THE TOUR IN FRANCE, 1764-66
“Everything I see appears the throwing broadcast of the seed of a
revolution,” wrote Voltaire to Chauvelin, a few weeks after Smith landed
in France. While the poor grew poorer, administration worse, taxes more
oppressive, that thick cloud of conventional darkness which had so long
shrouded misgovernment was dispersing, irradiated by the fierce glare of
an intellectual illumination such as the world had never seen before.
Already the mind of France was undimmed. Voltaire’s search-light had
shown the nakedness of Church and State. Diderot’s great lamp was fixed;
Rousseau waved his fiery torch, beaconing oppressed civilisation back to
the freedom of its cradle. Quesnai was at his patient calculations in
the Royal Palace. The great _Encyclopædia_ itself was on the eve of
completion.
This gigantic work—in thirty-five folio volumes, of which the first
appeared in 1751—was doubly English; for it was inspired by Lord Bacon’s
plan for a universal dictionary of sciences and arts, and it began as a
mere translation of the Cyclopædia which Ephraim Chambers had published
in 1727.
One of the first of our writers to study, perhaps the first to weigh and
measure the importance of the _Encyclopædia_, was Adam Smith. He seems
to have read it from the outset. In his letter to the _Edinburgh Review_
he called it the most complete work of the kind ever attempted in any
language. He there noticed that D’Alembert’s preliminary discourse upon
the genealogy and filiation of arts and sciences was nearly the same as
that of Lord Bacon, that the separate articles were not dry abstracts of
what is commonly known by a superficial student, but “a compleat,
reasoned, and even critical examination of each subject.” Its pages bore
testimony to the triumphant progress of English philosophy and science
in France. The ideas of Bacon, Boyle, and Newton were explained with
that order, perspicuity, and judgment which distinguished all the
eminent writers of France. “As since the Union we are apt to regard
ourselves in some measure as the countrymen of those great men, it
flattered my vanity as a Briton to observe the superiority of the
English philosophy thus acknowledged by their rival nation.” It seems,
Smith added, “to be the peculiar talent of the French nation to arrange
every subject in that natural and simple order which carries the
attention without any effort along with it.”
Smith was himself by nature and habit an Encyclopædist, not inferior
even to Diderot in his grasp of the whole field of science. Wanting the
laborious industry of the compiler, he was the equal perhaps of his
French contemporaries in the power of correlating knowledge and
combining truth. But he yielded to none in admiration of the
_Encyclopædia_, and commended it to English readers by translating the
magnificent eulogy bestowed on it by Voltaire in the conclusion of his
account of the artists who lived in the time of Louis the Fourteenth:—
“The last age has put the present in a condition to assemble into one
body and to transmit to posterity, to be by them delivered down to
remoter ages, the sacred repository of all the arts and all the
sciences, all of them pushed as far as human industry can go. This is
what a society of learned men, fraught with genius and knowledge, are
now labouring upon, an immense and immortal work which accuses the
shortness of human life.”
The Encyclopædists’ doctrine of the perfectibility of man was the
rational basis of Smith’s incurable optimism, but he did not share the
opinion of the French School that an absolute monarchy is the most
hopeful if not the only vehicle of human progress. 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.
One critic expresses surprise that so close an observer had not the
sagacity to anticipate the downfall of the French Monarchy. But Turgot’s
dismissal, which first made Voltaire despair of a peaceful reformation,
occurred two months after the publication of the _Wealth of Nations_,
and ten years after its author’s return to England. Nay, at the time
when the finishing touches were being given to that work, it might have
been a fair question whether Turgot’s reforms were less likely to save
France than Lord North’s policy to enslave England. In any case, it was
not for a foreigner to play Cassandra to the Bourbons. But it will be
shown that the author of the _Wealth of Nations_ was under no illusions
as to the wretched state of the French peasant, the misgovernment of the
kingdom, and its fiscal disorganisation.
The tutor and his pupil arrived in Paris on February 13, 1764, and,
after ten days with Hume, they proceeded to Toulouse, which still
preserved the dignity of a provincial capital, with a parliament, a
university, and an archbishopric. The nobility and notables of Languedoc
spent the winter there, and it was also a favourite resort of English
visitors, probably because it combined a good climate with agreeable
society. Its advocates vied with those of Paris. As a social and
intellectual centre it might be denominated the Edinburgh of France. Its
political importance is marked in the _Wealth of Nations_, where Adam
Smith describes the parliament of Toulouse as being “in rank and dignity
the second parliament of the kingdom.” Fortunately for the two Scots, a
cousin of Hume, the Abbé Seignelay Colbert, was at that time
Vicar-General of the diocese. Colbert was of the same family as the
great minister, and doubtless owed his success in the Gallican Church to
that connection. Hume’s personal popularity in Paris was enormous, and
his letters of introduction, which he wrote or procured, were everywhere
of service to the travellers. The Abbé, immediately on their arrival,
promised Hume he would do all that he could to make their stay
agreeable. After a month he was full of enthusiasm for his new
friends:—“Mr. Smith is a sublime man. His heart and his mind are equally
admirable.... The Duke, his pupil, is a very amiable spirit, and does
his exercises well, and is making progress in French.”
The Abbé was a man of liberal ideas. Promoted to the bishopric of Rodez,
he tried to assist the agriculture and manufactures of his diocese, and
even had a momentary popularity in Paris in the year of the Revolution
(1789), when as a member of the States-General he proposed the union of
the clergy with the Third Estate. The Archbishop of Toulouse at this
time was the famous Loménie de Brienne, an old friend of Turgot and
Morellet, and so far a disciple of their economic principles that he
persuaded the States of Languedoc to adopt free trade in corn. But, as
Mr. Rae observes, he could not have been very friendly to Smith; for
afterwards, when Cardinal and Minister of France, he refused Morellet a
hundred louis to defray the cost of printing his translation of the
_Wealth of Nations_. In spite of Colbert’s kindness, the early months at
Toulouse dragged heavily, and the Duke proved at first an exacting
companion. On July 5th, Smith sent a rather lugubrious and petulant
letter to Hume:—
“I should be much obliged to you if you could send us recommendations
to the Duke of Richelieu, the Marquis de Lorges, and the Intendant of
the Province. Mr. Townshend assured me that the Duc de Choiseul was to
recommend us to all the people of fashion here and everywhere else in
France. We have heard nothing, however, of these recommendations, and
have had our way to make as well as we could by the help of the Abbé,
who is a stranger here almost as much as we. The progress indeed we
have made is not very great. The Duke is acquainted with no Frenchman
whatever. I cannot cultivate the acquaintance of the few with whom I
am acquainted, as I cannot bring them to our house, and am not always
at liberty to go to theirs. The life which I led at Glasgow was a
pleasurable dissipated life in comparison of that which I lead here at
Present. I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time.”
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. The latter is a very honest fellow, and deserves
to be a bishop; make him one if you can.... Smith agrees with me in
thinking that you are turned soft by the _délices_ of the French
Court, and that you don’t write in that nervous manner you was
remarkable for in the more northern climates.”
From this time all went smoothly. Hume got them introductions from his
chief, Lord Hertford, the British Ambassador, to the Duc de Richelieu
and others.
On the 21st of October they were again in Toulouse, and Smith wrote in
good spirits to thank Hume for his kindness and the Ambassador “for the
very honourable manner in which he was so good as to mention me to the
Duke of Richelieu in the letter of recommendation which you sent us.” He
adds:—
“There was, indeed, one small mistake in it. He called me Robinson
instead of Smith. I took upon me to correct this mistake myself before
the Duke delivered the letter. We were all treated by the Maréchal
with the utmost Politeness and attention, particularly the Duke, whom
he distinguished in a very proper manner.... Our expedition to
Bordeaux and another we have made since to Bagnères has made a great
change upon the Duke. He begins now to familiarise himself to French
company, and I flatter myself I shall spend the rest of the time we
are to live together not only in peace and contentment, but in gayetty
and amusement.”
They went to Montpellier to see the meeting of the States of Languedoc,
the most important of the six local parliaments still remaining in
France. There they met Horne Tooke, who afterwards called the _Wealth of
Nations_ wicked and the _Moral Sentiments_ nonsense, and Cardinal
Dillon, the Archbishop of Narbonne, another of the band of Gallicised
Scots.
In Montpellier and Toulouse they saw many members of the parliament, and
obtained an insight into the legal and administrative system of a
province which enlightened Frenchmen were fond of citing as a model for
the reformation of their country. Smith took rather a favourable view of
French justice. The parliaments, he said, “are perhaps, in many
respects, not very convenient courts of justice; but they have never
been accused, they seem never even to have been suspected, of
corruption.”
But, though incorruptible, the Toulouse Court had been guilty of one
scandalous act of fanatical injustice. In 1762 it found the unfortunate
Jean Calas, a Protestant, guilty of the murder of his son, who had
abjured his faith in order to join the Toulouse Bar, and then in an
agony of remorse had committed suicide in his father’s house.
Characteristically Smith did not allow this foul episode to distort his
perspective. In his last edition of the _Moral Sentiments_ the story is
told as one of those fatal accidents which “happen sometimes in all
countries, even in those where justice is in general very well
administered”:—
“The unfortunate Calas, a man of much more than ordinary constancy
(broke upon the wheel and burnt at Toulouse for the supposed murder of
his own son, of which he was perfectly innocent), seemed with his last
breath to deprecate, not so much the cruelty of the punishment, as the
disgrace which the imputation might bring upon his memory. After he
had been broke, and was just going to be thrown into the fire, the
monk, who attended the execution, exhorted him to confess the crime
for which he had been condemned. ‘My Father,’ said Calas, ‘can you
yourself bring yourself to believe that I am guilty?’”
To such a man, he thinks, “humble philosophy, which confines its views
to this life, can afford but little consolation.” He must seek refuge in
religion, which alone can offer him a prospect of another world of more
candour, humanity, and justice. But justice was not allowed to sleep.
For three years Voltaire assailed the ears of France with impassioned
argument. Before Smith left Toulouse a new trial was ordered, and fifty
judges, among them Turgot, revised the sentence, pronounced Calas
innocent, relieved his family from infamy, and awarded them a large sum
of money.
A long stay in Languedoc would necessarily give a foreigner more
favourable impressions of the social and economic state of France than
he would have gained, say, in the Limousin, where Turgot was doing
heroic battle against famine and maladministration. Languedoc, with its
two millions of inhabitants, is described by Tocqueville as the
best-ordered and most prosperous as well as the largest of all the _pays
d’états_. Its roads, made and repaired without a _corvée_, were among
the best in France. Smith was struck by the great canal of Burgundy,
constructed some seventy years before by Riquet and kept in good repair
by his family, and he saw the province incessantly spending money on
developing and improving its roads and rivers. The charitable workhouses
established at the royal expense in other parts of France had not been
required in this comparatively happy territory. In fiscal system and
credit Languedoc was incomparably superior to the rest of the kingdom. A
land-tax instead of a poll-tax, few exemptions for the nobles, no
farmers-general to collect taxes and fortunes. The contrast between the
good local administration of Languedoc, and the fatal results of
centralisation in other parts of France, was often in the mind of the
author of the _Wealth of Nations_; and all that he said is fully
confirmed by Tocqueville’s study of French society before the
Revolution. Here is a passage that sounds like an echo of Turgot: Smith
is speaking of the advantages of local administration from local funds.
Under such an administration, he says, “a magnificent highroad cannot be
made through a desart country where there is little or no commerce, or
merely because it happens to lead to the country villa of the intendant
of the province, or to that of some great lord to whom the intendant
finds it convenient to make his court. A great bridge cannot be thrown
over a river at a place where nobody passes, or merely to embellish the
view from the windows of a neighbouring palace: things which sometimes
happen in countries where works of this kind are carried on by any other
revenue than that which they themselves are capable of affording.”
After eighteen months in Toulouse the party went, we are told, “by a
pretty extensive tour, through the south of France to Geneva.” There
Smith was able to gratify two of his strongest passions: his admiration
for the Republican form of government and for Voltaire. The little
Republic was then in a constitutional tumult, for the citizens were
pressing for a share in what had till then been a narrow aristocracy. In
this they had the support of Voltaire, who lived, the literary potentate
of Europe, at Ferney, just outside the city bounds, in the feudal
seigniory of Gex. To his château by the lake pilgrims resorted from all
parts of Europe to pay their court, and were hospitably received. Smith
seems to have visited Ferney five or six times during his short stay,
and conversation deepened the admiration which his favourite author had
inspired.
Samuel Rogers, meeting Smith a year before his death, happened to remark
of some writer that he was rather superficial, a Voltaire. “Sir!” cried
Smith, incensed by this use of the indefinite article, striking the
table with his hand, “there has been but one Voltaire.” Voltaire, on his
side, probably thought well of the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, for his
intimate friend, Dr. Tronchin, the famous physician of Geneva, had sent
his son to attend Smith’s classes at Glasgow. Rogers’s visit fell in the
year of the French Revolution, and the question of king against
parliaments was being debated. Smith mentioned that Voltaire had an
aversion to the States, and was attached to the royal authority.
Voltaire had talked about the Duke of Richelieu, whom the party had met
at Toulouse, as a singular character. The duke had slipped down at
Versailles, a few years before his death, “the first _faux pas_ he had
ever made at Court.” 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 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.” Smith said he could not pardon Joseph the
Second of Austria, “who pretended to travel as a philosopher,” for
passing Ferney without doing homage to the historian of Peter the Great.
He concluded from this circumstance that Joseph “was but a man of
inferior mind.”[22]
Smith kept no journal during his French tour, and as usual wrote as few
letters as possible, though he must have made extensive notes. Most of
his letters were probably to report progress to Charles Townshend. I
have in my possession part of an abstract of one of these, which, though
of no importance in itself, serves to show that he took his tutorship
very seriously. From sidelights in the correspondence of Charles Bonnet
the naturalist, and Le Sage, and Adam Ferguson, we know that he enjoyed
the best company in Geneva, particularly at the house of the Duchesse
d’Enville, who was there under Dr. Tronchin’s treatment with her son,
the ill-fated Duc de la Rochefoucauld. In 1774 Adam Ferguson wrote to
Smith that his own bad French reminded the Duchesse d’Enville of her old
difficulties with Smith, “but she said that before you left Paris she
had the happiness to learn your language.” Two years later Bonnet wished
Hume to remember him to “the Sage of Glascow, ... whom we shall always
recollect with great pleasure.”
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. Friendship with Hume was enough to ensure a friendly
reception from Parisian society, where science and letters were still
fashionable. But Smith was known and valued for his own sake; his
_Theory of Moral Sentiments_ was so much read, praised, and talked about
that several translators, among them the young Duc de Rochefoucauld,
were competing to repair the badness of the first attempt, published in
1764 by Dous at the instance of Holbach. That of the Abbé Blavet was,
Smith thought, but indifferently executed. The best translation, it is
said, was that published in 1798 by Condorcet’s widow.
For ten months Smith suffered and enjoyed enough dissipation for a
lifetime, if we may judge from the Hume correspondence, which shows that
in one week of July 1766 he was at Baron Holbach’s conversing with
Turgot, at the Comtesse de Boufflers’, and in the salon of Mademoiselle
de l’Espinasse. In fact, as Mr. Rae says, he seems to have been a
regular guest in almost all the famous _salons_ of Paris. Thus we find
Hume writing in March to the Countess de Boufflers: “I am glad you have
taken my friend Smith under your protection. You will find him a man of
true merit, though perhaps his sedentary recluse life may have hurt his
air and appearance as a man of the world.” She replies in May that she
has made the acquaintance of Mr. Smith, and for love of Hume has given
him a very hearty welcome; that she is reading the _Theory of Moral
Sentiments_, and believes it will please her. Six years later she talked
of translating the book, and said that Smith’s doctrine of Sympathy was
supplanting Hume’s philosophy as the fashionable opinion, especially
with the ladies! Smith was a keen playgoer in Paris, and made the
acquaintance of Madame Riccoboni, who had been a great actress but had
abandoned the stage for the novel, and was almost as popular as
Richardson. When he left France she gave him a charming letter of
introduction to Garrick:—
“Je suis bien vaine, my dear Mr. Garrick, de pouvoir vous donner ce
que je perds avec un regret très vif, le plaisir de voir Mr. Smith. Ce
charming philosopher vous dira combien il a d’esprit, car je le défie
de parler sans en montrer.... Oh ces Écossois! ces chiens d’Écossois!
ils viennent me plaire et m’affliger. Je suis comme ces folles jeunes
filles qui écoutent un amant sans penser au regret, toujours voisin du
plaisir. Grondez-moi, battez-moi, tuez-moi: mais j’aime Mr. Smith, je
l’aime beaucoup. Je voudrois que le diable emportât tous nos gens de
lettres, tous nos philosophes, et qu’il me rapportât Mr. Smith.”
In a separate letter to Garrick the novelist again describes her friend:
“Mr. Smith, un Écossois, homme d’un très grand mérite, aussi distingué
par son bon naturel, par la douceur de son caractère que par son esprit
et son savoir, me demande une lettre pour vous. Vous verrez un
philosophe moral et pratique; gay, riant à cent lieus de la pédanterie
des nôtres.”[23] Of the Rochefoucaulds we have already heard at Geneva.
They seem to have been at Paris during Smith’s stay there, for “from
Madame d’Enville,” writes Dugald Stewart, “the respectable mother of the
late excellent and much lamented Duke of Rochefoucauld, he received many
attentions which he always recollected with particular gratitude.” A
story is told of another lady, a marquise of talent and wit, who was so
overcome by his personal charms that she fell in love with him at
Abbeville, where Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch stopped on one of their
excursions from Paris. A Captain Lloyd, who was with the party,
doubtless on a patriotic visit to the field of Creçy, told the story to
Dr. Currie, the biographer of Burns. The philosopher could neither
endure these addresses nor conceal his embarrassment, for the reason,
said Lloyd, that he was deeply in love with an English lady who was also
at Abbeville. But Dugald Stewart only mentions an early attachment with
a lady who remained single, and at eighty years of age still retained
evident traces of her former beauty, and adds that “after this
disappointment he laid aside all thoughts of marriage.”
Susan Curchod, that “inestimable treasure” for whom Gibbon sighed as a
lover, had married Necker, then only a successful banker, while Smith
and his party were at Toulouse. The mother of Madame de Stäel, as we
learn from her first admirer, united elegant manners and lively
conversation with wit, beauty, and erudition. No wonder then that her
new home was already a centre of Parisian life. The Neckers were very
hospitable, and were intimate with Morellet and others of the economic
sect. Adam Smith’s impressions of Necker are mentioned by Sir James
Mackintosh in the ever admirable though recanted _Defence of the French
Revolution_. He had, as we there read, no very high opinion of the
future minister, speaking of him as a man probably upright and not
illiberal, but narrow, pusillanimous, and entangled by the habit of
detail. He predicted that Necker’s fame would fall when his talents
should be brought to the test, and always said emphatically, “He is a
man of detail.” Mackintosh adds: “At a time when the commercial
abilities of Lord Auckland were the theme of profuse eulogy, Dr. Smith
characterised him in the same words.”
Dugald Stewart mentions that Smith was also acquainted with D’Alembert,
Helvétius, and Marmontel. It was at the house of Helvétius that he first
met the great Turgot and the excellent Abbé Morellet. “He talked our
language very badly,” writes the Abbé in his memoirs; “but his _Theory
of Moral Sentiments_ had given me a great idea of his depth and
sagacity, and in fact I still look upon him as one who made most
comprehensive observations and analyses of all the questions that he
dealt with. M. Turgot, who was as fond of metaphysics as I was, held a
high opinion of his genius. We saw him often; he was presented at the
house of Helvétius: we discussed the theory of commerce, banking, loans,
and many points in the great book he was then composing. He gave me a
very pretty pocket-book which he used and which has served me for twenty
years.”
Turgot’s _Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth_,
which were written about this time, remained unpublished till 1769, when
they began to appear in the _Éphémérides du Citoyen_. It is noteworthy
as bearing upon the question of mutual obligation between Smith and
Turgot that it was the _Wealth of Nations_, not the _Reflections_, which
gave topics for their economic discussions. It has been supposed, on the
authority of Condorcet, that a correspondence was subsequently carried
on between Smith and Turgot. But the publication quite recently of a
letter written by Smith to the young Duke of Rochefoucauld has removed
all doubt upon the subject. Rochefoucauld had written to inquire of
Smith if he possessed any letters from Turgot, and this is the answer:—
“I should certainly have been very happy to have communicated to your
Grace any letters which the ever to be regretted Mr. Turgot had done
me the honour to write to me; and by that means to have the
distinguished honour of being recorded as one of his correspondents.
But tho’ I had the happiness of his acquaintance and, I flattered
myself, even of his friendship and esteem, I never had that of his
correspondence. He was so good as to send me a copy of the _Procès
Verbal_ of what passed at the bed of justice upon the registration of
his six edicts which did so much honour to their Author, and, had they
been executed without alteration, would have proved so beneficial to
his country. But the present (which I preserve as a most valuable
monument of a person whom I remember with so much veneration) was not
accompanied with any letter.”
Twenty-three years afterwards there is an entry in the diary of Samuel
Rogers: “Adam Smith said Turgot was an honest, well-meaning man, but
unacquainted with the world and human nature; that it was his maxim (he
mentioned it to Hume, but never to Smith) that whatever is right may be
done.” This is certainly not Adam Smith’s whole mind about Turgot, for
whom he entertained a lively admiration. But undoubtedly he considered
that his own obligations to the French School of Political Economy began
and ended with Quesnai, and we know that he intended at one time to
dedicate his book to the author of the _Economic Table_. Turgot,
Morellet, Rivière, and the rest were interpreters of Quesnai—disciples,
not masters.
Quesnai was the inventor of a new system, the founder of a sect, and the
wielder of whatever influence that sect exerted on the _Wealth of
Nations_. Smith’s intercourse with Quesnai and the physiocrats, as well
as a careful study of their writings, accounts for some important
developments of theory which distinguish his book from his lectures, and
particularly the attention he there pays to the problem of distribution,
as well as a distinct though moderated bias towards agriculture as the
most productive of pursuits. He was not a physiocrat. Indeed his
criticism of the distinctive doctrine of the school, that all wealth
comes from the soil, was felt to be convincing and final. But he went a
long way with them, and some of his most important practical conclusions
coincided with theirs. No reader of the ninth chapter of Smith’s fourth
book could doubt that Smith knew Quesnai as well as Quesnai’s _Table_,
which had been published in 1758 and was regarded with an almost
superstitious veneration by the whole sect. If the doubt existed, it
would be dispelled by a curious piece of evidence. Of the half-dozen
letters he wrote from France that have been preserved, the longest,
dated Compiègne, August 26, 1766, is to Charles Townshend, and describes
some anxious moments in which he had called in the aid of the king’s
physician. The Duke of Buccleuch had been to Compiègne to see the camp
and to hunt with the King and the Court, and after hunting had eaten too
heartily of a cold supper with a vast quantity of salad and some cold
punch. Sickness and fever followed. The faithful tutor begged him to
send for a doctor:—
“He refused a long time, but at last, upon seeing me uneasy,
consented. I sent for Quenay, first ordinary physician to the King. He
sent me word he was ill. I then sent for Senac; he was ill likewise. I
went to Quenay myself to beg that, notwithstanding his illness, which
was not dangerous, he would come to see the Duke. He told me he was an
old infirm man, whose attendance could not be depended on, and advised
me as his friend to depend upon De la Saone, first physician to the
Queen. I went to De la Saone. He was gone out, and was not expected
home that night. I returned to Quenay, who followed me immediately to
the Duke. It was by this time seven at night. The Duke was in the same
profuse sweat which he had been in all day and all the preceding
night. In this situation Quenay declared that it was improper to do
anything till the sweat should be over. He only ordered him some
cooling ptisane drink. Quenay’s illness made it impossible for him to
return next day (Monday), and De la Saone has waited on the Duke ever
since, to my entire satisfaction.”
In reading this we are reminded of a passage in the _Wealth of Nations_
where Quesnai is described as “a physician, and a very speculative
physician,” who thought the health of the human body could be preserved
only by a certain precise regimen of diet and exercise, the slightest
violation of which necessarily occasioned some degree of disease or
disorder. The letter to Townshend continues:—
“Depend upon hearing from me by every post till his perfect recovery;
if any threatening symptom should appear I shall immediately despatch
an express to you; so keep your mind as easy as possible. There is not
the least probability that any such symptom ever will appear. I never
stir from his room from eight in the morning till ten at night, and
watch for the smallest change that happens to him. I should sit by him
all night too if the ridiculous, impertinent jealousy of Cook, who
thinks my assiduity an encroachment upon his duty, would not be so
much alarmed, as it gave some disturbance even to his master in his
present illness.”
The visit was now drawing to an end, but our account of it would be
incomplete if we omitted Smith’s part in one of the most furious
squabbles of the century. Rousseau had arrived in Paris almost
simultaneously with our travellers, tempted by Hume’s generous promise
to find him a refuge in England from his persecutors. The advent of the
author of the _Social Contract_ and _Émile_ threw Paris into a tumult of
excitement. “People may talk of ancient Greece as they please,” wrote
Hume, full of affection and enthusiasm for his _protégé_, “but no nation
was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much engaged
their attention as Rousseau. Voltaire and everybody else are quite
eclipsed by him.” The philosophers of Paris predicted a quarrel before
they got to Calais, but for some time Hume contrived to manage this
wayward, suspicious genius admirably well, procuring him a pension and a
comfortable establishment in Derbyshire. At last, in June, Rousseau
suddenly lost his head, mastered by the haunting fears of treachery, and
wrote to Hume that his horrible designs were at last found out. For once
in his life Hume lost his temper, and discretion departed from him. He
determined to punish Rousseau’s ingratitude and put himself right in the
eyes of the world. But before taking this step he wrote to consult his
friends in Paris, and Smith sent the following reply:—
“Paris, _6th July 1766_.
“My dear Friend,—I am thoroughly convinced that Rousseau is as great a
rascal as you and as every man here believes him to be. Yet let me beg
of you not to think of publishing anything to the world upon the very
great impertinence which he has been guilty of to you. By refusing the
pension which you had the goodness to solicit for him with his own
consent, he may have thrown, by the baseness of his proceedings, a
little ridicule upon you in the eyes of the court and the ministry.
Stand this ridicule; expose his brutal letter, but without giving it
out of your own hand, so that it may never be printed; and, if you
can, laugh at yourself; and I shall pawn my life that before three
weeks are at an end this little affair which at present gives you so
much uneasiness shall be understood to do you as much honour as
anything that has ever happened to you. By endeavouring to unmask
before the public this hypocritical pedant, you run the risk of
disturbing the tranquillity of your whole life. By letting him alone
he cannot give you a fortnight’s uneasiness. To write against him is,
you may depend upon it, the very thing he wishes you to do. He is in
danger of falling into obscurity in England, and he hopes to make
himself considerable by provoking an illustrious adversary. He will
have a great party, the Church, the Whigs, the Jacobites, the whole
wise English nation, who will love to mortify a Scotchman, and to
applaud a man who has refused a pension from the King. It is not
unlikely, too, that they may pay him very well for having refused it,
and that even he may have had in view this compensation. Your whole
friends here wish you not to write,—the Baron, D’Alembert, Madame
Riccoboni, Mademoiselle Riancourt, M. Turgot, etc. etc. M. Turgot, a
friend every way worthy of you, desired me to recommend this advice to
you in a particular manner as his most earnest entreaty and opinion.
He and I are both afraid that you are surrounded with evil
counsellors, and that the advice of your English _literati_, who are
themselves accustomed to publishing all their little gossiping stories
in newspapers, may have too much influence upon you. Remember me to
Mr. Walpole, and believe me to be with the most sincere affection,
ever yours,
Adam Smith.”
Within six months Hume was sorry that he had not taken this sage advice,
and blamed himself for the “Succinct Exposure,” which had been followed
of course by a cloud of pamphlets. We must be careful not to suppose
from this letter that Smith really had a mean opinion of Rousseau. He
had reviewed with warm but discerning praise the second discourse on the
_Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Mankind_; and in later days
he spoke with reverential emotion of the author of the _Social
Contract_.
Smith was now anxious to return home. To Millar, his publisher, he wrote
early in the autumn:—“Though I am very happy here, I long passionately
to rejoin my old friends, and if I had once got fairly to your side of
the water, I think I should never cross it again. Recommend the same
sober way of thinking to Hume. He is light-hearted, tell him, when he
talks of coming to spend the remainder of his days here or in France.”
Their return was precipitated by a tragedy. Hew Scott, the Duke’s
younger brother, a lad of nineteen, was assassinated in the streets of
Paris on October 19th. Smith and the Duke almost immediately left Paris,
and were in London at the beginning of November. “We returned,” wrote
the Duke to Dugald Stewart, “after having spent near three years
together without the slightest disagreement or coolness, and on my part
with every advantage that could be expected from the society of such a
man. We continued to live in friendship till the hour of his death.”
Besides the substantial advantages of independence, Smith, as we learn
from many of his contemporaries, had gained vastly in manner, address,
and knowledge of the world. Much of his awkwardness had disappeared. In
the bustle of travel and society, he almost forgot how to be
absent-minded.
We have already mentioned a complaint that Smith failed to realise the
utter misery of France or to foresee the Revolution. The second half of
the complaint seems to be an impertinence. He was not called upon to
write out the past, or present, much less the future of France. The
first part of the complaint is more plausible. The _Wealth of Nations_
abounds in illustrations drawn from the French tour, and from these we
certainly get a less melancholy picture than from the pages of Arthur
Young, or from the correspondence of Voltaire, D’Alembert, Turgot and
the rest. But then, Young’s tour was twenty years later, and the French
reformers were thinking exclusively of the stagnant condition of France
in a moving and progressive age. They felt bitterly the dreadful
difference between their France and the France that should have been but
for the impoverishing wars and oppressive misgovernment of Louis XIV.
and his successors. Smith took France as she was, and found her still
one of the richest and most powerful countries of the world. In the
ninth chapter of his first book he compares Holland, England, France,
and Scotland. The first, “in proportion to the extent of its territory
and the number of its people, is a richer country than England.” Its
government can borrow at two per cent.; wages of labour are said to be
higher than in England, and the Dutch trade upon lower profits than any
people in Europe. They have large investments in foreign countries, and
“during the late war the Dutch gained the whole carrying-trade of
France, of which they still retain a very large share.” England comes
next. “France is perhaps in the present times not so rich a country as
England.” Its market rate of interest is generally higher, and so are
the profits of trade; “and it is no doubt upon this account that many
British subjects chuse rather to employ their capitals in a country
where trade is in disgrace than in one where it is highly respected.”
Then he shows that, though France was still richer than Scotland,
Scotland was making far more rapid progress:—
“The wages of labour are lower in France than in England. When you go
from Scotland to England, the difference which you may remark between
the dress and countenance of the common people in the one country and
in the other, sufficiently indicates the difference in their
condition. The contrast is still greater when you return from France.
France, though no doubt a richer country than Scotland, seems not to
be going forward so fast. It is a common and even a popular opinion in
the country, that it is going backwards; an opinion which, I
apprehend, is ill-founded even with regard to France, but which nobody
can possibly entertain with regard to Scotland, who sees the country
now, and who saw it twenty or thirty years ago.”
Misgovernment, it is true, had done its worst in pre-revolutionary
France, but it could not ruin fertile territory and a thrifty
population. At that time the cities of Bordeaux, Lyons, and Marseilles
surpassed in wealth and in the number of their inhabitants Copenhagen,
Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. Several of the provincial
parliaments offered as fair a field for legal talent as the Courts of
Dublin and Edinburgh. After the landed nobility, the Church, the King,
his ministers, intendants, and a host of minor officials had taken their
rents and revenues and stipends, fortunes were still left for rapacious
financiers and rascally farmers-general. Smith saw all this and
explained it with his usual lucidity. But he never mistook wealth for
welfare. He applied his favourite test of the condition of the labouring
poor. Though France was a much richer country, with a better soil and
climate than Scotland, and “better stocked with all those things which
it requires a long time to raise up and accumulate, such as great towns
and convenient and well-built houses, both in town and country,” yet the
poor were worse off. In England the common people all [_sic_] wore
leather shoes, in Scotland the men only; in France both men and women
went about sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes barefooted. He finds
the reason for these things in unfair and ill-judged taxation, and he
devotes many pages to a severe scrutiny of the French system.
Considering that France had some twenty-four millions of people, thrice
the number of Great Britain, that it was naturally richer and had been
“much longer in a state of improvement and cultivation,” it might have
been expected that the French Government could have raised a revenue of
thirty millions with as little inconvenience as a revenue of ten
millions was raised in Great Britain. In 1765 and 1766 the revenue
actually paid into the French Treasury did not amount to fifteen
millions sterling. Yet the taxes were so devised and collected that the
French people, it was generally acknowledged, were much more oppressed
by taxes than the people of Great Britain. “France, however, is
certainly the great Empire in Europe which, after that of Great Britain,
enjoys the mildest and most indulgent government!” Smith had not only
diagnosed the disease; his French studies and his friendship with
enlightened men like Turgot, Quesnai, and Morellet had enabled him to
propose remedies. “The finances of France,” he observes in the second
chapter of his fifth book, “seem in their present state to admit of
three very obvious reformations.” First, he would abolish the _taille_
and the capitation, balancing the loss by increasing the number of
_vingtièmes_ or land-tax. Second, “by rendering the _gabelle_, the
_aides_, the _traites_, the taxes upon tobacco, and all the different
customs and excises, uniform in all the different parts of the kingdom,
those taxes might be levied at much less expense, and the interior
commerce of the kingdom might be rendered as free as that of England.”
Thirdly, by subjecting all taxes to the immediate inspection and
direction of government, the exorbitant profits of the farmers-general
might be added to the revenue of the State. But, he adds, with the same
scepticism that colours his view of the prospects of Free Trade in
England, the opposition arising from the private interests of
individuals would probably be effectual in preventing all three parts of
the scheme of reformation. Yet half a century after the appearance of
the _Wealth of Nations_ one of its annotators was able to write: “Taxes
in France are now placed almost on the footing suggested by Dr. Smith.
The _taille_ and _capitation_ have been abolished, and replaced by the
_contribution foncière_; the different taxes have been rendered equal in
all the provinces of the kingdom, and they are chiefly collected by
officers appointed by the Government.” Nor is the connection between the
book and the reforms either fanciful or remote. “It was, I avow—to the
shame of my first instructors,” wrote “le bon Mollien,” Napoleon’s
favourite minister of finance, “this book of Adam Smith, then so little
known, that taught me better to appreciate the multitude of points at
which public finance touches every family, and raises judges of it in
every household.”