Adam Smith

by Francis W. Hirst

The intellectual level of the professors and lecturers in the University of Glasgow was already high when Smith joined them, and the place was free from the monopolistic spirit which dulled and enervated the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1752, a year after his arrival, Smith took part in founding what was called the Literary Society of Glasgow. Besides the professors a number of outsiders were admitted—David Hume, Sir John Dalrymple the historian, John Callander the antiquary, Robert Foulis the famous printer, and others. In one of the first papers read to this society (January 1753) Adam Smith reviewed Hume’s Essays on Commerce. He had no doubt read the essays in proof, as there is a letter from Hume in the previous September, asking him for criticisms towards a new edition he was then preparing of his Essays, Moral and Political, in which these new Commercial Essays were to be incorporated.

Another and more convivial club was presided over by Simson, the professor of Mathematics, whose genius and amiability had impressed Adam Smith from his student days. When Simson died in 1768 he had spent half a century in the college. He divided each day with precision between work, sleep, refection in the tavern at the gate, and a measured walk in the gardens. Every Friday evening his club supped in the tavern, and every Saturday the members walked out a mile to the neighbouring village of Anderston, and there feasted on the customary one-course dinner of chicken broth, with a tankard of claret followed by whist and punch. Ramsay of Ochtertyre says that Smith was a bad partner. If an idea came to him in the middle of the game he would renounce or neglect to call. After cards they would talk, or Simson, who was the soul of gaiety, would sing Greek odes to modern airs. A more distinguished circle than this of plain livers and high thinkers could hardly have been found in Europe. Besides the editor of Euclid it included the founders of political economy and modern chemistry, and the inventor of the steam engine. For Joseph Black and his young assistant, James Watt, sat round the same fireside with Simson and Adam Smith. To the conversation of the club, said Watt, “my mind owed its first bias towards such subjects [literature, philosophy, etc.], in which they were all my superiors, I never having attended college, and being then but a mechanic.” In 1756 young Watt had come from London to Glasgow, and being refused permission by the close corporation of hammermen to set up as a mechanic in the town, he was welcomed by the professors, who appointed him maker of mathematical instruments to the University, and gave him a workshop and saleroom within its precincts. It is easy to imagine the delight with which Smith joined in rescuing Watt from the tyranny of a close corporation. The workshop was one of his favourite resorts, and the two became fast friends. More than half a century afterwards, one of the first works which the “young” artist of eighty-three executed with his newly invented “sculpture machine” was a bust of Smith in ivory.

In another part of the college space had been found for Robert Foulis’s printing-office. Encouraged by Hutcheson, Foulis had begun his business in Glasgow just before Smith left for Oxford. His “immaculate” Horace, the famous duodecimo, appeared in 1744, the proof-sheets having been hung up in the college and a reward offered for the detection of any inaccuracy. Adam Smith was a subscriber for two sets of Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy, two beautifully printed quarto volumes issued by the Foulis press in 1755. The type used by the press came from Alexander Wilson’s typefoundry at Camlachie. But in 1760 the college built an observatory, and with the aid of the Crown founded a new chair of Astronomy. Thereupon Wilson, being appointed to the chair, asked to be allowed to transfer his foundry to the college, and the authorities, on the motion of Adam Smith, resolved to build a foundry in the grounds. Thus during Smith’s residence there were set up within the precincts of the University Watt’s workshop, Foulis’s printing-press, Wilson’s observatory and foundry, and last but not least, Cullen’s laboratory, where Black his assistant discovered the existence of latent heat.

The professors even started a series of lectures on natural science to a class of working men. In 1761 Smith and others sought to establish a school for dancing, fencing, and riding. But this project failed; and in the following year Smith is found as an active opponent of a proposal started in the town for the erection of a permanent theatre. He presides at a meeting which resolves that the University should join forces with the magistracy against this innovation. Shortly after his departure the opposition dropped and the theatre was built. But it was burned down by a mob of zealots, and in the Wealth of Nations Smith not only lashes those “fanatical promoters of popular frenzies,” who have always made the theatre an object of their peculiar abhorrence, but demands that the State should give “entire liberty to all those who for 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.” Such public diversions would easily dissipate “that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm,” and would, with the aid of science and philosophy, correct whatever was unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of the country. By then he had learned to admire the French theatre as well as the French dramatists. A true liberal, he was always open to new ideas, and this last stump of Scottish prejudice was rooted out by his continental tour.

In the fifties Smith and Black helped Foulis to start an institution called the Academy of Design, said to have been the first of its kind in Great Britain. The authorities of the University found rooms for the purpose in the college, and they may therefore claim to have been the fathers, not only of the University extension movement, but also of technical instruction. Painting, sculpture, and engraving were the principal arts taught in this Academy. Tassie and David Allan were among the students; and Lord Buchan, who boasted of walking “after the manner of the ancients in the porticoes of Glasgow with Smith and with Millar,” learned to etch in Foulis’s studio. A shop was started in Edinburgh for the sale of works of art produced in the Academy, and Sir John Dalrymple, writing to Foulis in 1757, begs him to take the advice of Mr. Smith and Dr. Black, who are the best judges of what will sell. He also advises Foulis to have a circular drafted showing the advantages of the Academy. “Mr. Smith is too busy or too indolent, but I flatter myself Dr. Black will be happy to make out this memorial for you.” He invites Foulis and Smith to visit him in the Christmas vacance.

There is no doubt, from the amount of business they laid on his shoulders, and their choice of him as “Præses” in 1762, that Smith’s colleagues had a high opinion of his practical abilities. His public spirit and loyalty to the University were unbounded. The warmest and most generous of friends, he was also one of those rare spirits, especially rare in the reign of George the Third, who never let private interests turn the scale against the common good. He made three protests against a professor exercising the legal right of voting for himself in an election to an office of profit. When Rouet, the professor of History, asked for leave of absence, so that he might travel abroad as Lord Hope’s tutor without relinquishing his professorship, Smith voted with a majority for refusing the leave, and on a later occasion for depriving him of office. This led to a quarrel with the Lord Rector, but the pressure of college opinion eventually forced Rouet to resign. We shall see that Smith on a similar occasion was careful to practise as he had preached.

From this reformed and progressive University the economist often issued forth to breathe the eager air of a thriving mart. The town was remarkably free from poverty and crime. In his lectures he said that in Glasgow there was less crime than in Edinburgh, because it had more commerce and independence, fewer servants and retainers. When he first went to Glasgow as a student it was still poor; when he returned as a professor, its commercial prosperity had fairly begun. Its loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty had cost it heavily in 1745, but that loyalty is intelligible enough; for the Act of Union which deprived Edinburgh of its Parliament, and of much of its resident aristocracy, opened up the colonial markets to Glasgow, and enabled its enterprising merchants to participate in the profitable monopoly of the American trade. By the middle of the century it was already the emporium for colonial tobacco. A tannery employed several hundred men; linen, copper, tin, and pottery became staple manufactures in the forties; carpets, crape, and silk in the fifties. Gibson, in his history of the town, tells us that after 1750 (when the first Glasgow Bank was opened) “not a beggar was to be seen in the streets.” When he adds that “the very children were busy,” we think of the early history of factories and shudder. “I have heard it asserted,” says Smith in the Wealth of Nations (Book II. chap. ii.), “that the trade of the city of Glasgow doubled in about fifteen years after the first erection of the banks there, and that the trade of Scotland has more than quadrupled since the first erection of the two public banks at Edinburgh.” He will not vouch for the figures, and holds such an effect “too great to be accounted for by the sole operation of this cause,” but says it cannot be doubted that the trade of Scotland did increase very considerably during the period, and that the banks contributed a good deal to this increase.

All these external marks of enterprise and progress indicated the truth of another of Smith’s sayings, that a few spirited merchants are a much better thing for a town than the residence of a court. According to Sir John Dalrymple, the three leading merchants of that time were together worth a quarter of a million of money. Measured by modern standards these are petty figures; but Mr. Rae says that commercial men in Glasgow still look back to John Glassford and Andrew Cochrane as perhaps the greatest merchants the Clyde had ever seen. Cochrane, who was Provost when the Young Pretender paid his unwelcome visit, founded a weekly club, the express design of which, according to Dr. Carlyle, was to inquire into the nature and principles of trade. Smith, who joined the club, became intimate with Cochrane, and afterwards, in Dr. Carlyle’s words, “acknowledged his obligations to this gentleman’s information when he was collecting materials for his Wealth of Nations.” The junior merchants, adds the Doctor, who flourished after Cochrane, “confess with respectful remembrance that it was Andrew Cochrane who first opened and enlarged their views.” In Humphrey Clinker he is described as “one of the first sages of the Scottish Kingdom.”

Dugald Stewart, who drew his information from James Ritchie, an eminent merchant of Glasgow, tells us that Smith’s intimacy with its most respected inhabitants gave him the commercial information he needed; and he adds: “It is a circumstance no less honourable to their liberality than to his talents, that notwithstanding the reluctance so common among men of business to listen to the conclusions of mere speculation and the direct opposition of his leading principles to all the old maxims of trade, he was able before he quitted his situation in the University to rank some very eminent merchants in the number of his proselytes.” That Provost Cochrane and his brethren were well inclined to these doctrines is probable, as they suffered severely from the duties on American iron; and that interest in economic subjects was strong is proved by the printing of several important books at Glasgow about this time.

The merchants were, however, much under the influence of an economist of the old school, Sir James Steuart, who lived in the neighbourhood, and the progress of Smith’s opinions was more rapid in the University. It was the students, as Dugald Stewart tells us, “that first adopted his system with eagerness and diffused a knowledge of its fundamental principles over this part of the kingdom.”