If this comes of learning, an even more extravagant charge has been preferred by an emotional school. A heated imagination, certainly not encumbered with facts, and informed only that Adam Smith was the founder of an odious science, denounced him as “the half-bred and half-witted Scotchman” who taught “the deliberate blasphemy”—“Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His Laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The same authority declares that he “formally, in the name of the philosophers of Scotland, set up this opposite God, on the hill of cursing against blessing, Ebal against Gerizim”—a God who “allows usury, delights in strife and contention, and is very particular about everybody’s going to his synagogue on Sunday.”[34] These three characteristics of Adam Smith’s deity were unfortunately chosen; for, as it happens, he disliked usury so much that he defended the laws which had vainly sought to prevent high rates of interest; disapproved vehemently of war, which he regarded as one of the deadliest enemies of human progress, and protested against the idea that a perfect Deity could possibly desire His creatures to abase themselves before Him. It is sad to think that to get his gold the Ruskinian must pass so much sand through his mind. The Fors Clavigera, with all its passionate intensity and high-strung emotion, is a standing warning to preachers not to abuse their masters, and to learn a subject before they teach it. Let those who climb so recklessly on Ebal deliver their curses from a safer foothold.

Perhaps what most impresses one in reading the Wealth of Nations is its pre-vision. The author seems to have been able to project himself into the centuries. He saw the blades of wheat as well as the tares that were springing up; and it would be hard to mention a single one of his forecasts and Utopias that has not been realised in some degree, or at least taken shape as a political project during the last century. He was, of course, above all, the precursor of Cobden and of the philosophic Radicals, who drew from him not only their economics, but their foreign and colonial policy. It is perhaps remarkable, after so fair a beginning had been made in his own lifetime, that the triumph of his doctrines was so long delayed. But most of what Shelburne, Pitt, and Eden did for commercial emancipation in the eighties was swept away by the French war. And when Napoleon fell, England was so weak, tyranny and superstition were so ground into the principles of her governing classes, that she seemed to be, in Milton’s phrase, beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery. For many years Smith’s disciples, and even the indefatigable Bentham, laboured almost in vain. Parliament was ignorant and bigoted. Until a great agitator arose, very little could be done; and the great agitator did not arrive quite soon enough to fulfil Pulteney’s prediction that Smith would convert his own generation and rule the next.

In the early years of the nineteenth century the practical influence of Smith’s teaching was felt principally in France and Germany. In France, as we have seen, Count Mollien was a professed disciple of the new economy. “It was then,” he said, in reviewing the events of his youth, “that I read an English book which the disciples M. Turgot had left eulogised in the highest terms—the work of Adam Smith. I had especially remarked how warmly the venerable and judicious Malesherbes used to speak of it—this book so disparaged by all the men of the old routine.” It is perhaps the most dazzling of all Smith’s posthumous triumphs, that he, through Mollien, should have been the philosophic guide of Napoleonic finance.

But his conquest of Germany was equally startling and momentous. The movement in that country can be directly traced to the university of Königsberg, where Kraus began to lecture on the Wealth of Nations in 1781. He soon gained the ears of the official class. In East Prussia, vexatious dues and taxes, with a multitude of feudal embarrassments, were removed from internal commerce, and in spite of much opposition Smith’s principles spread all over Germany. By the close of the Napoleonic war the officials as well as the professional economists were converts to the new ideas. Stein and Hardenberg, two truly great reformers, led the way. Year by year commercial restrictions were removed, and though jealousy of Prussia stood in the way of complete commercial union, the North German Zollverein constituted a great advance. It removed the barriers between Prussia and the adjoining States, and reduced external duties to such an extent that in 1827 Huskisson cited the example set by Germany to prove the wisdom of abandoning a restrictive policy. Even Friedrich List, who sought for political reasons to build up a counter theory of protection for infant industries, asserted that free trade was the right policy for England and for every adult nation. List, who often wrote with a bitterness and malice that only readers of his unhappy life can excuse, admitted in his principal work “the great services of Adam Smith”:—

“He was the first to introduce successfully into political economy the analytical method. By means of this method and of an unusual sharpness of intellectual vision he illuminated the most important branches of a science, which before his time had lain in almost utter darkness. Before Adam Smith there was only a policy (Praxis); his labours first made it possible to build up a science of political economy; and for that achievement he has given the world a greater mass of materials than all his predecessors and successors.”

Mill’s Political Economy is the only English treatise that can be compared with the Wealth of Nations. Indeed in his preface Mill challenges the comparison, but adds that “political economy, properly so-called, has grown up almost from infancy since the time of Adam Smith.” He finds the Wealth of Nations “in many parts obsolete, and in all imperfect,” and though he speaks generously enough of Adam Smith’s “admirable success in reference to the philosophy of the [eighteenth] century,” it is plain from this preface and from the autobiography that the later economist felt he could look down upon the earlier from the serene temples of increased knowledge and better social ideas. Mill’s confidence was not only justified for the time being by unqualified success in the sense that his own book at once became, and remained for a generation, the principal text-book of English students, it was also based upon what appear at first sight to be enormous advantages. A more logical and systematic arrangement is adopted. Errors are corrected; digressions are few; and in order to attain scientific exactitude, historical illustrations from the conditions and experience of nations are replaced by more precise instances of imaginary societies labelled A, B, C. Technical terms and definitions make it easy for the student to move lightly about in an artificial atmosphere.

But in this realm of political economy, is it not well to keep a foot, or at least an eye, on the ground? In Mill’s treatise there is a danger of mistaking words for things. It is never so in Smith’s inquiry. He gave twenty years to a task for which Mill could hardly spare as many months. With a gift for exposition, certainly not inferior, he had what Mill had not, a love of the concrete, a faculty for the picturesque, and withal a nervous force and vigour in argument quite peculiar to himself. It has been said that Smith hunted his subject with the inveteracy of a sportsman. With a wonderful knowledge of history, law, philosophy, and letters, he combined an intuitive insight into the motives of men and the unseen mechanism of society. At the same time, by restricting his horizon to wealth and its phenomena, he was able to see how men always had acted and always would act under certain circumstances, and by what rules public finance should be governed. This is the secret of his success in making political economy queen of the useful arts, and in raising her alone among political studies to the dignity of a science. “I think,” said Robert Lowe, “that Adam Smith is entitled to the merit, and the unique merit, among all men who ever lived in the world, of having founded a deductive and demonstrative science of human actions and conduct.” True, he is not a systematic writer. He does not shine, as so many inferior geniuses have shone, in the art of comparing, correlating, and harmonising the great truths which it is his glory to have discovered and illustrated. He puts us, as Lowe remarked with his usual felicity, in mind of the Sages of Ancient Greece, who, after lives of labour and study, bequeathed half a dozen maxims for the guidance of mankind.

CHAPTER X
FREE TRADE

One of the least edifying features of modern controversy, and particularly of political and economic controversy, is the habit of appealing to precedents and authorities which, if honestly cited, would militate against the opinions of the controversialist. No great writer has suffered more of late years from this species of misrepresentation than Adam Smith; yet his contemporaries and immediate successors both in England and abroad perfectly understood his drift. When Pitt and Shelburne declared themselves disciples of Smith, they thereby declared themselves free traders, and Pitt’s commercial policy from 1784 to 1794 was simply an attempt to carry out Smith’s views. Resolute retrenchment, customs’ reform, the commercial treaty with France, reduction of debt, were all projected under the inspiration and countenance of Mr. Commissioner Smith.

Nor did the English economists, from Ricardo to Mill, ever suggest that Adam Smith had doubts about the main doctrine of his book. In France and Germany his opinions were eagerly embraced. To translate, interpret, and systematise the Wealth of Nations was the main function of continental economists in the early years of the nineteenth century; and its influence was seen in a rapid and radical modification of commercial policy. Internal barriers were swept away, feudal restrictions abolished, and tariffs reduced. When the waves of reaction—political rather than economic—began to roll in, and “national” economists tried to reconstruct the case for protection, they paid Smith the compliment of a violent onslaught. “Smithianismus” then became a term of abuse in protectionist circles, and so remained until it was superseded by the equally cacophonous “Manchesterthum.” It was in England that the idea was started of dressing up Adam Smith as a protectionist. While List was inveighing against “cosmopolitical economy,” our own free traders in their agitation against the corn laws found themselves confronted with a new interpretation of their prophet. At one of the League meetings (July 3, 1844) Cobden gave a humorous description of the way in which some protectionist pamphleteers tried to adapt Adam Smith’s opinions to their own views. “They have done it in this manner: they took a passage, and with the scissors snipped and cut away at it, until by paring off the ends of sentences and leaving out all the rest of the passage, they managed to make Adam Smith appear in some sense as a monopolist. When we referred to the volume itself, we found out their tricks, and exposed them. I tell you what their argument reminds me of. An anecdote is told of an atheist who once asserted that there was no God, and said he would prove it from Scripture. He selected that passage from the Psalms which says, ‘The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.’ He then cut out the whole passage, except the words, ‘there is no God,’ and brought it forward as proof of his statement.”