“A huge dish of snails was placed before them; but philosophers are but men after all; and the stomachs of both doctors began to revolt against the proposed experiment. Nevertheless if they looked with disgust on the snails, they retained their awe for each other; so that each, conceiving the symptoms of internal revolt peculiar to himself, began with infinite exertion to swallow, in very small quantities, the mess which he loathed. Dr. Black at length ‘showed the white feather,’ but in a very delicate manner, as if to sound the opinion of his messmate. ‘Doctor,’ he said in his precise and quiet style, ‘Doctor, do you not think that they taste a little—a very little green?’ ‘D——d green, d——d green indeed!—tak’ them awa’, tak’ them awa’!’ vociferated Dr. Hutton, starting up from table and giving full vent to his feelings.”
One of Smith’s younger friends was John Sinclair, a Scotch laird of much ability and immense industry, whose History of the Public Revenue is still a standard work. It owed much to the Wealth of Nations; for when Smith saw how competent Sinclair was, he helped him in every possible way. In 1777 he dissuaded the young man from printing a pamphlet against the Puritanical observance of the Sabbath, saying, “Your work is very ably written, but I advise you not to publish it; for rest assured that the Sabbath as a political institution is of inestimable value independently of its claim to divine authority.” Late in the following year, when Sinclair brought him the news of Saratoga, and declared that the nation must be ruined, Smith answered coolly, “Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” About the same time he let Sinclair have the use (so long as he did not take it out of Edinburgh) of his own much-prized copy of the Mémoires concernant les Impositions, a contemporary survey of European systems of taxation, which he had obtained “by the particular favour of Mr. Turgot, the late Comptroller-General of the Finances.” In one of his letters to Sinclair he expressed his dislike of “all taxes that may affect the necessary expenses of the poor.”
“They, according to different circumstances, either oppress the people immediately subject to them, or are repaid with great interest by the rich, i.e. by their employers in the advanced wages of their labour. Taxes on the luxuries of the poor, upon their beer and other spirituous liquors, for example, as long as they are so moderate as not to give much temptation to smuggling, I am so far from disapproving, that I look upon them as the best of sumptuary laws.”[43]
Sinclair, who had entered Parliament in 1780, discussed foreign policy with Smith in the autumn of 1782, soon after the surrender at Yorktown, when the fortunes of Great Britain had sunk to their lowest ebb. The American colonies were lost; Ireland was almost in revolt; Gibraltar was besieged by the Spanish and French fleets; and the Northern powers were arrayed in an unfriendly armed neutrality. Sinclair had drafted a tract suggesting that we should seek to draw the Northern powers into an alliance against the House of Bourbon by offering them a share in our colonial monopoly. Again Smith advised his young friend not to go into print. The proposal, he thought, would not find favour with the neutrals, and there seemed to be a moral inconsistency in the argument. “If it be just to emancipate the continent of America from the dominion of every European power, how can it be just to subject the islands to such dominion; and if the monopoly of the trade of the continent be contrary to the rights of mankind, how can that of the islands be agreeable to those rights?”
In the following year peace was concluded with America and France; and the Prime Minister boasted to Morellet that all the treaties of that year were inspired by “the great principle of free trade.”
The necessity for resuming commercial intercourse with the United States raised in an acute form the problem of the colonial monopoly. Should the States be allowed to trade with Canada on the same terms as with Great Britain? William Eden (afterwards Lord Auckland) was afraid of abandoning the differential principle, and in his perplexity wrote to Smith, who replied that if the Americans really meant to subject the goods of all nations to the same import duties, they would “set an example of good sense which all other nations ought to imitate.” He had little anxiety—and his confidence was completely justified by the event—about the loss of the American monopoly. “By an equality of treatment of all nations, we might soon open a commerce with the neighbouring nations of Europe infinitely more advantageous than that of so distant a country as America.” As he hopes to see Eden in a few weeks’ time, he will not write a tedious dissertation, but contents himself with saying that “every extraordinary, either encouragement or discouragement, that is given to the trade of any country, more than to that of another, may, I think, be demonstrated to be in every case a complete piece of dupery, by which the interest of the State and the nation is constantly sacrificed to that of some particular class of traders.” He ends with warm praise of the East India Bill, and of the decisive judgment and resolution with which it had been introduced and triumphantly carried through the House of Commons by Fox.[44]
It is worth while here to note Smith’s steady devotion to Fox and Burke, who represented the Rockingham branch of the Whig party. He was faithful found among innumerable false, for he approved alike of Fox’s resignation in 1782 rather than serve under Shelburne, and of his fatal coalition with Lord North in the following year.[45] It may seem strange to those who think of Adam Smith only as the founder of free trade that he should have been a Foxite, and especially that he should have remained one in the last decade of his life, when commercial questions were uppermost, and when Shelburne first, and then Pitt, set themselves to translate the Wealth of Nations into laws and treaties. But, as we have tried to show, he never allowed economical considerations to weigh in the scale with political liberty; and the clue to his distrust of Shelburne and Pitt is his dislike of the King as a corrupter of politics, and of the Court as a corrupter of morals. Shelburne and Pitt exalting the King and the executive would have depressed the House of Commons. Rockingham, Fox, and Burke sought manfully, and not unsuccessfully, so to maintain and glorify constitutional usages as to check and limit the power of the King. This single consideration was enough to determine the allegiance of a truly republican heart.
Burke, moreover, was in every way a sympathetic figure. His measure of economical reform had docked the resources of patronage, and sensibly relieved the burdens of the taxpayer. And his views about commercial liberty coincided with Smith’s own. About this time a happy chance brought the two friends together. In the autumn of 1783 Burke was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, and early in the following April, during the general election which overwhelmed the Whigs, Burke, having saved his own seat at Malton, paid a visit to Scotland. He stayed a few days in Edinburgh, and then, accompanied by Adam Smith, Lord Maitland,[46] and others, went on to Glasgow to be installed in his new office. On the day of their arrival (Friday, April 9) they supped with that stalwart Whig, John Millar, the Professor of Law. On Sunday, Smith and Maitland took Burke to see Loch Lomond, and made their way back by Carron to Edinburgh, which they reached on the following Wednesday. Next day Burke, with a company of Smith’s Edinburgh friends, dined at Panmure House. On Friday the great orator returned to England extremely pleased by his reception in Scotland, and leaving behind him many friends and admirers. One of these has preserved some particulars of the visit. “Smith, Dugald, and I,” wrote Dalzel, “had more of his company than anybody in this country, and we got a vast deal of political anecdote from him and fine pictures of political characters both dead and living.” Burke advised Lord Maitland, if he had ambition and wanted office, to abandon the Whig party. “Shake us off: give us up.” Smith said cheerfully that “in two years things would come about again.” “Why,” cried Burke, “I have already been in a minority nineteen years, and your two years, Mr. Smith, will make me twenty-one years, and it will surely be high time for me then to be in my majority!”
Before the end of May a dark cloud came over Smith’s life, for his mother passed away in her ninetieth year. Four years later her death was followed by that of his cousin, Miss Douglas. Their loss was irreparable. “They had been the objects of his affection for more than sixty years, and in their society he had enjoyed from his infancy all that he ever knew of the endearments of a family.”[47]
Late in the autumn of 1784 Faujas de Saint-Fond, the geologist, visited Edinburgh after some adventurous discoveries in the Hebrides. During his fortnight’s stay “that venerable philosopher Adam Smith” was one of those whom he visited most frequently. “He received me on every occasion in the kindest manner, and studied to procure for me every kind of information and amusement that the town afforded.” Smith’s library, he says, bore evidence of his tour in France and his stay in Paris. “All our best French authors occupied prominent places on his shelves. He was very fond of our language.”