Adam Smith

“ In this letter Smith makes no complaint of his condition of health, but he seems to have got worse again in the course of the winter, for we find Gibbon writing Cadell, [Pg 415] the bookseller, with some apparent anxiety on the 11th of February 1789: "If you can send me a good account of Adam Smith, there is no man more sincerely interested in his welfare than myself." If, however, he were ill then, he recovered in the summer, and was in excellent spirits in July, when Samuel Rogers saw him often during a week he spent in Edinburgh. ”

“ One recalls the saying of Sir James Mackintosh, who was a student of Cullen and Black's in Smith's closing years, and used occasionally to meet the economist in private society. "I have known," said Mackintosh to Empson many years after this—"I have known Adam Smith slightly, Ricardo well, and Malthus intimately. Is it not something to say for a science that its three greatest masters were about the three best men I ever knew?" ”

“ Reason reigned; and as reason seldom wears an air of originality, we need not wonder if later ingenuity has discovered that all these philosophers borrowed their doctrines either from the ancients or from one another or from foreigners.
But though there appears to be just now a tendency to carry the search for the genealogy and pedigree of ideas rather too far, it is certainly not our purpose to show that Adam Smith was a solitary conqueror who founded a kingdom entirely for himself, and peopled it with the creatures of his imagination. ”

“ Without claiming for Smith's teaching what must in any case have been largely the result of a fine natural character, it is certain that no young man could live for three years in daily intimacy with Adam Smith without being powerfully influenced by that deep love of justice and humanity which animated Smith beyond his fellows, and ran as warmly through his conversation in private life as we see it still runs through his published writings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Cousin has laid great stress on Adam Smith's taste and talent for history. “Whatever the subject he treats, he turns his eyes backward over the road traversed before himself, and he illuminates every object on his path by the aid of the torch which reflection has placed in his hand. Thus, in Political Economy, his principles not only prepare the future but renew the past, and discover the reason, heretofore unknown, of ancient facts which history had gathered together without understanding them. ”

“ No poison is more subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone of public policy. Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort. Where each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was bound, in his view, to be splendid. A population each element of which was active and alert to its economic problems could not escape the achievement of greatness. ”

“ Let due honour, therefore, be paid to our countryman Adam Smith, the founder, on this side of the Channel at least, of the science of political economy—honour to him who turned a most keen intellect, sharpened by those metaphysical studies for which his fragmentary Essays, as well as and still more than his Theory of Moral Sentiments, prove him to have been eminently qualified—turned it from these captivating subtleties to inquiries into the causes, actually in operation, of the prosperity of a commercial people. ”

“ His reasoning is not always sound; but the base of his fabric is unassailable, and the illustration which constitutes its ornament, is amongst the happiest ever employed to give life and light to a solid structure. Adam Smith is the great practical philosopher of an age and a people, craving for his philosophy more than for any other, yet wanting, most of all, the philosophy which shows the soul of a man as the most precious of all his estates, and teaches him the husbandry of it. ”

“ Adam Smith, the greatest of political economists, was born in 1723 at Kirkcaldy in Fifeshire, Scotland. He was sent in 1737 to the University of Glasgow, and three years later to Balliol College, Oxford, where he remained seven years. ”

“ Adam Smith was born at Kirkcaldy, in the county of Fife, Scotland, on the 5th of June 1723. He was the son of Adam Smith, Writer to the Signet, Judge Advocate for Scotland and Comptroller of the Customs in the Kirkcaldy district, by Margaret, daughter of John Douglas of Strathendry, a considerable landed proprietor in the same county. ”

“ The world has no reason to regret this want of gaiety, for the book which Smith had begun in order to “pass away the time” was no other than the Wealth of Nations. At Bordeaux, Adam Smith, his pupil and the Abbé met Colonel Barré who wrote from that town to Hume on September the 4th:—
“I thank you for your last letter from Paris, which I received just as Smith and his élève and l’Abbé Colbert were sitting down to dine with me at Bordeaux. ”

“ When Saint-Fond, who visited Edinburgh in 1784, called on Adam Smith, he was shown a fine bust of Voltaire; and Smith discoursed upon the incalculable obligations that Reason owed to the Philosopher 128 of Ferney. “The ridicule and sarcasms which he lavished upon fanatics and hypocrites of all sects have enabled the understandings of men to bear the light of truth,” and prepared them for research. “He has done much more for the benefit of mankind than those grave philosophers whose books are read by a few only. The writings of Voltaire are made for all and read by all.” ”

“ Some of the work of old Adam Smith had gone as far as Jerusalem. Dickon felt occasionally that if he were a spear-head or a dagger, he would stand more chance of seeing the world than he did as the son of his father.
Adam was secretly proud of the lad who at thirteen could do nearly as much as he himself could. That was saying more than a little, for Adam Smith had the knack of making every blow count by putting it in exactly the right place. A man who can do that will double his strength. ”

“ An Adam Smith, while studying the great laws which regulate the accumulation, distribution, and consumption of wealth, can so far forget himself and the world, as to mimic with his cane, a soldier, who presents arms to him through respect, and march after him when he moves off; he can be present when toasts are drunk, and know nothing of what is passing.14 Minds of this order are almost sure to neglect associations of a lighter character. They fail to acquire that species of information which is most pleasing in conversation. ”

“ I have found one just man in Gomorrah, Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations. He was the Duke of Buccleugh's tutor, is a wise and deep philosopher, and although made Commissioner of the Customs here by the Duke and Lord Advocate, is what I call an honest fellow. ”

“ The question of self-government is closely associated with the question of self-support. Plenty of good land and the liberty to manage their own affairs were the causes assigned by Adam Smith for the marked prosperity of the British colonies towards the end of the 18th century. The same causes are still observed to produce the same effects, and it may be pointed out that, since the date of the latest of Adam Smith’s writings, upwards of 6,000,000 sq. m. of virgin soil, rich with possibilities of agricultural, pastoral and mineral wealth, have been added to the empire. ”

“ By French principles the public understood, it is true, much more than the abolition of all commercial and agrarian privilege which was advocated by Smith, but in their recoil they made no fine distinctions, and they naturally felt their prejudices strongly confirmed when they found men like the Marquis of Lansdowne, who were believers in the so-called French principles and believers at the same time in the principles of Adam Smith, declaring that the two things were substantially the same. ”

“ When Adam Smith wrote things were very different from what they are now. He stood in no fear of consequences, and therefore followed out the natural results of his own thought. Nowadays, every non-socialist economist has the dread of Socialism before his eyes, and, consequently, feels bound to caution in the statement of conclusions. For instance, the doctrine that labor is the basis of value seems to the ordinary economist to remove any theoretic justification in the nature of things for the independent function of the capitalist. ”

“ This, sir, is a sweeping clause of proscription. With the names of Say, Smith, and Ganilh, I profess to be acquainted, for I, too, am versed in title-pages; but I did not expect to hear, in this house, a name, with which I am a little further acquainted, treated with so little ceremony; and by whom? I leave Adam Smith to the simplicity, the majesty, and strength of his own native genius, which has canonized his name—a name which will be pronounced with veneration, when 3016not one in this house will be remembered. ”

“ Quesnai and his disciples never dreamed that people could govern themselves; they conjured up an ideal monarch who would let his people live in a state of natural liberty. Adam Smith had faith in men as well as in philosophy, and therefore his politics were not for his own age only but for the time to come. A Whig in practice and a Republican in theory, he was not likely to sympathise with the idea that natural liberty is to be enjoyed under a despot. ”

“ Swediaur, the Paris physician, who spent some time in Edinburgh in 1784 making researches along with Cullen, and was made a member of this club during his stay, writes Jeremy Bentham: "We have a club here which consists of nothing but philosophers. Dr. Adam Smith, Cullen, Black, Mr. M'Gowan, etc., belong to it, and I am also a member of it. Thus I spend once a week in a most enlightened and agreeable, cheerful and social company." And of Smith, with whom he says he is intimately acquainted, he tells Bentham he "is quite our man"—in opinion and tendencies, I presume. ”

“ Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is Smith's conception of nature. Nor can there be much doubt of what he thought its inner substance. Facile distinctions such as the effort of Buckle to show that while in the Moral Sentiments Adam Smith was dealing with the unselfish side of man's nature, in the Wealth of Nations he was dealing with a group of facts which required the abstraction of such altruistic elements, are really beside the point. Nature for Smith is simply the spontaneous action of human character unchecked by hindrances of State. ”

“ And as all of us are sympathetic as well as selfish; in other words, as all of us look without as well as within, and as this classification is a primary and exhaustive division of our motives to action, it is evident, that if Adam Smith had completely accomplished his vast design, he would at once have raised the study of human nature to a science, leaving nothing for subsequent inquirers except to ascertain the minor springs of affairs, all of which would find their place in this general scheme, and be deemed subordinate to it. ”

“ The tutor with his two pupils, for the Duke had been joined at Bordeaux by a younger brother, left Geneva for Paris early in December 1765, promising, however, to return to republican soil before they left the continent. Hume, now a rich man with a pension of £900 a year, was just leaving the Embassy, and relinquishing his sovereignty of philosophy and society; but the two friends had a few days together before he crossed the Channel with poor, wayward, irresolute Rousseau, hunted or haunted by the furies. Adam Smith was soon in a whirlpool of gaiety and philosophy. ”

“ 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 222 were uppermost, and when Shelburne first, and then Pitt, set themselves to translate the Wealth of Nations into laws and treaties. ”

“ Adam Smith is where he seems to consider every increase of the revenue or stock of a society, as an increase of the funds for the maintenance of labour, and consequently, as tending always to ameliorate the condition of the poor. ”

“ I should therefore be sorry to see any beginning given to the publication of his letters. His life will not make a volume, but it will make a small pamphlet. I shall certainly be in London by the tenth of January at furthest. I have a little business at Edinburgh which may detain me a few days about Christmas, otherwise I should be with you by the new year. I have a great deal more to say to you; but the post is just going. I shall write to Mr. Cadell by next post.—I ever am, dear sir, most affectionately yours,
Adam Smith. ”

“ It is this power of teaching other men how to think that has given to the works of Adam Smith an immortality of influence. In his first university chair, the chair of Logic, he had given scant time to the investigation of the formal laws of reasoning, and had insisted, by preference, upon the practical uses of discourse, as the living application of logic, treating of style and of the arts of persuasion and exposition; and here in his other chair, of Moral Philosophy, he was practically illustrating the vivifying power of the art he had formerly sought to expound to his pupils. ”