This year was marked by a severe commercial crisis; nearly all the banks in Edinburgh came to grief, and the Duke of Buccleuch and other friends of Smith were in the greatest difficulty. In a letter to Pulteney (September 5, 1772), Smith says, though he has himself suffered no loss in the public calamities, some of his friends have been deeply concerned, and he has been much occupied about the best method of extricating them. He continues:—
“In the book which I am now preparing for the press, I have treated fully and distinctly of every part of the subject which you have recommended to me; and I intended to send you some extracts from it; but upon looking them over I find that they are too much interwoven with other parts of the work to be easily separated from it. I have the same opinion of Sir James Steuart’s book[26] that you have. Without once mentioning it, I flatter myself that any fallacious principle in it will meet with a clear and distinct confutation in mine.... My book would have been ready for the press by the beginning of this winter, but interruptions occasioned partly by bad health, arising from want of amusement and from thinking too much upon one thing, and partly by the avocations above mentioned, will oblige me to retard its publication for a few months longer.”
It appears that Pulteney had recommended the Directors of the East India Company to appoint Smith as a commissioner to examine their administration and accounts. Smith says he is much honoured and obliged: “You have acted in your old way, of doing your friends a good office behind their backs, pretty much as other people do them a bad one. There is no labour of any kind which you can impose upon me which I will not readily undertake.” He believes he is in agreement with Pulteney as to the proper remedy for the disorders of the coin in Bengal. The commission, however, was not appointed. No reforms worth mentioning were made, and the Wealth of Nations teems with severe criticisms of the Company.[27]
A month after this letter to Pulteney, Hume drafts a little programme for the completion and publication of the work, evidently in reply to one of Smith’s dilatory notes: “I should agree to your reasoning if I could trust your resolution. Come hither for some weeks about Christmas; dissipate yourself a little; return to Kirkcaldy; finish your work before autumn; go to London; print it; return and settle in this town, which suits your studious, independent turn even better than London. Execute this plan faithfully, and I forgive you.”
Before following our hero to London with the fateful manuscript, we must repeat a local tradition belonging to this period which is recorded in Dr. Charles Rogers’s Social Life in Scotland. One Sunday morning Smith, falling into an unusually profound reverie (brought on perhaps by thought upon the disorders of the Bengal currency), walked into his garden in an old dressing-gown. Instead of returning to the house, he made his way by a small path into the turnpike road, and eventually marched into the town of Dunfermline, fifteen miles from his home. The people there were flocking to church, and the bustle restored the philosopher to his wits. In April 1773, after six years of seclusion, he at last left home with his manuscript, intending no doubt to have it printed and published in the course of a few months. He broke his journey at Edinburgh, and there wrote a formal letter constituting Hume his executor:—
“As I have left the care of all my literary papers to you, I must tell you that except those which I carry along with me, there are none worth the publishing but a fragment of a great work which contains a history of the astronomical systems that were successively in fashion down to the time of Descartes. Whether that might not be published as a fragment of an intended juvenile work I leave entirely to your judgment, tho’ I begin to suspect myself that there is more refinement than solidity in some parts of it. This little work you will find in a thin folio paper book in my writing-desk in my book-room. All the other loose paper which you will find either in that desk or within the glass folding-doors of a bureau which stands in my bedroom, together with about eighteen thin paper folio books, which you will likewise find within the same glass folding-doors, I desire may be destroyed without any examination. Unless I die very suddenly, I shall take care that the Papers I carry with me shall be carefully sent to you.”
He reached London in May, and seems to have remained there until after the publication of the Wealth of Nations in March 1776. But the records of his stay are of the slightest. There is left but one important letter, a long and earnest plea against the principle of monopoly in medical education. It was to his friend Dr. Cullen. Some of the Scottish universities had been conferring medical degrees without examination on incompetent men. The Duke of Buccleuch was willing to join in a petition to Parliament to stop the mischief. Smith’s views upon the subject are highly characteristic. He considers that the Scotch universities, though of course capable of amendment, are “without exception the best seminaries of learning that are to be found anywhere in Europe.” A visitation (that is, a Royal Commission) would be the only proper means of reforming them:—
“Before any wise man, however, would apply for the appointment of so arbitrary a tribunal in order to improve what is already, upon the whole, very well, he ought certainly to know with some degree of certainty, first, who are likely to be appointed visitors, and secondly, what plan of reformation those visitors are likely to follow; but in the present multiplicity of pretenders to some share in the prudential management of Scotch affairs, these are two points which, I apprehend, neither you nor I, nor the Solicitor-General nor the Duke of Buccleugh, can possibly know anything about.”
Perhaps in the future a better opportunity might present itself. An admonition, or other irregular means of interference, was out of the question. Dr. Cullen had proposed that no person should be admitted to examination for his degrees unless he brought a certificate of his having studied at least two years in some university. Smith (who was himself at this very time, with Gibbon, attending a course given by Dr. William Hunter) objects: “would not such a regulation be oppressive upon all private teachers, such as the Hunters, Hewson, Fordyce, etc.? The scholars of such teachers surely merit whatever honour or advantage a degree can confer much more than the greater part of those who have spent many years in some universities.... When a man has learnt his lesson very well, it surely can be of little importance where or from whom he has learnt it.”
The last sentence is one that men should lay to heart. It is one of those obvious truths which few have the candour to assert and still fewer the courage to act upon. A very clever person, on reading the Wealth of Nations, complained that it seemed to be little more than a well arranged succession of truisms. Yet for the want of those truths mankind has stumbled along in the dark from the beginning. “The less you restrain trade, the more you will have.” A truism, if you like, but its denial has caused an infinitude of avoidable suffering. “If a man has learnt his lesson well, never mind about his university or his degree.” A truism, without doubt, but one that is constantly neglected and despised to the grave detriment of justice and learning.