During these thirteen years at Glasgow Smith kept up his connection with Edinburgh by pretty constant visits. Shorn of royalty by the union of crowns, and of its parliament by the union of parliaments, Edinburgh was slowly recovering in trade what it had lost in political significance. It had kept its Courts of Justice, and its boards of customs and excise. Above all, it was the centre of an intellectual activity which gave Scotland for the first time a name and a fame in European philosophy and letters.
The social and intellectual leader of the new movement was Smith’s early friend and benefactor, Henry Home, who was raised to the bench as Lord Kames in 1752, a man of very liberal and progressive ideas, full of patriotic schemes for the improvement of Scottish art, manufactures, and agriculture. His writings, though highly praised for their learning, have long been forgotten, for sufficient reason. “I am afraid of Kames’s Law Tracts,” Hume once wrote to Smith. “The man might as well think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and aloes as an agreeable combination by joining metaphysics and Scottish Law.” Robertson, already a prominent preacher and ecclesiastical politician, was feeling his way towards Edinburgh and literary fame. John Home, a brother minister, was composing the Tragedy of Douglas, counted by Hume, so he told Smith in 1756, “the best, and by French critics the only tragedy in our language.” Another member of this circle, quite a fashionable oddity, who ploughed his own glebe like a peasant, and startled a passer-by with apt quotations from Theocritus, was Wilkie, the author of the Epigoniad, a particular friend and admirer of our philosopher. Then there were the two Dalrymples, both historians, and the gossipy autobiographer, Dr. Carlyle. Three politicians of distinction often adorned Edinburgh society at this time: brilliant Charles Townshend, who was to make a revolution in Smith’s life, James Oswald, his old friend and neighbour, and William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney). Among the relics of Smith’s correspondence is an introductory letter, dated January 19, 1752, to Oswald, then at the Board of Trade, which “will be delivered to you by Mr. William Johnstone, son of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall, a young gentleman whom I have known intimately these four years, and of whose discretion, good temper, sincerity, and honour, I have had during all that time frequent proof.” The young gentleman was to give a further signal proof of his discretion by bestowing his affections on a Pulteney, whose vast fortune doubtless consoled him for the surrender of his name. The letter continues:—
“You will find in him too, if you come to know him better, some qualities which from real and unaffected modesty he does not at first discover; a refinement and depth of observation and an accuracy of judgment, joined to a natural delicacy of sentiment, as much improved as study and the narrow sphere of acquaintance this country affords can improve it. He had, first when I knew him, a good deal of vivacity and humour, but he has studied them away. He is an advocate; and though I am sensible of the folly of prophesying with regard to the future fortune of so young a man, yet I could almost venture to foretell that if he lives he will be eminent in that profession. He has, I think, every quality that ought to forward, and not one that should obstruct his progress, modesty and sincerity excepted, and these, it is to be hoped, experience and a better sense of things may in part cure him of. I do not, I assure you, exaggerate knowingly, but could pawn my honour upon the truth of every article.”
A cluster of these and many other stars formed, in 1754, a constellation known as the Select Society, an institution, as we learn from Dugald Stewart’s life of Robertson, “intended partly for philosophical inquiry, and partly for the improvement of the members in public speaking.” It was projected, he says, by Mr. Allan Ramsay, the painter, and a few of his friends—Dr. Robertson, Mr. David Hume, Mr. Adam Smith, Mr. Wedderburn (afterwards Lord Chancellor), Lord Kames, Mr. John Home, Dr. Carlyle, and Sir Gilbert Elliot. Hailes, Monboddo, and Dalrymple were also members. In the Select Society, writes Stewart, “the most splendid talents that have ever adorned this country were roused to their best exertions by the liberal and ennobling discussions of literature and philosophy.”
When the projectors met in May 1754, Smith, who had come from Glasgow, was required to explain the proposals. At the second meeting, as appears from the minutes now preserved in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh, he was “Præses,” and gave out as subjects for the next debate (1) whether a general naturalisation of Foreign Protestantism would be advantageous to Britain; and (2) whether bounties on the exportation of corn would be advantageous to manufactures as well as to agriculture.
Many economic questions such as pauperism, slavery, hiring, banking, export bounties on linen, rent, leases, highways, the relative advantages of large and small farms, were discussed by a society which, in Stewart’s words, contributed so much to the fame and improvement of Scotland. A year after its foundation Hume wrote to Allan Ramsay that it had grown to be a national concern. “Young and old, noble and ignoble, witty and dull, laity and clergy, all the world are ambitious of a place amongst us, and on each occasion we are as much solicited by candidates as if we were to choose a member of Parliament.” The society did more than debate. Adam Smith and eight others were appointed managers to carry out a scheme for the promotion of Scottish arts, sciences, manufactures, and agriculture. Executive committees were formed. Contributions poured in; and prizes and premiums large in those days were offered and awarded for every subject under the sun. From the researches of Mr. Rae we learn, for example, that twenty-six prizes were offered in the first year (1755), including three gold medals for the best discovery in science, the best essay on taste, and the best on vegetation. Six silver medals were given, including one for the best and most correctly printed book, another for the best imitation of English blankets, and a third for the best hogshead of strong ale. Four years later the number of prizes given had increased to 142, and they included one for the person who cured most smoky chimneys.
The society sank as suddenly as it rose. After only a decade of brilliant usefulness, the meteor fell, and expired, it is said, in a flash of Townshend’s wit. “Why,” he asked, after listening to a debate rich in eloquence, but unintelligible to a southern ear, “why can you not learn to speak the English language as you have already learned to write it?” So the society died, and Thomas Sheridan, father of the statesman, came to Edinburgh with a course of lectures on English elocution, which he delivered to about three hundred eminent gentlemen in Carrubber’s Close.
Upon the ashes of this famous society arose an equally patriotic but perhaps less beneficent organisation. The Poker Club, as its name indicated, was intended to be an instrument for stirring opinion. The cause to be agitated was the establishment of a Scotch Militia on national lines, to be followed, as some of its radical members hoped, by a parliamentary reform which would “let the industrious farmer and manufacturer share at last in a privilege now engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener bailie.”
Adam Smith was one of the original members of the Poker Club, which gathered in most of the Select Society; but before 1776 he had changed his opinions, for, in the Wealth of Nations, he comes to the conclusion that “it is only by means of a well regulated standing army that a civilised country can be defended.” If it relied for its defence on a militia, it would be exposed to conquest. The militia movement is mentioned by Smith in a letter to Strahan (April 4, 1760), in the course of some reflections suggested by the Memoirs of Colonel Hooke. The passage is interesting as a Scotch Whig’s explanation and defence of the disaffection which prevailed north of the Tweed in the early part of the eighteenth century:—
“Apropos to the Pope and the Pretender, have you read Hook’s Memoirs? I have been ill these ten days, otherwise I should have written to you sooner, but I sat up the day before yesterday in my bed and read them thro’ with infinite satisfaction, tho’ they are by no means well written. The substance of what is in them I knew before, tho’ not in such detail. I am afraid they are published at an unlucky time, and may throw a damp upon our militia. Nothing, however, appears to me more excusable than the disaffection of Scotland at that time. The Union was a measure from which infinite good has been derived to this country. The Prospect of that good, however, must then have appeared very remote and very uncertain. The immediate effect of it was to hurt the interest of every single order of men in the country. The dignity of the nobility was undone by it. The greater part of the gentry who had been accustomed to represent their own country in its own Parliament were cut out for ever from all hopes of representing it in a British Parliament. Even the merchants seemed to suffer at first. The trade to the Plantations was, indeed, opened to them. But that was a trade which they knew nothing about; the trade they were acquainted with, that to France, Holland, and the Baltic, was laid under new embar[r]assments, which almost totally annihilated the two first and most important branches of it. The Clergy, too, who were then far from insignificant, were alarmed about the Church. No wonder if at that time all orders of men conspired in cursing a measure hurtful to their immediate interest. The views of their Posterity are now very different; but those views could be seen by but few of our forefathers, by those few in but a confused and imperfect manner.”