdale's _Sermons_, Preface by Dalzel.
[6] Campbell, _Journey from Edinburgh through North Britain_, 1802,
ii. p. 49.
[7] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I. chap. iv.
CHAPTER II
STUDENT AT GLASGOW COLLEGE
A.D. 1737-1740. _Aet._ 14-17
Smith entered Glasgow College in 1737, no doubt in October, when the
session began, and he remained there till the spring of 1740. The arts
curriculum at that time extended over five sessions, so that Smith did
not complete the course required for a degree. In the three sessions
he attended he would go through the classes of Latin, Greek,
Mathematics, and Moral Philosophy, and have thus listened to the
lectures of the three eminent teachers who were then drawing students
to this little western College from the most distant quarters, and
keeping its courts alive with a remarkable intellectual activity. Dr.
A. Carlyle, who came to Glasgow College for his divinity classes after
he had finished his arts course at Edinburgh, says he found a spirit
of inquiry and a zeal for learning abroad among the students of
Glasgow which he remembered nothing like among the students of
Edinburgh. This intellectual awakening was the result mainly of the
teaching of three professors--Alexander Dunlop, Professor of Greek, a
man of fine scholarship and taste, and an unusually engaging method of
instruction; Robert Simson, the professor of Mathematics, an original
if eccentric genius, who enjoyed a European reputation as the restorer
of the geometry of the ancients; and above all, Francis Hutcheson, a
thinker of great original power, and an unrivalled academic lecturer.
Smith would doubtless improve his Greek to some extent under Dunlop,
though from all we know of the work of that class, he could not be
carried very far there. Dunlop spent most of his first year teaching
the elements of Greek grammar with Verney's Grammar as his textbook,
and reading a little of one or two easy authors as the session
advanced. Most of the students entered his class so absolutely
ignorant of Greek that he was obliged to read a Latin classic with
them for the first three months till they learnt enough of the Greek
grammar to read a Greek one. In the second session they were able to
accompany him through some of the principal Greek classics, but the
time was obviously too short for great things. Smith, however, appears
at this time to have shown a marked predilection for mathematics.
Dugald Stewart's father, Professor Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, was a
class-fellow of Smith's at Glasgow; and Dugald Stewart has heard his
father reminding Smith of a "geometrical problem of considerable
difficulty by which he was occupied at the time when their
acquaintance commenced, and which had been proposed to him as an
exercise by the celebrated Dr. Simson." The only other fellow-student
of his at Glasgow of whom we have any knowledge is Dr. Maclaine, the
translator of Mosheim, and author of several theological works; and
Dr. Maclaine informed Dugald Stewart, in private conversation, of
Smith's fondness for mathematics in those early days. For his
mathematical professor, Robert Simson himself, Smith always retained
the profoundest veneration, and one of the last things he ever
wrote--a passage he inserted in the new edition of his _Theory of
Moral Sentiments_, published immediately before his death in
1790--contains a high tribute to the gifts and character of that
famous man. In this passage Smith seeks to illustrate a favourite
proposition of his, that men of science are much less sensitive to
public criticism and much more indifferent to unpopularity or neglect
than either poets or painters, because the excellence of their work
admits of easy and satisfactory demonstration, whereas the excellence
of the poet's work or the painter's depends on a judgment of taste
which is more uncertain; and he points to Robert Simson as a signal
example of the truth of that proposition. "Mathematicians," he says,
"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. The two
greatest mathematicians that I ever have had the honour to be known
to, and I believe the two greatest that have lived in my time, Dr.
Robert Simson of Glasgow and Dr. Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, never
seemed to feel even the slightest uneasiness from the neglect with
which the ignorance of the public received some of their most valuable
works."[8] And it ought to be remembered that when Smith wrote thus of
Simson he had been long intimate with D'Alembert.
But while Smith improved his Greek under Dunlop, and acquired a
distinct ardour for mathematics under the inspiring instructions of
Simson, the most powerful and enduring influence he came under at
Glasgow was undoubtedly that of Hutcheson--"the never-to-be-forgotten
Hutcheson," as he styled him half a century later in recalling his
obligations to his old College on the occasion of his election to the
Rectorship. No other man, indeed, whether teacher or writer, did so
much to awaken Smith's mind or give a bent to his ideas. He is
sometimes considered a disciple of Hume and sometimes considered a
disciple of Quesnay; if he was any man's disciple, he was Hutcheson's.
Hutcheson was exactly the stamp of man fitted to stir and mould the
thought of the young. He was, in the first place, one of the most
impressive lecturers that ever spoke from an academic chair. Dugald
Stewart, who knew many of his pupils, states that every one of them
told of the extraordinary impression his lectures used to make on
their hearers. He was the first professor in Glasgow to give up
lecturing in Latin and speak to his audience in their own tongue, and
he spoke without notes and with the greatest freedom and animation.
Nor was it only his eloquence, but his ideas themselves were rousing.
Whatever he touched upon, he treated, as we may still perceive from
his writings, with a certain freshness and decided originality which
must have provoked the dullest to some reflection, and in a bracing
spirit of intellectual liberty which it was strength and life for the
young mind to breathe. He was not long in Glasgow, accordingly, till
he was bitterly attacked by the older generation outside the walls of
the College as a "new light" fraught with dangers to all accepted
beliefs, and at the same time worshipped like an idol by the younger
generation inside the walls, who were thankful for the light he
brought them, and had no quarrel with it for being new. His immediate
predecessor in that chair, Professor Gershom Carmichael, the reputed
father of the Scottish Philosophy, was still a Puritan of the
Puritans, wrapt in a gloomy Calvinism, and desponding after signs that
would never come. But Hutcheson belonged to a new era, which had
turned to the light of nature for guidance, and had discovered by it
the good and benevolent Deity of the eighteenth century, who lived
only for human welfare, and whose will was not to be known from
mysterious signs and providences, but from a broad consideration of
the greater good of mankind--"the greatest happiness of the greatest
number." Hutcheson was the original author of that famous phrase.
All this was anathema to the exponents of the prevailing theology with
which, indeed, it seemed only too surely to dispense; and in Smith's
first year at Glasgow the local Presbytery set the whole University in
a ferment by prosecuting Hutcheson for teaching to his students, in
contravention of his subscription to the Westminster Confession, the
following two false and dangerous doctrines: 1st, that the standard
of moral goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others; and
2nd, that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior
to a knowledge of God. This trial of course excited the profoundest
feeling among the students, and they actually made a formal appearance
before the Presbytery, and defended their hero zealously both by word
and writing. Smith, being only a bajan--a first year's student--would
play no leading part in these proceedings, but he could not have lived
in the thick of them unmoved, and he certainly--either then or
afterwards, when he entered Hutcheson's class and listened to his
lectures on natural theology, or perhaps attended his private class on
the Sundays for special theological study--adopted the religious
optimism of Hutcheson for his own creed, and continued under its
influence to the last of his days.
In politics also Hutcheson's lectures exercised important practical
influence on the general opinion of his students. The principles of
religious and political liberty were then so imperfectly comprehended
and so little accepted that their advocacy was still something of a
new light, and we are informed by one of Hutcheson's leading
colleagues, Principal Leechman, that none of his lectures made a
deeper or wider impression than his exposition of those principles,
and that very few of his pupils left his hands without being imbued
with some of the same love of liberty which animated their master.
Smith was no exception, and that deep strong love of all reasonable
liberty which characterised him must have been, if not first kindled,
at any rate quickened by his contact with Hutcheson.
Interesting traces of more specific influence remain. Dugald Stewart
seems to have heard Smith himself admit that it was Hutcheson in his
lectures that suggested to him the particular theory of the right of
property which he used to teach in his own unpublished lectures on
jurisprudence, and which founded the right of property on the general
sympathy of mankind with the reasonable expectation of the occupant
to enjoy unmolested the object which he had acquired or discovered.[9]
But it is most probable that his whole theory of moral sentiments was
suggested by the lectures of Hutcheson, perhaps the germs of it even
when he was passing through the class. For Hutcheson in the course of
his lectures expressly raises and discusses the question, Can we
reduce our moral sentiments to sympathy? He answered the question
himself in the negative, on the ground that we often approve of the
actions of people with whom we have no sympathy, our enemies for
example, and his pupil's contribution to the discussion was an
ingenious attempt to surmount that objection by the theory of sympathy
with an impartial spectator.
Hutcheson's name occurs in no history of political economy, but he
lectured systematically on that subject--as Smith himself subsequently
did--as a branch of his course on natural jurisprudence, a discussion
of contracts requiring him to examine the principles of value,
interest, currency, etc., and these lectures, though fragmentary, are
remarkable for showing a grasp of economic questions before his time,
and presenting, with a clear view of their importance, some of Smith's
most characteristic positions. He is free from the then prevailing
mercantilist fallacies about money. His remarks on value contain what
reads like a first draft of Smith's famous passage on value in use and
value in exchange. Like Smith, he holds labour to be the great source
of wealth and the true measure of value, and declares every man to
have the natural right to use his faculties according to his own
pleasure for his own ends in any work or recreation that inflicts no
injury on the persons or property of others, except when the public
interests may otherwise require. This is just Smith's system of
natural liberty in matters industrial, with a general limitation in
the public interest such as Smith also approves. In the practical
enforcement of this limitation he would impose some particular
restraints which Smith might not, but, on the other hand, he would
abolish other particular restraints which Smith, and even Quesnay,
would still retain, _e.g._ the fixing of interest by law. His doctrine
was essentially the doctrine of industrial liberty with which Smith's
name is identified, and in view of the claims set up on behalf of the
French Physiocrats that Smith learnt that doctrine in their school, it
is right to remember that he was brought into contact with it in
Hutcheson's class-room at Glasgow some twenty years before any of the
Physiocrats had written a line on the subject, and that the very first
ideas on economic subjects which were presented to his mind contained
in germ--and in very active and sufficient germ--the very doctrines
about liberty, labour, and value on which his whole system was
afterwards built.
Though Smith was a mere lad of sixteen at that time, his mind had
already, under Hutcheson's stimulating instructions, begun to work
effectively on the ideas lodged in it and to follow out their
suggestions in his own thought. Hutcheson seems to have recognised his
quality, and brought him, young though he was, under the personal
notice of David Hume. There is a letter written by Hume to Hutcheson
on the 4th of March 1740 which is not indeed without its difficulties,
but if, as Mr. Burton thinks, the Mr. Smith mentioned in it be the
economist, it would appear as if Smith had, while attending
Hutcheson's class,--whether as a class exercise or otherwise,--written
an abstract of Hume's _Treatise of Human Nature_, then recently
published, that Smith's abstract was to be sent to some periodical for
publication, and that Hume was so pleased with it that he presented
its young author with a copy of his own work. "My bookseller," Hume
writes, "has sent to Mr. Smith a copy of my book, which I hope he has
received as well as your letter. I have not yet heard what he has done
with the abstract. Perhaps you have. I have got it printed in London,
but not in the _Works of the Learned_, there having been an article
with regard to my book somewhat abusive before I sent up the
abstract." If the Mr. Smith of this letter is Adam Smith, then he must
have been away from Glasgow at that time, for Hutcheson was
communicating with him by letter, but that may possibly be explained
by the circumstance that he had been appointed to one of the Snell
exhibitions at Balliol College, Oxford, and might have gone home to
Kirkcaldy to make preparations for residence at the English
University, though he did not actually set out for it till June.
These Snell exhibitions, which were practically in the gift of the
Glasgow professors, were naturally the prize of the best student of
Glasgow College at the time they fell vacant, and they have been held
in the course of the two centuries of their existence by many
distinguished men, including Sir William Hamilton and Lockhart,
Archbishop Tait and Lord President Inglis. They were originally
founded by an old Glasgow student, a strong Episcopalian, for the
purpose of educating Scotchmen for the service of the Episcopal Church
in Scotland. By the terms of his will the holders were even to be
bound under penalty of £500 "to enter holy orders and return to serve
the Church in Scotland," and it has sometimes been concluded from that
circumstance that Smith must have accepted the Snell exhibition with a
view to the Episcopal ministry. But the original purpose of the
founder was frustrated by the Revolution settlement, which made "the
Church in Scotland" Presbyterian, and left scarce any Episcopal
remnant to serve, and the original condition has never been
practically enforced. The last attempt to impose it was made during
Smith's own tenure of the exhibition, and failed. In the year 1744 the
Vice-Chancellor and the heads of Colleges at Oxford raised a process
in the Court of Chancery for compelling the Snell exhibitioners "to
submit and conform to the doctrines and discipline of the Church of
England, and to enter into holy orders when capable thereof by the
canons of the Church of England"; but the Court of Chancery refused to
interfere, and the exhibitioners were left entirely free to choose
their sect, their profession, and their country, as seemed best to
themselves. It may be added that in Smith's time the Snell foundation
yielded five exhibitions of £40 a year each, tenable for eleven years.
Of Smith's friends among his fellow-students at Glasgow, no names have
been preserved for us except those already mentioned, Professor
Matthew Stewart, and Dr. Maclaine, the embassy chaplain at the Hague.
He continued on a footing of great intimacy with Stewart, whom, as we
have seen, he considered to be, after Robert Simson, the greatest
mathematician of his time, and he seems to have enjoyed occasional
opportunities of renewing his acquaintance with Dr. Maclaine, though
the opportunities could not have been frequent, as Maclaine spent his
whole active life abroad as English chaplain at the Hague. But the
remark made by Smith to Dr. William Thompson, a historical writer of
the last century, seems to imply his having had some intercourse with
his early friend. Thompson, Dr. Watson the historian of Philip II.,
and Dr. Maclaine, seem all to have been writing the history of the
Peace of Utrecht, and Smith, who knew all three, said Watson was much
afraid of Maclaine, and Maclaine was just as much afraid of Watson,
but he could have told them of one they had much more cause to fear,
and that was Thompson himself.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, i. 313.
[9] Stewart's _Works,_ vii. 263.
CHAPTER III
AT OXFORD
1740-1746. _Aet._ 17-23
Smith left Scotland for Oxford in June 1740, riding the whole way on
horseback, and, as he told Samuel Rogers many years afterwards, being
much struck from the moment he crossed the Border with the richness of
the country he was entering, and the great superiority of its
agriculture over that of his own country. Scotch agriculture was not
born in 1740, even in the Lothians; the face of the country everywhere
was very bare and waste, and, as he was rather pointedly reminded on
the day of his arrival at Oxford, even its cattle were still lean and
poor, compared with the fat oxen of England. Among the stories told of
his absence of mind is one he is said by a writer in the _Monthly
Review_ to have been fond of relating himself whenever a particular
joint appeared on his own table. The first day he dined in the hall at
Balliol he fell into a reverie at table and for a time forgot his
meal, whereupon the servitor roused him to attention, telling him he
had better fall to, because he had never seen such a piece of beef in
Scotland as the joint then before him. His nationality, as will
presently appear, occasioned him worse trouble at Oxford than this
good-natured gibe.
He matriculated at the University on the 7th of July. Professor
Thorold Rogers, who has collected the few particulars that can now be
learned of Smith's residence at Oxford from official records, gives us
the matriculation entry: "Adamus Smith e Coll. Ball., Gen. Fil. Jul.
7mo 1740,"[10] and mentions that it is written in a round school-boy
hand--a style of hand, we may add, which Smith retained to the last.
He has himself said that literary composition never grew easier to him
with experience; neither apparently did handwriting. His letters are
all written in the same big round characters, connected together
manifestly by a slow, difficult, deliberate process.
He remained at Oxford till the 15th of August 1746; after that day his
name appears no longer in the Buttery Books of the College; but up
till that day he resided at Oxford continuously from the time of his
matriculation. He did not leave between terms, and was thus six years
on end away from home. A journey to Scotland was in those days a
serious and expensive undertaking; it would have taken more than half
Smith's exhibition of £40 to pay for the posting alone of a trip to
Kirkcaldy and back. When Professor Rouet of Glasgow was sent up to
London a few years later to push on the tedious twenty years' lawsuit
between Glasgow College and Balliol about the Snell exhibitions, the
single journey cost him £11:15s., exclusive of personal expenses, for
which he was allowed 6s. 8d. a day.[11] Now Smith out of his £40 a
year had to pay about £30 for his food; Mr. Rogers mentions that his
first quarter's maintenance came to £7:5s., about the usual cost of
living, he adds, at Oxford at that period. Then the tutors, though
they seem to have ceased to do any tutoring, still took their fees of
20s. a quarter all the same, and Smith's remaining £5 would be little
enough to meet other items of necessary expenditure. It appears from
Salmon's _Present State of the Universities_, published in 1744,
during Smith's residence at Oxford, that an Oxford education then cost
£32 a year as a minimum, but that there was scarce a commoner in the
University who spent less than £60.
Smith's name does not appear in Bliss's list of Oxford graduates, and
although in Mr. Foster's recent _Alumni Oxonienses_ other particulars
are given about him, no mention is made of his graduation; but
Professor Rogers has discovered evidence in the Buttery Books of
Balliol which seems conclusively to prove that Smith actually took the
degree of B.A., whatever may be the explanation of the apparent
omission of his name from the official graduation records. In those
Buttery Books he is always styled Dominus from and after the week
ending 13th April 1744. Now Dominus was the usual designation of a
B.A., and in April 1744 Smith would have kept the sixteen terms that
were then, we may say, the only qualification practically necessary
for that degree. He had possibly omitted some step requisite for the
formal completion of the graduation.
Smith's residence at Oxford fell in a time when learning lay there
under a long and almost total eclipse. This dark time seems to have
lasted most of that century. Crousaz visited Oxford about the
beginning of the century and found the dons as ignorant of the new
philosophy as the savages of the South Sea. Bishop Butler came there
as a student twenty years afterwards, and could get nothing to satisfy
his young thirst for knowledge except "frivolous lectures" and
"unintelligible disputations." A generation later he could not even
have got that; for Smith tells us in the _Wealth of Nations_ that the
lecturers had then given up all pretence of lecturing, and a foreign
traveller, who describes a public disputation he attended at Oxford in
1788, says the Præses Respondent and three Opponents all sat consuming
the statutory time in profound silence, absorbed in the novel of the
hour. Gibbon, who resided there not long after Smith, tells that his
tutor neither gave nor sought to give him more than one lesson, and
that the conversation of the common-room, to which as a gentleman
commoner he was privileged to listen, never touched any point of
literature or scholarship, but "stagnated in a round of College
business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal."
Bentham, a few years after Gibbon, has the same tale to tell; it was
absolutely impossible to learn anything at Oxford, and the years he
spent there were the most barren and unprofitable of his life. Smith's
own account of the English universities in the _Wealth of Nations_,
though only published in 1776, was substantially true of Oxford during
his residence there thirty years before. Every word of it is endorsed
by Gibbon as the word of "a moral and political sage who had himself
resided at Oxford." Now, according to that account, nobody was then
taught, or could so much as find "the proper means of being taught,
the sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to
teach." The lecturers had ceased lecturing; "the tutors contented
themselves with teaching a few unconnected shreds and parcels" of the
old unimproved traditionary course, "and even these they commonly
taught very negligently and superficially"; being paid independently
of their personal industry, and being responsible only to one another,
"every man consented that his neighbour might neglect his duty
provided he himself were allowed to neglect his own"; and the general
consequence was a culpable dislike to improvement and indifference to
all new ideas, which made a rich and well-endowed university the
"sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find
shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner
of the world." Coming up from a small university in the North, which
was cultivating letters with such remarkable spirit on its little
oatmeal wisely dispensed, Smith concluded that the stagnation of
learning which prevailed in the wealthy universities of England was
due at bottom to nothing but their wealth, because it was distributed
on a bad system.
Severely, however, as Smith has censured the order of things he found
prevailing at Oxford, it is worthy of notice that he never, like
Gibbon and Bentham, thought of the six years he spent there as being
wasted. Boswell and others have pronounced him ungrateful for the
censures he deemed meet to pass upon that order of things, but that
charge is of course unreasonable, because the censures were undeniably
true and undeniably useful, and I refer to it here merely to point out
that as a matter of fact Smith not only felt, but has publicly
expressed, gratitude for his residence at the University of Oxford. He
does so in his letter to the Principal of Glasgow College in 1787
accepting the Rectorship, when in enumerating the claims which Glasgow
College had upon his grateful regard, he expressly mentions the fact
that it had sent him as a student to Oxford. In truth, his time was
not wasted at Oxford. He did not allow it to be wasted. He read deeply
and widely in many subjects and in many languages; he read and thought
for six years, and for that best kind of education the negligence of
tutors and lecturers, such as they then were, was probably better than
their assiduity.
For this business of quiet reading Smith seems to have been happily
situated in Balliol. Balliol was not then a reading college as it is
now. A claim is set up in behalf of some of the other Oxford colleges
that they kept the lamp of learning lit even in the darkest days of
last century, but Balliol is not one of them. It was chiefly known in
that age for the violence of its Jacobite opinions. Only a few months
after Smith left it a party of Balliol students celebrated the
birthday of Cardinal York in the College, and rushing out into the
streets, mauled every Hanoverian they met, and created such a serious
riot that they were sentenced to two years' imprisonment for it by the
Court of King's Bench; but for this grave offence the master of the
College, Dr. Theophilus Leigh, and the other authorities, had thought
the culprits entitled to indulgence on account of the anniversary they
were celebrating, and had decided that the case would be sufficiently
met by a Latin imposition. If Balliol, however, was not more
enlightened than any of the other colleges of the day, it had one
great advantage, it possessed one of the best college libraries at
Oxford. The Bodleian was not then open to any member of the University
under the rank of a bachelor of arts of two years' standing, and Smith
was only a bachelor of arts of two years' standing for a few months
before he finally quitted Oxford. He could therefore have made little
use of the Bodleian and its then unrivalled treasures, but in his own
college library at Balliol he was allowed free range, and availed
himself of his privilege with only too great assiduity, to the injury
of his health.
His studies took a new turn at Oxford; he laid aside the mathematics
for which he showed a liking at Glasgow, and gave his strength to the
ancient Latin and Greek classics, possibly for no better reason than
that he could get nobody at Oxford to take the trouble of teaching him
the former, and that the Balliol library furnished him with the means
of cultivating the latter by himself. He did so, moreover, to some
purpose, for all through life he showed a knowledge of Greek and Latin
literature not only uncommonly extensive but uncommonly exact. Dalzel,
the professor of Greek at Edinburgh, was one of Smith's most intimate
friends during those latter years of his life when he was generally
found with one of the classical authors before him, in conformity with
his theory that the best amusement of age was to renew acquaintance
with the writers who were the delight of one's youth; and Dalzel used
always to speak to Dugald Stewart with the greatest admiration of the
readiness and accuracy with which Smith remembered the works of the
Greek authors, and even of the mastery he exhibited over the niceties
of Greek grammar.[12] This knowledge must of course have been acquired
at Oxford. Smith had read the Italian poets greatly too, and could
quote them easily; and he paid special care to the French classics on
account of their style, spending much time indeed, we are told, in
trying to improve his own style by translating their writings into
English.
There was only one fruit in the garden of which he might not freely
eat, and that was the productions of modern rationalism. A story has
come down which, though not mentioned by Dugald Stewart, is stated by
M'Culloch to rest on the best authority, and by Dr. Strang of Glasgow
to have been often told by Smith himself, to the effect that he was
one day detected reading Hume's _Treatise of Human Nature_--probably
the very copy presented him by the author at the apparent suggestion
of Hutcheson--and was punished by a severe reprimand and the
confiscation of the evil book. It is at least entirely consistent with
all we know of the spirit of darkness then ruling in Oxford that it
should be considered an offence of peculiar aggravation for a student
to read a great work of modern thought which had been actually placed
in his hands by his professor at Glasgow, and the only wonder is that
Smith escaped so lightly, for but a few years before three students
were expelled from Oxford for coquetting with Deism, and a fourth, of
whom better hopes seem to have been formed, had his degree deferred
for two years, and was required in the interval to translate into
Latin as a reformatory exercise the whole of Leslie's _Short and Easy
Method with the Deists_.[13]
Except for the great resource of study, Smith's life at Oxford seems
not to have been a very happy one. For one thing, he was in poor
health and spirits a considerable part of the time, as appears from
the brief extracts from his letters published by Lord Brougham. When
Brougham was writing his account of Smith he got the use of a number
of letters written by the latter to his mother from Oxford between
1740 and 1746, which probably exist somewhere still, but which, he
found, contained nothing of any general interest. "They are almost
all," he says, "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 mother." The very brief extracts Brougham
makes from them, however, inform us that Smith was then suffering from
what he calls "an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head," for
which he was using the new remedy of tar-water which Bishop Berkeley
had made the fashionable panacea for all manner of diseases. At the
end of July 1744 Smith says to his mother: "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. Tar-water is a remedy very
much in vogue here at present for almost all diseases. It has
perfectly cured me of an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head. I
wish you'd try it. I fancy it might be of service to you." In another
and apparently subsequent letter, however, he states that he had had
the scurvy and shaking as long as he remembered anything, and that the
tar-water had not removed them. On the 29th of November 1743 he makes
the curious confession: "I am just recovered from a violent fit of
laziness, which has confined me to my elbow-chair these three
months."[14] Brougham thinks these statements show symptoms of
hypochondria; but they probably indicate no more than the ordinary
lassitude and exhaustion ensuing from overwork. Hume, when about the
same age, had by four or five years' hard reading thrown himself into
a like condition, and makes the same complaints of "laziness of
temper" and scurvy. The shaking in the head continued to attend Smith
all his days.
But low health was only one of the miseries of his estate at Oxford.
There is reason to believe that Balliol College was in his day a
stepmother to her Scotch sons, and that their existence there was made
very uncomfortable not merely at the hands of the mob of young
gentlemen among whom they were obliged to live, but even more by the
unfair and discriminating harshness of the College authorities
themselves. Out of the hundred students then residing at Balliol,
eight at least were Scotch, four on the Snell foundation and four on
the Warner, and the Scotch eight seem to have been always treated as
an alien and intrusive faction. The Snell exhibitioners were
continually complaining to the Glasgow Senatus on the subject, and the
Glasgow Senatus thought them perfectly justified in complaining. In a
letter of 22nd May 1776, in which they go over the whole long story of
grievances, the Glasgow Senatus tell the Master and Fellows of Balliol
plainly that the Scotch students had never been "welcomely received"
at Balliol, and had never been happy there. If an English
undergraduate committed a fault, the authorities never thought of
blaming any one but himself, but when one of the eight Scotch
undergraduates did so, his sin was remembered against all the other
seven, and reflections were cast on the whole body; "a circumstance,"
add the Senatus, "which has been much felt during their residence at
Balliol." Their common resentment against the injustice of this kind
of tribal accountability that was imposed on them naturally provoked a
common resistance; it developed "a spirit of association," say the
Senatus, which "has at all periods been a cause of much trouble both
to Balliol and to Glasgow Colleges."[15] In 1744, when Smith himself
was one of them, the Snell exhibitioners wrote an account of their
grievances to the Glasgow Senatus, and stated "what they wanted to be
done towards making their residence more easy and advantageous";[16]
and in 1753, when some of Smith's contemporaries would still be on the
foundation, Dr. Leigh, the master of Balliol, tells the Glasgow
Senatus that he had ascertained in an interview with one of the Snell
exhibitioners that what they wanted was to be transferred to some
other college, because they had "a total dislike to Balliol."[17]
This idea of a transference, I may be allowed to add, continued to be
mooted, and in 1776 it was actually proposed by the heads of Balliol
to the Senatus of Glasgow to transfer the Snell foundationers
altogether to Hertford College; but the Glasgow authorities thought
this would be merely a transference of the troubles, and not a remedy
for them, that the exhibitioners would get no better welcome at
Hertford than at Balliol if they came as "fixed property" instead of
coming as volunteers, and that they could never lose their national
peculiarities of dialect and their habits of combination if they came
in a body. Accordingly, in the letter of 22nd May 1776, which I have
already quoted,[18] they recommended the arrangement of leaving each
exhibitioner to choose his own college,--an arrangement, it may be
remembered, which had just then been strongly advocated as a general
principle by Smith in his newly-published _Wealth of the Nations_, on
the broader ground that it would encourage a wholesome competition
between the colleges, and so improve the character of the instruction
given in them all.
Now if the daily relations between the Scotch exhibitioners at Balliol
and the authorities and general members of the College were of the
unhappy description partially revealed in this correspondence, that
may possibly afford some explanation of what must otherwise seem the
entirely unaccountable circumstance that Smith, so far as we are able
to judge, made almost no permanent friends at Oxford. Few men were
ever by nature more entirely formed for friendship than Smith. At
every other stage of his history we invariably find him surrounded by
troops of friends, and deriving from their company his chief solace
and delight. But here he is six or seven years at Oxford, at the
season of manhood when the deepest and most lasting friendships of a
man's life are usually made, and yet we never see him in all his
subsequent career holding an hour's intercourse by word or letter with
any single Oxford contemporary except Bishop Douglas of Salisbury, and
Bishop Douglas had been a Snell exhibitioner himself. With Douglas,
moreover, he had many other ties. Douglas was a Fifeshire man, and may
possibly have been a kinsman more or less remote; he was a friend of
Hume and Robertson, and all Smith's Edinburgh friends; and he was,
like Smith again, a member of the famous Literary Club of London, and
is celebrated in that character by Goldsmith in the poem
"Retaliation," as "the scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks." I
have gone over the names of those who might be Smith's contemporaries
at Balliol as they appear in Mr. Foster's list of _Alumni Oxonienses_,
and they were a singularly undistinguished body of people. Smith and
Douglas themselves are indeed the only two of them who seem to have
made any mark in the world at all.
An allusion has been made to the Scottish dialect of the Snell
exhibitioners; it may be mentioned that Smith seems to have lost the
broad Scotch at Oxford without, like Jeffrey, contracting the narrow
English; at any rate Englishmen, who visited Smith after visiting
Robertson or Blair, were struck with the pure and correct English he
spoke in private conversation, and he appears to have done so without
giving any impression of constraint.
Smith returned to Scotland in August 1746, but his name remained on
the Oxford books for some months after his departure, showing
apparently that he had not on leaving come to a final determination
against going back. His friends at home are said to have been most
anxious that he should continue at Oxford; that would naturally seem
to open to him the best opportunities either in the ecclesiastical
career for which they are believed to have destined him, or in the
university career for which nature herself designed him. But both
careers were practically barred against him by his objection to taking
holy orders, the great majority of the Oxford Fellowships being at
that time only granted upon condition of ordination, and Smith
concluded that the best prospect for him was after all the road back
to Scotland. And he never appears to have set foot in Oxford again.
When he became Professor at Glasgow he was the medium of intercourse
between the Glasgow Senate and the Balliol authorities, but beyond the
occasional interchange of letters which this business required, his
relations with the Southern University appear to have continued
completely suspended. Nor did Oxford, on her part, ever show any
interest in him. Even after he had become perhaps her greatest living
alumnus, she did not offer him the ordinary honour of a doctor's
degree.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Rogers's edition of the _Wealth of Nations_, I. vii.
[11] Laing MSS., Edinburgh University.
[12] Stewart's _Life of Adam Smith_, p. 8.
[13] Tyerman's _Wesley_, i. 66.
[14] Brougham, _Men of Letters_, ii. 216.
[15] Letter from Senatus of Glasgow College to Balliol College, in
Laing MSS., Edinburgh University.
[16] Letter of A.G. Ross of Gray's Inn to Professor R. Simson,
Glasgow, in Edinburgh University Library.
[17] Laing MSS., Edinburgh University.
[18] Edinburgh University Library.
CHAPTER IV
LECTURER AT EDINBURGH
1748-1750. _Aet._ 25-27
In returning to Scotland Smith's ideas were probably fixed from the
first on a Scotch university chair as an eventual acquisition, but he
thought in the meantime to obtain employment of the sort he afterwards
gave up his chair to take with the Duke of Buccleugh, a travelling
tutorship with a young man of rank and wealth, then a much-desired
and, according to the standard of the times, a highly-remunerated
occupation. While casting about for a place of that kind he stayed at
home with his mother in Kirkcaldy, and he had to remain there without
any regular employment for two full years, from the autumn of 1746
till the autumn of 1748. The appointment never came; because from his
absent manner and bad address, we are told, he seemed to the ordinary
parental mind a most unsuitable person to be entrusted with the care
of spirited and perhaps thoughtless young gentlemen. But the visits he
paid to Edinburgh in pursuit of this work bore fruit by giving him
quite as good a start in life, and a much shorter cut to the
professorial position for which he was best fitted. During the winter
of 1748-49 he made a most successful beginning as a public lecturer by
delivering a course on the then comparatively untried subject of
English literature, and gave at the same time a first contribution to
English literature himself by collecting and editing the poems of
William Hamilton of Bangour. For both these undertakings he was
indebted to the advice and good offices of Lord Kames, or, as he then
was, Mr. Henry Home, one of the leaders of the Edinburgh bar, with
whom he was made acquainted, we may safely assume, by his friend and
neighbour, James Oswald of Dunnikier, whom we know to have been among
Kames's most intimate friends and correspondents. Kames, though now
fifty-two, had not yet written any of the works which raised him
afterwards to eminence, but he had long enjoyed in the literary
society of the North something of that position which Voltaire laughs
at him for trying to take towards the world in general; he was a law
on all questions of taste, from an epic poem to a garden plot. He had
little Latin and no Greek, for he never was at college, and the
classical quotations in his _Sketches_ were translated for him by A.F.
Tytler. But he had thrown himself with all the greater zeal on that
account into English literature when English literature became the
rage in Scotland after the Union, and he was soon crossing steel with
Bishop Butler in metaphysics, and the accepted guide of the new Scotch
poets in literary criticism. Hamilton of Bangour confesses that he
himself
From Hume learned verse to criticise,
the Hume meant being his early friend, Henry Home of Kames, and not
his later friend, David Hume the historian.[19] Home's place in the
literature of Scotland corresponds with his place in its agriculture;
he was the first of the improvers; and Smith, who always held him in
the deepest veneration, was not wrong when, on being complimented on
the group of great writers who were then reflecting glory on Scotland,
he said, "Yes, but we must every one of us acknowledge Kames for our
master."[20]
When Home found Smith already as well versed in the English classics
as himself, he suggested the delivery of this course of lectures on
English literature and criticism. The subject was fresh, it was
fashionable, and though Stevenson, the Professor of Logic, had already
lectured on it, and lectured on it in English too to his class, nobody
had yet given lectures on it open to the general public, whose
interest it had at the moment so much engaged. The success of such a
course seemed assured, and the event fully justified that
prognostication. The class was attended among others by Kames himself;
by students for the bar, like Alexander Wedderburn, afterwards Lord
Chancellor of England, and William Johnstone, who long played an
influential part in Parliament as Sir William Pulteney; by young
ministers of the city like Dr. Blair, who subsequently gave a similar
course himself; and by many others, both young and old. It brought
Smith in, we are informed, a clear £100 sterling, and if we assume
that the fee was a guinea, which was a customary fee at the period,
the audience would be something better than a hundred. It was probably
held in the College, for Blair's subsequent course was delivered there
even before the establishment of any formal connection with the
University by the creation of the professorship.
The lectures Smith then delivered on English literature were burnt at
his own request shortly before his death. Blair, who not only heard
them at the time, but got the use of them--or, at least, of part of
them--afterwards for the preparation of his own lectures on rhetoric,
speaks as if there was some hope at one time that Smith would publish
them, but if he ever entertained such an intention, he was too
entirely preoccupied with work of greater importance and interest to
himself to obtain leisure to put them into shape for publication. It
has been suggested that they are practically reproduced in the
lectures of Blair. Blair acknowledges having taken a few hints for his
treatment of simplicity in style from the manuscript of Smith's
lectures. His words are: "On this head, of the general characters of
style, particularly the plain and the simple, and the characters of
those English authors who are classed under them, in this and the
following lecture, several ideas have been taken from a manuscript
treatise on rhetoric, part of which was shown to me many years ago by
the learned and ingenious author, Dr. Adam Smith; and which it is
hoped will be given by him to the public."[21] Now many of Smith's
friends considered this acknowledgment far from adequate, and Hill,
the biographer of Blair, says Smith himself joined in their complaint.
It is very unlikely that Smith ever joined in any such complaint, for
Henry Mackenzie told Samuel Rogers an anecdote which conveys an
entirely contrary impression. Mackenzie was speaking of Smith's wealth
of conversation, and telling how he often used to say to him, "Sir,
you have said enough to make a book," and he then mentioned that Blair
frequently introduced into his sermons some of Smith's thoughts on
jurisprudence, which he had gathered from his conversation, and that
he himself had told the circumstance to Smith. "He is very welcome,"
was the economist's answer; "there is enough left."[22] And if Smith
made Blair welcome to his thoughts on jurisprudence, a subject on
which he intended to publish a work of his own, we may be certain he
made him not less heartily welcome to his thoughts on literature and
style, on which he probably entertained no similar intention. Besides,
if we judge from the two chapters regarding which he owns his
obligation to Smith, Blair does not seem to have borrowed anything but
what was the commonest of property already. He took only what his
superficial mind had the power of taking, and the pith of Smith's
thinking must have been left behind. To borrow even a hat to any
purpose, the two heads must be something of a size.
We cannot suppose, therefore, that we have any proper representation
or reflection of Smith's literary lectures in the lectures of Blair,
but it would be quite possible still, if it were desired, to collect a
not inadequate view of his literary opinions from incidental remarks
contained in his writings or preserved by friends from recollections
of his conversation. Wordsworth, in the preface to the _Lyrical
Ballads_, calls him "the worst critic, David Hume excepted, that
Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has
produced," and his judgments will certainly not be confirmed by the
taste of the present time. He preferred the classical to the romantic
school. He thought with Voltaire that Shakespeare had written good
scenes but not a good play, and that though he had more dramatic
genius than Dryden, Dryden was the greater poet. He thought little of
Milton's minor poems, and less of the old ballads collected by Percy,
but he had great admiration for Pope, believed Gray, if he had only
written a little more, would have been the greatest poet in the
English language, and thought Racine's _Phædrus_ the finest tragedy
extant in any language in the world. His own great test of literary
beauty was the principle he lays down in his Essay on the Imitative
Arts, that the beauty is always in the proportion of the difficulty
perceived to be overcome.
Smith seems at this early period of his life to have had dreams of
some day figuring as a poet himself, and his extensive familiarity
with the poets always struck Dugald Stewart as very remarkable in a
man so conspicuous for the weight of his more solid attainments. "In
the English language," says Stewart, "the variety of poetical passages
which he was not only accustomed to refer to occasionally, but which
he was able to repeat with correctness, appeared surprising even to
those whose attention had never been attracted to more important
acquisitions." The tradition of Smith's early ambition to be a poet is
only preserved in an allusion in Caleb Colton's "Hypocrisy," but it
receives a certain support from a remark of Smith's own in
conversation with a young friend in his later years. Colton's allusion
runs as follows:--
Unused am I the Muse's path to tread,
And curs'd with Adam's unpoetic head,
Who, though that pen he wielded in his hand
Ordain'd the _Wealth of Nations_ to command;
Yet when on Helicon he dar'd to draw,
His draft return'd and unaccepted saw.
If thus like him we lay a rune in vain,
Like him we'll strive some humbler prize to gain.
Smith's own confession is contained in a report of some conversations
given in the _Bee_ for 1791. He was speaking about blank verse, to
which he always had a dislike, as we know from an interesting incident
mentioned by Boswell. Boswell, who attended Smith's lectures on
English literature at Glasgow College in 1759, told Johnson four years
after that Smith had pronounced a strong opinion in these lectures
against blank verse and in favour of rhyme--always, no doubt, on the
same principle that the greater the difficulty the greater the beauty.
This delighted the heart of Johnson, and he said, "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." Twenty years later Smith was again expressing to the
anonymous interviewer of the _Bee_ his unabated contempt for all blank
verse except Milton's, and he said that though he could never find a
single rhyme in his life, he could make blank verse as fast as he
could speak. "Blank verse," he said; "they do well to call it blank,
for blank it is. I myself even, who never could find a single rhyme in
my life, could make blank verse as fast as I could speak." The critic
would thus appear here again to have been the poet who has failed,
though in this case he had the sense to discover the failure without
tempting the judgment of the public.
Indeed he had already begun to discover his true vocation, for besides
his lectures on English literature, which he delivered for three
successive winters, he delivered at least one winter a course on
economics; and in this course, written in the year 1749, and delivered
in the year 1750-51, Smith advocated the doctrines of commercial
liberty on which he was nurtured by Hutcheson, and which he was
afterwards to do so much to advance. He states this fact himself in a
paper read before a learned society in Glasgow in 1755, which
afterwards fell into the hands of Dugald Stewart, and from which
Stewart extracts a passage or two, which I shall quote in a subsequent
chapter. They certainly contain a plain enough statement of the
doctrine of natural liberty; and Smith says that a great part of the
opinions contained in the paper were "treated of at length in some
lectures which I have still by me, and which were written in the hand
of a clerk who left my service six years ago"--that is, in 1749--and
adds that "they had all of them been the subjects of lectures which I
read at Edinburgh the winter before I left it, and I can adduce
innumerable witnesses both from that place and from this who will
ascertain them sufficiently to be mine."[23] These ideas of natural
liberty in industrial affairs were actively at work, not only in
Smith's own mind, but in the minds of others in his immediate circle
in Scotland in those years 1749 and 1750. David Hume and James Oswald
were then corresponding on the subject, and though it is doubtful
whether Smith had seen much or anything of Hume personally at that
time (for Hume had been abroad with General St. Clair part of it, and
did not live in Edinburgh after his return), it was in those and the
two previous years that Smith was first brought into real intellectual
contact with his friend and townsman, James Oswald.
Oswald, it may be mentioned, though still a young man--only eight
years older than Smith--had already made his mark in Parliament where
he sat for their native burgh, and had been made a Commissioner of the
Navy in 1745. He had made his mark largely by his mastery of economic
subjects, for which Hume said, after paying him a visit at Dunnikier
for a week in 1744, that he had a "great genius," and "would go far in
that way if he persevered." He became afterwards commissioner of trade
and plantations, Lord of the Treasury, and Vice-Treasurer of Ireland,
and would have certainly gone further but for his premature death in
1768 at the age of fifty-two. Lord Shelburne once strongly advised
Lord Bute to make him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Smith thought as
highly of Oswald as Hume. He used to "dilate," says Oswald's grandson,
who heard him, "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."[24] Dugald Stewart saw a paper written by Smith which
described Oswald not only as a man of extensive knowledge of economic
subjects, but a man with a special taste and capacity for the
discussion of their more general and philosophical aspects. That
paper, we cannot help surmising, is the same document of 1755 I have
just mentioned in which Smith was proving his early attachment to the
doctrines of economic liberty, and would naturally treat of
circumstances connected with the growth of his opinions. However that
may be, it is certain that Smith and Oswald must have been in
communication upon economic questions about that period, and Oswald's
views at that period are contained in the correspondence to which
reference has been made.
Early in 1750 David Hume sent Oswald the manuscript of his well-known
essay on the Balance of Trade, afterwards published in his _Political
Essays_ in 1752, asking for his views and criticisms; and Oswald
replied on the 10th of October in a long letter, published in the
_Caldwell Papers_,[25] which shows him to have been already entirely
above the prevailing mercantilist prejudices, and to have very clear
conceptions of economic operations. He declares jealousies between
nations of being drained of their produce and money to be quite
irrational; that could never happen as long as the people and industry
remained. The prohibition against exporting commodities and money, he
held, had always produced effects directly contrary to what was
intended by it. It had diminished cultivation at home instead of
increasing it, and really forced the more money out of the country the
more produce it prevented from going. Oswald's letter seems to have
been sent on by Hume, together with his own essay, to Baron Mure, who
was also interested in such discussions. The new light was thus
breaking in on groups of inquirers in Scotland as well as elsewhere,
and Smith was from his earliest days within its play.
Amid the more serious labours of these literary and economic lectures,
it would be an agreeable relaxation to collect and edit the scattered
poems, published and unpublished, of Hamilton of Bangour, the author
of what Wordsworth calls the "exquisite ballad" of "The Braes o'
Yarrow," beginning--
Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride,
Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow,
Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride,
And think no more on the Braes o' Yarrow.
This ballad had appeared in Allan Ramsay's _Tea-Table Miscellany_ so
long ago as 1724, and it was followed by Hamilton's most ambitious
effort, the poem "Contemplation," in 1739, but the general public of
Scotland only seem to have awakened to their merits after the poet
espoused the Jacobite cause in 1745, and celebrated the victory of
Prestonpans by his "Ode to the Battle of Gladsmuir"--the name the
Jacobites preferred to give the battle. This ode, which had been set
to music by M'Gibbon, became a great favourite in Jacobite households,
and created so much popular interest in the author's other works that
imperfect versions of some of his unpublished poems, and even of those
which were already in print, began to appear. The author was himself
an outlaw, and could not intervene. The ode which had lifted him into
popularity had at the same time driven him into exile, and he was then
living with a little group of young Scotch refugees at Rouen, and
completely shattered in bodily health by his three months' hiding
among the Grampians. Under those circumstances his friends thought it
advisable to forestall the pirated and imperfect collections of his
poems which were in contemplation by publishing as complete and
correct an edition of them as could possibly be done in the absence of
the author. And this edition was issued from the famous Foulis press
in Glasgow in 1748. In doing so they acted, as they avow in the
preface, "not only without the author's consent, but without his
knowledge," but it is absurd to call an edition published under those
circumstances, as the new _Dictionary of National Biography_ calls it,
a "surreptitious edition." It was published by the poet's closest
personal friends as a protection for the poet's reputation, and
perhaps as a plea for his pardon.
The task of collecting and editing the poems was entrusted to Adam
Smith. We are informed of this fact by the accurate and learned David
Laing, and though Laing has not imparted his authority for the
information, it receives a certain circumstantial corroboration from
other quarters. We find Smith in the enjoyment of a very rapid
intimacy with Hamilton during the two brief years the poet resided in
Scotland between receiving the royal pardon in 1750 and flying again
in 1752 from a more relentless enemy than kings--the fatal malady of
consumption, from which he died two years later at Lyons. Sir John
Dalrymple, the historian, speaks in a letter to Robert Foulis, the
printer, of "the many happy and flattering hours which he (Smith) had
spent with Mr. Hamilton." We find again that when Hamilton's friends
propose to print a second edition of the poems, they come to Smith for
assistance. This edition was published in 1758, and is dedicated to
the memory of William Craufurd, merchant, Glasgow, a friend of the
poet mentioned in the preface to the first edition as having supplied
many of the previously unpublished pieces which it contained. Craufurd
appears to have been an uncle of Sir John Dalrymple, and Sir John asks
Foulis to get Smith to write this dedication. "Sir," says he, in
December 1757, "I have changed my mind about the dedication of Mr.
Hamilton's poems. I would have it stand 'the friend of William
Hamilton,' but I assent to your opinion to have something more to
express Mr. Craufurd's character. I know none so able to do this as my
friend Mr. Smith. I beg it, therefore, earnestly that he will write
the inscription, and with all the elegance and all the feelingness
which he above the rest of mankind is able to express. This is a thing
that touches me very nearly, and therefore I beg a particular answer
as to what he says to it. The many happy and the many flattering hours
which he has spent with Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Craufurd makes me think
that he will account his usual indolence a crime upon this occasion. I
beg you will make my excuse for not wryting him this night, but then I
consider wryting to you upon this head to be wryting to him."[26] It
is unlikely that Smith would resist an appeal like this, and the
dedication bears some internal marks of his authorship. It describes
Mr. Craufurd as "the friend of Mr. Hamilton, who to that exact
frugality, that downright probity and pliancy of manners so suitable
to his profession, joined a love of learning and of all the ingenious
arts, an openness of hand and a generosity of heart that was far both
from vanity and from weakness, and a magnanimity that would support,
under the prospect of approaching and inevitable death, a most
torturing pain of body with an unalterable cheerfulness of temper, and
without once interrupting even to his last hour the most manly and the
most vigorous activity of business." This William Craufurd is
confounded by Lord Woodhouselee, and through him by others, with
Robert Crauford, the author of "The Bush aboon Traquair," "Tweedside,"
and other poems, who was also an intimate friend of Hamilton of
Bangour, but died in 1732.
Another link in the circumstantial evidence corroborating David
Laing's statement is the fact that Smith was certainly at the moment
in communication with Hamilton's personal friends, at whose instance
the volume of poems was published. Kames, who was then interesting
himself so actively in Smith's advancement, was the closest surviving
friend Hamilton possessed. They had been constant companions in youth,
leading spirits of that new school of dandies called "the
beaux"--young men at once of fashion and of letters--who adorned
Scotch society between the Rebellions, and continued to adorn many an
after-dinner table in Edinburgh down till the present century.
Hamilton owns that it was Kames who first taught him "verse to
criticise," and wrote to him the poem "To H.H. at the Assembly"; while
Kames for his part used in his old age, as his neighbour Ramsay of
Ochtertyre informs us, to have no greater enjoyment than recounting
the scenes and doings he and Hamilton had transacted together in those
early days, of which the poet himself writes, when they "kept
friendship's holy vigil" in the subterranean taverns of old Edinburgh
"full many a fathom deep."
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Home and Hume, it may be mentioned, are only different ways of
spelling the same name, which, though differently spelt, was not
differently pronounced.
[20] Tytler's _Life of Kames_, i. 218.
[21] Blair's _Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres_, i. 381.
[22] Clayden's _Early Life of Samuel Rogers_, p. 168.
[23] Stewart's _Works_, ed. Hamilton, vol. x. p. 68.
[24] _Correspondence of James Oswald_, Preface.
[25] _Caldwell Papers_, i. 93.
[26] Duncan's _Notes and Documents illustrative of the Literary
History of Glasgow_, p. 25.
CHAPTER V
PROFESSOR AT GLASGOW
1751-1764. _Aet._ 27-40
The Edinburgh lectures soon bore fruit. On the death of Mr. Loudon,
Professor of Logic in Glasgow College, in 1750, Smith was appointed to
the vacant chair, and so began that period of thirteen years of active
academic work which he always looked back upon, he tells us, "as by
far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most
honourable period" of his life. The appointment lay with the
Senatus--or, more strictly, with a section of the Senatus known as the
Faculty Professors--some of whom, of course, had been his own teachers
ten years before, and knew him well; and the minutes state that the
choice was unanimous. He was elected on the 9th of January 1751, and
was admitted to the office on the 16th, after reading a dissertation
_De origine idearum_, signing the Westminster Confession of Faith
before the Presbytery of Glasgow, and taking the usual oath _De
fideli_ to the University authorities; but he did not begin work till
the opening of the next session in October. His engagements in
Edinburgh did not permit of his undertaking his duties in Glasgow
earlier, and his classes were accordingly conducted, with the sanction
of the Senatus, by Dr. Hercules Lindsay, the Professor of
Jurisprudence, as his substitute, from the beginning of January till
the end of June. During this interval Smith went through to Glasgow
repeatedly to attend meetings of the Senatus, but he does not appear
to have given any lectures to the students. If he was relieved of his
duties in the summer, however, he worked double tides during the
winter, for besides the work of his own class, he undertook to carry
on at the same time the work of Professor Craigie of the Moral
Philosophy chair, who was laid aside by ill health, and indeed died a
few weeks after the commencement of the session. This double burden
was no doubt alleviated by the circumstance that he was able in both
the class-rooms to make very considerable use of the courses of
lectures he had already delivered in Edinburgh. By the traditional
distribution of academic subjects in the Scotch universities, the
province of the chair of Logic included rhetoric and belles-lettres,
and the province of the chair of Moral Philosophy included
jurisprudence and politics, and as Smith had lectured in Edinburgh
both on rhetoric and belles-lettres and on jurisprudence and politics,
he naturally took those branches for the subjects of his lectures this
first session at Glasgow. Professor John Millar, the author of the
_Historical View of the English Government_ and other works of great
merit, was a member of Smith's logic class that year, having been
induced, by the high reputation the new professor brought with him
from Edinburgh, to take out the class a second time, although he had
already completed his university curriculum; and Millar states that
most of the session was occupied with "the delivery of a system of
rhetoric and belles-lettres." In respect to the other class,
jurisprudence and politics were specially suggested to him as the
subjects for the year when he was asked to take Professor Craigie's
place. The proposal came through Professor Cullen, who was probably
Craigie's medical attendant, and Cullen suggested those particular
subjects as being the most likely to suit Smith's convenience and save
him labour, inasmuch as he had lectured on them already. Smith replied
that these were the subjects which it would be most agreeable to him
to take up.
EDINBURGH, _3rd Sept. 1751_.
DEAR SIR--I received yours this moment. I am very glad that
Mr. Craigie has at last resolved to go to Lisbon. I make no
doubt but he will soon receive all the benefit he expects or
can wish from the warmer climate. I shall, with great
pleasure, do what I can to relieve him of the burden of his
class. You mention natural jurisprudence and politics as the
parts of his lectures which it would be most agreeable for
me to take upon me to teach. I shall very willingly
undertake both. I shall be glad to know when he sets out for
Lisbon, because if it is not before the first of October I
would endeavour to see him before he goes, that I might
receive his advice about the plan I ought to follow. I would
pay great deference to it in everything, and would follow it
implicitly in this, as I shall consider myself as standing
in his place and representing him. If he goes before that
time I wish he would leave some directions for me, either
with you or with Mr. Leechman, were it only by word of
mouth.--I am, dear doctor, most faithfully yours,
ADAM SMITH.[27]
Smith would begin work at Glasgow on the 10th of October, and before
the middle of November he and Cullen were already deeply immersed in
quite a number of little schemes for the equipment of the College.
There was first of all the affair of the vacancy in the Moral
Philosophy chair, which was anticipated to occur immediately through
the death of Mr. Craigie--referred to in the following letter as "the
event we are afraid of." This vacancy Cullen and Smith were desirous
of seeing filled up by the translation of Smith from the Logic to the
Moral Philosophy chair, and the Principal (Dr. Neil Campbell) seems to
have concurred in that proposal, and to have mentioned Smith's name
with approbation to the Duke of Argyle, who, though without any power
over the appointment to any except the Crown chairs, took much
interest in, and was believed to exercise much influence over, the
appointment to all. This was the Duke Archibald--better known by his
earlier title of the Earl of Islay--who was often called the King of
Scotland, because he practically ruled the affairs of Scotland in the
first half of last century, very much as Dundas did in the second.
Smith seems to have gone through to Edinburgh to push his views with
the Duke, and to have waited on him and been introduced to him at his
levee.
Then there was the affair of Hume's candidature for the Logic chair,
contingent on Smith's appointment to the other. There was the affair
of the Principal's possible retirement, with, no doubt, some plan in
reserve for the reversion, probably in favour of Professor Leechman,
mentioned in the previous letter, who did in the event succeed to it.
Then there was Cullen's "own affair," which Smith was promoting in
Edinburgh through Lord Kames (then Mr. Home), and which probably
concerned a method of purifying salt Cullen had then invented, and
wanted to secure a premium for. At any rate, Lord Kames did speak to
the Duke of Argyle on this subject in Cullen's behalf a few months
later.
While immersed in this multiplicity of affairs Smith wrote Cullen the
following letter:--[28]
EDIN., _Tuesday, November 1751_.
DEAR SIR--I did not write to you on Saturday as I promised,
because I was every moment expecting Mr. Home to town. He is
not, however, yet come.
I should prefer David Hume to any man for the College, but I
am afraid the public would not be of my opinion, and the
interest of the society will oblige us to have some regard
to the opinion of the public. If the event, however, we are
afraid of should happen we can see how the public receives
it. From the particular knowledge I have of Mr. Elliot's
sentiments, I am pretty certain Mr. Lindsay must have
proposed it to him, not he to Mr. Lindsay. I am ever obliged
to you for your concern for my interest in that affair.
When I saw you at Edinburgh you talked to me of the
Principal's proposing to retire. I gave little attention to
it at that time, but upon further consideration should be
glad to listen to any proposal of that kind. The reasons of
my changing my opinion I shall tell you at meeting. I need
not recommend secrecy to you upon this head. Be so good as
to thank the Principal in my name for his kindness in
mentioning me to the Duke. I waited on him at his levee at
Edinburgh, when I was introduced to him by Mr. Lind, but it
seems he had forgot.
I can tell you nothing particular about your own affair more
than what I wrote you last till I see Mr. Home, whom I
expect every moment.--I am, most dear sir, ever yours,
A. SMITH.
The event they were afraid of happened on the 27th of November, and
Smith was, without any opposition, appointed Craigie's successor on
the 29th of April 1752. It would appear from this letter as if Cullen
had heard from his colleague, Professor Lindsay, of a possible rival
to Smith for that chair in the person of Mr. Elliot--no doubt Mr.
Gilbert Elliot, a man of brilliant parts and accomplishments, who
afterwards attained high political eminence as Sir Gilbert Elliot, but
who was at this time a young advocate at the Edinburgh bar, with no
liking for law and a great liking for letters and philosophy. Smith,
however, who was a personal friend of Elliot's, knew that the latter
had no such designs, and eventually his own candidature was unopposed.
But in anticipation of this result, the keenest contest was carried on
all winter over the election to the Logic chair, which he was to
leave. David Hume came forward as a candidate, and there is an
erroneous, though curiously well-supported tradition that Edmund Burke
was a candidate also. One of Burke's biographers, Bisset, states that
Burke actually applied for the post, but applied too late.[29] Another
of his biographers, Prior, says that Burke being in Scotland at the
time, took some steps for the place, but finding his chances hopeless,
withdrew;[30] while Professor Jardine, a subsequent occupier of the
chair himself, asserts that Burke was thought of by some of the
electors, but never really came forward.[31] But Smith, who was not
only the previous occupant of the office, but, as Professor of Moral
Philosophy, was one of the electors of his successor, stated
explicitly to Dugald Stewart (as Stewart wrote to Prior[32]) "that the
story was extremely current, but he knew of no evidence on which it
rested, and he suspected it took its rise entirely from an opinion
which he had himself expressed at Glasgow upon the publication of
Burke's book on the _Sublime and Beautiful_, that the author of that
book would be a great acquisition to the College if he would accept of
a chair." Had anything been known in Glasgow of Burke's candidature
for a chair there five years before, it would unquestionably be
recollected on the occasion of the publication of so notable a work,
but Burke's very name was so unfamiliar to the circle interested in
the election that when Hume first met him in London in 1759, he
mentions him in a letter to Smith as "a Mr. Burke, an Irish
gentleman who has written a very pretty book on the _Sublime and
Beautiful_."[33]
The interest of the contest is sufficiently great from the candidature
of one philosopher of the first rank, and to Smith himself--already
that philosopher's very close friend--it must have been engrossing. It
will be observed that in his letter to Cullen he expresses himself
with great caution on the subject. He is quite alive to the fact that
the appointment of a notorious sceptic like Hume might be so unpopular
with the Scottish public as to injure the interests of the University.
But when Hume came forward Cullen threw himself heart and soul into
his cause, as we know from Hume's own acknowledgments; and if Cullen
and Smith are found acting in concert at the initiation of the
candidature, it is not likely that Smith lagged behind Cullen in the
prosecution of the canvass, though nothing remains to give us any
decisive information on the point. Their exertions failed, however,
in consequence, Hume himself always believed, of the interference of
the Duke of Argyle, and the chair was given to a young licentiate of
the Church named Clow, who was at the time entirely unknown, and
indeed never afterwards established any manner of public reputation.
Smith's preference for the Moral Philosophy chair came mainly no doubt
from preference for the subjects he would be called upon to teach in
it, but the emoluments also seem to have been somewhat better, for
Smith was expressly required, as a condition of acceptance of the
office, to content himself until the 10th of October of that year (the
opening day of the new session) "with the salary and emoluments of his
present profession of Logic," even though he might be actually
admitted to the other professorship before that date. It must not be
supposed, however, that the emoluments of his new office were by any
means very lordly. They accrued partly from a moderate endowment and
partly from the fees paid by the students who attended the lectures--a
principle of academic payment which Smith always considered the best,
because it made the lecturer's income largely dependent on his
diligence and success in his work. The endowment was probably no more
than that of the Mathematical chair, and the endowment of the
Mathematical chair was £72 a year.[34] The fees probably never
exceeded £100, or even came up to that figure, for Dr. Thomas Reid,
Smith's successor in the Moral Philosophy chair, writes an Aberdeen
friend, after two years' experience of Glasgow, that he had more
students than Smith ever had, and had already touched £70 of fees, but
expected, when all the students arrived, to make £100 that
session.[35] The income from fees in the Scotch chairs in last century
seems to have been subject to considerable variations from session to
session. A bad harvest would sometimes tell seriously on the
attendance, and a great crisis like that of 1772, when the effects of
a succession of bad harvests were aggravated by ruinous mercantile
speculations, deprived Adam Ferguson in the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy
chair of half his usual income from fees. It may also be mentioned as
a curious circumstance that in those days a professor used to lose
regularly many pounds a year by light money. When Lord Brougham, as a
young student of chemistry in Edinburgh, paid his fee to Black, the
great chemist weighed the guineas carefully on a weighing machine he
had on the table before him, and observed in explanation, "I am
obliged to weigh when strange students come, there being a very large
number who bring light guineas, so that I should be defrauded of many
pounds every year if I did not act in self-defence against this class
of students."[36]
Smith kept an occasional boarder in his house, and would of course
make a trifle by that, but his regular income from his class work
would not exceed £170 a year. £170 a year, however, was a very
respectable income at a period when, as was the case in 1750, only
twenty-nine ministers in all broad Scotland had as much as £100 a
year, and the highest stipend in the Church was only £138.[37]
Besides his salary Smith had a house in the College--one of those new
manses in the Professors' Court which Glasgow people at the time
considered very grand; and though the circumstance is trifling, it is
a little curious that he changed his house three times in the course
of his thirteen years' professorship. It was the custom when a house
fell vacant for the professors to get their choice of it in the order
of their academical seniority. There seems to have been no compulsion
about the step, so that it is not beneath noticing that Smith should
in so short a term have elected to make the three removes which
proverbial wisdom deprecates. When his friend Cullen was translated
to Edinburgh in 1756, Smith, who was next in seniority, having been
made professor in Glasgow a few months after the eminent physician,
removed to Cullen's house; then he quitted this house in 1757 for the
house of Dr. Dick, Professor of Natural Philosophy, who died in that
year; and he left Dick's house in turn for Dr. Leechman's, on the
promotion of that divine to the Principalship in 1762. These houses
are now demolished with the rest of the old College of Glasgow, so
that we cannot mark the gradation of comfort that may have determined
these successive changes; and besides they may have been determined by
no positive preference of the economist himself, but by the desires of
his mother and his aunt, Miss Jane Douglas, who both lived with him in
Glasgow, and whose smallest wishes it was the highest ambition of his
affectionate nature to gratify.
In Smith's day there were only some 300 students at Glasgow College in
all, and the Moral Philosophy chair alone had never more than 80 or 90
in the public class and 20 in the private. The public class did not
mean a free class, as it does on the Continent; it really was the
dearer of the two, the fee in the private class being only a guinea,
while the fee of the public class was a guinea and a half. The public
class was the ordinary class taken for graduation and other purposes,
and obligatory by academic authority; the private was a special class,
undertaken, with the permission of the Senatus, for those who wished
to push the subject further; and to harmonise this account of them
with what has been previously said of the income Smith drew from fees,
it is necessary to explain that many of the students who attended
these classes paid no fees, according to a custom which still prevails
in Scotch universities, and by which one was considered a _civis_ of a
class he had attended for two years, and might thereafter attend it
whenever he chose without charge. Many in this way attended the Moral
Philosophy class four or five years, and among them, as Dr. Reid
informs us, quite a number of preachers and advanced students of
divinity and law, before whom, the worthy doctor confesses, he used to
stand in awe to speak without the most careful preparation.
The College session was then longer than it is now, extending from the
10th of October to the 10th of June, and the classes began at once
earlier in the morning and continued later at night. Smith commenced
his labours before daybreak by his public class from 7.30 to 8.30
A.M.; he then held at 11 A.M. an hour's examination on the lecture he
delivered in the morning, though to this examination only a third of
the students of the morning class were in the habit of coming; and he
met with his private class twice a week on a different subject at 12.
Besides these engagements Smith seems to have occasionally read for an
hour like a tutor with special pupils; at least one is led to infer so
much from the remarks of a former pupil, who, under the _nom de plume_
of Ascanius, writes his reminiscences of his old master to the editor
of the _Bee_ in June 1791. This writer says that he went to Glasgow
College after he had gone through the classes at St. Andrews,
Edinburgh, and even Oxford, in order that he might, "after the manner
of the ancients, walk in the porticoes of Glasgow with Smith and with
Millar, and be imbued with the principles of jurisprudence and law and
philosophy"; and then he adds: "I passed most of my time at Glasgow
with those two first-rate men, and Smith read private lectures to me
on jurisprudence, and accompanied them with his commentaries in
conversation, exercises which I hope will give a colour and a
substance to my sentiments and to my reason that will be eternal."
There is no difficulty in identifying this enthusiastic disciple with
the eccentric and bustling Earl of Buchan, the elder brother of Lord
Chancellor Erskine, and of the witty and greatly beloved Harry Erskine
of the Scotch bar, and the subject of the Duchess of Gordon's
well-known _mot_: "The wit of your lordship's family has come by the
mother, and been all settled on the younger branches." We know that
this Earl of Buchan was a contributor to the _Bee_ under various
fictitious signatures, because he has himself republished some of his
contributions, and we know that he attended Smith's class at Glasgow,
because he says so in a letter to Pinkerton, the historian, mentioning
having seen in Smith's library at that time a book of which Pinkerton
could not find a single copy remaining anywhere--the memoirs of
Lockhart of Lee, Cromwell's ambassador to France, which had been
suppressed (as the Earl had been told by his maternal uncle, Sir James
Steuart, the economist) at the instance of Lockhart, the famous
advocate, afterwards Lord Covington, because the family had turned
Jacobite, and disliked the association with the Commonwealth.[38] The
Earl gives the year of his attendance at Glasgow as 1760, but he must
have continued there more than one session, for he attended Millar's
lectures as well as Smith's, and Millar was not there till the session
1761-62; and it is on the whole most likely that this is the very
young nobleman whom Dr. Alexander Carlyle met in company with Smith at
a large supper party in April 1763, and concerning whom he mentions
that he himself whispered after a little to Smith that he wondered how
he could set this young man so high who appeared to be so foolish, and
Smith answered, "We know that perfectly, but he is the only lord in
our College."
It will be observed that Lord Buchan says Smith _read_ private
lectures to him. Smith's public lectures he was not accustomed to read
in any of his classes, but he seems to have found it more convenient
in teaching a single pupil to read them, and interpose oral comments
and illustrations as he went along. Others of Smith's old students
besides Lord Buchan express their obligations to the conversations
they were privileged to have with him. Dugald Stewart, Brougham
informs us, used to decline to see his students, because he found them
too disputatious, and he disliked disputing with them about the
correctness of the doctrines he taught. But Smith, by all accounts,
was extremely accessible, and was even in the habit of seeking out the
abler men among them, inviting them to his house, discussing with them
the subjects of his lectures or any other subject, and entering
sympathetically into their views and plans of life. John Millar,
having occasion to mention Smith's name in his _Historical View of the
English Government_, takes the opportunity to say: "I am happy to
acknowledge the obligations I feel myself under to this illustrious
philosopher by having at an early period of life had the benefit of
his lectures on the history of civil society, and enjoying his
unreserved conversation on the same subject."[39]
Millar, it may be added, was one of Smith's favourite pupils, and
after obtaining the chair of Jurisprudence in his old College, one of
his chief associates, and Smith held so high an opinion of Millar's
unique powers as a stimulating teacher that he sent his cousin, David
Douglas, to Glasgow College for no other purpose but to have the
advantage of the lectures and conversation of Millar. Jeffrey used to
say that the most bracing exercises a student in Glasgow underwent in
those days were the supper disputations at Professor Millar's house,
and that, able and learned as his works are, "they revealed nothing of
that magical vivacity which made his conversation and his lectures
still more full of delight than of instruction." Though he always
refused to accept Smith's doctrine of free trade, Millar was the most
effective and influential apostle of Liberalism in Scotland in that
age, and Jeffrey's father could never forgive himself for having put
his son to Glasgow, where, though he was strictly forbidden to enter
Millar's class-room, "the mere vicinity of Millar's influence" had
sent him back a Liberal.[40]
Now it is this interesting and famous lecturer from whom we obtain the
fullest account of Smith's qualities as a lecturer and of the
substance of his lectures.
"In the professorship of logic," he says, "to which Mr. Smith was
appointed on his first introduction into this University, he soon 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
metaphysics of the schools. Accordingly, after exhibiting a general
view of the powers of the mind, and explaining as 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
delivering of a system of rhetoric and belles-lettres."
In moral philosophy "his course of lectures," says Millar, "was
divided into four parts. The first contained natural theology, in
which he considered the proofs of the being and attributes of God, and
those principles of the human mind upon which religion is founded. The
second comprehended ethics, strictly so called, and consisted chiefly
of the doctrines which he afterwards published in his _Theory of Moral
Sentiments_. In the third part he treated at more length of that
branch of morality which relates to _justice_, and which, being
susceptible of precise and accurate rules, is for that reason capable
of a full and particular explanation.
"Upon this subject he followed the plan that seems to be suggested by
Montesquieu, endeavouring to trace the gradual progress of
jurisprudence, both public and private, from the rudest to the most
refined ages, and to point out the effects of those arts which
contribute to subsistence and to the accumulation of property, in
producing correspondent improvements or alterations in law and
government. This important branch of his labours he also intended to
give to the public; but this intention, which is mentioned in the
conclusion of the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, he did not live to
fulfil.
"In the last of his lectures he examined those political regulations
which are founded, not upon the principle of _justice_ but that of
_expediency_, and which are calculated to increase the riches, the
power, and the prosperity of a state. Under this view he considered
the political institutions relating to commerce, to finances, to
ecclesiastical and military establishments. What he delivered on those
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_."[41]
Under the third part were no doubt included those lectures on the
history of civil society to which Millar expresses such deep
obligation, and of which another pupil of Smith's, Professor
Richardson of the Humanity chair in Glasgow--a minor poet of
considerable acceptance in his day--also speaks with lively gratitude,
particularly of those "on the nature of those political institutions
that succeeded the downfall of the Roman Empire, and which included an
historical account of the rise and progress of the most conspicuous
among the modern European governments."[42]
Richardson tells us, too, that Smith gave courses of lectures on
taste, on the history of philosophy, and on belles-lettres, apparently
continuing to utilise his old lectures on this last subject
occasionally even after his translation from the chair to which they
properly appertained, and that he was very fond of digressing into
literary criticism from his lectures on any subject. "Those who
received instruction from Dr. Smith," says Richardson, "will recollect
with much satisfaction many of those incidental and digressive
illustrations and discussions, not only in morality but in criticism,
which were delivered by him with animated and extemporaneous eloquence
as they were suggested in the course of question and answer. They
occurred likewise, with much display of learning and knowledge, in his
occasional explanations of those philosophical works, which were also
a very useful and important subject of examination in the class of
moral philosophy."[43]
His characteristics as a lecturer are thus described by Millar:--
"There was no situation in which the abilities of Mr. Smith
appeared to greater advantage than as a professor. In
delivering his lectures he trusted almost entirely to
extemporary elocution. 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, his manner became warm
and animated, and his expression easy and fluent. On 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."[44]
One little peculiarity in his manner of lecturing was mentioned to the
late Archdeacon Sinclair by Archibald Alison the elder, apparently as
Alison heard it from Smith's own lips. He used to acknowledge that in
lecturing he was more dependent than most professors on the sympathy
of his hearers, and he would sometimes select one of his students, who
had more mobile and expressive features than the rest, as an
unsuspecting gauge of the extent to which he carried with him the
intelligence and interest of the class. "During one whole session," he
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."[45]
The great majority of his students were young men preparing for the
Presbyterian ministry, a large contingent of them--quite a third of
the whole--being Irish dissenters who were unfairly excluded from the
university of their own country, but appear to have been no very
worthy accession to the University of Glasgow. We know of no word of
complaint against them from Smith, but they were a sore trial both to
Hutcheson and to Reid. Reid says he always felt in lecturing to those
"stupid Irish teagues" as St. Anthony must have felt when he preached
to the fishes,[46] and Hutcheson writes a friend in the north of
Ireland that his Irish students were far above taking any interest in
their work, and that although he had "five or six young gentlemen from
Edinburgh, men of fortune and fine genius, studying law, these
Irishmen thought them poor bookworms."[47] Smith had probably even
more of this stamp of law students than Hutcheson. Henry Erskine
attended his class on jurisprudence as well as his elder brother.
Boswell was there in 1759, and was made very proud by the certificate
he received from his professor at the close of the session, stating
that he, Mr. James Boswell, was "happily possessed of a facility of
manners."[48] After the publication of the _Theory of Moral
Sentiments_, students came even from a greater distance. Lord
Shelburne, who was an enthusiastic admirer of that work, sent his
younger brother, the Honourable Thomas Fitzmaurice, for a year or two
to study under Smith, before sending him to Oxford in 1761 to read law
with Sir William Blackstone. Mr. Fitzmaurice, who married the Countess
of Orkney, and is the progenitor of the present Orkney family, rose to
a considerable political position, and would have risen higher but for
falling into ill health in the prime of life and remaining a complete
invalid till his death in 1793, but he never forgot the years he spent
as a student in Smith's class and a boarder in Smith's house. Dr.
Currie, the well-known author of the _Life of Burns_, was his medical
attendant in his latter years, and Dr. Currie says his conversation
always turned back to his early life, and particularly to the pleasant
period he had spent under Smith's roof in Glasgow. Currie has not,
however, recorded any reminiscences of those conversations.[49] Two
Russian students came in 1762, and Smith had twice to give them an
advance of £20 apiece from the College funds, because their
remittances had got stopped by the war. Tronchin, the eminent
physician of Geneva, the friend of Voltaire, the enemy of Rousseau,
sent his son to Glasgow in 1761 purposely "to study under Mr. Smith,"
as we learn from a letter of introduction to Baron Mure which the
young man received before starting from Colonel Edmonston of Newton,
who was at the time resident in Geneva. It was of Tronchin Voltaire
said, "He is a great physician, he knows the mind," and he must have
formed a high idea of the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ to send his son
so far to attend the lectures of its author. It was this young man
who, on his way back from Glasgow, played a certain undesigned part in
originating the famous quarrel between Rousseau and Hume, of which we
shall have more to hear anon. He was living with Professor Rouet of
Glasgow, at Miss Elliot's lodging-house in London, when Hume brought
Rousseau there in January 1866, and the moment Rousseau saw the son of
his old enemy established in the house to which he was conducted, he
flew to the conclusion that young Tronchin was there as a spy, and
that the good and benevolent Hume was weaving some infernal web about
him.
Smith's popularity as a lecturer grew year by year. It was felt that
another and perhaps greater Hutcheson had risen in the College. Reid,
when he came to Glasgow to succeed him in 1764, wrote his friend Dr.
Skene in Aberdeen that there was a great spirit of inquiry abroad
among the young people in Glasgow--the best testimony that could be
rendered of the effect of Smith's teaching. It had taught the young
people to think. His opinions became the subjects of general
discussion, the branches he lectured on became fashionable in the
town, the sons of the wealthier citizens used to go to College to take
his class though they had no intention of completing a university
course, stucco busts of him appeared in the booksellers' windows, and
the very peculiarities of his voice and pronunciation received the
homage of imitation. One point alone caused a little--in certain
quarters not a little--shaking of heads, we are told by John Ramsay of
Ochtertyre. The distinguished professor was a friend of "Hume the
atheist"; he was himself ominously reticent on religious subjects; he
did not conduct a Sunday class on Christian evidences like Hutcheson;
he would often too be seen openly smiling during divine service in his
place in the College chapel (as in his absent way he might no doubt be
prone to do); and it is even stated by Ramsay that he petitioned the
Senatus on his first appointment in Glasgow to be relieved of the duty
of opening his class with prayer, and the petition was rejected; that
his opening prayers were always thought to "savour strongly of natural
religion"; that his lectures on natural theology were too flattering
to human pride, and induced "presumptuous striplings to draw an
unwarranted conclusion, viz. 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,"[50] as if it were a fault to show religious truth to be
natural, for fear young men should believe it too easily. No record of
the alleged petition about the opening prayers and its refusal remains
in the College minutes, and the story is probably nothing but a morsel
of idle gossip unworthy of attention, except as an indication of the
atmosphere of jealous and censorious theological vigilance in which
Smith and his brother professors were then obliged to do their work.
In his lectures on jurisprudence and politics he had taught the
doctrine of free trade from the first, and not the least remarkable
result of his thirteen years' work in Glasgow was that before he left
he had practically converted that city to his views. Dugald Stewart
was explicitly informed by Mr. James Ritchie, one of the most eminent
Clyde merchants of that time, that Smith had, during his
professorship in Glasgow, made many of the leading men of the place
convinced proselytes of free trade principles.[51] Sir James Steuart
of Coltness, the well-known economist, used, after his return from his
long political exile in 1763, to take a great practical interest in
trying to enlighten his Glasgow neighbours on the economical problems
that were rising about them, and having embraced the dying cause in
economics as well as in politics, he sought hard to enlist them in
favour of protection, but he frankly confesses that he grew sick of
repeating arguments for protection to these "Glasgow theorists," as he
calls them, because he found that Smith had already succeeded in
persuading them completely in favour of a free importation of
corn.[52] Sir James Steuart was a most persuasive talker; Smith
himself said he understood Sir James's system better from his talk
than from his books,[3] and those Glasgow merchants must have obtained
from Smith's expositions a very clear and complete hold indeed of the
doctrines of commercial freedom, when Steuart failed to shake it, and
was fain to leave such theorists to their theories. Long before the
publication of the _Wealth of Nations_, therefore, the new light was
shining clearly from Smith's chair in Glasgow College, and winning its
first converts in the practical world. One can accordingly well
understand the emotion with which J.B. Say sat in this chair when he
visited Glasgow in 1815, and after a short prayer said with great
fervour, "Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace."[53]
Dugald Stewart further states, on the authority of gentlemen who were
students in the moral philosophy class at Glasgow in 1752 or 1753,
that Smith delivered so early as that lectures containing the
fundamental principles of the _Wealth of Nations_; and in 1755--the
year Cantillon's _Essai_ first saw the light, and the year before
Quesnay published his first economic writing--Smith was not only
expounding his system of natural liberty to his students, but publicly
asserting his claim to the authorship of that system in a Glasgow
Economic Society--perhaps the first economic club established
anywhere. The paper in which Smith vindicates this claim came somehow
into the possession of Dugald Stewart, and so escaped the fire to
which Smith committed all his other papers before his death, but it is
believed to have been destroyed by Stewart's son, very possibly after
his father's directions. For Stewart thought it would be improper to
publish the complete manuscript, because it would revive personal
differences which had better remain in oblivion, and consequently our
knowledge of its contents is confined to the few sentences which he
has thought right to quote as a valuable evidence of the progress of
Smith's political ideas at that very early period. It will be observed
that, as far as we can collect from so small a fragment of his
discourse, he presents the doctrine of natural liberty in a more
extreme form than it came to wear after twenty years more of thought
in the _Wealth of Nations_. Stewart says that many of the most
important opinions in the _Wealth of Nations_ are detailed in this
document, but he cites only the following:--
"Man is generally considered by statesmen and projectors as
the materials of a sort of political mechanics. Projectors
disturb nature in the course of her operations on human
affairs, and it requires no more than to leave her alone and
give her fair play in the pursuit of her ends that she may
establish her own designs.... Little else is required to
carry a state to the highest degree of affluence from the
lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable
administration of justice; all the rest being brought about
by the natural course of things. All governments which
thwart this natural course, which force things into another
channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of
society at a particular point, are unnatural, and, to
support themselves, are obliged to be oppressive and
tyrannical.... A great part of the opinions enumerated in
this paper is treated of at length in some lectures which I
have still by me, and which were written in the hand of a
clerk who left my service six years ago. They have all of
them been the constant subjects of my lectures since I first
taught Mr. Craigie's class the first winter I spent in
Glasgow down to this day without any considerable
variations. They had all of them been the subjects of
lectures which I read at Edinburgh the winter before I left
it, and I can adduce innumerable witnesses both from that
place and from this who will ascertain them sufficiently to
be mine."[54]
The distinction drawn in the last sentence between _that_ place,
Edinburgh, and _this_ place, shows that the paper was read to a
society in Glasgow. Smith was a member of two societies there, of
which I shall presently have something more to say, the Literary
Society and a society which we may call the Economic, because it met
for the discussion of economic subjects, though we do not know its
precise name, if it had any. Now this paper of Smith's was not read to
the Literary Society--at least, it is not included in the published
list of papers read by it--and we may therefore conclude that it was
read to the Economic Society.
Nothing is now known of the precise circumstances in which the paper
originated, except what Stewart tells us, that Smith "was anxious to
establish his exclusive right" to "certain leading principles both
political and literary," "in order to prevent the possibility of some
rival claims which he thought he had reason to apprehend, and to which
his situation as a professor, added to his unreserved communications
in private companies, rendered him peculiarly liable"; and that he
expressed himself "with a good deal of that honest and indignant
warmth which is perhaps unavoidable by a man who is conscious of the
purity of his intentions when he suspects that advantages have been
taken of the frankness of his temper." It would appear that some one,
who had got hold of Smith's ideas through attending his class or
frequenting his company, either had published them, or was believed to
be going to publish them as his own.
The writer of the obituary notice of Smith in the _Monthly Review_ for
1790 alleges that in this Glasgow period Smith lived in such constant
apprehension of being robbed of his ideas that, if he saw any of his
students take notes of his lectures, he would instantly stop him and
say, "I hate scribblers." But this is directly contradicted by the
account of Professor John Millar, who, as we have seen, was a student
in Smith's classes himself, and who expressly states both that the
permission to take notes was freely given by Smith to his students,
and that the privilege was the occasion of frequent abuse. "From the
permission given to students of taking notes," says Millar, "many
observations and opinions contained in these lectures (the lectures on
rhetoric and belles-lettres) have either been detailed in separate
dissertations or engrossed in general collections which have since
been given to the public." In those days manuscript copies of a
popular professor's lectures, transcribed from his students'
notebooks, were often kept for sale in the booksellers' shops. Blair's
lectures on rhetoric, for example, were for years in general
circulation in this intermediate state, and it was the publication of
his criticism on Addison, taken from one of the unauthorised
transcripts, in Kippis's _Biographia Britannica_, that at length
instigated Blair to give his lectures to the press himself. A
professor was thus always liable to have his unpublished thought
appropriated by another author without any acknowledgment at all, or
published in such an imperfect form that he would hardly care to
acknowledge it himself. If Smith, therefore, exhibited a jealousy over
his rights to his own thought, as has been suggested, Millar's
observation shows him to have had at any rate frequent cause; but
neither at that time of his life nor any other was he animated by an
undue or unreasonable jealousy of this sort such as he has sometimes
been accused of; and if in 1755 he took occasion to resent with
"honest and indignant warmth" a violation of his rights, there must
have been some special provocation.
Mr. James Bonar suggests that this manifesto of 1755 was directed
against Adam Ferguson, but that is not probable. Ferguson's name, it
is true, will readily occur in such a connection, because Dr. Carlyle
tells us that when he published his _History of Civil Society_ in 1767
Smith accused him of having borrowed some of his ideas without owning
them, and that Ferguson replied that he had borrowed nothing from
Smith, but much from some French source unnamed where Smith had been
before him. But, however this may have been in 1767, it is unlikely
that Ferguson was the occasion of offence in 1755. Up till that year
he was generally living abroad with the regiment of which he was
chaplain, and it is not probable that he had begun his _History_
before his return to Scotland, or that he had time between his return
and the composition of Smith's manifesto to do or project anything to
occasion such a remonstrance. Then he is found on the friendliest
footing with Smith in the years immediately following the manifesto,
and Stewart's allusion to the circumstances implies a graver breach
than could be healed so summarily. Besides, had Ferguson been the
cause of offence, Stewart would have probably avoided the subject
altogether in a paper to the Royal Society, of which Ferguson was
still an active member.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Thomson's _Life of Cullen_, i. 605.
[28] Thomson's _Life of Cullen_, i. 606.
[29] Bisset's _Burke_, i. 32.
[30] Prior's _Burke_, p. 38.
[31] _Outlines of the Philosophy of Education_, p. 23.
[32] Prior's _Life of Burke_, Bohn's ed. p. 38.
[33] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 55.
[34] _Caldwell Papers_, i. 170.
[35] Hamilton's _Reid_, p. 40.
[36] _Brougham's Life and Times_, i. 78.
[37] Chamberlayne's _Angliæ Notitia_ for 1750.
[38] Smith's copy of this book seems to have gone out of existence
like the others, for his cousin and heir, David Douglas, wrote Lord
Buchan in January 1792 that he had searched for it in Smith's library
without any success, and that though a catalogue of the library had
since then been made out, Lockhart's Memoirs was not contained in it.
Douglas's letter is in the Edinburgh University Library.
[39] Book II. chap. x.
[40] Cockburn's _Life of Jeffrey_, p. 12.
[41] Stewart's _Works_, x. 12.
[42] Richardson's _Life of Arthur_. See _Arthur's Discourses_, p. 510.
[43] Richardson's _Life of Arthur_. See _Arthur's Discourses_, p. 508.
[44] Stewart's _Works_, x. 12.
[45] Sinclair's _Old Times and Distant Places_, p. 9.
[46] Hamilton's _Reid_, p. 43.
[47] M'Cosh, _Scottish Philosophy_, p. 66.
[48] Boswell's _Correspondence with Erskine_, p. 26.
[49] Currie's _Memoirs of James Currie, M.D._, ii. 317.
[50] Ramsay, _Scotland and Scotsmen_, i. 462, 463.
[51] _Steuart's Works_, vi. 379.
[52] _Ibid._ vi. 378.
[53] Dr. Cleland's account of Glasgow in _New Statistical Account of
Scotland_, vi. 139.
[54] Stewart's _Works_, ed. Hamilton; x. 68.
CHAPTER VI
THE COLLEGE ADMINISTRATOR
A common misconception regarding Smith is that he was as helpless as a
child in matters of business. One of his Edinburgh neighbours remarked
of him to Robert Chambers that it was strange a man who wrote so well
on exchange and barter was obliged to get a friend to buy his horse
corn for him. This idea of his helplessness in the petty transactions
of life arose from observing his occasional fits of absence and his
habitual simplicity of character, but his simplicity, nobody denies,
was accompanied by exceptional acuteness and practical sagacity, and
his fits of absence seem to have been neither so frequent nor so
prolonged as they are commonly represented. Samuel Rogers spent most
of a week with him in Edinburgh the year before his death, and did not
remark his absence of mind all the time. Anyhow, during his thirteen
years' residence at Glasgow College, Smith seems to have had more to
do with the business of the College, petty or important, than any
other professor, and his brethren in the Senate of that University
cannot have seen in him any marked failing or incapacity for ordinary
business. They threw on his shoulders an ample share of the committee
and general routine work of the place, and set him to audit accounts,
or inspect the drains in the College court, or see the holly hedge in
the College garden uprooted, or to examine the encroachments on the
College lands on the Molendinar Burn, without any fear of his
forgetting his business on the way. They entrusted him for years with
the post of College Quæstor or Treasurer, in which inattention or the
want of sound business habits might inflict injury even on their
pecuniary interests. They made him one of the two curators of the
College chambers, the forty lodgings provided for students inside the
College gates. And when there was any matter of business that was a
little troublesome or delicate to negotiate, they seem generally to
have chosen Smith for their chief spokesman or representative. It was
then very common for Scotch students to bring with them from home at
the beginning of the session as much oatmeal as would keep them till
the end of it, and by an ancient privilege of the University they were
entitled to bring this meal with them into the city without requiring
to pay custom on it; but in 1757 those students were obliged by the
tacksman of the meal-market to pay custom on their meal, though it was
meant for their own use alone. Smith was appointed along with
Professor Muirhead to go and represent to the Provost that the
exaction was a violation of the privileges of the University, and to
demand repayment within eight days, under pain of legal proceedings.
And at the next meeting of Senate "Mr. Smith reported that he had
spoken to the Provost of Glasgow about the ladles exacted by the town
from students for meal brought into the town for their own use, and
that the Provost promised to cause what had been exacted to be
returned, and that accordingly the money was offered by the town's
ladler[55] to the students."
Smith was often entrusted with College business to transact in
Edinburgh--to arrange with Andrew Stuart, W.S., about promoting a bill
in Parliament, or to wait on the Barons of Exchequer and get the
College accounts passed; and he was generally the medium of
communication between the Senatus and the authorities of Balliol
College during their long and troublesome contentions about the Snell
property and the Snell exhibitioners.
He was Quæstor from 1758 till he left in 1764, and in that capacity
had the management of the library funds and some other funds, his
duties being subsequently divided between the factor and the
librarian. The professors, we are told by Professor Dickson, used to
take this office in turn for a term of two or three years, but Smith
held the office longer than the customary term, and on the 19th of May
1763 the Senate agreed that "as Dr. Smith has long executed the office
of Quæstor, he is allowed to take the assistance of an amanuensis." He
was Dean of Faculty from 1760 to 1762, and as such not only exercised
a general supervision over the studies of the College and the granting
of degrees, but was one of the three visitors charged with seeing that
the whole business of the College was administered according to the
statutes of 1727. While still filling these two offices, he was in
1762 appointed to the additional and important business office of
Vice-Rector, by his personal friend Sir Thomas Miller, the
Lord-Advocate of Scotland (afterwards Lord President of the Court of
Session), who was Rector of the University that year. As Sir Thomas
Miller was generally absent in consequence of his public engagements
in London or his professional engagements in Edinburgh, Smith as
Vice-Rector had to preside over all University meetings--meetings of
the Senatus, of the Comitia, of the Rector's Court--at a time when
this duty was rendered delicate by the contentions which prevailed
among the professors. The Rector's Court, it may be added--which
consisted of the Rector and professors--was a judiciary as well as
administrative body, which at one time possessed the power of life and
death, and according to the Parliamentary Report of 1829, actually
inflicted imprisonment in the College steeple on several delinquents
within the preceding fifty years. It may be mentioned that some time
elapsed after Sir Thomas Miller's election to the Rectorship before
he was able to appoint a Vice-Rector, because he could not appoint a
Vice-Rector till he was himself admitted, and he could not attend
personally to be admitted on account of engagements elsewhere. During
this interval Smith was elected præses of the University meetings by
the choice of his colleagues, and as the position was at the time one
of considerable difficulty, they would not be likely to select for it
a man of decided business incapacity.
Some idea of the difficulty of the place, on account of the
dissensions prevailing in the College during Smith's residence there,
may be got from a remark of his successor, Dr. Reid. In the course of
the first year after his arrival in Glasgow, Reid writes one of his
Aberdeen friends complaining bitterly of being obliged to attend five
or six College meetings every week, and meetings, moreover, of a very
disagreeable character, in consequence of "an evil spirit of party
that seems to put us in a ferment, and, I am afraid, will produce bad
consequences."[56] A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, in noticing
Smith's death in 1790, says that these divisions turned on questions
of academic policy, and that Smith always took the side which was
popular with people of condition in the city. The writer offers no
further particulars, but as far as we can now ascertain anything about
the questions which then kept the Glasgow Senate in such perpetual
perturbation, they were not questions of general policy or public
interest such as his words might suggest, and on the petty issues they
raised it makes no odds to know whether Smith sided with the kites or
with the crows. The troubles were generated, without any public
differences, out of the constitution of the University itself, which
seemed to be framed, as if on purpose, to create the greatest possible
amount of friction in its working. By its constitution; as that is
described in the Parliamentary Report of 1830, Glasgow University was
at that time under one name really two distinct corporations, with
two distinct governing bodies: (1) the University governed by the
Senate, which was composed of the Rector, the Dean of Faculty, the
Principal, the thirteen College or Faculty professors, and the five
regius professors; and (2) the College governed by the Faculty, as it
was called, which consisted of the thirteen College professors alone,
who claimed to be the sole owners and administrators of the older
endowments of the College, and to have the right of electing the
occupants of their own thirteen chairs by co-optation. Within the
Faculty again there was still another division of the professors into
gown professors and other professors. The gown professors, who seem to
have been the representatives of the five regents of earlier times,
were the professors of those classes the students of which wore
academical gowns, while the students of the other classes did not; the
gown classes being Humanity, Greek, Logic, Natural Philosophy, and
Moral Philosophy. These several bodies held separate meetings and kept
separate minutes, which remain to this day. The meetings of the Senate
were called University meetings or Rector's meetings, because they
were presided over by the Rector; and the meetings of the Faculty were
called Faculty meetings or Principal's meetings, because they were
presided over by the Principal. Even the five gown professors with the
Principal held separate meetings which the other professors had no
right to attend--meetings with the students every Saturday in the
Common Hall for the administration of ordinary academic discipline for
petty offences committed by the students of the five gown classes.
Smith belonged to all three bodies; he was University professor,
Faculty or College professor, and gown professor too. It is obvious
how easily this complicated and unnatural system of government might
breed incessant and irritating discussions without any grave division
of opinion on matters of serious educational policy. Practical
difficulties could scarce help arising as to the respective functions
of the University and the College, or the respective claims of the
regius professors and the Faculty professors, or the respective powers
of the Rector and the Principal; and Smith himself was one of a small
committee which presented a very lengthy report on this last subject
to the Senate of the University on the 13th of August 1762. The report
was adopted, but two of the professors dissented on the ground that it
was too favourable to the powers of the Principal.
But, wrangle as they might over petty points of constitutional right
or property administration, the heads of Glasgow College were guided
in their general policy at this period by the wisest and most
enlightened spirit of academic enlargement. Only a few years before
Smith's arrival they had recognised the new claims of science by
establishing a chemical laboratory, in which during Smith's residence
the celebrated Dr. Black was working out his discovery of latent heat.
They gave a workshop in the College to James Watt in 1756, and made
him mathematical instrument maker to the University, when the trade
corporations of Glasgow refused to allow him to open a workshop in the
city; and it was in that very workshop and at this very period that a
Newcomen's engine he repaired set his thoughts revolving till the
memorable morning in 1764 when the idea of the separate condenser
leapt to his mind as he was strolling past the washhouse on Glasgow
Green. They had at the same time in another corner of the College
opened a printing office for the better advancement of that art, and
were encouraging the University printer, the famous Robert Foulis, to
print those Homers and Horaces by which he more than rivalled the
Elzevirs and Etiennes of the past. To help Foulis the better, they had
with their own money assisted the establishment of the type-foundry of
Wilson at Camlachie, where Foulis procured the types for his _Iliad_;
they appointed Wilson type-founder to the University, and in 1762 they
erected for him a founding-house, as they called it, in their own
grounds. They had just before endowed a new chair of astronomy, of
which they had made their versatile type-founder the first professor,
and built for him an astronomical observatory, from which he brought
reputation to the College and himself by his observation of the solar
spots. They further gave Foulis in 1753 several more rooms in the
College, including the large room afterwards used as the Faculty Hall,
to carry out his ill-fated scheme of an Academy of Design; so that the
arts of painting, sculpture, and engraving were taught in the College
as well as the classics and mathematics, and Tassie and David Allan
were then receiving their training under the same roof with the
students for the so-called learned professions. The Earl of Buchan,
while walking, as he said, "after the manner of the ancients in the
porticoes of Glasgow with Smith and with Millar," unbent from the high
tasks of philosophy by learning to etch in the studio of Foulis. This
was the first school of design in Great Britain. There was as yet no
Royal Academy, no National Gallery, no South Kensington Museum, no
technical colleges, and the dream of the ardent printer, which was so
actively seconded by the heads of the University, was to found an
institution which should combine the functions of all those several
institutions, and pay its own way by honest work into the bargain. In
all these different ways the College of Glasgow was doing its best, as
far as its slender means allowed, to widen the scope of university
education in accordance with the requirements of modern times, and
there was still another direction in which they anticipated a movement
of our own day. They had already done something for that
popularisation of academic instruction which we call university
extension. Professor John Anderson, an active and reforming spirit who
deserves to be held in honour in spite of his troublesome pugnacity,
used then to deliver within the College walls, with the complete
concurrence and encouragement of his colleagues, a series of evening
lectures on natural philosophy to classes of working-men in their
working clothes, and the lectures are generally acknowledged to have
done great service to the arts and manufactures of the West of
Scotland, by improving the technical education of the higher grades of
artisans.
Now in all these new developments Smith took a warm interest; some of
them he actively promoted. There is nothing in the University minutes
to connect Smith in any more special way than the other professors
with the University's timely hospitality to James Watt; but as that
act was a direct protest on behalf of industrial liberty against the
tyrannical spirit of the trade guilds so strongly condemned in the
_Wealth of Nations_, it is at least interesting to remember that Smith
had a part in it. Watt, it may be recollected, was then a lad of
twenty, who had come back from London to Glasgow to set up as
mathematical instrument maker, but though there was no other
mathematical instrument maker in the city, the corporation of
hammermen refused to permit his settlement because he was not the son
or son-in-law of a burgess, and had not served his apprenticeship to
the craft within the burgh. But in those days of privilege the
universities also had their privileges. The professors of Glasgow
enjoyed an absolute and independent authority over the area within
college bounds, and they defeated the oppression of Watt by making him
mathematical instrument maker to the University, and giving him a room
in the College buildings for his workshop and another at the College
gates for the sale of his instruments. In these proceedings Smith
joined, and joined, we may be sure, with the warmest approval. For we
know the strong light in which he regarded the oppressions of the
corporation laws. "The property which every man has in his labour," he
says, "as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it
is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of the poor man lies
in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and to hinder him from
employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper
without injury to his neighbour is a plain violation of this most
sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty
both of the workman and of those who might be disposed to employ
him."[57] Watt's workshop was a favourite resort of Smith's during his
residence at Glasgow College, for Watt's conversation, young though he
was, was fresh and original, and had great attractions for the
stronger spirits about him. Watt on his side retained always the
deepest respect for Smith, and when he was amusing the leisure of his
old age in 1809 with his new invention of the sculpture machine, and
presenting his works to his friends as "the productions of a young
artist just entering his eighty-third year," one of the first works he
executed with the machine was a small head of Adam Smith in ivory.[58]
In the Foulis press and the Academy of Design Smith took a particular
interest. He was himself a book-fancier, fond of fine editions and
bindings, and he once said to Smellie the printer, whom he observed
admiring some of the books in his library, "I am a beau in nothing but
my books." And he was a man, as Dugald Stewart informs us, with a
carefully-cultivated taste for the fine arts, who was considered by
his contemporaries an excellent judge of a picture or a sculpture,
though in Stewart's opinion he appeared interested in works of art
less as instruments of direct enjoyment than as materials for
speculative discussions about the principles of human nature involved
in their production. Smith seems to have been one of Foulis's chief
practical advisers in the work of the Academy of Design, in settling
such details, for example, as the pictures which ought to be selected
to be copied by the pupils, or the subjects which ought to be chosen
for original work from Plutarch or other classical sources, and which
would be most likely to suit modern taste.
Sir John Dalrymple, who appears to have been one of Foulis's
associates in the enterprise, and to have taken an active concern in
the sale of the productions of the Academy in its Edinburgh agency
shop, writes Foulis on the 1st of December 1757 regarding the kind of
work that ought to be sent for sale there. "In the History pictures
that you send in, I beg you will take the advice of Mr. Smith and Dr.
Black. Your present scheme should be to execute not what you think the
best, but what will sell the best. In the first you may be the better
judge, since you are the master of a great Academa, but in the last I
think their advice will be of use to you."[59] The letter concludes:
"Whether it is an idea or not, I am going to give you a piece of
trouble. Be so good as make out a catalogue of your pictures, and as
far as you can of your busts, books of drawings, and prints. Secondly,
your boys, and how employed. Thirdly, the people who have studied
under you with a view to the mechanical art. And lastly, give some
account of the prospects which you think you have of being of use
either to the mechanical or to the fine arts of your country. Frame
this into a memorial and send it to me. I shall have it tryed here by
some who wish well to you, and as I go to London in the spring, I
shall, together with Mr. Wedderburn and Mr. Elliot, consider what are
the most prudent measures to take for your sake, or whether to take
any. Mr. Smith is too busy or too indolent, but I flatter myself Dr.
Black will be happy to make out this memorial for you. Let me know if
I have any chance of seeing you this winter. I have none of being at
Glasgow, and therefore wish you and Mr. Smith would come here, or you
by yourself would come here in the Christmas vacance."
The memorial alluded to in this letter was no doubt a memorial to
Government in behalf of a project then promoted by the Earl of
Selkirk and other friends of Foulis, of settling a salary on him for
directing an institution so useful to the nation as the Academy of
Design. Whether Smith overcame his alleged indolence and drew up the
memorial I cannot say, but this whole letter shows that Smith and
Black were the two friends in Glasgow whom Foulis was in the habit of
principally consulting, and the last sentence seems to indicate that
Smith's hand in the business was hardly less intimate than Dalrymple's
own. It may be noticed too how completely Sir John Dalrymple's ideas
of Smith, as implied in this letter, differ from those which are
current now, and how he sends a tradesman to the philosopher for
advice on practical points in his trade. As to pure questions of art,
whether this work or that is finest, he thinks Foulis himself may
possibly be the best judge, but when it comes to a question as to
which will sell the best--and that was the question for the success of
the project--then he is urged to take the practical mind of Smith to
his counsels. Though Smith's leanings were not to practical life, his
judgment, as any page of the _Wealth of Nations_ shows, was of the
most eminently practical kind. He had little of the impulse to meddle
in affairs or the itch to manage them that belongs to more bustling
people, but had unquestionably a practical mind and capacity.
If Smith was consulted by Foulis in this way about the management of
the Academy of Design, we may safely infer that he had also more to do
with the Foulis press than merely visiting the office to see the
famous _Iliad_ while it was on the case. Smith's connection with
Foulis began before he went to Glasgow, by the publication of Hamilton
of Bangour's poems by the University press, and I think it not
unreasonable to see traces of Smith's suggestion in the number of
early economic books which Foulis reissued after the year 1750, works
of writers like Child, Gee, Mun, Law, and Petty.
In the University type-foundry Smith took an active interest, because
he was a warm friend and associate of the accomplished type-founder.
Wilson had been bred a physician, but gave up his practice to become
type-founder, and devoted himself besides, as I have just mentioned,
to astronomy, to which Smith also at this period of his life gave some
attention. Smith indeed was possibly then writing his fragment on the
history of astronomy, which, though not published till after his
death, was, we are informed by Dugald Stewart, the earliest of all his
compositions, being the first part of an extensive work on the history
of all the sciences which he had at this time projected. Wilson,
having gone to large expense both of time and money to cast the Greek
type for the University Homer, and having never found another customer
for the fount except the University printer, went up to London in 1759
to push around, if possible, for orders, and was furnished by Smith
with a letter of recommendation to Hume, who was then residing there.
Hume writes to Smith on the 29th of July: "Your friend Mr. Wilson
called on me two or three days ago when I was abroad, and he left your
letter. I did not see him till to-day. He seems a very modest,
sensible, ingenious man. Before I saw him I spoke to Mr. A. Millar
about him, and found him much disposed to serve him. I proposed
particularly to Mr. Millar that it was worthy of so eminent a
bookseller as he to make a complete elegant set of the classics, which
might set up his name equal to the Alduses, Stevenses, or Elzevirs,
and that Mr. Wilson was the properest person in the world to assist
him in such a project. He confessed to me that he had sometimes
thought of it, but that his great difficulty was to find a man of
letters that could correct the press. I mentioned the matter to
Wilson, who said he had a man of letters in his eye one Lyon, a
nonjuring clergyman of Glasgow. I would desire your opinion of
him."[60]
When Wilson came to reside in the College in 1762, after his
appointment to the chair of Astronomy, he found it inconvenient to go
to and fro between the College and Camlachie to attend to the
type-foundry, and petitioned the Senate to build him a founding-house
in the College grounds, basing his claim on their custom of giving
accommodation to the arts subservient to learning, on his own services
to the University in the matter of the Greek types before mentioned,
and on his having undertaken, in spite of the discouraging results of
that speculation, to cast a large and elegant Hebrew type for the
University press. He estimated that the building would cost no more
than the very modest sum of £40 sterling, and he offered to pay a fair
rent. This memorial came up for consideration on the 5th of April, and
it was Smith who proposed the motion which was ultimately carried, to
the effect that the University should build a new foundry for Mr.
Wilson on the site most convenient within the College grounds, at an
expense not exceeding the sum of £40 sterling, on condition (1) that
Mr. Wilson pay a reasonable rent, and (2) that if the house should
become useless to the College before the Senate were sufficiently
recouped for their expenditure, Mr. Wilson or his heirs should be
obliged to make adequate compensation. The foundry was erected in the
little College garden next the Physic Garden; it cost £19 more than
the estimate, and was let for £3:15s. a year, from which it would
appear that 6-1/2 per cent on the actual expenditure (irrespective of
any allowance for the site) was considered a fair rent by the
University authorities in those days.
The Senate of this little college, which was thus actively encouraging
every liberal art, which had in a few years added to the lecture-room
of Hutcheson and Smith the laboratory of Black, the workshop of Watt,
the press of Foulis, the academy of painting, sculpture, and
engraving, and the foundry and observatory of Wilson, entertained in
1761 the idea of doing something for the promotion of athletics among
the students, and had under consideration a proposal for the
establishment of a new academy of dancing, fencing, and riding in the
University. One of the active promoters of this scheme appears again
to have been Adam Smith, for it is he who is chosen by the Senate on
the 22nd December 1761 to go in their name and explain their design to
the Rector, Lord Erroll, and request his assistance. This idea seems,
however, to have borne no fruit. Dancing was an exercise they required
to be observed with considerable moderation, for they passed a rule in
1752 that no student should be present at balls or assemblies or the
like more than thrice in one session, but they treated it with no
austere proscription.
One art alone did they seek to proscribe, the art dramatic, and in
1762 the Senate was profoundly disturbed by a project then on foot for
the erection of the first permanent theatre in Glasgow. The affair
originated with five respectable and wealthy merchants, who were
prepared to build the house at their own expense, the leading spirit
of the five being Robert Bogle of Shettleston, who had himself, we are
told by Dr. Carlyle, played "Sempronius" in a students' performance of
_Cato_ within the walls of Glasgow College in 1745. Carlyle played the
title _rôle_, and another divinity student, already mentioned as a
college friend of Smith's, Dr. Maclaine of the Hague, played a minor
part. But an amateur representation of an unexceptionable play under
the eye of the professors was one thing, the erection of a public
playhouse, catering like other public playhouses for the too
licentious taste of the period, was another, and the project of Mr.
Bogle and his friends in 1762 excited equal alarm in the populace of
the city, in the Town Council, and in the University. The Council
refused to sanction a site for the theatre within the city bounds, so
that the promoters were obliged to build it a mile outside; but the
anger of the multitude pursued them thither, and on the very eve of
its opening in 1764 by a performance in which Mrs. Bellamy was to play
the leading part, it was set on fire by a mob, at the instigation of a
wild preacher, who said he had on the previous night been present in a
vision at an entertainment in hell, and the toast of the evening,
proposed in most flattering terms from the chair, was the health of
Mr. Millar, the maltster who had sold the site for this new temple of
the devil.
During the two years between the projection of this building and its
destruction it caused the Senate of the College no common anxiety, and
Smith went along with them in all they did. On the 25th of November
1762 he was appointed, with the Principal and two other professors, as
a committee, to confer with the magistrates concerning the most proper
methods of preventing the establishment of a playhouse in Glasgow, and
at the same time to procure all the information in their power
concerning the privileges of the University of Oxford with respect to
their ability to prevent anything of that kind being established
within their bounds, and concerning the manner in which those
privileges, if they existed, were made effectual. On the
recommendation of this committee the University agreed to memorialise
the Lord Advocate on the subject, and to ask the magistrates of the
city to join them in sending the memorial. The Lord Advocate having
apparently suggested doubts as to the extent of their ancient powers
or privileges in the direction contemplated, Smith was appointed,
along with the Principal and one or two other professors, as a special
committee of inquiry into the ancient privileges and constitution of
the University, and the Principal was instructed meanwhile to express
to his lordship the earnest desire of the University to prevent the
establishment of a playhouse. While this inquiry was proceeding, the
magistrates of the city, on their part, had determined, with the
concurrence of a large body of the inhabitants, to raise an action at
law against the players if they should attempt to act plays in the new
theatre, and at a meeting over which Smith presided, and in whose
action he concurred, the University agreed to join the magistrates in
this prosecution. The agitation against the playhouse was still
proceeding when Smith resigned his chair in 1764, but shortly
afterwards, finding itself without any legal support, it gradually
died away. The part Smith took in this agitation may seem to require a
word of explanation, for he not only entertained no objection to
theatrical representations, but was so deeply impressed with their
beneficial character that in the _Wealth of Nations_ he specially
recommends them for positive encouragement by the State, and expressly
dissociates himself from those "fanatical promoters of popular
frenzies" who make dramatic representations "more than all other
diversions the objects of their peculiar abhorrence." The State
encouragement he wants is nothing in the nature of the endowment of a
national theatre, which is sometimes demanded nowadays. All the
encouragement he asks for is liberty--"entire liberty to all those who
from their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency,
to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing, by
all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions." But in
pressing for this liberty, he expresses the strongest conviction that
"the frequency and gaiety of public diversions" is absolutely
essential for the good of the commonwealth, in order to "correct
whatever is unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of all the
little sects into which the country is divided," and to "dissipate
that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the source of
popular superstition and enthusiasm."[61] Yet here we seem to find him
in alliance with the little sects himself, and trying to crush that
liberty of dramatic representations which he declares to be so vital
to the health of the community.
The reason is not, moreover, that he had changed his opinions in the
interval between the attempts to suppress the Glasgow playhouse in
1762 and the publication of his general plea for playhouses in the
Wealth of Nations in 1776. He had not changed his opinions. He
travelled with a pupil to France, still warm from this agitation in
Glasgow, and, as we learn from Stewart, was a great frequenter and
admirer of the theatre in that country,[62] and a few years before the
agitation began he was as deeply interested as any other of John
Home's friends in the representations of the tragedy of Douglas, and
as much a partisan of Home's cause. He does not appear indeed, as is
sometimes stated, to have been present either at the public
performance of Home's tragedy in Edinburgh in 1756, or at the previous
private performance, which is alleged to have taken place at Mrs. Ward
the actress's rooms, and in which the author himself, and Hume,
Carlyle, Ferguson, and Blair are all said to have acted parts. But
that he was in complete sympathy with them on the subject is manifest
from an undated letter of Hume to Smith, which must have been written
in that year. In this letter, knowing Smith's sentiments, he writes:
"I can now give you the satisfaction of hearing that the play, though
not near so well acted in Covent Garden as in this place, is likely to
be very successful. Its great intrinsic merit breaks through all
obstacles. When it shall be printed (which shall be soon) I am
persuaded it will be esteemed the best, and by French critics the only
tragedy of our language." After finishing his letter he adds: "I have
just now received a copy of _Douglas_ from London. It will instantly
be put on the press. I hope to be able to send you a copy in the same
parcel with the dedication."[63] These sentences certainly imply that
Smith's ideas of theatrical representations were in harmony with those
of Hume and his other Edinburgh friends, but shortly afterwards he is
seeking to revive obsolete academic privileges to prevent the erection
of a theatre.
The explanation must be looked for in the line of the conditional
clause with which he limits his claim for entire liberty to dramatic
entertainments--they must be "without scandal or indecency." There is
never any question that if free trade and public morals clash, it is
free trade that must give way, and his opposition to the project of
the Glasgow playhouse must have originated in his persuasion that it
was not attended, as things then went, with sufficient practical
safeguards against scandal and indecency. In considering that point
due weight must be given not only to the general improprieties
permissible on the English stage at that time, but to the fact that
locally great offence had quite recently been given in Scotland by the
profane or immoral character of some of the pieces presented on the
Scottish boards,[64] and that Glasgow itself had had experience of a
disorderly theatre already--the old wooden shed where hardy playgoers
braved opinion and listened to indifferent performances under the
protection of troops, and where, it will be remembered, Boswell, then
a student at the College, made the acquaintance of Francis Gentleman,
the actor. That house was not a licensed house, but the new house was
not to be a licensed house either, and it is quite possible for one
who thought a theatre generally, with due safeguards, a public
benefit, to think that a particular theatre without those safeguards
might constitute a public danger, especially in a university town.
On two delicate questions of professorial duty Smith made a decided
stand in behalf of the stricter interpretation. In 1757 Professor John
Anderson, the founder of the Andersonian University, who was then
Professor of Oriental Languages in Glasgow, became a candidate for the
chair which he afterwards filled for so many years with great credit
and success--the chair of Natural Philosophy; and, as the appointment
lay with the professors, Professor Anderson was one of the electors,
and was quite within his legal right in voting for himself. But Smith,
impressed with the importance of keeping such appointments free from
any leaven of personal interest, tabled a formal protest on three
successive occasions against the intervention of that distinguished
but headstrong professor in the business of that particular election.
He protested first against Anderson voting on a preliminary resolution
respecting the election; he protested the second time against him
taking part in the election itself; and he protested a third time
after the election, desiring it to be recorded expressly "that he did
not vote in the election of Mr. Anderson as Professor of Natural
Philosophy, not from objection to Mr. Anderson, in whose election he
would willingly have concurred, but because he regarded the method of
proceeding as irregular and possibly establishing a bad precedent." As
patrons of University chairs, the professors were trustees for the
community, and ought each to be bound by a tacit self-denying
ordinance, at least to the extent of refraining from actively using
this public position to serve his private interest. Smith himself, it
will be remembered, was one of his own electors to the Moral
Philosophy chair, but then that election was uncontested, and Smith
was not present at the meeting which appointed him.
The other personal question arose also out of circumstances which have
their counterpart in Smith's own history. Professor William Rouet,
Professor of Ecclesiastical and Civil History, made an engagement in
1759 to travel abroad as tutor with Lord Hope, the eldest son of Lord
Hopetoun; but when Lord Hopetoun wrote requesting leave of absence for
Professor Rouet, the Senate by a majority refused to grant the
request. Smith was one of that majority, and took an active part in
the subsequent transactions arising out of their decision. Rouet
persists in going abroad in the teeth of the refusal, and the
University by a majority deprive him of office for his negligence of
duty. The Crown, however, at first refuse to appoint a successor, on
the ground of informality in the act of deprivation, and Lord Bute
tells the Rector, Lord Erroll, that "the king's orders" are that the
business must be done over again _de novo_, or "else it may be of the
worst consequences to the University." The University take the opinion
of eminent counsel, Ferguson of Pitfour and Burnet of Mountbodie
(Monboddo), and are prepared to face the consequences threatened, but
are eventually saved the trouble by the resignation of Rouet in 1761.
Now in these transactions Smith seems to bear a leading part. He was
one of the small committee appointed to draw up answers to the protest
tabled by the minority of the Senatus; it was to him Lord Erroll
communicated the intimation of Lord Bute, though he was not then
either Vice-Rector or Dean of Faculty; and it was he and Professor
Millar who were sent through to Edinburgh to consult the two
advocates.
Smith was probably on the best terms with Rouet himself, who was an
intimate friend of David Hume and a cousin of their common friend
Baron Mure, and it was not an uncommon practice for the Scotch
universities at that period to sanction the absence of a professor on
a tutorial engagement. Adam Ferguson left England as tutor to Lord
Chesterfield while he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh,
and Dalzel resided at Oxford as tutor to Lord Maitland after he was
Professor of Greek in the same University. The Senate of Glasgow had
itself already permitted Professor John Anderson to remain another
winter in France with a son of the Primate of Ireland, when he was
chosen Professor of Oriental Languages in 1756, and Smith had
concurred in giving the permission. But Anderson's absence was absence
to fulfil an already-existing engagement, like the absence granted to
Smith himself in the first year of his own appointment, while Rouet's
was absence to fulfil a new one; and Smith, as his own subsequent
conduct shows, held pluralities and absenteeism of that sort to be a
wrong and mischievous subordination of the interest of the University
to the purely private interest or convenience of the professors. They
had too many temptations to accommodate one another by such
arrangements at the expense of the efficiency of the College; and his
action both in Rouet's case and his own is entirely in the spirit of
his criticism of the English universities in the _Wealth of Nations_.
FOOTNOTES:
[55] The words ladles and ladler seem to have descended from a time
when the exactions were made in kind by ladling the quantity out of
the sack.
[56] Hamilton's _Reid_, p. 43.
[57] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I. chap. ix.
[58] Muirhead's _Life of Watt_, p. 470.
[59] Duncan's _Notes and Documents_, p. 25.
[60] Burton, _Life of Hume_, ii. 59.
[61] _Wealth of Nations_, Book V. chap. i. art. iii.
[62] Stewart's _Works_, x. 49.
[63] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 16.
[64] See Doran's _Annals of the Stage_, ii. 377.
CHAPTER VII
AMONG GLASGOW FOLK
Smith was not only teacher in Glasgow, he was also learner, and the
conditions of time and place were most favourable, in many important
ways, for his instruction. Had he remained at Oxford, he would
probably never have been an economist; had he not spent so many of his
best years in Glasgow, he would never have been such an eminent one.
It was amid the thickening problems of the rising trade of the Clyde,
and the daily discussions they occasioned among the enterprising and
intelligent merchants of the town, that he grew into a great
economist.
It need scarce be said that the Glasgow of the middle of last century
was a very different city from the Glasgow of to-day. It was in size
and appearance a mere provincial town of 23,000 inhabitants. Broom
still grew on the Broomielaw; a few cobles were the only craft on the
river; and the rude wharf was the resort of idlers, watching the
fishermen on the opposite side cast for salmon, and draw up netfuls on
the green bank. The Clyde was not deepened till 1768. Before that the
whole tonnage dues at Glasgow were only eight pounds a year, and for
weeks together not a single vessel with a mast would be seen on the
water. St. Enoch Square was a private garden; Argyle Street an
ill-kept country road; and the town herd still went his rounds every
morning with his horn, calling the cattle from the Trongate and the
Saltmarket to their pasture on the common meadows in the now
densely-populated district of the Cowcaddens.
Glasgow in these its younger days struck every traveller chiefly for
its beauty. Mrs. Montagu thought it the most beautiful city in Great
Britain, and Defoe, a few years before, said it was "the cleanest and
beautifullest and best built city in Britain, London excepted." As
Mrs. Bellamy approached it on the occasion I have mentioned in order
to open the new theatre in 1764, she says "the magnificence of the
buildings and the beauty of the river ...elated her heart"; and Smith
himself, we know, once suffered for praising its charms. It was at a
London table, and Johnson was present, who, liking neither Smith nor
his Scotch city, cut him short by asking, "Pray, sir, have you seen
Brentford?" Boswell, who took a pride in Glasgow himself, calling it
"a beautiful city," afterwards expostulated with the doctor for this
rough interruption: "Now, sir," said he, "was not that rude?" The full
rudeness is only apparent when we remember that Brentford was in that
day a byword for dreariness and dirt--Thomson in the _Castle of
Indolence_ calls it "a town of mud." When Johnson visited Glasgow,
however, he joined the troop of its admirers himself, and Boswell took
the opportunity to put him then in mind of his question to Smith, and
whisper to him, "Don't you feel some remorse?"
But Glasgow had already begun its transition from the small provincial
to the great commercial capital, and was therefore at a stage of
development of special value to the philosophical observer. Though
still only a quiet but picturesque old place, nestling about the
Cathedral and the College and two fine but sleepy streets, in which
carriers built their haystacks out before their door, it was carrying
on a trade which was even then cosmopolitan. The ships of Glasgow were
in all the waters of the world, and its merchants had won the lead in
at least one important branch of commerce, the West India tobacco
trade, and were founding fresh industries every year with the
greatest possible enterprise. The prosperity of Glasgow is a fruit of
the Union which first opened the colonial markets to Scotch
merchandise, and enabled the merchants of the Clyde to profit by the
advantages of their natural situation for trading with the American
plantations. Before the middle of the century the Clyde had become the
chief European emporium for American tobacco, which foreign countries
were not then allowed to import directly, and three-fourths of the
tobacco was immediately on arrival transhipped by the Glasgow
merchants for the seaports of the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the
North Sea.
As they widened their connections abroad, they naturally developed
their industries at home. They founded the Smithfield ironworks, and
imported iron from Russia and Sweden to make hoes and spades for the
negroes of Maryland. They founded the Glasgow tannery in 1742, which
Pennant thought an amazing sight, and where they employed 300 men
making saddles and shoes for the plantations. They opened the
Pollokshaws linen print-field in 1742, copper and tin works in 1747,
the Delffield pottery in 1748. They began to manufacture carpets and
crape in 1759, silk in 1759, and leather gloves in 1763. They opened
the first Glasgow bank--the Ship--in 1750, and the second--the
Arms--in 1752. They first began to improve the navigation of the Clyde
by the Act of 1759; they built a dry dock at their harbour of Port
Glasgow in 1762; while in 1768 they deepened the Clyde up to the city,
and began (for this also was mainly their work) the canal to the Forth
for their trade with the Baltic. It was obvious, therefore, that this
was a period of unique commercial enterprise and expansion. We can
easily believe Gibson, the historian of Glasgow, when he states that
after 1750 "not a beggar was to be seen in the streets," and "the very
children were busy"; and we can as easily understand Smith when,
contrasting Glasgow and Edinburgh among other places, he says the
residence of a few spirited merchants is a much better thing for the
common people of a place than the residence of a court.
Now it was those spirited merchants who had then so much to do with
the making of Glasgow that had also something to do with the making of
Adam Smith. Plain business men of to-day sometimes smile at the
"Virginian Dons" and "tobacco lords" of last century as they picture
them gathering to the Glasgow Plainstanes at the hour of Change in the
glory of scarlet cloaks, cocked hats, and gold-headed canes, and the
plain citizens of that time all making way for their honours as they
passed. But there was much enlightenment and sagacity concealed under
that finery. Mrs. Montagu, who visited Glasgow in 1767, wrote Sir A.
Mitchell, the Ambassador, that she was more delighted with it than
with any other commercial town she had seen, because gain did not
usurp people's whole attention, but "the sciences, the arts, and the
love of agriculture had their share."[65] Their fortunes were small
compared with the present standard. Sir John Dalrymple, speaking of
three of the foremost merchants of Glasgow (one of them, John
Glassford, the richest man in the city), computes that they had a
quarter of a million between the three, and Dr. Reid, explaining the
anxiety caused in Glasgow by the American troubles in 1765, says
Glasgow owners possessed property in the American plantations
amounting to £400,000. But these figures meant large handling and
large dealings in those times, and perhaps more energy, mind, and
character than the bigger figures of the present day; and we are told
that commercial men in Glasgow still look back to John Glassford and
Andrew Cochrane as perhaps the greatest merchants the Clyde has seen.
Andrew Cochrane was Smith's particular friend among them, and Dr.
Carlyle tells that "Dr. Smith acknowledged his obligations to this
gentleman's information when he was collecting materials for his
_Wealth of Nations_; and the junior merchants who have flourished
since his time and extended their commerce far beyond what was then
dreamt of, confess with respectful remembrance that it was Andrew
Cochrane who first opened and enlarged their views."[66] Dr. Carlyle
informs us, moreover, that Cochrane founded a weekly club in the
"forties"--political economy club--of which "the express design was to
inquire into the nature and principles of trade in all its branches,
and to communicate knowledge and ideas on that subject to each other,"
and that Smith became a member of this club after coming to reside in
Glasgow. This was probably the first political economy club in the
world, for Carlyle was in Glasgow in 1743, and it is of that period he
speaks when he says, "I was not acquainted with Provost Cochrane at
this time, but I observed that the members of this society had the
highest admiration of his knowledge and talents."
Cochrane was indeed one of the remarkable men of that time. Smollett
describes him in _Humphrey Clinker_ as "one of the first sages of the
Scottish kingdom," and "a patriot of a truly Roman spirit." He was
Provost of Glasgow during the Rebellion, and while the Government and
the Horse Guards slumbered and dawdled, and let Prince Charlie march
from the Highlands to Edinburgh, and from Edinburgh up into the heart
of England, Cochrane had already raised two regiments in Glasgow to
resist the invader, which, however, this same dawdling Government,
from mistaken suspicions of Scottish loyalty, refused to permit him to
arm. The Prince, on his return from England, actually occupied
Glasgow, and taxed it severely, but Cochrane's sagacious management
piloted the city through the crisis, so that it neither yielded to the
popular Prince's arts nor provoked him to hostilities; and, looking
back at these difficulties when he laid down the Provostship a few
years later, he said, "I thank my God that my magistracy has ended
without reproach." His correspondence, published by the Maitland Club,
contains some terse descriptions of the "prodigious slavery" he
underwent, "going through the great folks" in London day after day for
two months trying to recover from the Government some compensation for
the Prince's exactions. And it may be added that it was his banking
firm--Cochrane, Murdoch and Co., generally known, however, as the
Glasgow Arms Bank, because they printed the Glasgow arms on their
notes--that fell on the happy expedient of paying in sixpences when
the Bank of Scotland made the infamous attempt to "break" it in 1759
by first collecting its notes for some time, and then suddenly
presenting the whole number collected for immediate payment. The agent
of the Bank of Scotland presented £2893 of notes on the 14th of
December, and after thirty-four successive days' attendance he wrote
his employers that he had only received £1232, because "the partners
vied with each other in gaining time by miscounting and other low
arts, and when the partners became wearied or ashamed of the task,
their porter, a menial servant, would act the part of teller."[67]
Of the Political Economy Club, founded by this able man, we know
nothing except what Dr. Carlyle tells us, and the only other member of
it besides Smith and Cochrane whose name Carlyle mentions is Dr.
Wight, Professor of Ecclesiastical and Civil History. But it met once
a week all the thirteen years Smith resided in Glasgow, and must have
discussed many commercial problems during that time. We know, indeed,
some of the principal practical questions which were then agitating
the minds of Glasgow merchants, and may be sure those, at least, would
be among the questions discussed at the club. Some of them concerned
the removal of trade restrictions, but the restrictions which those
Glasgow merchants were anxious to remove were restrictions on the
import of raw materials for their manufactures, such as iron and linen
yarn, and manufacturers, of course, are not necessarily free-traders
because they want free import of raw materials. That was advocated as
strongly from the old mercantilist standpoint as it is now from the
free-trade one; it was merely sanctioning a little addition to our
imports in order to produce a much greater addition to our exports.
In 1750 we find Provost Cochrane in correspondence with Smith's
friend, James Oswald, M.P., concerting parliamentary action for the
entire removal of the import duty on American iron. The Glasgow
ironworks--the nailery, as it was called--with which Mr. Cochrane was
connected used at that time 400 tons of iron in the year, and the iron
had to be all imported at a high price from Russia and Sweden, because
the native ores of Scotland were not then discovered, and American
iron, by an iniquitous piece of preferential legislation in favour of
the English manufacturer, was allowed to come duty free into English
but not into Scotch seaports. Cochrane wants Oswald to get the law
amended so as to "allow bar iron from our colonies to be imported to
Scotland duty free." "It would," he says, "save our country very great
sums, and no way hurt the landed interest. It would lower the price of
iron, and consequently of all our manufactures, which would increase
the consumpt and sale; it would serve for ballast to our ships from
North America, and when tobacco is scarce, fill up part of the
tonnage; would increase our exports, and no way interfere with our
neighbours in the South."[68] That language might be held
indifferently by the mercantilist and the free-trader.
In advocating the abolition of the duty on foreign linen yarns, which
they succeeded in obtaining in 1756, the Glasgow merchants seem
certainly to have had no thought of free trade, or probably anything
else but their own obvious interest as manufacturers, for they never
dreamt of abolishing either the export bounty on home-made linen cloth
or of repealing the law of 1748
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