"THE WEALTH OF NATIONS"
1776. _Aet._ 52
The _Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ was
at length published on the 9th of March 1776. Bishop Horne, one of
Smith's antagonists, of whom we shall presently hear more, said the
books which live longest are those which have been carried longest in
the womb of the parent. The _Wealth of Nations_ took twelve years to
write, and was in contemplation for probably twelve years before that.
It was explicitly and publicly promised in 1759, in the concluding
paragraph of the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, though it is only the
partial fulfilment of that promise.
The promise is: "I shall in another discourse endeavour to give an
account of the general principles of law and government, and of the
different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and
periods of society, not only in what concerns justice, but in what
concerns policy revenue and arms, and whatever else is the object of
law." In speaking of this promise in the preface of the sixth edition
of the _Theory_ in 1790, Smith says, "In the _Inquiry concerning the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ I have partially executed
this promise, at least so far as concerns policy revenue and arms."
Now doubtless when Smith began writing his book in Toulouse he began
it on the large plan originally in contemplation, and some part of the
long delay that took place in its composition is probably to be
explained by the fact that he would have possibly been a considerable
time at work before he determined to break his book in two, and push
on meanwhile with the section on policy revenue and arms, leaving to a
separate publication in the future his discussion of the theory of
jurisprudence.
The work was published in two vols. 4to, at the price of £1:16s. in
boards, and the author uses this time all his honours on the
title-page, describing himself as Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S.,
formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.
What was the extent of this edition, or the terms, as between author
and publisher, on which it was put out, is not exactly known. The
terms were not half-profits, for that arrangement is proposed by Smith
for the second edition as if it were a new one, and is accepted in the
same way by Strahan, who in a letter which I shall presently quote,
pronounces it a "very fair" proposal, "and therefore very agreeable to
Mr. Cadell and me"; nor was it printed for the author, for the
presentation copies he gave away were deducted from the copy money he
received. On the whole, it seems most probable that the book was
purchased from him for a definite sum, and as he mentions in his
letter of the 13th November 1776 that he had received, £300 of his
money at that time, and had still a balance owing to him, one may
reasonably conjecture that the full sum was £500--the same sum
Cadell's firm had paid for the last economic work they had undertaken,
Sir James Steuart's _Inquiry into the Principles of Political
Economy_.
The book sold well. The first edition, of whose extent, however, we
are ignorant, was exhausted in six months, and the sale was from the
first better than the publishers expected, for on the 12th of April,
when it had only been a month out, Strahan takes notice of a remark of
David Hume that Smith's book required too much thought to be as
popular as Gibbon's, and states, "What you say of Mr. Gibbon's and Dr.
Smith's book is exactly just. The former is the most popular work;
but the sale of the latter, though not near so rapid, has been more
than I could have expected from a work that requires much thought and
reflection (qualities that do not abound among modern readers) to
peruse to any purpose."[244] The sale is the more remarkable because
it was scarce to any degree helped on by reviews, favourable or
otherwise. The book was not noticed at all, for example, in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_, and it was allowed only two pages in the
_Annual Register_, while in the same number Watson's _History of
Philip_ got sixteen. This review of the book, however, was probably
written by Burke.
Smith speaks in one of his letters to Strahan of having distributed
numerous presentation copies. One of the first of these was of course
sent to his old friend David Hume, and that copy, by the way, with its
inscription, probably still exists, having been possessed for a time
by the late Mr. Babbage. Hume acknowledged receipt of it in the
following letter, which shows among other things that not even Hume
had seen the manuscript of the book before publication:--
EDINBURGH, _1st April 1776_.
EUGE! BELLE! DEAR MR. SMITH--I am much pleased with your
performance, and the perusal of it has taken me from a state
of great anxiety. It was a work of so much expectation, by
yourself, by your friends, and by the public, that I
trembled for its appearance, but am now much relieved. Not
but that the reading of it necessarily requires so much
attention, and the public is disposed to give so little that
I shall still doubt for some time of its being at first very
popular, but it has depth and solidity and acuteness, and is
so much illustrated by curious facts that it must at last
attract the public attention. It is probably much improved
by your last abode in London. If you were here at my
fireside, I should dispute some of your principles. I cannot
think that the rent of farms makes any part of the price of
the produce, but that the price is determined altogether by
the quantity and the demand. It appears to me impossible
that the King of France can take a seignorage of 8 per cent
upon the coinage. Nobody would bring bullion to the mint, it
would be all sent to Holland or England, where it might be
coined and sent back to France for less than 2 per cent.
Accordingly Necker says that the French king takes only 2
per cent of seignorage. But these and a hundred other points
are fit only to be discussed in conversation, which till you
tell me the contrary I still flatter myself with soon. I
hope it will be soon, for I am in a very bad state of health
and cannot afford a long delay. I fancy you are acquainted
with Mr. Gibbon. I like his performance extremely, and have
ventured to tell him that had I not been personally
acquainted with him I should never have expected such an
excellent work from the pen of an Englishman. It is
lamentable to consider how much that nation has declined in
literature during our time. I hope he did not take amiss
this national reflection.
All your friends here are in deep grief at present for the
death of Baron Mure, which is an irreparable loss to our
society. He was among the oldest and best friends I had in
the world.[245]
On the same day as Hume wrote this letter from Edinburgh, Gibbon wrote
from London to Adam Ferguson and said among other things, "What an
excellent work is that with which our common friend Mr. Adam Smith has
enriched the public! An extensive science in a single book, and the
most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language. He
proposes visiting you very soon, and I find he means to exert his most
strenuous endeavours to persuade Mr. Hume to return with him to town.
I am sorry to hear that the health and spirits of that truly great man
are in a less favourable state than his friends could wish, and I am
sure you will join your efforts in convincing him of the benefits of
exercise, dissipation, and change of air."
Some of Smith's personal friends seem to have entertained the common
prejudice that a good work on commerce could not be reasonably
expected from a man who had never been engaged in any branch of
practical business, and seemed in outward air and appearance so ill
fitted to succeed in such a line of business if he had engaged in it.
One of these was Sir John Pringle, President of the Royal Society, and
formerly, like Smith himself, Professor of Moral Philosophy at a
Scotch university. When the _Wealth of Nations_ appeared Sir John
Pringle remarked to Boswell that Smith, having never been in trade,
could not be expected to write well on that subject any more than a
lawyer upon physic, and Boswell repeated the remark to Johnson, who at
once, however, sent it to the winds. "He is mistaken, sir," said the
Doctor; "a man who has never been engaged in trade himself may
undoubtedly write well upon trade, and there is nothing that requires
more to be illustrated by philosophy than does trade. As to mere
wealth--that is to say, money--it is clear that one nation or one
individual cannot increase its store but by making another poorer; but
trade procures what is more valuable, the reciprocation of the
peculiar advantages of different countries. A merchant seldom thinks
but of his own particular trade. To write a good book upon it a man
must have extensive views; it is not necessary to have practised to
write well upon a subject."
It is not within the scope of a work like the present to give an
account of the doctrines of the _Wealth of Nations_, or any estimate
of their originality or value, or of their influence on the progress
of science, on the policy and prosperity of nations, or on the
practical happiness of mankind. Buckle, as we know, declared it to be
"in its ultimate results probably the most important book that has
ever been written"; a book, he said, which has "done more towards the
happiness of man than has been effected by the united abilities of all
the statesmen and legislators of whom history has preserved an
authentic account";[246] and even those who take the most sober view
of the place of this work in history readily admit that its public
career, which is far from being ended yet, is a very remarkable story
of successive conquest.
It has been seriously asserted that the fortune of the book in this
country was made by Fox quoting it one day in the House of Commons.
But this happened in November 1783, after the book had already gone
through two editions and was on the eve of appearing in a third. It is
curious, however, that that was the first time it was quoted in the
House, and it is curious, again, that the person to quote it then was
Fox, who was neither an admirer of the book, nor a believer in its
principles, nor a lover of its subject. He once told Charles Butler
that he had never read the book, and the remark must have been made
many years after its publication, for it was made at St. Anne's Hill,
to which Fox only went in 1785. "There is something in all these
subjects," the statesman added in explanation, "which passes my
comprehension; something so wide that I could never embrace them
myself nor find any one who did."[247] On another occasion, when he
was dining one evening in 1796 at Sergeant Heywood's, Fox showed his
hearty disdain for Smith and political economy together. The Earl of
Lauderdale, who was himself an economist of great ability, and by no
means a blind follower of Smith, made the remark that we knew nothing
of political economy before Adam Smith wrote. "Pooh," said Fox, "your
Adam Smiths are nothing, but" (he added, turning to the company) "that
is his love; we must spare him there." "I think," replied Lauderdale,
"he is everything." "That," rejoined Fox, "is a great proof of your
affection." Fox was no believer in free trade, and actively opposed
the Commercial Treaty with France in 1787 on the express and most
illiberal ground that it proceeded from a novel system of doctrines,
that it was a dangerous departure from the established principles of
our forefathers, and that France and England were enemies by nature,
and ought to be kept enemies by legislation.
It is curious therefore that in a House where Smith had many admirers
and not a few disciples, his book was never mentioned for near eight
years after its appearance, and was mentioned then by an enemy of its
principles. Fox's quotation from it on that occasion was of the most
unimportant character. It was in his speech on the Address of Thanks
to the Throne, and he said: "There was a maxim laid down in an
excellent book upon the Wealth of Nations which had been ridiculed for
its simplicity, but which was indisputable as to its truth. In that
book it was stated that the only way to become rich was to manage
matters so as to make one's income exceed one's expenses. This maxim
applied equally to an individual and to a nation. The proper line of
conduct therefore was by a well-directed economy to retrench every
current expense, and to make as large a saving during the peace as
possible."[248] To think of this allusion having any influence on the
fortunes of the work is of course out of reason. It was never even
mentioned in the House again till the year 1787, when Mr. Robert
Thornton invoked it in support of the Commercial Treaty with France,
and Mr. George Dempster read an extract from it in the debate on the
proposal to farm the post-horse duties. It was quoted once in 1788, by
Mr. Hussy on the Wool Exportation Bill, and not referred to again
until Pitt introduced his Budget on the 17th February 1792. In then
explaining the progressive accumulation of capital that was always
spontaneously going on in a country when it was not checked by
calamity or by vicious legislation, that great minister, a deep
student of Smith's book and the most convinced of all Smith's
disciples, made the remark: "Simple and obvious as this principle is,
and felt and observed as it must have been in a greater or less degree
even from the earliest periods, I doubt whether it has ever been fully
developed and sufficiently explained but in the writings of an author
of our own time, now unfortunately no more (I mean the author of the
celebrated treatise on the _Wealth of Nations_), whose extensive
knowledge of detail and depth of philosophical research will, I
believe, furnish the best solution of every question connected with
the history of commerce and with the system of political
economy."[249] In the same year it was quoted by Mr. Whitbread and by
Fox (from the exposition of the division of labour in the first book)
in the debate on the armament against Russia, and by Wilberforce in
his speech introducing his Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
It was not mentioned in the House of Lords till 1793, when in the
debate on the King's Message for an Augmentation of the Forces it was
referred to by Smith's two old friends, the Earl of Shelburne (now
Marquis of Lansdowne) and Alexander Wedderburn (now Lord Loughborough,
and presiding over the House as Lord Chancellor, of England). The
Marquis of Lansdowne said: "With respect to French principles, as they
had been denominated, those principles had been exported from us to
France, and could not be said to have originated among the population
of the latter country. The new principles of government founded on the
abolition of the old feudal system were originally propagated among us
by the Dean of Gloucester, Mr. Tucker, and had since been more
generally inculcated by Dr. Adam Smith in his work on the _Wealth of
Nations_, which had been recommended as a book necessary for the
information of youth by Mr. Dugald Stewart in his _Elements of the
Philosophy of the Human Mind_." The Lord Chancellor in replying merely
said that "in the works of Dean Tucker, Adam Smith, and Mr. Stewart,
to which allusion had been made, no doctrines inimical to the
principles of civil government, the morals or religion of mankind,
were contained, and therefore to trace the errors of the French to
these causes was manifestly fallacious."[250]
Lord Lansdowne's endeavour to shield Smith's political orthodoxy under
the countenance lent to his book by so safe and trusted a teacher of
the sons of the Whig nobility as Dugald Stewart, is hardly less
curious than his unreserved identification of the new political
economy with that moving cloud of ideas which, under the name of
French principles, excited so much alarm in the public mind of that
time. For Dugald Stewart was in that same year 1793 (on the evenings
of 21st January and 18th March) reading his _Memoir of Adam Smith_ to
the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and he tells us himself (in 1810) how
he was compelled to abandon the idea of giving a long account of
Smith's opinions which he intended to have done, because at that
period, he says, "it was not unusual, even among men of some talents
and information, to confound studiously the speculative doctrines of
political economy with those discussions concerning the first
principles of government, which happened unfortunately at that time to
agitate the public mind. The doctrine of a Free Trade was itself
represented as of a revolutionary tendency, and some who had formerly
prided themselves on their intimacy with Mr. Smith, and on their zeal
for the propagation of his liberal system, began to call in question
the expediency of subjecting to the disputation of philosophers the
arcana of State policy, and the unfathomable wisdom of feudal
ages."[251] People's teeth had been so set on edge by the events in
France that, as Lord Cockburn tells us, when Stewart first began to
give a course of lectures in the University on political economy in
the winter 1801-2, the mere term "political economy" made them start.
"They thought it included questions touching the constitution of
governments, and not a few hoped to catch Stewart in dangerous
propositions."[252]
The French Revolution seems to have checked for a time the growing
vogue of Smith's book and the advance of his principles in this
country, just as it checked the progress of parliamentary and social
reform, because it filled men's mind with a fear of change, with a
suspicion of all novelty, with an unreasoning dislike of anything in
the nature of a general principle. 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. Whether and how far
Smith or Tucker had any influence on that development of opinion which
eventuated in the Revolution, it would be difficult to gauge. Before
Lord Lansdowne made this speech in 1793 two different translations of
the _Wealth of Nations_ into French had already been published; a
third (by the Abbé Morellet) had been written but not published, and a
fourth was possibly under way, for it appeared in a few years. The
first and worst of these translations, moreover (Blavet's), had
already gone through three separate editions, after having originally
run through a periodical in monthly sections for two years. These are
all tokens that the work was unquestionably influencing French
opinion.
But if the French Revolution stopped for a time, as is most likely,
the onward advance of Smith's free-trade principles, it does not seem
to have exercised the same effect on the actual sale of the book. I do
not know whether the successive editions were uniform in number of
copies, but as many editions of the _Wealth of Nations_--four English
and one Irish--appeared between the years 1791 and 1799 as between the
years 1776 and 1786, and since none was called for from 1786 till
1791, the edition of 1786 took longer to sell off than the subsequent
editions of 1791, 1793, and 1796. It is quite possible--indeed it is
only natural--that the wave of active antagonism which, according to
Stewart's testimony, rose against the principles of the book after the
outbreak of the French Revolution would have helped on the sale of
the book itself by keeping it more constantly under public attention,
discussion, and, if you will, vituperation. The fortune of a book,
like that of a public man, is often made by its enemies.
But the very early influence of the _Wealth of Nations_ in the English
political world is established by much better proofs than quotations
in Parliament. It had actually shaped parts of the policy of the
country years before it was ever publicly alluded to in either House.
The very first budget after its publication bore its marks. Lord North
was then on the outlook for fresh and comparatively unburdensome means
of increasing the revenue, and obtained valuable assistance from the
_Wealth of Nations_. He imposed two new taxes in 1777, of which he got
the idea there; one on man-servants, and the other on property sold by
auction. And the budget of 1778 owed still more important features to
Smith's suggestions, for it introduced the inhabited house duty so
strongly recommended by him, and the malt tax.[253] Then in the
following year 1779 we find Smith consulted by statesmen like Dundas
and the Earl of Carlisle on the pressing and anxious question of
giving Ireland free trade. His answers still exist, and will appear
later on in this work.[254]
FOOTNOTES:
[244] _Hume MSS._, R.S.E.
[245] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 487.
[246] Buckle's _History of Civilisation_, ed. 1869, i. 214.
[247] Butler's _Reminiscences_, i. 176.
[248] _Parliamentary History_, xxiii. 1152.
[249] _Parliamentary History_, xxix. 834.
[250] _Ibid._, xxx. 330, 334.
[251] Stewart's _Works_, x. 87.
[252] Cockburn's _Memorials of My Own Time_, p. 174.
[253] See Dowell's _Taxation_, ii. 169.
[254] See below, pp. 350, 352.