before Smith; nature of great fallacies; mercantile system; its origin and true meaning; the arguments of the mer- chants; comparison between Colbert and Bismarck; the exaggeration of the free traders, and the fallacies of the protectionists; France and the encyclopædists; the agri- cultural system; Quesnay and Turgot ; nature of advances accomplished by men of genius; difference between science and literature in this respect; Hume prepared the ground for Smith; Quesnay's influence on Smith; abstract nature of method of English economists who succeeded Smith; difference between political economy and politics; they were not separated in Smith's hands; his mixed method PAGE Relation of Smith's teaching to modern politics; the concrete character of his method; political economy a hypothetical science; Smith an individualist but only as a rule of prac- tice; his attitude towards Free Trade the only safe one in view of the impending controversy; limits of State inter- ference; Smith's bias against enlarging the duties of the Government when persons under no disability were con- cerned; hardly any political problem can be treated as a single illustration of a simple principle; the House of Commons not fitted to decide what are really speculative questions; there is no theoretical but only a practical test possible as regards the propriety of State interference, and this appears to have been Smith's view; the pressure ex- LIFE OF ADAM SMITH. CHAPTER I. 'Tis more difficult to write about a man of letters IT than about any other kind of great man. The individuality of an author, to whatever extent he may live in the creations of his pen, is immensely less bound up, in the public imagination, with his deeds, than is that of a soldier or a statesman. If these deeds have fashioned our daily lives, they have done so in a manner usually far more subtle and less obvious in the former case than in the latter. The individuality of Adam Smith can hardly be said to be bound up at all with his deeds. Even in Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh, the places of his birth and of his death, but little memorial of him has survived. We think of him, in the main, and we think of him rightly, as the bosom friend of David Hume. It is to be regretted, on nearly all scores, that the records of his life are so meagre. For he was a great writer, and an interesting man. He is not reputed to have played any part in the world's history of the kind which tempts those whose ambition it is to show that the private and inner lives of all men are lived on a level. On the contrary, he was a somewhat shy, retiring, and awkward student, caring, so far as we can judge, little what the world thought about himself, and much what it thought, or some day would think, of his books. To give some account of the life and work of this man, without magnifying or diminishing either unduly, is the object aimed at in these pages. In order to do so at all fairly, within the compass of a small space, it will be necessary, so far as possible, to abstract from irrelevant detail, and to invite the attention of the reader to more marked and distinctive matters. To the practical politician and social reformer, Adam. Smith ought to be a hero, no less than he is to the economist. To both he appears in the light of one of the greatest vanquishers of error on record, the literary Napoleon of his generation. No man in modern times has said more with so much effect within the compass of one book. Yet it is not probable that any competent person could now be found to repeat without hesitation the assertion, made more than once by Buckle in his "History of Civilization," that "The Wealth of Nations" is the most important book ever written. As we become removed by an ever-increasing distance from the prejudices and opinions which Adam Smith once for all shattered, their magnitude and importance appear to grow smaller. It is safe to affirm that even the battle between Free Trade and Protection will never again be fought upon the ground from which Smith drove his opponents. Here, as in almost every other particular, issues, however they may resemble the old disputes in name. Adam Smith was a breaker down of prejudices. What the prejudices were which the Time-spirit equipped him to encounter, it will be the chief business of this volume to state in a plain fashion. Like every great thinker he came upon a scene which was prepared for him. Like every great thinker he is apt to lose something of the admiration he merits, because of the extent to which his conceptions have entered into and become part of our intellectual lives. He The economist possesses a certain advantage over the metaphysician and the man of letters. His department of knowledge is not old enough to have had periods of want of progress, and even of backward movement. has not to torment himself by observing how much less the Greeks were embarrassed by conceptions, such as that of the distinction of subject and object, which to-day hinder us by thrusting themselves with irresistible force upon philosopher and man of letters alike. His is an unbroken history of advances in the direction of intellectual freedom. It is with the name of Adam Smith that the most important of these advances are associated. His work was something more than the overthrow of the agricultural and mercantile systems, and the extirpation of certain subtle prejudices derived from the doctrines of these systems by persons who did not in terms profess them. He threw the lessons of modern political economy into a systematic form, and thereby left them advanced a stage in their development. It is as an economist that Smith will be remembered. |