The still small voice of a detractor was heard: Boswell wrote to a friend that with Smith’s accession the club had “lost its select merit.”
All this time the fatal quarrel with America was drawing near. Upon this, as upon all other economical questions, Smith was in full sympathy with Burke, “the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us.” This compliment, as we know, was highly valued by the author of the speech on American Taxation. But Smith had another friend and counsellor for his critical chapter on the colonies and their administration. Dr. Franklin is reported to have said, that “the celebrated Adam Smith when writing his Wealth of Nations was in the habit of bringing chapter after chapter as he composed it to himself, Dr. Price, and others of the literati”; that he would then patiently hear their observations, sometimes submitting to write whole chapters anew, and even to reverse some of his propositions. Franklin’s remark has probably been inaccurately reported. We know from one of Smith’s letters that he had not a high opinion of Dr. Price as an economist; but Parton, Franklin’s biographer, justly points to the countless colonial illustrations with which the Wealth of Nations abounds, and to that intimate knowledge of American conditions which Franklin was of all men the best fitted to impart. And there is internal evidence in the text itself that the important chapter on the colonies in Book IV. was written, or at least considerably enlarged, in the years 1773 and 1774. Franklin’s papers contained problems which seemed to have been jotted down at meetings of philosophers, and no doubt Price as well as Smith would take a prominent part. At Glasgow Smith must have heard a good deal about the colonial trade; but colonial policy did not become the question of the day until after he left, and in the lectures there is nothing about the colonies. We may conjecture that the idea of devoting a large section of the book to the history and economics of colonial dominions did not strike him until after his return from France. The great debates of 1766 and of the early seventies, the intimate acquaintance with British policy and finance in large outline and in official detail, which his friendships with Burke and Franklin, with Oswald, Pulteney, and Shelburne helped him to acquire, and his eagerness to prevent war and to discredit expenditure on colonial establishments, or indeed upon any provinces which could not support themselves, conspired to make colonial policy and imperial expenditure large and imposing themes in the Wealth of Nations.
CHAPTER IX
THE WEALTH OF NATIONS AND ITS CRITICS
In February 1776 Hume wrote to Smith: “By all accounts your book has been printed long ago, yet it has never been so much as advertised. What is the reason? If you wait till the fate of America be decided, you may wait long.” Declining health made him anxious to accelerate his friend’s return. “Your chamber in my house is always unoccupied.” In the same letter there are a few words about the war with the American colonies. The two friends were at one in condemning the war and the colonial policy which provoked it. But Smith was more deeply moved by the impending disaster, and was eagerly endeavouring to induce the Government to adopt means of conciliation before it was too late. He was therefore—so the Duke of Buccleuch had informed Hume—“very zealous” in American affairs. “My notion,” writes Hume, cool as ever where only national interests were concerned, “is that this matter is not so important as is commonly imagined. If I be mistaken, I shall probably correct my error when I see you, or read you. Our navigation and general commerce may suffer more than our manufactures. Should London fall as much in size as I have done, it will be the better. It is nothing but a hulk of bad and unclean humours.”
At last, on the 9th of March, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in two sumptuous quarto volumes. The price was thirty-six shillings, and the first edition, probably of a thousand copies, was sold out in six months; though the second, a reprint with some few corrections and additions, was not issued till 1778. The publishers were Strahan and Cadell. Smith is said to have received £500 for the first edition, the sum paid by the same firm to Steuart for his Principles of Political Economy (1767). The first volume of Gibbon’s History came out at the same time. Hume was immensely taken with both performances. He told Gibbon that he should never have expected such a work from the pen of an Englishman. To Smith he wrote:—
“Euge! Belle! Dear Mr. Smith,—I am much pleased with your performance; and the perusal of it has taken me from a state of great anxiety. It was a work of so much expectation, by yourself, by your friends, and by the public, that I trembled for its appearance, but am now much relieved. Not but that the reading of it necessarily requires so much attention, and the public is disposed to give so little, that I shall still doubt for some time of its being at first very popular. But it has depth, and solidity, and acuteness, and is so much illustrated by curious facts that it must at last take the public attention. It is probably much improved by your last abode in London. If you were here at my fireside, I should dispute some of your principles. I cannot think that the rent of farms makes any part of the price of the produce, but that the price is determined altogether by the quantity and the demand.”
On the publication of the book Sir John Pringle observed to Boswell that Dr. Smith, who had never been in trade, could not be expected to write well on that subject any more than a lawyer upon physic. Boswell passed this on to Johnson, who replied: “He is mistaken, sir; a man who has never been engaged in trade may undoubtedly write well upon trade, and there is nothing which requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does.” Johnson added, as if he had already turned over with profit the pages of the new book, that trade promises what is more valuable than money, “the reciprocation of the peculiar advantages of different countries.” Gibbon was no less delighted than Hume with the new philosophy. “What an excellent work!” he exclaimed; “an extensive science in a single book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language.” Gibbon’s judgment has been confirmed by the tribunals of Time, and the world places the Wealth of Nations in the small library of masterpieces that receives, as the years roll by, so surprisingly few accessions.
In a science like political economy, every new teacher endeavours to correct the mistakes of his predecessors, to supply their deficiencies, and generally to teach the science in its last stage of perfection. Some of Smith’s successors were themselves men of genius, and proved equal to the task of displacing their master for a few years. But those who have seen the rise and decline of Mill may well ask with Wakefield, who had seen Smith superseded by Malthus and Ricardo and M’Culloch: How is it that the Wealth of Nations, all these things notwithstanding, is still read and studied and quoted as if it had been published yesterday? How is it that British statesmen from Pitt to Gladstone should have sought authority in the same pages? After all, the question we are asking is a wider one. Why is this one of the great books of the world? We would like to say simply: It is the world’s verdict; take it or not as you like; but whether you like it or not, it stands. One cannot argue with universal consent. Still something may be due in extenuation of fame. In the first place, Adam Smith writes as one who has applied his mind to definite problems without neglecting a wider field of letters and learning. The store is rich and the steward is bounteous. So far from being an isolated study of abstract doctrines, political economy is treated from first to last as a branch of the study of mankind, a criticism of their manners and customs, of national history, administration, and law. Even when silencing a battery or throwing up a counterwork he is very seldom disputatious or doctrinal. “He appears,” says Wakefield, “to be engaged in composing not a theory, but a history of national wealth. He dwells indeed on principles, but nearly always, as it seems, for the purpose of explaining the facts which he narrates.” There is no scarecrow of thin abstractions and deterrent terminology flapping over the pages to warn men off a dismal science. The laws of wealth unfold themselves like the incidents in a well-laid plot. It was left for his successors to show how dull economics might be, and how suitable for the empty class-room of an endowed chair.
Hume, as we have seen, on reading the Wealth of Nations foretold that its curious facts would help to gain the public ear. Adam Smith was full of out-of-the-way learning. He collected stories of all the adventures in the New World, and loved to sift the wheat from the chaff of a traveller’s tale. Consequently his book abounds in oddities about his own and bygone ages, and a few of these with necessary abbreviations may be retailed:—
There is at this day a village in Scotland, where it is not uncommon, I am told, for a workman to carry nails instead of money to the baker’s shop or to the alehouse.
In North America, provisions are much cheaper and wages much higher than in England. In the province of New York, common labourers earn three shillings and sixpence currency, equal to two shillings sterling a day.
Till after the middle of the fourteenth century, an English mason’s wages were much higher than those of a parish priest. In spite of a statute of Anne there are still [1776] many curacies under £20 a year.
A middling farmer in France will sometimes have 400 fowls in his yard.
Between 1339 and 1776 the price of the best English wool has fallen from 30s. to 21s. the tod, after allowing for the changes in the currency. The price of a yard of the finest cloth has fallen, after making the same allowances, from £3, 3s. 6d. to £1, 1s. since 1487.
The first person that wore stockings in England is said to have been Queen Elizabeth. She received them as a present from the Spanish Ambassador.
What was formerly a seat of the family of Seymour, is now an inn upon the Bath road. The marriage bed of James the First of Great Britain, which his Queen brought with her from Denmark as a present fit for a sovereign to make to a sovereign, was a few years ago the ornament of an alehouse at Dunfermline.
The wool of the southern counties of Scotland is, a great part of it, after a long land carriage through very bad roads, manufactured in Yorkshire, for want of a capital to manufacture it at home. In England, owing to the laws of settlement, it is often more difficult for a poor man to pass the artificial boundary of a parish than an arm of the sea or a ridge of high mountains.
There is no city in Europe in which house rent is dearer than in London, and yet I know no capital in which a furnished apartment can be hired so cheap.
At Buenos Ayres forty years ago 1s. 9½d. was the ordinary price of an ox.
A piece of fine cloth which weighs only eighty pounds, contains in it the price not only of eighty pounds weight of wool, but sometimes of several thousand weight of corn, the maintenance of the different working people, and of their immediate employers.
In the white herring fishery it has been common for vessels to fit out for the purpose of catching not the fish but the bounty. In 1759, when the bounty was at fifty shillings the ton, each barrel of sea sticks cost Government in bounties alone, £113, 15s.; each barrel of merchantable herrings £159, 7s. 6d.