CHAPTER V
IN THE GLASGOW CHAIR—THE LECTURES ON JUSTICE AND POLICE
The finding of Adam Smith’s lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms, 133 years at least after their last delivery and 105 years after the author had had his own folio notes of them destroyed, is not only one of the curiosities of literature, it is also the most important aid that has been afforded to the study of Smith’s economic, social, and juristic ideas since the appearance in 1793 of Dugald Stewart’s biographical sketch. From 1793 to 1896, hundreds of German students big with their epoch-making theses “über Smiths Entwicklung,” scores of Frenchmen eager to prove the superiority of Quesnai and Turgot, and perhaps half a dozen English critics had whetted their ingenuity on a brief account of the Glasgow lectures which was supplied to Dugald Stewart by Adam Smith’s old pupil and friend, John Millar. According to Millar, Smith’s course, while he occupied the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, fell into four parts, the first two of which consisted, as we have seen, of Natural Theology and Ethics. In the third part he treated at more length of that branch of morality which relates to justice. Here he followed the plan suggested by Montesquieu, “endeavouring to trace the gradual progress of jurisprudence, both public and private, from the rudest to the most refined ages.” This important branch of his labours he also intended to give to the public, but he did not live to fulfil his intention.
In the last part of his lectures he examined those political regulations which are founded not upon justice, but expediency, and considered the political institutions relating to commerce, to finance, to ecclesiastical and military establishments. “What he delivered on these subjects contained the substance of the work he afterwards published under the title of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”
This was all that the world knew of Adam Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence and political economy, save that at the end of his Theory of Moral Sentiments he promised “another discourse” dealing with the general principles of law and government, and with the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society, “not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else in the subject of law.” On the first section of his lectures Adam Smith never even promised a book. He had no ambition to bring the kirk about his ears. The second section took shape, as we have seen, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, after the publication of which in 1759 the plan of the lectures underwent a change, the ethical part being compressed and the economical part extended. The Wealth of Nations covers the subject of police, revenue, and arms, and so executes the promise in part. “What remains,” he wrote in 1790, “the theory of Jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been hindered from executing.” In the lectures now discovered and published we have therefore a first draft of the Wealth of Nations and also a first draft of the projected work on Justice, or Jurisprudence, “a sort of theory and history of law and government,” as he called it in a letter of 1785.
How, then, comes it to pass that we possess these legal and economic lectures just as Smith delivered them to his class at Glasgow, in spite of Dugald Stewart’s express statement that no part of them had been preserved “excepting what he himself published in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and in The Wealth of Nations”?
When Smith left Glasgow in 1764 his fame stood high, and probably there were many note-books containing his lectures floating about in the college. A good manuscript of useful lectures would pass from one student to another and might from time to time be found on a bookstall. In the session of 1762-3, or possibly of the previous year, an intelligent and attentive student took down Smith’s lectures with unusual accuracy. At least one copy was taken of it after Smith had left the University; for the manuscript so happily preserved is dated 1766, is clear, well written, and free from abbreviations, while some of the mistakes are evidently misreadings and not mishearings. That this fair copy was not made by the student who took the original notes is further shown, says the editor, “by the fact that, though the original note-taker must have been able and intelligent, the transcription is evidently the work of a person who often did not understand what he was writing.”
The manuscript consists of 192 leaves octavo size, bound in calf, with the signature of “J. A. Maconochie, 1811,” on the front cover. This Maconochie, or perhaps his father Allan, the first Lord Meadowbank, who was appointed professor of Public Law at Edinburgh in 1779, must have picked up the book, and it has remained in the possession of the family ever since. In 1876 Mr. Charles C. Maconochie rescued it from a garret-room, and in 1895 happened to mention it to Mr. Edwin Cannan, who thereupon undertook the task of editing it for the press—a task which he has performed to perfection. One result of this lucky discovery is to dispose of the legend that Adam Smith was little more than a borrower from the French school, a mere reflector of the Reflexions of Turgot. By examining the lectures we shall inform ourselves in the political wisdom which Adam Smith used to teach his fortunate class at Glasgow long years before he met Quesnai or Turgot, and longer still before the Reflexions began to appear in the Éphémérides du Citoyen.
“Jurisprudence” was the title Adam Smith gave to this course of lectures, and he divided it under four heads: Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms, taken in the order named. Natural Jurisprudence, he begins, is the science that inquires into the general principles which ought to be the foundation of the laws of all nations. It is, he says elsewhere in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, “of all sciences by far the most important, but hitherto perhaps the least cultivated.” Grotius’s treatise on the Laws of War and Peace—“a sort of casuistical book for sovereigns and states”—was still, he thought, the most complete work on this subject. After Grotius came Hobbes, who, from an utter abhorrence of ecclesiasticism and bigotry, sought to establish a system of morals by which men’s consciences might be subjected to the civil power. Then after a few words on Puffendorf and Cocceii, Adam Smith explained his own classification as follows:—
“Jurisprudence is the theory of the general principles of law and government. The four great objects of law are justice, police, revenue, and arms.
“The object of justice is the security from injury, and it is the foundation of civil government.
“The objects of police are the cheapness of commodities, public security and cleanliness, if the two last were not too minute for a lecture of this kind. Under this head we will consider the opulence of a state.
“For defraying the expenses of government, some fund must be raised. Hence the origin of revenue.... In general, whatever revenue can be raised most insensibly from the people ought to be preferred; and in the sequel it is proposed to be shown, how far the laws of Britain and of other European nations are calculated for this purpose.
“As the best police cannot give security unless the government can defend themselves from foreign attacks, the fourth thing appointed by law is for this purpose; and under this head will be shown the different species of arms, the constitution of standing armies, militias, etc.
“After these will be considered the laws of nations.”
Having thus divided his whole course, Adam Smith proceeded further in an introductory lecture to subdivide his first part, Justice. The end of justice is to secure from injury; and a man may be injured as a member of a state, as a private individual (in his body, reputation, or property), or as a member of a family. Adam Smith therefore treats of justice under the three heads of Public Jurisprudence, Domestic Law, and Private Law. Many of his juristic ideas are evidently derived from Grotius, Locke, Montesquieu, Hutcheson, and Hume; but the effect produced is that of a powerful and original thinker in close touch with the best minds of his day, who draws his illustrations freely and easily alike from ancient and modern history. He finds that men were induced to enter civil society by two principles, authority and utility, that is to say, by the instinct of obedience and the instinct of self-preservation.