The Rockinghams carried the Repeal of the Stamp Act; but the effect of this wise and generous policy was marred by a Declaratory Act for better securing the dependence of His Majesty’s dominions in America, which set forth the supremacy of Parliament over all the colonies and its right to impose taxes. At the end of July, after the conclusion of a satisfactory session, the Marquis of Rockingham was suddenly, to the surprise of the nation, ejected from office by the king, and a new ministry of strangely assorted talents, with Chatham at its head, in which Shelburne, Charles Townshend, the Duke of Grafton, and Camden were the leading figures, was pushed into office. Accordingly when Adam Smith returned to England he found not only that those commercial, fiscal, and colonial questions in which he was so deeply versed were the first questions in politics, but also that the two statesmen with whom he was most intimate occupied two of the most important posts—for Charles Townshend was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Shelburne was a Secretary of State.
These events sufficiently explain why a real statesman like Shelburne, one of the leading members of the ministry, was seeking information at the beginning of the session of 1767 upon colonial topics. It seems astonishing to us now that the Roman analogy should have so exercised the minds of practical statesmen; but Greek and Latin were the only subjects in those days with which educated members of the governing classes were sure to be familiar, and it was to these men in Parliament that political arguments were exclusively addressed. Probably Shelburne wanted classical precedents to check his colleagues from reverting to a coercive policy, and was anxious to meet the argument from Rome that had been used in the debates of the previous year. At any rate, he had asked help of Adam Smith, and received the following reply, which was more helpful than it should have been: “Within these two days I have looked over everything I can find relating to the Roman colonys. I have not yet found anything of much consequence.... They seem to have been very independent. Of thirty colonys of whom the Romans demanded troops in the second Carthaginian War, twelve refused to obey. They frequently rebelled and joined the enemies of the republic; being in some measure little independent republics, they naturally followed the interests which their peculiar situation pointed out to them.” His first studies on Roman colonisation had a decidedly whiggish complexion. Further reading led him to the juster view expressed in the Wealth of Nations, that a Roman colony was quite different from the autonomous Greek ἀποικία, “at best a sort of corporation, which, though it had the power of enacting byelaws for its own government, was at all times subject to the correction, jurisdiction, and legislative authority of the mother country.” And this explains why the Greek colonies were so much more prosperous: “As they were altogether independent of the mother city, they were at liberty to manage their own affairs in the way they judged was most suitable to their own interests.” But before the colonial debates of 1767 came on Adam Smith had left London.
On March 25th he wrote from Lower Grosvenor Street to Thomas Cadell, one of the partners in Millar’s firm, which combined bookselling with publishing, to ask him to insure four boxes of books for £200, and despatch them to Kincaid, his publisher in Edinburgh.[24] He probably stayed in London till the third of May, when the Duke of Buccleuch was married. He would then pick up his valuable parcels in Edinburgh and go on without delay to Kirkcaldy to rejoin his mother and his cousin, Miss Jane Douglas, from whom he had been separated for more than two years.
His first letter to Hume (Kirkcaldy, June 9th) describes his daily life. “My business here is study, in which I have been very deeply engaged for about a month past. My amusements are long solitary walks by the seaside. You may judge how I spend my time. I feel myself, however, extremely happy, comfortable, and contented. I never was perhaps more so in all my life.” He goes on to ask about his friends in London, and wishes to be remembered to all, particularly to Mr. Adams the architect, and to Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. He inquires about Rousseau: “Has he gone abroad, because he cannot contrive to get himself sufficiently persecuted in Great Britain?” He also wants to know the meaning of “the bargain that your ministry have made with the India Company,” and rejoices that they have refused to prolong its charter. At the end of August Smith paid a visit to Dalkeith House to help the newly married couple to entertain their tenants and friends on the occasion of the Duke’s birthday. “The Duke and Dutchess of Buccleugh,” he wrote to Hume on September 15th, “have been here now for almost a fortnight. They begin to open their house on Monday next, and I flatter myself, will both be very agreeable to the people of this country. I am not sure that I have ever seen a more agreeable woman than the Dutchess. I am sorry that you are not here, because I am sure you would be perfectly in love with her. I shall probably be here some weeks.”
Dr. Carlyle was among the guests at Dalkeith House, and in his autobiography takes some credit to himself for the success of the proceedings. “Adam Smith,” he says, “was but ill qualified to promote the jollity of a birthday,” and but for Carlyle’s exertions the meeting might have been dissolved without even drinking the proper toasts. His conclusion is that the Duke and Duchess should have brought down a man of “more address,” and he leaves little doubt as to who that man should have been. Incidentally Dr. Carlyle has to admit that the new Duke proved a great credit to his tutor. The Buccleuch family had always been good landlords, but Duke Henry “surpassed them all as much in justice and humanity as he did in superiority of understanding and good sense.” Lord Brougham relates a story which illustrates what Carlyle meant by “want of address.” On one occasion, during dinner at Dalkeith, our philosopher broke out into a discourse on some political matters of the day, and was bestowing a variety of severe epithets on a certain statesman, when he suddenly perceived the statesman’s nearest relative sitting opposite, and stopped; but he was heard to mutter, “Deil care, deil care, it’s all true!”
After two months at Dalkeith he returned to his mother and his studies, and remained for the next six years, so far as we know, uninterruptedly at Kirkcaldy, save for an occasional visit to Edinburgh, whither he was constantly and with much importunity invited by his friend Hume. Dugald Stewart remarks that this retirement “formed a striking contrast to the unsettled mode of life he had been for some time accustomed to, but was so congenial to his natural disposition, and to his first habits, that it was with the utmost difficulty he was ever persuaded to leave it.” He was never happier than now, living with his mother in Kirkcaldy; “occupied habitually in intense study, but unbending his mind at times in the company of some of his old school-fellows, whose sober wishes’ had attached them to the place of their birth. In the society of such men Mr. Smith delighted; and to them he was endeared, not only by his simple and unassuming manners, but by the perfect knowledge they all possessed of those domestic virtues which had distinguished him from his infancy.”[25]
The High Street of Kirkcaldy contained some excellent houses, and that occupied by Smith was one of the best. It was large and substantially built, four stories high, with twenty windows facing into the High Street. It had a frontage of about fifty feet, and a garden of the same width ran back a hundred yards or more eastwards down to the sands. On either side of the garden was a high wall, and on the north side a narrow public footpath divided Smith’s garden from his neighbour’s. This quaint passage, enclosed by two high walls, is still called Adam Smith’s Close.
The house was pulled down in 1844. Robert Chambers, who saw it in the twenties, noticed a mark on the wall of Smith’s study, and was told that the philosopher used to compose standing. As he dictated to his clerk he would rub his wig sideways against the wall, and so left a mark which, says the antiquary regretfully, “remained till lately, when the room being painted anew it was unfortunately destroyed.” Hume, who had just removed to James’s Court, Edinburgh, wrote to his friend in August 1769 to tempt him from his retreat:—
“I am glad to have come within sight of you, and to have a view of Kirkaldy from my windows: but as I wish also to be within speaking terms of you, I wish we could concert measures for that purpose. I am mortally sick at sea, and regard with horror and a kind of hydrophobia the great gulf that lies between us. I am also tired of travelling, as much as you ought naturally to be of staying at home. I therefore propose to you to come hither and pass some days with me in this solitude. I want to know what you have been doing, and propose to exact a rigorous account of the method in which you have employed yourself during your retreat. I am positive you are in the wrong in many of your speculations, especially where you have the misfortune to differ from me. All these are reasons for our meeting, and I wish you would make me some reasonable proposal for that purpose. There is no habitation on the island of Inchkeith, otherwise I should challenge you to meet me on that spot, and neither of us ever to leave the place till we were fully agreed on all points of controversy.”
By the following February the book had made such progress that Hume was expecting to see his friend in Edinburgh for a day or two on his way to London, where Smith already talked of arranging for immediate publication. He changed his mind, however, though he went to Edinburgh in June, where with the Duke of Buccleuch and John Hallam he received the freedom of the city. In January 1772 we find the friends corresponding about Italian literature. Smith recommends Hume to read Metastasio. Hume replies that he is reading Italian prose, again reminds him of the promised visit, and refuses to take the excuse of ill-health, which he calls a subterfuge invented by indolence and love of solitude. “Indeed, my dear Smith, if you continue to hearken to complaints of this nature, you will cut yourself out entirely from human society to the great loss of both parties.”