He invited Rogers to dine with him next day at the Oyster Club; but a tedious laird (brother of the Thibetan traveller) monopolised the conversation. “That Bogle,” said Smith afterwards, apologetically, “I was sorry he talked so much. He spoiled our evening.” Next Sunday Smith took an airing in his sedan chair, while his young friend went to hear Robertson and Blair preach. At nine o’clock, Blair having concluded, Rogers supped at Panmure House, and found the Oyster Club minus Bogle and plus a gentleman from Göttingen. The conversation was personal, and perhaps the only item now worth recalling is Smith’s reason for identifying Junius with “Single Speech Hamilton.” Hamilton once told the Duke of Richmond at Goodwood—the story came to Smith from Gibbon—of “a devilish keen letter” from Junius in that day’s Public Advertiser. But when the Duke got the paper he found not the letter, but an apology for its non-appearance; after this Hamilton was suspected of the authorship, and no more Junius was published. The inference Smith drew was that so long as suspicion pointed to the wrong man the letters continued to appear, and only stopped when the true author was named. Next day Rogers again dined with Smith, and Henry Mackenzie told them stories of second-sight. Hutton came in to tea, and then they went on to a meeting of the Royal Society to hear a paper by Dr. James Anderson on “Debtors and the Revision of the Laws that respect them.” Rogers says it was portentously long and dull. “Mr. Commissioner Smith fell asleep, and Mackenzie touched my elbow and smiled.” Altogether Rogers gives us a very pleasing picture of a serene and bright old age. “He is a very friendly, agreeable man, and I should have dined and supped with him every day if I had accepted all his invitations.” He did not notice any trace of absentmindedness, but thought that, compared with Robertson, Smith was a man of the world.
In the same summer William Adam, a nephew of the architect, conversed with Smith upon Bentham’s letters on usury. The economist is reported to have said that “the Defence of Usury was the work of a very superior man, and that though he had given him some hard knocks, it was done in so handsome a way that he could not complain.”[51] It is quite possible that had Smith lived to see another edition of the Wealth of Nations through the press, he would have responded to Bentham’s invitation by admitting the futility of fixing interest by law. But at this time he was still busy with the sixth edition of the Moral Sentiments, which at last appeared early in the following year. In the preface he referred to the promise he had made in 1759 of a treatise on Jurisprudence. That promise had been partially fulfilled in the Wealth of Nations; but what remained, the theory of Jurisprudence, he had hitherto failed to execute. “Though my very advanced age leaves me,” he acknowledged, “very little expectation of ever being able to execute this great work to my own satisfaction, yet, as I have not altogether abandoned the design, and as I wish still to continue under the obligation of doing what I can, I have allowed the paragraph to remain as it was published more than thirty years ago, when I entertained no doubt of being able to execute everything which it announced.”
These words were probably written late in the year 1789. In February 1790 he told Lord Buchan, “You will never see your old friend any more. I find that the machine is breaking down.” From this time he rapidly wasted away, and in June his friends knew, as well as he did, that there was no hope of recovery. His intellect remained perfectly clear, and he bore his sufferings with the utmost fortitude and resignation.
But he could not be easy about his papers. In 1773, when he consigned their care to Hume, he had instructed him to destroy without examination all his loose manuscript, together with about eighteen thin paper folio books containing his lectures. When he went to London in 1787 he had given similar instructions to Black and Hutton. Now that he had become very weak, and felt that his days were numbered, he spoke again to them on the same subject. They entreated him to make his mind easy, as he might depend upon their fulfilling his desire. He was satisfied for a time. But some days afterwards—this is Hutton’s account—finding his anxiety not entirely removed, he begged one of them to destroy the volumes immediately. This accordingly was done; and his mind was so much relieved that he was able to receive his friends in the evening with his usual cheerfulness. They had been used to sup with him every Sunday, and that evening there was a pretty numerous company of them. The old man not finding himself able to sit up with them as usual, retired to bed before supper; and as he went away took leave of his friends by saying, “I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place.” He died a very few days afterwards, on July the 17th, 1790, and was buried in the Canongate Churchyard, in an obscure spot which must have been overlooked by some of the windows of Panmure House.
In his will he had made his cousin, David Douglas (the youngest son of Colonel Douglas of Strathendry), his heir, with instructions to dispose of his manuscripts in accordance with the advice of Black and Hutton.
A small but choice library of four or five thousand volumes, and a simple table, to which his friends were always welcome without the formality of an invitation, were, says Dugald Stewart, “the only expenses that could be considered his own.” His acts of private generosity, though sedulously concealed, were on a scale “much beyond what might have been expected from his fortune,” and those who knew only of his frugality were surprised to find how small, in comparison with the income he had long enjoyed, was the property he left behind him.
His friends were indignant that the death of so great a thinker made but little stir. They might have been consoled had they been able to look forward twenty years, and read a letter which a German student, Alexander von der Marwitz, wrote to a friend on reading the Wealth of Nations. It was on the eve of Jena, and the form of Napoleon stood out a gigantic menace to all that the young patriot held dear. Yet he did not hesitate to compare the victorious author with the conqueror of Europe. “Next to Napoleon he is now the mightiest monarch in Europe.”
In the emancipation of thought and dispersion of knowledge which mark the century that divides the English from the French Revolution, Adam Smith takes his place in the order of time after Locke, Montesquieu, Newton, and Voltaire, with Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Turgot, and Burke. With all of them he agreed in abhorring religious intolerance; with each of them he had some special affinity. Like the first and the last, he had a truly English reverence for law and order. A Newtonian in his patient and tranquil research for the hidden secrets of Nature, he had Voltaire’s love of Justice, while he resembled Rousseau, the only democrat of the French school, in a new sentiment for popular government, and in what may be called either the Social or Republican instinct. He vied with Diderot in an universal curiosity and an encyclopædic grasp of all the sciences, but surpassed him in originality and creative power. He combined in an extraordinary degree the faculties of observation, meditation, and abstraction. His achievements are not accidents. If the architect’s plans are compared with history, they will be found to have been executed in large part by the builders of the nineteenth century. Of the great Frenchmen who synchronised with him and moved along parallel lines of thought, it cannot be said that any one, or that all together, destroyed the Church or the government, or even the social system of France. It may even be questioned whether they swayed the fortunes of France with an influence so potent as Smith’s sceptre has wielded over the destinies of Europe. The criticisms of Voltaire had mighty consequences, no doubt, but those consequences were not deliberately planned, or even descried. Hume’s scepticism went far deeper than Voltaire’s, tore up by the roots whole systems of debased philosophy, and roused Kant from his dogmatic slumbers. But Hume and Voltaire had little to sow on the land they ploughed and harrowed. In all their anxiety to humble and ridicule religion, they would retain the Church as a useful instrument of the State. In all their appeals to public opinion, they never thought of resting government on a broad basis of popular right. Their view of society was conventional; they were rather satirists than reformers. It has been a commonplace of criticism to compare Adam Smith with Locke. He is supposed to have done for a particular branch of politics what Locke did for the whole science. But Locke’s main achievement, after all, was to find philosophic sanction for a revolution accomplished by others, and to establish in the minds of the Whig aristocracy an unlimited respect for a limited constitution. Smith was the single-handed contriver and sole author of a revolution in thought which has modified the governing policy and prodigiously increased the welfare of the whole civilised world.
Of his contemporaries, the nearest perhaps in spirit are Turgot and the younger Burke, the Burke of the American Revolution and of Free Trade and Economical Reform. But Burke and even Turgot were in a certain sense men of the past. Though their radiance can never fade, their influence wanes. But Smith has issued from the seclusion of a professorship of morals, from the drudgery of a commissionership of customs, to sit in the council-chamber of princes. His word has rung through the study to the platform. It has been proclaimed by the agitator, conned by the statesman, and printed in a thousand statutes.