Others of Smith's Edinburgh friends zealously joined Hume in his representations, especially the faithful Johnstone (afterwards Sir W. Pulteney), who actually wrote Smith a letter on the subject along with Hume's. Hume's letter is as follows:—
Dear Smith—I sit down to write to you along with Johnstone, and as we have been talking over the matter, it is probable we shall employ the same arguments. As he is the younger lawyer, I leave him to open the case, and suppose that you have read his letter first. We are certain that the settlement of you here and of Ferguson at Glasgow would be perfectly easy by Lord Milton's Interest. The Prospect of prevailing with Abercrombie is also very good. For the same statesman by his influence over the Town Council could oblige him either to attend, which he never would do, or dispose of the office for the money which he gave for it. The only real difficulty is then with you. Pray then consider that this is perhaps the only opportunity we shall ever have of getting you to town. I dare swear that you think the difference of Place is worth paying something for, and yet it will really cost you nothing. You made above a hundred pound a year by your class when in this Place, though you had not the character of Professor. We cannot suppose that it will be less than a hundred and thirty after you are settled. John Stevenson[97]—and it is John Stevenson—makes near a hundred and fifty, as we were informed upon Enquiry. Here is a hundred pounds a year for eight years' Purchase, which is a cheap purchase, even considered in the way of a Bargain. We flatter ourselves that you rate our company at something, and the Prospect of settling Ferguson will be an additional inducement. For though we think of making him take up the Project if you refuse it, yet it is uncertain whether he will consent; and it is attended in his case with many very obvious objections. I beseech you therefore to weigh all these motives over again. The alteration of these circumstances merit that you should put the matter again in deliberation. I had a letter from Miss Hepburn, where she regrets very much that you are settled at Glasgow, and that we had the chance of seeing you so seldom.—I am, dear Smith, yours sincerely,
David Hume.
8th June 1758.
P.S.—Lord Milton can with his finger stop the foul mouths of all the Roarers against heresy.[98]
The postscript shows what we have already indicated, that Smith had not escaped the general hue and cry against heresy which was now for some years abroad in the country.
The Miss Hepburn who regrets so much the remoteness of Smith's residence is doubtless Miss Hepburn of Monkrig, near Haddington, one of those gifted literary ladies who were then not infrequently to be found in the country houses of Scotland. It was to Miss Hepburn and her sisters that John Home is said to have been indebted for the first idea of Douglas, and Robertson submitted to her the manuscript of his History of Scotland piece by piece as he wrote it. When it was finished the historian sent her a presentation copy with a letter, in which he said: "Queen Mary has grown up to her present form under your eye; you have seen her in many different shapes, and you have now a right to her. Were I a galante writer now, what a fine contrast might I make between you and Queen Mary? What a pretty string of antitheses between your virtues and her vices. I am glad, however, she did not resemble you. If she had, Rizzio would have only played first fiddle at her consort (sic), with a pension of a thousand merks and two benefits in a winter; Darnley would have been a colonel in the Guards; Bothwell would, on account of his valour, have been Warden of the Middle Marches, but would have been forbid to appear at court because of his profligacy. But if all that had been done, what would have become of my History?"[99]
Smith seems to have declined, for whatever reason, to take up the suggestion of Hume about this chair of Law, for we find Hume presently trying hard to secure the place for Ferguson. The difficulty may have been about the price, for though Hume speaks of £800, it seems Abercromby wanted more than £1000, and Ferguson too had no mind to begin life with such a debt on his shoulders. But the world is probably no loser by the difficulty, whatever it was, which kept Smith five years longer among the merchants and commercial problems of Glasgow.
Smith was one of the founders, or at least the original members, of the Edinburgh Poker Club in 1762. Every one has heard of that famous club, but most persons probably think of it as if it were merely a social or convivial society; and Mr. Burton lends some countenance to that mistake by declaring that he has never been able to discover any other object it existed for except the drinking of claret. But the Poker Club was really a committee for political agitation, like the Anti-Corn-Law League or the Home Rule Union; only, after the more genial manners of those times, the first thing the committee thought requisite for the proper performance of their work was to lay in a stock of sound Burgundy that could be drawn from the wood at eighteenpence or two shillings a quart, to engage a room in a tavern for the exclusive use of the members, and establish a weekly or bi-weekly dinner at a moderate figure, to keep the poker of agitation in active exercise. The club got its name from the practical purpose it was instituted to serve; it was to be an instrument for stirring opinion, especially in high quarters, on a public question which was exciting the people of Scotland greatly at the moment, the question of the establishment of a national Scotch militia. Some of the members thought that when that question was settled, the club should go on and take up others. George Dempster of Dunnichen, for example, an old and respected parliamentary hand of that time, wrote Dr. Carlyle in 1762 that when they got their militia, they ought to agitate for parliamentary reform, "so as to let the industrious farmer and manufacturer share at last in a privilege now engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener baillie."[100] But they never got the length of considering other reforms, for the militia question was not settled in that generation. It outlived the Poker Club, and it outlived the Younger Poker Club which was enrolled to take up the cause in 1786, and it was not finally settled till 1793.
The Scotch had been roused to the defenceless condition of their country by the alarming appearance of Thurot in Scotch waters in 1759, and had instantly with one voice raised a cry for the establishment of a national militia. The whole country seemed to have set its mind on this measure with a singular unanimity, and a bill for its enactment was accordingly introduced into the House of Commons in 1760 by two of the principal Scotch members, both former ministers of the Crown—James Oswald and Gilbert Elliot; but it was rejected by a large majority, because within only fifteen years of the Rebellion the English members were unwilling to entrust the Scotch people with arms. The rejection of the bill provoked a deep feeling of national indignation, the slur it cast on the loyalty of Scotland being resented even more than the indifference it showed to her perils. It was under the influence of this wave of national sentiment that the Poker Club was founded in 1762, to procure for the Scotch at once equality of rights with the English and adequate defences for their country.
The membership of the club included many of the foremost men in the land—great noblemen, advocates, men of letters, together with a number of spirited county gentlemen on both sides of politics, who cried that they had a militia of their own before the Union, and must have a militia of their own again. Dr. Carlyle says most of the members of the Select Society belonged to it, the exceptions consisting of a few who disapproved of the militia scheme, and of others, like the judges, who scrupled, on account of their official position, to take any part in a political movement. Carlyle gives a list of the members in 1774, containing among other names those of the Duke of Buccleugh, Lords Haddington, Glasgow, Glencairn, Elibank, and Mountstuart; Henry Dundas, Lord Advocate; Baron Mure, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, Black, Adam Ferguson, John Home, Dr. Blair, Sir James Steuart the economist, Dempster, Islay Campbell, afterwards Lord President; and John Clerk of Eldin. The first secretary of the club was William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney), and, as has been frequently told, David Hume was jocularly appointed to a sinecure office created for him, the office of assassin, and lest Hume's good-nature should unfit him for the duties, Andrew Crosbie, advocate (the original of Scott's "Pleydell"), was made his assistant. The club met at first in Tom Nicholson's tavern, the Diversorium, at the Cross, and subsequently removed to more fashionable quarters at the famous Fortune's in the Stamp Office Close, where the Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly held his levees, and the members dined every Friday at two and sat till six. However the club may have pulled wires in private, their public activity seems to have been very little; so far at least as literary advocacy of their cause went, nothing proceeded from it except a pamphlet by Dr. Carlyle, and a much-overlauded squib by Adam Ferguson, entitled "A History of the Proceedings in the Case of Margaret, commonly called Sister Peg."
Smith was, as I have said, one of the original members of the club, and from Carlyle's list would appear to have continued a member till 1774; but he was not a member of the Younger Poker Club, established in 1786. In the interval he had expressed in the Wealth of Nations a strong preference for a standing army over a national militia,[101] after instituting a very careful examination of the whole subject. Whether his views had changed since 1762, or whether he had joined in the agitation for a militia merely as a measure of justice to Scotland or as an expedient of temporary necessity, without committing himself to any abstract admiration for the institution in general, I have no means of deciding; but we can hardly think he ever shared that kind of belief in the principle of a militia which animated men like Ferguson and Carlyle, and which, according to them, animated the other members of the club also at its birth. Ferguson says the club was founded "upon the principle of zeal for a militia and a conviction that there could be no lasting security for the freedom and independence of these islands but in the valour and patriotism of an armed people";[102] and when, during his travels in Switzerland in 1775, he saw for the first time in his life a real militia—the object of his dreams—actually moving before him in the flesh, and going through their drill, his heart came to his mouth, and he wrote his friend Carlyle: "As they were the only body of men I ever saw under arms on the true principle for which arms should be carried, I felt much secret emotion, and could have shed tears."[103] He was deeply disappointed a year later with Smith's apostasy on this question, or at least opposition, for Ferguson makes no accusation of apostasy. After reading the Wealth of Nations, he wrote Smith on the 18th of April 1776: "You have provoked, too, so far the Church, the universities, and the merchants, against all of whom I am willing to take your part; but you have likewise provoked the militia, and there I must be against you. The gentlemen and peasants of this country do not need the authority of philosophers to make them supine and negligent of every resource they might have in themselves in the case of certain extremities, of which the pressure, God knows, may be at no great distance. But of this more at Philippi."[104]
But many others besides Smith had in this interval either found their zeal for a militia grown cool or their opinion of its value modified, and when Lord Mountstuart introduced his new Scotch Militia Bill in 1776, it received little support from Scotch members, and its rejection excited nothing like the feeling roused by the rejection of its predecessor in 1760, although it was attended this time with the galling aggravation that what was refused to the Scotch was in the same hour granted to the Irish, then the less disliked and distrusted nation of the two. Opinions had grown divided. Old Fletcher of Saltoun's idea of a citizen army with universal compulsory service was still much discussed, but many now objected to the compulsion, and others, among whom was Lord Kames, to the universality of the compulsion, rallying to the idea of Fencibles—i.e. regiments to be raised compulsorily by the landed proprietors, each furnishing a number of men proportioned to their valued rent.[105] Smith said a militia formed in this way, like the old Highland militia, was the best of all militias, but he held that the day was past for militias of men with one hand on the sword and the other on the plough, and that nothing could now answer for what he calls "the noblest of all arts," the art of war, but the division of labour, which answered best for the arts of peace, and a standing army of soldiers by exclusive occupation.