THE COLLEGE ADMINISTRATOR
A common misconception regarding Smith is that he was as helpless as a
child in matters of business. One of his Edinburgh neighbours remarked
of him to Robert Chambers that it was strange a man who wrote so well
on exchange and barter was obliged to get a friend to buy his horse
corn for him. This idea of his helplessness in the petty transactions
of life arose from observing his occasional fits of absence and his
habitual simplicity of character, but his simplicity, nobody denies,
was accompanied by exceptional acuteness and practical sagacity, and
his fits of absence seem to have been neither so frequent nor so
prolonged as they are commonly represented. Samuel Rogers spent most
of a week with him in Edinburgh the year before his death, and did not
remark his absence of mind all the time. Anyhow, during his thirteen
years' residence at Glasgow College, Smith seems to have had more to
do with the business of the College, petty or important, than any
other professor, and his brethren in the Senate of that University
cannot have seen in him any marked failing or incapacity for ordinary
business. They threw on his shoulders an ample share of the committee
and general routine work of the place, and set him to audit accounts,
or inspect the drains in the College court, or see the holly hedge in
the College garden uprooted, or to examine the encroachments on the
College lands on the Molendinar Burn, without any fear of his
forgetting his business on the way. They entrusted him for years with
the post of College Quæstor or Treasurer, in which inattention or the
want of sound business habits might inflict injury even on their
pecuniary interests. They made him one of the two curators of the
College chambers, the forty lodgings provided for students inside the
College gates. And when there was any matter of business that was a
little troublesome or delicate to negotiate, they seem generally to
have chosen Smith for their chief spokesman or representative. It was
then very common for Scotch students to bring with them from home at
the beginning of the session as much oatmeal as would keep them till
the end of it, and by an ancient privilege of the University they were
entitled to bring this meal with them into the city without requiring
to pay custom on it; but in 1757 those students were obliged by the
tacksman of the meal-market to pay custom on their meal, though it was
meant for their own use alone. Smith was appointed along with
Professor Muirhead to go and represent to the Provost that the
exaction was a violation of the privileges of the University, and to
demand repayment within eight days, under pain of legal proceedings.
And at the next meeting of Senate "Mr. Smith reported that he had
spoken to the Provost of Glasgow about the ladles exacted by the town
from students for meal brought into the town for their own use, and
that the Provost promised to cause what had been exacted to be
returned, and that accordingly the money was offered by the town's
ladler[55] to the students."
Smith was often entrusted with College business to transact in
Edinburgh--to arrange with Andrew Stuart, W.S., about promoting a bill
in Parliament, or to wait on the Barons of Exchequer and get the
College accounts passed; and he was generally the medium of
communication between the Senatus and the authorities of Balliol
College during their long and troublesome contentions about the Snell
property and the Snell exhibitioners.
He was Quæstor from 1758 till he left in 1764, and in that capacity
had the management of the library funds and some other funds, his
duties being subsequently divided between the factor and the
librarian. The professors, we are told by Professor Dickson, used to
take this office in turn for a term of two or three years, but Smith
held the office longer than the customary term, and on the 19th of May
1763 the Senate agreed that "as Dr. Smith has long executed the office
of Quæstor, he is allowed to take the assistance of an amanuensis." He
was Dean of Faculty from 1760 to 1762, and as such not only exercised
a general supervision over the studies of the College and the granting
of degrees, but was one of the three visitors charged with seeing that
the whole business of the College was administered according to the
statutes of 1727. While still filling these two offices, he was in
1762 appointed to the additional and important business office of
Vice-Rector, by his personal friend Sir Thomas Miller, the
Lord-Advocate of Scotland (afterwards Lord President of the Court of
Session), who was Rector of the University that year. As Sir Thomas
Miller was generally absent in consequence of his public engagements
in London or his professional engagements in Edinburgh, Smith as
Vice-Rector had to preside over all University meetings--meetings of
the Senatus, of the Comitia, of the Rector's Court--at a time when
this duty was rendered delicate by the contentions which prevailed
among the professors. The Rector's Court, it may be added--which
consisted of the Rector and professors--was a judiciary as well as
administrative body, which at one time possessed the power of life and
death, and according to the Parliamentary Report of 1829, actually
inflicted imprisonment in the College steeple on several delinquents
within the preceding fifty years. It may be mentioned that some time
elapsed after Sir Thomas Miller's election to the Rectorship before
he was able to appoint a Vice-Rector, because he could not appoint a
Vice-Rector till he was himself admitted, and he could not attend
personally to be admitted on account of engagements elsewhere. During
this interval Smith was elected præses of the University meetings by
the choice of his colleagues, and as the position was at the time one
of considerable difficulty, they would not be likely to select for it
a man of decided business incapacity.
Some idea of the difficulty of the place, on account of the
dissensions prevailing in the College during Smith's residence there,
may be got from a remark of his successor, Dr. Reid. In the course of
the first year after his arrival in Glasgow, Reid writes one of his
Aberdeen friends complaining bitterly of being obliged to attend five
or six College meetings every week, and meetings, moreover, of a very
disagreeable character, in consequence of "an evil spirit of party
that seems to put us in a ferment, and, I am afraid, will produce bad
consequences."[56] A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, in noticing
Smith's death in 1790, says that these divisions turned on questions
of academic policy, and that Smith always took the side which was
popular with people of condition in the city. The writer offers no
further particulars, but as far as we can now ascertain anything about
the questions which then kept the Glasgow Senate in such perpetual
perturbation, they were not questions of general policy or public
interest such as his words might suggest, and on the petty issues they
raised it makes no odds to know whether Smith sided with the kites or
with the crows. The troubles were generated, without any public
differences, out of the constitution of the University itself, which
seemed to be framed, as if on purpose, to create the greatest possible
amount of friction in its working. By its constitution; as that is
described in the Parliamentary Report of 1830, Glasgow University was
at that time under one name really two distinct corporations, with
two distinct governing bodies: (1) the University governed by the
Senate, which was composed of the Rector, the Dean of Faculty, the
Principal, the thirteen College or Faculty professors, and the five
regius professors; and (2) the College governed by the Faculty, as it
was called, which consisted of the thirteen College professors alone,
who claimed to be the sole owners and administrators of the older
endowments of the College, and to have the right of electing the
occupants of their own thirteen chairs by co-optation. Within the
Faculty again there was still another division of the professors into
gown professors and other professors. The gown professors, who seem to
have been the representatives of the five regents of earlier times,
were the professors of those classes the students of which wore
academical gowns, while the students of the other classes did not; the
gown classes being Humanity, Greek, Logic, Natural Philosophy, and
Moral Philosophy. These several bodies held separate meetings and kept
separate minutes, which remain to this day. The meetings of the Senate
were called University meetings or Rector's meetings, because they
were presided over by the Rector; and the meetings of the Faculty were
called Faculty meetings or Principal's meetings, because they were
presided over by the Principal. Even the five gown professors with the
Principal held separate meetings which the other professors had no
right to attend--meetings with the students every Saturday in the
Common Hall for the administration of ordinary academic discipline for
petty offences committed by the students of the five gown classes.
Smith belonged to all three bodies; he was University professor,
Faculty or College professor, and gown professor too. It is obvious
how easily this complicated and unnatural system of government might
breed incessant and irritating discussions without any grave division
of opinion on matters of serious educational policy. Practical
difficulties could scarce help arising as to the respective functions
of the University and the College, or the respective claims of the
regius professors and the Faculty professors, or the respective powers
of the Rector and the Principal; and Smith himself was one of a small
committee which presented a very lengthy report on this last subject
to the Senate of the University on the 13th of August 1762. The report
was adopted, but two of the professors dissented on the ground that it
was too favourable to the powers of the Principal.
But, wrangle as they might over petty points of constitutional right
or property administration, the heads of Glasgow College were guided
in their general policy at this period by the wisest and most
enlightened spirit of academic enlargement. Only a few years before
Smith's arrival they had recognised the new claims of science by
establishing a chemical laboratory, in which during Smith's residence
the celebrated Dr. Black was working out his discovery of latent heat.
They gave a workshop in the College to James Watt in 1756, and made
him mathematical instrument maker to the University, when the trade
corporations of Glasgow refused to allow him to open a workshop in the
city; and it was in that very workshop and at this very period that a
Newcomen's engine he repaired set his thoughts revolving till the
memorable morning in 1764 when the idea of the separate condenser
leapt to his mind as he was strolling past the washhouse on Glasgow
Green. They had at the same time in another corner of the College
opened a printing office for the better advancement of that art, and
were encouraging the University printer, the famous Robert Foulis, to
print those Homers and Horaces by which he more than rivalled the
Elzevirs and Etiennes of the past. To help Foulis the better, they had
with their own money assisted the establishment of the type-foundry of
Wilson at Camlachie, where Foulis procured the types for his _Iliad_;
they appointed Wilson type-founder to the University, and in 1762 they
erected for him a founding-house, as they called it, in their own
grounds. They had just before endowed a new chair of astronomy, of
which they had made their versatile type-founder the first professor,
and built for him an astronomical observatory, from which he brought
reputation to the College and himself by his observation of the solar
spots. They further gave Foulis in 1753 several more rooms in the
College, including the large room afterwards used as the Faculty Hall,
to carry out his ill-fated scheme of an Academy of Design; so that the
arts of painting, sculpture, and engraving were taught in the College
as well as the classics and mathematics, and Tassie and David Allan
were then receiving their training under the same roof with the
students for the so-called learned professions. The Earl of Buchan,
while walking, as he said, "after the manner of the ancients in the
porticoes of Glasgow with Smith and with Millar," unbent from the high
tasks of philosophy by learning to etch in the studio of Foulis. This
was the first school of design in Great Britain. There was as yet no
Royal Academy, no National Gallery, no South Kensington Museum, no
technical colleges, and the dream of the ardent printer, which was so
actively seconded by the heads of the University, was to found an
institution which should combine the functions of all those several
institutions, and pay its own way by honest work into the bargain. In
all these different ways the College of Glasgow was doing its best, as
far as its slender means allowed, to widen the scope of university
education in accordance with the requirements of modern times, and
there was still another direction in which they anticipated a movement
of our own day. They had already done something for that
popularisation of academic instruction which we call university
extension. Professor John Anderson, an active and reforming spirit who
deserves to be held in honour in spite of his troublesome pugnacity,
used then to deliver within the College walls, with the complete
concurrence and encouragement of his colleagues, a series of evening
lectures on natural philosophy to classes of working-men in their
working clothes, and the lectures are generally acknowledged to have
done great service to the arts and manufactures of the West of
Scotland, by improving the technical education of the higher grades of
artisans.
Now in all these new developments Smith took a warm interest; some of
them he actively promoted. There is nothing in the University minutes
to connect Smith in any more special way than the other professors
with the University's timely hospitality to James Watt; but as that
act was a direct protest on behalf of industrial liberty against the
tyrannical spirit of the trade guilds so strongly condemned in the
_Wealth of Nations_, it is at least interesting to remember that Smith
had a part in it. Watt, it may be recollected, was then a lad of
twenty, who had come back from London to Glasgow to set up as
mathematical instrument maker, but though there was no other
mathematical instrument maker in the city, the corporation of
hammermen refused to permit his settlement because he was not the son
or son-in-law of a burgess, and had not served his apprenticeship to
the craft within the burgh. But in those days of privilege the
universities also had their privileges. The professors of Glasgow
enjoyed an absolute and independent authority over the area within
college bounds, and they defeated the oppression of Watt by making him
mathematical instrument maker to the University, and giving him a room
in the College buildings for his workshop and another at the College
gates for the sale of his instruments. In these proceedings Smith
joined, and joined, we may be sure, with the warmest approval. For we
know the strong light in which he regarded the oppressions of the
corporation laws. "The property which every man has in his labour," he
says, "as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it
is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of the poor man lies
in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and to hinder him from
employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper
without injury to his neighbour is a plain violation of this most
sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty
both of the workman and of those who might be disposed to employ
him."[57] Watt's workshop was a favourite resort of Smith's during his
residence at Glasgow College, for Watt's conversation, young though he
was, was fresh and original, and had great attractions for the
stronger spirits about him. Watt on his side retained always the
deepest respect for Smith, and when he was amusing the leisure of his
old age in 1809 with his new invention of the sculpture machine, and
presenting his works to his friends as "the productions of a young
artist just entering his eighty-third year," one of the first works he
executed with the machine was a small head of Adam Smith in ivory.[58]
In the Foulis press and the Academy of Design Smith took a particular
interest. He was himself a book-fancier, fond of fine editions and
bindings, and he once said to Smellie the printer, whom he observed
admiring some of the books in his library, "I am a beau in nothing but
my books." And he was a man, as Dugald Stewart informs us, with a
carefully-cultivated taste for the fine arts, who was considered by
his contemporaries an excellent judge of a picture or a sculpture,
though in Stewart's opinion he appeared interested in works of art
less as instruments of direct enjoyment than as materials for
speculative discussions about the principles of human nature involved
in their production. Smith seems to have been one of Foulis's chief
practical advisers in the work of the Academy of Design, in settling
such details, for example, as the pictures which ought to be selected
to be copied by the pupils, or the subjects which ought to be chosen
for original work from Plutarch or other classical sources, and which
would be most likely to suit modern taste.
Sir John Dalrymple, who appears to have been one of Foulis's
associates in the enterprise, and to have taken an active concern in
the sale of the productions of the Academy in its Edinburgh agency
shop, writes Foulis on the 1st of December 1757 regarding the kind of
work that ought to be sent for sale there. "In the History pictures
that you send in, I beg you will take the advice of Mr. Smith and Dr.
Black. Your present scheme should be to execute not what you think the
best, but what will sell the best. In the first you may be the better
judge, since you are the master of a great Academa, but in the last I
think their advice will be of use to you."[59] The letter concludes:
"Whether it is an idea or not, I am going to give you a piece of
trouble. Be so good as make out a catalogue of your pictures, and as
far as you can of your busts, books of drawings, and prints. Secondly,
your boys, and how employed. Thirdly, the people who have studied
under you with a view to the mechanical art. And lastly, give some
account of the prospects which you think you have of being of use
either to the mechanical or to the fine arts of your country. Frame
this into a memorial and send it to me. I shall have it tryed here by
some who wish well to you, and as I go to London in the spring, I
shall, together with Mr. Wedderburn and Mr. Elliot, consider what are
the most prudent measures to take for your sake, or whether to take
any. Mr. Smith is too busy or too indolent, but I flatter myself Dr.
Black will be happy to make out this memorial for you. Let me know if
I have any chance of seeing you this winter. I have none of being at
Glasgow, and therefore wish you and Mr. Smith would come here, or you
by yourself would come here in the Christmas vacance."
The memorial alluded to in this letter was no doubt a memorial to
Government in behalf of a project then promoted by the Earl of
Selkirk and other friends of Foulis, of settling a salary on him for
directing an institution so useful to the nation as the Academy of
Design. Whether Smith overcame his alleged indolence and drew up the
memorial I cannot say, but this whole letter shows that Smith and
Black were the two friends in Glasgow whom Foulis was in the habit of
principally consulting, and the last sentence seems to indicate that
Smith's hand in the business was hardly less intimate than Dalrymple's
own. It may be noticed too how completely Sir John Dalrymple's ideas
of Smith, as implied in this letter, differ from those which are
current now, and how he sends a tradesman to the philosopher for
advice on practical points in his trade. As to pure questions of art,
whether this work or that is finest, he thinks Foulis himself may
possibly be the best judge, but when it comes to a question as to
which will sell the best--and that was the question for the success of
the project--then he is urged to take the practical mind of Smith to
his counsels. Though Smith's leanings were not to practical life, his
judgment, as any page of the _Wealth of Nations_ shows, was of the
most eminently practical kind. He had little of the impulse to meddle
in affairs or the itch to manage them that belongs to more bustling
people, but had unquestionably a practical mind and capacity.
If Smith was consulted by Foulis in this way about the management of
the Academy of Design, we may safely infer that he had also more to do
with the Foulis press than merely visiting the office to see the
famous _Iliad_ while it was on the case. Smith's connection with
Foulis began before he went to Glasgow, by the publication of Hamilton
of Bangour's poems by the University press, and I think it not
unreasonable to see traces of Smith's suggestion in the number of
early economic books which Foulis reissued after the year 1750, works
of writers like Child, Gee, Mun, Law, and Petty.
In the University type-foundry Smith took an active interest, because
he was a warm friend and associate of the accomplished type-founder.
Wilson had been bred a physician, but gave up his practice to become
type-founder, and devoted himself besides, as I have just mentioned,
to astronomy, to which Smith also at this period of his life gave some
attention. Smith indeed was possibly then writing his fragment on the
history of astronomy, which, though not published till after his
death, was, we are informed by Dugald Stewart, the earliest of all his
compositions, being the first part of an extensive work on the history
of all the sciences which he had at this time projected. Wilson,
having gone to large expense both of time and money to cast the Greek
type for the University Homer, and having never found another customer
for the fount except the University printer, went up to London in 1759
to push around, if possible, for orders, and was furnished by Smith
with a letter of recommendation to Hume, who was then residing there.
Hume writes to Smith on the 29th of July: "Your friend Mr. Wilson
called on me two or three days ago when I was abroad, and he left your
letter. I did not see him till to-day. He seems a very modest,
sensible, ingenious man. Before I saw him I spoke to Mr. A. Millar
about him, and found him much disposed to serve him. I proposed
particularly to Mr. Millar that it was worthy of so eminent a
bookseller as he to make a complete elegant set of the classics, which
might set up his name equal to the Alduses, Stevenses, or Elzevirs,
and that Mr. Wilson was the properest person in the world to assist
him in such a project. He confessed to me that he had sometimes
thought of it, but that his great difficulty was to find a man of
letters that could correct the press. I mentioned the matter to
Wilson, who said he had a man of letters in his eye one Lyon, a
nonjuring clergyman of Glasgow. I would desire your opinion of
him."[60]
When Wilson came to reside in the College in 1762, after his
appointment to the chair of Astronomy, he found it inconvenient to go
to and fro between the College and Camlachie to attend to the
type-foundry, and petitioned the Senate to build him a founding-house
in the College grounds, basing his claim on their custom of giving
accommodation to the arts subservient to learning, on his own services
to the University in the matter of the Greek types before mentioned,
and on his having undertaken, in spite of the discouraging results of
that speculation, to cast a large and elegant Hebrew type for the
University press. He estimated that the building would cost no more
than the very modest sum of £40 sterling, and he offered to pay a fair
rent. This memorial came up for consideration on the 5th of April, and
it was Smith who proposed the motion which was ultimately carried, to
the effect that the University should build a new foundry for Mr.
Wilson on the site most convenient within the College grounds, at an
expense not exceeding the sum of £40 sterling, on condition (1) that
Mr. Wilson pay a reasonable rent, and (2) that if the house should
become useless to the College before the Senate were sufficiently
recouped for their expenditure, Mr. Wilson or his heirs should be
obliged to make adequate compensation. The foundry was erected in the
little College garden next the Physic Garden; it cost £19 more than
the estimate, and was let for £3:15s. a year, from which it would
appear that 6-1/2 per cent on the actual expenditure (irrespective of
any allowance for the site) was considered a fair rent by the
University authorities in those days.
The Senate of this little college, which was thus actively encouraging
every liberal art, which had in a few years added to the lecture-room
of Hutcheson and Smith the laboratory of Black, the workshop of Watt,
the press of Foulis, the academy of painting, sculpture, and
engraving, and the foundry and observatory of Wilson, entertained in
1761 the idea of doing something for the promotion of athletics among
the students, and had under consideration a proposal for the
establishment of a new academy of dancing, fencing, and riding in the
University. One of the active promoters of this scheme appears again
to have been Adam Smith, for it is he who is chosen by the Senate on
the 22nd December 1761 to go in their name and explain their design to
the Rector, Lord Erroll, and request his assistance. This idea seems,
however, to have borne no fruit. Dancing was an exercise they required
to be observed with considerable moderation, for they passed a rule in
1752 that no student should be present at balls or assemblies or the
like more than thrice in one session, but they treated it with no
austere proscription.
One art alone did they seek to proscribe, the art dramatic, and in
1762 the Senate was profoundly disturbed by a project then on foot for
the erection of the first permanent theatre in Glasgow. The affair
originated with five respectable and wealthy merchants, who were
prepared to build the house at their own expense, the leading spirit
of the five being Robert Bogle of Shettleston, who had himself, we are
told by Dr. Carlyle, played "Sempronius" in a students' performance of
_Cato_ within the walls of Glasgow College in 1745. Carlyle played the
title _rôle_, and another divinity student, already mentioned as a
college friend of Smith's, Dr. Maclaine of the Hague, played a minor
part. But an amateur representation of an unexceptionable play under
the eye of the professors was one thing, the erection of a public
playhouse, catering like other public playhouses for the too
licentious taste of the period, was another, and the project of Mr.
Bogle and his friends in 1762 excited equal alarm in the populace of
the city, in the Town Council, and in the University. The Council
refused to sanction a site for the theatre within the city bounds, so
that the promoters were obliged to build it a mile outside; but the
anger of the multitude pursued them thither, and on the very eve of
its opening in 1764 by a performance in which Mrs. Bellamy was to play
the leading part, it was set on fire by a mob, at the instigation of a
wild preacher, who said he had on the previous night been present in a
vision at an entertainment in hell, and the toast of the evening,
proposed in most flattering terms from the chair, was the health of
Mr. Millar, the maltster who had sold the site for this new temple of
the devil.
During the two years between the projection of this building and its
destruction it caused the Senate of the College no common anxiety, and
Smith went along with them in all they did. On the 25th of November
1762 he was appointed, with the Principal and two other professors, as
a committee, to confer with the magistrates concerning the most proper
methods of preventing the establishment of a playhouse in Glasgow, and
at the same time to procure all the information in their power
concerning the privileges of the University of Oxford with respect to
their ability to prevent anything of that kind being established
within their bounds, and concerning the manner in which those
privileges, if they existed, were made effectual. On the
recommendation of this committee the University agreed to memorialise
the Lord Advocate on the subject, and to ask the magistrates of the
city to join them in sending the memorial. The Lord Advocate having
apparently suggested doubts as to the extent of their ancient powers
or privileges in the direction contemplated, Smith was appointed,
along with the Principal and one or two other professors, as a special
committee of inquiry into the ancient privileges and constitution of
the University, and the Principal was instructed meanwhile to express
to his lordship the earnest desire of the University to prevent the
establishment of a playhouse. While this inquiry was proceeding, the
magistrates of the city, on their part, had determined, with the
concurrence of a large body of the inhabitants, to raise an action at
law against the players if they should attempt to act plays in the new
theatre, and at a meeting over which Smith presided, and in whose
action he concurred, the University agreed to join the magistrates in
this prosecution. The agitation against the playhouse was still
proceeding when Smith resigned his chair in 1764, but shortly
afterwards, finding itself without any legal support, it gradually
died away. The part Smith took in this agitation may seem to require a
word of explanation, for he not only entertained no objection to
theatrical representations, but was so deeply impressed with their
beneficial character that in the _Wealth of Nations_ he specially
recommends them for positive encouragement by the State, and expressly
dissociates himself from those "fanatical promoters of popular
frenzies" who make dramatic representations "more than all other
diversions the objects of their peculiar abhorrence." The State
encouragement he wants is nothing in the nature of the endowment of a
national theatre, which is sometimes demanded nowadays. All the
encouragement he asks for is liberty--"entire liberty to all those who
from their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency,
to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing, by
all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions." But in
pressing for this liberty, he expresses the strongest conviction that
"the frequency and gaiety of public diversions" is absolutely
essential for the good of the commonwealth, in order to "correct
whatever is unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of all the
little sects into which the country is divided," and to "dissipate
that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the source of
popular superstition and enthusiasm."[61] Yet here we seem to find him
in alliance with the little sects himself, and trying to crush that
liberty of dramatic representations which he declares to be so vital
to the health of the community.
The reason is not, moreover, that he had changed his opinions in the
interval between the attempts to suppress the Glasgow playhouse in
1762 and the publication of his general plea for playhouses in the
Wealth of Nations in 1776. He had not changed his opinions. He
travelled with a pupil to France, still warm from this agitation in
Glasgow, and, as we learn from Stewart, was a great frequenter and
admirer of the theatre in that country,[62] and a few years before the
agitation began he was as deeply interested as any other of John
Home's friends in the representations of the tragedy of Douglas, and
as much a partisan of Home's cause. He does not appear indeed, as is
sometimes stated, to have been present either at the public
performance of Home's tragedy in Edinburgh in 1756, or at the previous
private performance, which is alleged to have taken place at Mrs. Ward
the actress's rooms, and in which the author himself, and Hume,
Carlyle, Ferguson, and Blair are all said to have acted parts. But
that he was in complete sympathy with them on the subject is manifest
from an undated letter of Hume to Smith, which must have been written
in that year. In this letter, knowing Smith's sentiments, he writes:
"I can now give you the satisfaction of hearing that the play, though
not near so well acted in Covent Garden as in this place, is likely to
be very successful. Its great intrinsic merit breaks through all
obstacles. When it shall be printed (which shall be soon) I am
persuaded it will be esteemed the best, and by French critics the only
tragedy of our language." After finishing his letter he adds: "I have
just now received a copy of _Douglas_ from London. It will instantly
be put on the press. I hope to be able to send you a copy in the same
parcel with the dedication."[63] These sentences certainly imply that
Smith's ideas of theatrical representations were in harmony with those
of Hume and his other Edinburgh friends, but shortly afterwards he is
seeking to revive obsolete academic privileges to prevent the erection
of a theatre.
The explanation must be looked for in the line of the conditional
clause with which he limits his claim for entire liberty to dramatic
entertainments--they must be "without scandal or indecency." There is
never any question that if free trade and public morals clash, it is
free trade that must give way, and his opposition to the project of
the Glasgow playhouse must have originated in his persuasion that it
was not attended, as things then went, with sufficient practical
safeguards against scandal and indecency. In considering that point
due weight must be given not only to the general improprieties
permissible on the English stage at that time, but to the fact that
locally great offence had quite recently been given in Scotland by the
profane or immoral character of some of the pieces presented on the
Scottish boards,[64] and that Glasgow itself had had experience of a
disorderly theatre already--the old wooden shed where hardy playgoers
braved opinion and listened to indifferent performances under the
protection of troops, and where, it will be remembered, Boswell, then
a student at the College, made the acquaintance of Francis Gentleman,
the actor. That house was not a licensed house, but the new house was
not to be a licensed house either, and it is quite possible for one
who thought a theatre generally, with due safeguards, a public
benefit, to think that a particular theatre without those safeguards
might constitute a public danger, especially in a university town.
On two delicate questions of professorial duty Smith made a decided
stand in behalf of the stricter interpretation. In 1757 Professor John
Anderson, the founder of the Andersonian University, who was then
Professor of Oriental Languages in Glasgow, became a candidate for the
chair which he afterwards filled for so many years with great credit
and success--the chair of Natural Philosophy; and, as the appointment
lay with the professors, Professor Anderson was one of the electors,
and was quite within his legal right in voting for himself. But Smith,
impressed with the importance of keeping such appointments free from
any leaven of personal interest, tabled a formal protest on three
successive occasions against the intervention of that distinguished
but headstrong professor in the business of that particular election.
He protested first against Anderson voting on a preliminary resolution
respecting the election; he protested the second time against him
taking part in the election itself; and he protested a third time
after the election, desiring it to be recorded expressly "that he did
not vote in the election of Mr. Anderson as Professor of Natural
Philosophy, not from objection to Mr. Anderson, in whose election he
would willingly have concurred, but because he regarded the method of
proceeding as irregular and possibly establishing a bad precedent." As
patrons of University chairs, the professors were trustees for the
community, and ought each to be bound by a tacit self-denying
ordinance, at least to the extent of refraining from actively using
this public position to serve his private interest. Smith himself, it
will be remembered, was one of his own electors to the Moral
Philosophy chair, but then that election was uncontested, and Smith
was not present at the meeting which appointed him.
The other personal question arose also out of circumstances which have
their counterpart in Smith's own history. Professor William Rouet,
Professor of Ecclesiastical and Civil History, made an engagement in
1759 to travel abroad as tutor with Lord Hope, the eldest son of Lord
Hopetoun; but when Lord Hopetoun wrote requesting leave of absence for
Professor Rouet, the Senate by a majority refused to grant the
request. Smith was one of that majority, and took an active part in
the subsequent transactions arising out of their decision. Rouet
persists in going abroad in the teeth of the refusal, and the
University by a majority deprive him of office for his negligence of
duty. The Crown, however, at first refuse to appoint a successor, on
the ground of informality in the act of deprivation, and Lord Bute
tells the Rector, Lord Erroll, that "the king's orders" are that the
business must be done over again _de novo_, or "else it may be of the
worst consequences to the University." The University take the opinion
of eminent counsel, Ferguson of Pitfour and Burnet of Mountbodie
(Monboddo), and are prepared to face the consequences threatened, but
are eventually saved the trouble by the resignation of Rouet in 1761.
Now in these transactions Smith seems to bear a leading part. He was
one of the small committee appointed to draw up answers to the protest
tabled by the minority of the Senatus; it was to him Lord Erroll
communicated the intimation of Lord Bute, though he was not then
either Vice-Rector or Dean of Faculty; and it was he and Professor
Millar who were sent through to Edinburgh to consult the two
advocates.
Smith was probably on the best terms with Rouet himself, who was an
intimate friend of David Hume and a cousin of their common friend
Baron Mure, and it was not an uncommon practice for the Scotch
universities at that period to sanction the absence of a professor on
a tutorial engagement. Adam Ferguson left England as tutor to Lord
Chesterfield while he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh,
and Dalzel resided at Oxford as tutor to Lord Maitland after he was
Professor of Greek in the same University. The Senate of Glasgow had
itself already permitted Professor John Anderson to remain another
winter in France with a son of the Primate of Ireland, when he was
chosen Professor of Oriental Languages in 1756, and Smith had
concurred in giving the permission. But Anderson's absence was absence
to fulfil an already-existing engagement, like the absence granted to
Smith himself in the first year of his own appointment, while Rouet's
was absence to fulfil a new one; and Smith, as his own subsequent
conduct shows, held pluralities and absenteeism of that sort to be a
wrong and mischievous subordination of the interest of the University
to the purely private interest or convenience of the professors. They
had too many temptations to accommodate one another by such
arrangements at the expense of the efficiency of the College; and his
action both in Rouet's case and his own is entirely in the spirit of
his criticism of the English universities in the _Wealth of Nations_.
FOOTNOTES:
[55] The words ladles and ladler seem to have descended from a time
when the exactions were made in kind by ladling the quantity out of
the sack.
[56] Hamilton's _Reid_, p. 43.
[57] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I. chap. ix.
[58] Muirhead's _Life of Watt_, p. 470.
[59] Duncan's _Notes and Documents_, p. 25.
[60] Burton, _Life of Hume_, ii. 59.
[61] _Wealth of Nations_, Book V. chap. i. art. iii.
[62] Stewart's _Works_, x. 49.
[63] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 16.
[64] See Doran's _Annals of the Stage_, ii. 377.