Smith held that the effect of degrees injudiciously conferred was not very considerable. “That doctors are sometimes fools as well as other people is not in the present time one of those profound secrets which is known only to the learned.” Apothecaries and old herb-women practised physic without complaint, because they only poisoned the poor people. “And if here and there a graduated doctor should be as ignorant as an old woman, can great harm be done?” Smith rubbed in his moral about university degrees with evident relish, comparing degrees which could only be conferred on students of a certain standing to the statutes of apprenticeship and other corporation laws, which had expelled arts and manufactures from so many boroughs.
In boroughs, monopoly had made work bad and dear; in universities, it had led to quackery, imposture, and exorbitant fees. One remedy for the inconveniences of town corporations had been found in the outgrowth of manufacturing villages; and, in a similar way, the private interest of some poor professors of physic had done something to check the exorbitance of rich universities, which made a course of eleven or even sixteen years necessary before a student could become a Doctor of Law, Physic, or Divinity. The poor universities could not stipulate for residence, and sold their degrees to any one who would buy them, often without even a decent examination. “The less trouble they gave, the more money they got, and I certainly do not pretend to vindicate so dirty a practice.” Nevertheless these cheap degrees, though extremely disagreeable to graduates whose degrees had cost much time and expense, were of advantage to the public in that they multiplied doctors, and so sunk fees. “Had the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge been able to maintain themselves in the exclusive privilege of graduating all the doctors who could practise in England, the price of feeling a pulse might by this time have risen from two and three guineas, the price which it has now happily arrived at, to double or triple that sum; and English physicians might, and probably would, have been at the same time the most ignorant and quackish in the world.”[28]
This trenchant reasoning seems to have prevailed. At any rate, the idea of obtaining governmental interference was dropped. Some time afterwards, however, Dr. Cullen took an opportunity of pointing out that there is a good deal more to be said for the corporate regulation of medicine than for ordinary trade guilds. Adam Smith probably pushed his argument for free trade in medical degrees to this extreme mainly from anxiety to prevent the interference of an unwise Government in his favourite universities, though partly no doubt because he thought fraudulent competition better than none, partly again for love of maintaining a paradox. A more spacious handling of this theme is found in the Wealth of Nations, more especially in the famous tenth chapter of the first book, with its account of “Inequalities occasioned by the Policy of Europe,” and in a later criticism of universities.
During his stay in London Smith was in close intercourse with the ruling kings of art, science, and letters, as well as with some of the leading statesmen. We hear of him in January 1775 with Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon at a dinner given by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In December, Horace Walpole met him at Beauclerk’s. With Gibbon, as we have seen, he attended Dr. William Hunter’s lectures on Anatomy. Hume’s letters to him were addressed to the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street, a club kept by a clever sister of Bishop Douglas and much favoured by Scots in London, though Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, and Richard Cumberland were also members. In 1775 he was elected a member of the famous Literary Club which met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street. The members present on the night of his election were Gibbon, Reynolds, Beauclerk, and Sir William Jones, three of whom appear in Dean Barnard’s lines:—
“If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,
Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em
In form select and terse;
Jones teach me modesty and Greek,
Smith how to think, Burke how to speak,
And Beauclerk to converse.”