BURKE AND ADAM SMITH ON THE FISCAL QUESTION.
[TO TEE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] have come by chance across a passage in Lecky's " England in the Eighteenth Century " which bears on the question of the day, and to which I beg to call your notice. It is a quotation from Burke's. "Thoughts on. Scarcity." "My opinion," says Burke, "is against an overdoing of any sort of administration, and more especially against this most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority, the meddling with the subsistence of the people." The next few paragraphs in Lecky on Adam Smith's views of the extent to which Protection is justifiable are interesting. Adam Smith, if he were alive, would probably agree with Mr. Chamberlain on his fiscal policy so far as Europe, and perhaps America,
were concerned, though with Burke against it on the point of preference to the Colonials, at any rate in the matter of food, and they are both, I suppose, still authorities on such ques-
Previous page
