Adam Smith
1723-1790

by James Anson Farrer

The fame of Adam Smith rests so deservedly on his great work, the Wealth of Nations, that the fact is apt to be lost sight of, that long before he distinguished himself as a political economist he had gained a reputation, not confined to his own country, by his speculations in moral philosophy. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was first published in 1759, when its author was thirty-six; the Wealth of Nations in 1776, when he was fifty-three. The success of the latter soon eclipsed that of his first work, but the wide celebrity which soon attended the former is attested by the fact of. the sort of competition that ensued for translating it into French. Rochefoucauld, grandson of the famous author of the Maxims, got so far in a translation of it as the end of the first Part, when a complete translation by the Abbé Blavet compelled him to renounce the continuance of his work. The Abbé Morelletso conspicuous a figure in the French literature of that periodspeaks of himself in his Memoirs as having been impressed by Adam Smith's Theory with a great idea of its author's wisdom and depth of thought.(1)

The publication of these two books, the only writings published by their author in his lifetime, are strictly speaking the only episodes which form anything like landmarks in Adam Smith's career. The sixty-seven years of his life (1723-90) were in other respects strangely destitute of what are called "events;" and beyond the adventure of his childhood, when he was carried away by gipsies but soon rescued, nothing extraordinary ever occurred to ruffle the even surface of his existence.

If, therefore, the happiness of an individual, like that of a nation, may be taken to vary inversely with the materials afforded by them to the biographer or the historian, Adam Smith may be considered to have attained no mean degree of human felicity. From his ideal of life, political ambition and greatness were altogether excluded; it was his creed that happiness was equal in every lot, and that contentment alone was necessary to ensure it. "What," he asks, "can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?"

To this simple standard, circumstances assisted him to mould his life. His health, delicate in his early years, became stronger with age; necessity never compelled him to seek a competence in uncongenial pursuits; nor did a tranquil life of learning ever tempt him into paths at variance with the laws of his moral being or his country. In several passages of his Moral Sentiments, it will appear that he took no pains to conceal his preference for the old Epicurean theory of life, that in ease of body and peace of mind consists happiness, the goal of all desire.

But the charm of such a formula of life is perhaps more obvious than its rendering into an actual state of existence. Ease of body does not always come for the wishing; and peace of mind often lies still further from command. The advantage of the formula is, that it sets before us a definite aim, and affords us at any time a measure of the happiness we enjoy or of that we see around us. Judged by this standard, however, the conclusion must beand it is a conclusion from which Adam Smith does not shrinkthat the lot of a beggar may be equal in point of happiness to that of a king.

The result of this Epicurean theory of life on Adam Smith was, fortunately for the world, a strong preference for the life of learning and literature over the professional or political life. He abjured from the first all anxiety for the prizes held out by the various professions to candidates for wealth or reputation. Though sent to Balliol at seventeen as a Snell exhibitioner, for the purpose of fitting himself for service in the Church of England, he preferred so much the peace of his own mind to the wishes of his friends and relations, that, when he left Oxford after a residence of seven years, he declined to enter into the ecclesiastical profession at all, and he returned to Scotland with the sole and simple hope of obtaining through literature some post of moderate preferment more suitable to his inclinations.

Fortune seems to have favoured him in making such a course possible, for after leaving Oxford he spent two years at home with his mother at Kirkaldy. He had not to encounter the difficulties which compelled Hume to practise frugality abroad, in order to preserve his independence. His father, who had died a few months before his birth, had been private secretary to the Principal Secretary of State for Scotland, and after that Comptroller of the Customs at Kirkaldy. Adam Smith was, moreover, an only child, and if there was not wealth at home, there was the competence which was all he desired.

By the circumstances of his birth, his education, like that of David Hume, devolved in his early years upon his mother, of whom one would gladly know more than has been vouchsafed by her son's biographer. She is said to have been blamed for spoiling him, but it is possible that what seemed to her Scotch neighbours excessive indulgence meant no very exceptional degree of kindness. At all events, the treatment succeeded, nor had ever a mother a more devoted son. Her death, which did not long precede his own, closed a life of unremitted affection on both sides, and was the first and greatest bereavement that Adam Smith ever had to mourn. The society of his mother and her niece, Miss Douglas, who lived with them, was all that he ever knew of family life; and when the small circle broke up, as it did at last speedily and with short intervals of survival for those who experienced the grief of the first sepa- ration, Adam Smith was well-advanced in years. He survived his mother only six years, his cousin about two; and he had passed sixty when the former died.

It is said, that after a disappointment in early life, Adam Smith gave up all thoughts of marriage; but if he thus failed of the happiest condition of life, it is equally true that he was spared the greatest sorrows of human existence, and a number of minor troubles and anxieties. The domestic economy was entirely conducted by his cousin, and to the philosopher is attributed with more than usual justice all that incapacity for the common details of life with which the popular conception always clothes a scholar. It is said that even the fancy of a La Bruyère has scarcely imagined instances of a more striking absence of mind than might be actually quoted of him;(2) and from boyhood upwards he' had the habit of laughing and talking to himself which sometimes led casual observers to inferences not to his credit.

Dugald Stewart, whose somewhat meagre memoir on Adam Smith is the chief authority for all that is known of his life, describes him as "certainly not fitted for the general commerce of the world or for the business of active life." The subject of his studies rendered him "habitually inattentive to familiar objects and to common occurrences." Even in company, he was apt to be engrossed with his studies, and would seem, by the motion of his lips as well as by his looks and gestures, to be in all the fervour of composition. In conversation "he was scarcely ever known to start a topic himself," and if he did succeed in falling in with the common dialogue of conversation, "he was somewhat apt to convey his own ideas in the form of a lecture." Notwithstanding these defects, we are told of "the splendour of his conversation," and of the inexhaustible novelty and variety which belonged to it, by reason of his ready adaptation of fanciful theories to all the common topics of discourse.

Of his early yearsoften the most interesting of any, as indicative of future charactersingularly little remains known. Some of those who were the companions of his first school years at Kirkaldy, and who remained his friends for life, have attested the passion he even then had for books and "the extraordinary powers of his memory."

At the age of fourteen he was sent to the University of Glasgow, where his favourite studies were mathematics and natural sciences, and where he attended the lectures of Dr. Hutcheson, who has been called "the father of speculative philosophy in Scotland in modern times," and whose theory of the Moral Sense had so much influence on Adam Smith's own later ethical speculations.

Beyond this reference to his studies, nothing is told of Adam Smith's three years at Glasgow. His whole youth is in fact a blank for his biographer. We hear of no prizes, no distinctions, no friendships, no adventures, no eccentricities of any kind. Nor is it much better with regard to his career at Oxford, to which he was sent by the University of Glasgow at the age of seventeen. Only one anecdote remains, of very doubtful truth, and not mentioned by Dugald Stewart, to the effect that he once incurred rebuke from the college authorities of Balliol for having been detected in his rooms reading Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. The story is worth mentioning, if only as an indication of the prevalent idea of Adam Smith's bent of mind in his undergraduate days; and those who, in spite of experience, still hold to the theory, that at the bottom of every story some truth must lie, may gather from this one, that even at college the future friend of the historian was attracted by the bold scepticism which distinguished his philosophy.

It was perhaps by reason of this attraction that at the end of seven years at Oxford Adam Smith declined to take orders. Leaving Oxford, which for most men means an entire change of life, meant for him simply a change in the scene of his studies; a transfer of them from one place to another. Languages, literature, and history, could, he found, be studied as well at Kirkaldy as at the chief seat of learning in England. To Oxford, so different in most colleges now from what it was in those days, he seems never to have expressed or felt the gratitude which through life attached him to Glasgow; and his impressions of the English university have been immortalized by him in no flattering terms in what he has said of it in his Wealth of Nations.

After nearly two years spent at home, Adam Smith removed to Edinburgh, where, under the patronage of Lord Kames, so well known in connexion with the Scotch literature of the last century, he delivered lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres; and the same subject formed the greater part of his lectures as Professor of Logic at Glasgow, to which post he was elected in 1751, at the age of twenty-eight. The next year he was chosen Professor of Moral Philosophy at the same university; and the period of thirteen years, during which he held this situation, he ever regarded as the most useful and happy of his life.

Of his lectures at Glasgow only so much has been preserved as he published in the Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations respectively. He divided his course into four parts, the first relating to Natural Theology, the second to Ethics, the third to the subject of Justice and the growth of Jurisprudence, the fourth to Politics. Under the latter head he dealt with the political institutions relating to commerce and all the subjects which enter into his maturer work on the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; whilst under the second head, he expounded the doctrines which he afterwards published in the Moral Sentiments. On the subject of Justice, it was his intention to write a system of natural jurisprudence, "or a theory of the general principles which ought to run through and be the foundation of the laws of all nations." It was to have been an improvement on the work of Grotius on the same subject, and the Theory of Moral Sentiments concludes with a promise which, unfortunately, was never fulfilled. "I shall," he says, "in another discourse, endeavour to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society, not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. I shall not, therefore, at present, enter into any further details concerning the history of jurisprudence.(3)

One of Adam Smith's own pupils, and afterwards for life one of his most intimate friends, Dr. Millar, professor of law at Glasgow, and author of an excellent work on the Origin of Ranks, has left a graphic description of the great success which attended these lectures at Glasgow. "There was no situation in which the abilities of Mr. Smith appeared to greater advantage than as a professor.... his reputation as a professor was accordingly raised vcry high, and a multitude of students from a great distance resorted to the University, merely upon his account. Those branches of science which he taught became fashionable at this place, and his opinions were the chief topic of discussion in clubs and literary societies. Even the small peculiarities in his pronunciation or manner of speaking, became frequently the objects of imitation."

It seems to have been during the early years of his professorship at Glasgow that Adam Smith formed that friendship with David Hume which forms so pleasing a feature in the life of both of them, and is so memorable in the history of literary attachments. There was sufficient sameness in the fundamental characteristics and opinions of each of them, together with sufficient differences on minor points, to ensure the permanence of their mutual affection. Both took the same interest in questions of moral philosophy and political economy; both had a certain simplicity and gentleness of character; both held the same ideas of the relation of natural to revealed religion.

A letter written by Hume to his friend in 1759, on the occasion of the publication of his Moral Sentiments, is of interest, not only as characteristic of the friendship between them, but as indicative of the good reception which the book immediately met with from all persons competent to judge of it. The letter is dated April 12, 1759

"I give you thanks for the agreeable present of your Theory. Wedderburne and I made presents of our copies to such of our acquaintances as we thought good judges, and proper to spread the reputation of the book. I sent one to the Duke of Argyll, to Lord Lyttleton, Horace Walpole, Soame Jennyns, and Burke, an Irish gentleman, who wrote lately a very pretty treatise on the Sublime. Millar desired my permission to send one in your name to Dr. Warburton. I have delayed writing till I could tell you something of the success of the book, and could prognosticate, with some probability, whether it should be finally damned to oblivion, or should be registered in the temple of immortality. Though it has been published only a few weeks, I think there appear already such strong symptoms, that I can almost venture to foretell its fate.... I am afraid of Lord Kames's Law Tracts. A man might as well think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and aloes as an agreeable composition by joining metaphysics and Scotch law.... I believe I have mentioned to you already Helvetius's book de l'Esprit. It is worth your reading, not for its philosophy, which I do not highly value, but for its agreeable composition. I had a letter from him a few days ago wherein he tells me that my name was much oftener in the manuscript, but that the censor of books at Paris obliged him to strike it out.... But what is all this to my book? say you. My dear Mr. Smith, have patience: compose yourself to tranquillity; show yourself a philosopher in practice as well as profession; think on the emptiness, and rashness, and futility of the common judgment of men; how little they are regulated by reason in any subject, much more in philosophical subjects, which so far exceed the comprehension of the vulgar. ... A wise man's kingdom is his own breast; or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.

"Supposing. there fore, that you have duly prepared yourself for the worst by all these reflections, I proceed to tell you the melancholy news, that your book has been very unfortunate, for the public seem disposed to applaud it extremely. It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises. Three bishops called yesterday at Millar's shop in order to buy copies and to ask questions about its author. The Bishop of Peterborough said he had passed the evening in a company where he heard it extolled above all books in the world. The Duke of Argyll is more decisive than he uses to be in its favour. I suppose he either considers it an exotic or thinks the author will be serviceable to him in the Glasgow elections. Lord Lyttleton says that Robertson, and Smith, and Bower are the glories of English literature. Oswald protests he does not know whether he has reaped more instruction or entertainment from it. But you may easily judge what reliance can be placed on his judgment who has been engaged all his life in public business, and who never sees any faults in his friends. Millar exults and brags that two-thirds of the edition are already sold, and that it is sure of success. You see what a son of earth that is, to value books only by the profit they bring him.. In that view, I believe, it may prove a very good book.

"Charles Townsend, who passes for the cleverest fellow in England, is so taken with the performance that he said to Oswald he would put the Duke of Buccleuch under the author's care, and would make it worth his while to accept of that charge. As soon as I heard this I called on him twice, with a view of talking with him about the matter, and of convincing him of the propriety of sending that young nobleman to Glasgow; for I could not hope that he could offer you any terms which would tempt you to renounce your professorship. But I missed him.....

"In recompense for so many mortifying things, which nothing but truth could have extorted from me, and which I could easily have multiplied to a greater number, I doubt not but you are so good a Christian as to return good for evil; and to flatter my vanity by telling me that all the godly in Scotland abuse me for my account of John Knox and the Reformation," etc.

The invitation referred to by Hume in this letter to travel with the Duke of Buecleuch came in about four years time; and the liberal terms in which the proposal was made, together with the strong temptation to travel, led to a final resignation of the Glasgow professorship.

But here again curiosity is doomed to disappointment; for Adam Smith wrote no journal of his travels abroad, and he had such an aversion to letter-writing that no records of this sort preserve his impressions of foreign life.(4) Scarcely more than the bare outline of his route is known. Some two weeks at Paris were followed by eighteen months at Toulouse. Then a tour in the South of France was followed by two months at Geneva; and from Christmas, 1765, to the following October the travellers were in Paris, this latter period being the only one of any general interest, on account of the illustrious acquaintances which the introductions of Hume enabled Adam Smith to make in the French capital.

During this period Adam Smith became acquainted with the chief men of letters and philosophers of Paris, such as D'Alemhert, Helvetius, Marmontel, Morellet; and it is to be regretted that Morellet, who mentions the fact of conversations between himself, Turgot, and Adam Smith, on subjects of political economy and on several points connected with the great work then contemplated by the latter, should have given us no clue to the influence Turgot may have had in suggesting or confirming the idea of free trade. That the intercourse between them became intimate may at least be inferred from the unverified story of their subsequent literary correspondence; and to Quesnai, the economist, it is known that Adam Smith intended, but for the death of the former, to have dedicated his Wealth of Nations. `With Morellet, too, Adam Smith seems to have been intimate. The abbé records in his Memoirs that he kept for twenty years a pocket-book presented to him as a keepsake by Adam Smith. The latter sent him also a copy of the Wealth of Nations ten years later, which Morellet, with his usual zeal for translating, set to work upon at once. The Abbé Blavet, however, was again the first in the field, so that Morellet could not find a publisher. It is worth noticing that Morellet mentions the fact that Adam Smith spoke French very badly, which is not the least inconsistent with his biographer's claim for him of an "uncommonly extensive and accurate knowledge" of modern languages.

The duke and the philosopher, having laid in their companionship abroad the foundation of a friendship which lasted till the death of the latter, returned to London in October, 1766. The next ten years of his life Adam Smith spent at home with his mother and cousin, preparing the work on which his fame now chiefly rests. It was a period of quiet uneventful study, and almost solitude. Writing to Hume, he says that his chief amusements are long and solitary walks by the sea, and that he never felt more happy, comfortable, or contented, in his life. Hume made vain endeavours to tempt him to Edinburgh from his retirement. "I want," he said, "to know what you have been doing, and propose to exact a rigorous account of the method in which you have employed yourself during your retreat. I am positive you are wrong in many of your speculations, especially where you have the misfortune to differ from me. All these are reasons for our meeting."

This was in 1769. Seven years later, 1776, the Wealth of Nations appeared, and Hume, who was then dying, again wrote his friend a congratulatory letter. "Euge! Belle! I am much pleased with your performance, and the perusal of it has taken me from a great state of 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, 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. . . . But these, and a hundred other points, are fit only to be discussed in conversation. I hope it will be soon, for I am in a very bad state of health, and cannot afford a long delay."

This letter seems to have led to a meeting between the two friends, the last before the sad final separation. Of the cheerfulness with which Hume met his death, Adam Smith wrote an account in a letter addressed to Strahan, the publisher, and appended to Hume's autobiography, telling how Hume, in reference to his approaching departure, imagined a conversation between himself and Charon, and how he continued to correct his works for a new edition, to read books of amusement, to converse, or sometimes play at whist with his friends. Ho also extolled "Hume's extreme gentleness of nature, which never weakened the firmness of his mind nor the steadiness of his resolutions; his constant pleasantry and good humour; his severe application to study, his extensive learning, his depth of Thought. He thought that his temper was more evenly balanced than in any other man he ever knew; and that, however much difference of opinion there might be among men as to his philosophical ideas, according as they happened or not to coincide with their own, there could scarcely be any concerning his character and conduct. "Upon the whole," he concluded, "I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."

Considering that Hume counted among his friends such churchmen as Robertson the historian, and Blair, author of the Sermons, Adam Smith's confident belief in the uniformity of judgment about his friend's character need not appear unreasonable; but, unfortunately, a dignitary of the Church, author of a Commentary on the Psalms, and afterwards Bishop of Norwich, chose to consider the letter to Strahan a manifesto against Christianity, and accordingly published anonymously a letter to Adam Smith, purporting to be written "by one of the people called Christians." The writer claimed to have in his composition a large proportion of the milk of human kindness; to be no bigot nor enemy to human learning; and never to have known the meaning of envy or hatred. Strange then that, at the age of forty-six, Dr. Home should have been guilty of a letter, which it would be difficult to match for injustice of inference, or contemptibility of style, and which he even thought fit to leave to posterity among his other published works. He begins: "You have been lately employed in embalming a philosopher; his body, I believe I must say, for concerning the other part of his nature neither you nor he seem to have entertained an idea, sleeping or waking. Else it surely might have claimed a little of your care and attention; and one would think the belief of the soul's existence and immortality could do no harm, if it did no good, in a Theory of Moral Sentiments. But every gentleman understands his own business best."

The letter, pervaded by the same spirit of banter throughout, is too long to quote at length, but the following extracts contain the leading idea: "Are you sure, and can you make us sure, that there really exist no such things as God, a future state of rewards and punishments? If so, all is well. Let us then, in our last hours, read Lucian, and play at whist, and droll upon Charon and his boat; let us die as foolish and insensible, as much like our brother philosophers the calves of the field and the asses of the desert, as we can, for the life of us. . . . . Upon the whole, doctor, your meaning is good; but I think you will not succeed this time. You would persuade us, by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits, and the proper antidote against the fear of death."

It is difficult to say whether the puerility or the ignorance displayed in this letter is the greater. Either the writer had never read the Theory of Moral Sentiments at all, or he was so 1ittle versed in philosophy as to see no difference between Deism and Atheism, two distinct logical contradictories. There is, moreover, not a word in Adam Smith's letter to justify any reference to religious questions at all; and sub- sequent quotations from the Moral Sentiments will abundantly demonstrate the total falsity of the churchman's assumptions. Adam Smith treated his letter with the contemptuous silence it so well deserved. The story quoted by Sir Walter Scott, in an article in the Quarterly, that Johnson grossly insulted Adam Smith at a literary meeting in Glasgow, by reason of his dislike for him, as the eulogizer of Hume, is easily shown to rest on no foundation. Hume did not die till 1776, and it was three years earlier that Johnson visited Glasgow.

The two years after the publication of his greatest work Adam Smith spent in London, in the midst of that literary society which we know so well through the pages of Boswell. Then, at the request of the Duke of Buceleuch, he was made one of the Commissioners of Custom in Scotland, and in this occupation spent the last twelve years of his life, in the midst of a society which must have formed an agreeable contrast to the long years of his retirement and solitude. The light duties of his office the pleasures of friendship; the loss of his mother and cousin, and increasing ill health, all combined to prevent the completion of any more of his literary projects. A few days before his death he ordered all his manuscripts to be burnt, with the exception of a few essays, which may still be read. They consist of a History of Astronomy, a History of Ancient Physics, a History of Ancient Logic and Metaphysics, an Essay on the Imitative Arts, on certain English and Italian verses, and on the External Senses. The destroyed manuscripts are supposed to have comprised the lectures on Rhetoric, read at Edinburgh forty-two years before, and the lectures on Natural Theology and on Jurisprudence, which formed part of his lectures at Glasgow. The additions which lie made to the Moral Sentiments, in the last winter of his life, he lived to see published before his death.