CONTENTS
PAGE CHAPTER I [Early Years] 1 CHAPTER II [The Beginning of a Career] 23 CHAPTER III [Theology and Religious Establishments] 36 CHAPTER IV [“The Theory of Moral Sentiments”] 46 CHAPTER V [In the Glasgow Chair—The Lectures on Justice And Police] 68 CHAPTER VI [Glasgow and its University] 94 CHAPTER VII [The Tour in France, 1764-66] 118 CHAPTER VIII [Politics and Study, 1766-76] 144 CHAPTER IX [The “Wealth of Nations” and its Critics] 164 CHAPTER X [Free Trade] 188 CHAPTER XI [Last Years] 205 [Index] 237
ADAM SMITH
CHAPTER I
EARLY YEARS
Adam Smith was born on June 5, 1723, in the “lang toun” of Kirkcaldy. It was one of the “mony royal boroughs yoked on end to end like ropes of ingans, with their hie-streets and their booths, and their kraemes and houses of stane and lime and forestairs,” which led Andrew Fairservice to contrast “the kingdom of Fife” with the inferior county of Northumberland; nay, it furnished him with a special boast, “Kirkcaldy, the sell o’t, is langer than ony toun in England.” It had been a royal borough from the time of Charles I., and had declined, like many other Scotch towns, in the religious wars of the seventeenth century. Many of its citizens who had fought for the Covenant had fallen on the fatal field of Tippermuir. But it still contained about 1500 inhabitants, who were variously employed as colliers, fishermen, salters, nailmakers, and smugglers. From the harbour you might walk a mile or more westward along the High Street, enjoying from time to time a glimpse of the sea and shelving beach, where the line of shops opened for a narrow “wynd,” or a still narrower “close” threaded the high-walled gardens of a few substantial houses. In one of these Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, and probably in one of these he was born. The father, who died a few weeks before the birth of his only child, had been a leading townsman. Adam Smith the elder was a man of note in his own day. From 1707 to his death he was a Writer,[1] i.e. solicitor, and Judge Advocate for Scotland. He had acted as private secretary to Lord Loudon, then Minister for Scotland; and Loudon, on leaving office in 1713, obtained for his secretary the Comptrollership of Customs at Kirkcaldy—a post worth about £100 a year.
His widow lived to a great age, and saw her boy rise step by step to the fulness of fame. She is said to have been an over-indulgent mother; but her devotion was repaid by the life-long love of a most tender son. Mrs. Smith’s maiden name was Margaret Douglas, and she was the daughter of the Laird of Strathendry, in the county of Fife. At Strathendry the future economist had a narrow escape; for one day as he played at the door he was picked up and carried off by a party of vagrant tinkers. Luckily he was soon missed, pursued and overtaken in Leslie Wood; and thus, in the grandiose dialect of Dugald Stewart, there was preserved to the world “a genius, which was destined, not only to extend the boundaries of science, but to enlighten and reform the commercial policy of Europe.”
The next landmark in the boy’s history is a copy of Eutropius, on the fly-leaf of which is inscribed in a childish hand, “Adam Smith, his book, May 4th, 1733.” Before his tenth birthday, therefore, he had already made some progress in Latin. The Burgh School of Kirkcaldy, which he attended, was a good grammar school of the kind that already abounded in Scotland. It was patronised by the Oswalds of Dunnikier, the principal people of the neighbourhood. James Oswald, who soon made a mark in politics, was Smith’s senior by some years, but they became life-long friends. Robert Adams, the architect who planned Edinburgh University, was another friend and schoolfellow; and so was John Drysdale, who twice held the helm of the Scotch Church as Moderator of its General Assembly. In 1734 the schoolboys played a moral piece written for the purpose by the head master, David Millar. As a teacher he had a considerable reputation, but as a dramatist he will be judged by the title of his play, “A Royal Counsel for Advice; or Regular Education for Boys the Foundation of all other Improvements.” Adam Smith soon attracted notice at school “by his passion for books and by the extraordinary powers of his memory.” Too weak and delicate to join in active games, he was yet popular with his schoolfellows; for his temper, “though warm, was to an uncommon degree friendly and generous.” In company his absentmindedness was often noticed, and this habit, with a trick of talking to himself, clung to him to the end.
In his fourteenth year Smith left the Grammar School of Kirkcaldy for the University of Glasgow, where he was to remain until the spring of 1740. He entered, probably, in October 1737, at the beginning of the session. As the full course extended over four sessions and Smith only attended three, he did not take his degree; but he had the good fortune to study Greek under Dunlop, mathematics under Simson, the editor of Euclid, and morals under Hutcheson, perhaps the greatest philosopher of his generation, and certainly the most eloquent.
Glasgow, though still but a small place, was already the most prosperous and progressive of Scotch towns. After a century of decay it had found salvation in the Act of Union, which gave it free trade with England and a share in the colonial monopoly. Readers of Rob Roy will remember how the inimitable Jarvie enlarged upon these advantages and on the facilities Glasgow possessed “of making up sortable cargoes for the American market.” It was very loyal, therefore, to the House of Hanover. In the rising of 1745, Charles Edward got considerable support from Edinburgh, and even from Manchester, but none from Glasgow, which, indeed, soon afterwards obtained a parliamentary vote of £10,000 in recognition of its exertions and as compensation for its losses. Glasgow was the only town in Scotland, as a learned writer has observed, to exhibit the same kind of visible progress in the first half of the eighteenth century which the rest of the country developed in the second. Its shipping, sadly cramped by the Navigation Act, began to expand after the Union. In 1716 the “first honest vessel in the West India trade” sailed from the Clyde, and in 1735, two years before Smith’s arrival, Glasgow owned sixty-seven vessels with a total burden of 5600 tons, nearly half of the total Scotch, though only one-eightieth of the total English tonnage.
In this rising mart Smith learned to value the English connection, and as he trod its busy streets and watched the merchandise of the West pouring into its warehouses, the boy saw that a new world had been called in to enrich the old. With the new sights and sounds came new ideas that had not yet penetrated the gloom of Holyrood or the rusty pride of the Canongate. From the lips of his master, Hutcheson, he heard that fruitful formula which his own philosophy was to interpret and develop, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” His mind was opened at once to the wisdom of the ancients and to the discoveries of the moderns. He learned from Bacon, and Grotius, and Locke, and Newton to discern through the obscuring mists of mediæval philosophy the splendid dawn of science. To the end of his life he loved to recall “the abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson.” Unorthodox yet not irreligious, radical yet not revolutionary, receptive yet inspiring, erudite yet original, Hutcheson was one of those rare reformers whose zeal is fertilised by knowledge and enforced by practical devotion. In early manhood he had refused to seek an easy advancement by subscribing to the tenets of the Church of England in Ireland, and while Smith was at Glasgow he braved the resentment of the Presbytery by teaching moral principles which were supposed to contravene the Westminster Confession. He was also the first in the University to abandon the practice of lecturing in Latin; and Dugald Stewart tells us that his old pupils were all agreed about his extraordinary talent as a public speaker. His pen was so unequal to his tongue that Stewart applies to Hutcheson what Quintilian said of Hortensius: “apparet placuisse aliquid eo dicente quod legentes non invenimus.”—“He gave a pleasure to his hearers which his readers miss.”