ADAM SMITH'S LECTURES.*
IN publishing, at the Clarendon Press, Notes of Adam Smith's Lectures delivered at Glasgow University not later than the Academical Session of 1763-64, the University of Oxford has rendered an important service to the memory of one of the most distinguished of her sons. The Notes in question were preserved in MS., in a calf-bound volume, which has been, at any rate since early in the present century, in the possession of the eminent Scotch legal family of Maconochie. Mr. Charles C. Maconochie, of Edinburgh, who brought its existence to the notice of Mr. Edwin Cannan, under whose editorship it has been brought out by the Clarendon Press, has been unable to trace the Source from which the MS. volume came, as an inscription within it shows, in 1811, into the hands of his grand - uncle, Mr. James Alan Maconochie, and is inclined to suppose that it must have been bought at a sale or elsewhere. As is explained in Mr. Cannan's very interesting introduction, the MS. is clearly a fair copy, and not the original notes taken at the Lectures. This is shown "first by the fact that the date on the title-page is MDCCLXVI., whereas Adam Smith relinquished his professorial chair in January, 1764; secondly, by its clean and well-written character and the almost entire absence of abbreviations, coupled with the fact that the report is often obviously verbatim ; and thirdly, by the circumstance that some of the mistakes are evidently caused by mis-reading and not by mis-hearing." This mis- reading, moreover, as appears from several curious illus- trations, was that of an unintelligent and illiterate copyist rashly employed by the original note-taker, who himself, as is shown by the general scope of the report —made, be it remembered, at a time when shorthand was unknown—m net have followed the Lectures with much intelligence. Note-taker and copyist alike, it would seem, must remain for ever anonymous. Only one thing appears certain about them, and that is that if Adam Smith had known of the existence of their joint work he would have taken every possible step to destroy it. He was greatly exercised during the last few days of his life by anxiety lest the volumes of his Lectures in MS., which he had always kept in a certain bureau, should be preserved ; and, according to Dugald Stewart, he was so far from satisfied by the assur- ances of his friends of their faithful intention to observe his wishes in that regard, that he insisted upon having the volumes in question burnt before be had passed away. How much more earnestly would he have longed to be protected against the currency, after his death, of a necessarily summarised version of what he had said by an unknown student, transcribed by a clerk to whom the language of economics was as an unknown tongue !
And at the first blush it would seem as if the course required of any right-minded economists of our own day on coming into possession of any such unauthorised version of the discourses of the founder of their science would have been the performance upon it of an act of cremation attended with all fitting solemnities. Yet, beyond question, to have acted so would have been to have observed the letter and not the spirit of the dictates of a pions regard for the great man's memory. For, certainly, a perusal of the present volume, and a comparison of it, for which Mr. Cannan provides valuable aid by a table of parallel passages, with the Wealth of Nations, cannot fail to enhance the reader's admiration for Adam Smith as an independent and original thinker. The Lectures thus reported were delivered by Adam Smith before that long sojourn which he made in France, when acting as travelling tutor to the young Duke of Bnccleuch, which so greatly widened the range of his immediate observation of economic facts, and brought him into touch with the school of economic thinkers in France, of whom Targot was perhaps the most eminent. By some economic writers it has been alleged that Smith plagiarised
• Lecture, on Justice, Po'ice, Revenue, and Arms. Delivered in the Universi.y of Glasgow by Adam Smith, Reported by a Student in IV63, and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Edwin Osman. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
freely in the Wealth of Nations from Turgot's liVexions. That allegation, which, as Mr. Cannan shows, rested on extremely shadowy evidence even before the discovery of the notes of Smith's Lectures, is by their publication completely smashed. Indeed, "as it now appears that the resemblance between the Befiexions and the Lectures is just as close as that between the B,ejlexions and the Wealth of Nations, and as the .Reflexions were not even written till after Adam Smith had ceased lecturing, and had seen and conversed with Turgot, it may be supposed," as Mr. Cannan ironically re- marks, "that the enthusiasts of plagiarism will now seek to show that instead of Smith stealing from Turgot, the truth was that Turgot stole from Smith." The Lectures contain, in very considerable measure, a clear outline of those dis- tinctive principles for the lucid enforcement and illustration of which the Wealth of Nations is so justly celebrated,— principles by the permeation of which into English thought the fiscal policy of this country has been completely revo- lutionised. Thirteen years or more before the first appearance of the Wealth of Nations its author had exposed the fallacies of the "mercantile system" in convincing language to the youths attending his classes in Glasgow University. That system rested on the principle that public opulence consisted in money, and the injurious results of that delusive doctrine were dwelt upon by Adam Smith in his Lectures from various points of view. Thus he denounces as "most pernicious" the regulations in force for the purpose of checking or preventing those species of commerce which would draw off our money, while encouraging those which would increase it :—
" The absurdity of these regulations will appear." he contends, "on the least reflection. All commerce that is carried on betwixt any two countries must necessarily be advantageous to both. The very intention of commerce is to exchange your own commodities for others which you think will be more convenient for you. When two men trade between themselves it is undoubtedly for the advantage of both The case is exactly the same betwixt any two nations. The goods which the English merchants want to import from France are certainly more valuable to them than what they give for them."
And that Smith fearlessly accepted the full sweep of his doctrine, even at that early date, is shown by his urging a little farther on that it was precisely the relatively high commercial development which France had reached which made it specially desirable that trade between that country and our own should be encouraged, because, as the Notes of the Lectures put it, " the industry which a com- merce with that country would have excited at home would have been much greater" than in the case of the trade, which was encouraged by law, with more backward countries like Spain and Portugal. There we have the heart and essence of the whole Free-trade system of thought, set forth as affecting our relations to the great nation, our traditional foe, with which, when the lecturer was speaking, Great Britain had just concluded, or was still waging, her grand struggle for world-empire. A more signal illustration of philosophic detachment can hardly be imagined. Let it be admitted, indeed, that equal praise is due to Hume, and that his brilliant essays on the "Balance of Trade" and "Jealousy of Trade," which appeared a few years before the delivery of the Lectures of Smith's now published, contain an admirable destructive criticism of then dominant theories, on very much the same lines as those taken by Smith. The in- timate friendship between those eminent writers is a very interesting chapter in the history of letters, and it is hardly possible to judge which of them learned most from the other. But it is certain that Smith thought out quite independently the questions on which he agreed with his friend. This is evident from the decision with which, while calling his hearers' attention to and eulogising Hume's Essays, Smith enforced views quite different from, and much more modern than, those maintained by Hume on the subject of paper money.
Exceptionally favoured, indeed, were these classes of Univer- sity students, who found included, quaintly enough, in the sweep of a course of instruction on "Moral Philosophy" —section `. Jurisprudence" and sub-sections " Police " and "Revenue "—a large part of the framework of a new science, which, however " dismal " some of its professors may have made it, and however perversely its principles may have been strained by many who did not understand its limitations, has exercised a more beneficent influence than almost any other form of intellectual speculation, on the course of public policy. Space will not allow of our illus-
trating in detail the numerous and important anticipations of the Wealth of Nations contained in the Lectures, besides the striking exhibition, already partly quoted, of the follies of that international fiscal policy which consisted in preventing countries differently circumstanced from ministering to one another's advantage. It is enough to mention here that the Glasgow students listened to disquisitions, more or less closely corresponding to those which were subsequently embodied in their Moral Philosophy Professor's classic work, on the chief cause and consequences of division of labour, —a subject in connection with which, by the way, remarks are to be found in the Lectures, which would hardly allow the in- telligent workman to complain of Adam Smith as the founder of a capitalist's science ; on "natural" and " market " prices, leading up to the conclusion that "whatever police tends to raise the market price above the natural, tends to diminish public opulence," and to the consequent denunciation of taxes upon industries and of monopolies ; and on the hindrances placed by primogeniture and entails in the way of good husbandry. It may seem strange to us that, quickly as the teachings of Smith were diffused in other languages than his own, it is only his countrymen who have as yet at all steadily recognised the truths which he proclaimed, and that even now the other branch of the English-speaking race is surrendering itself more and more completely to the fallacies which he exposed. But his anticipations were always pessimistic in that regard, and the calm convictions of his philosophic mind would not be in the least disturbed by the long predominance of combinations of private and sectional interests over the claims of the general benefit of nations and of mankind.
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