POLITICS AND STUDY, 1766-76
Adam Smith, as we have seen, had begun to write his immortal book at
Toulouse in the summer of 1764 “in order to pass away the time.” But
even after his return to London, in November 1766, more than nine years
were still to pass before the _Wealth of Nations_ could be placed in the
publisher’s hands. All this time the book was his chief occupation, and
but for the light which an occasional letter throws upon his studies,
the story of Smith’s life during these nine years might almost be
written in as many lines. For about six months he remained in London,
where he mingled with men, collected books and material for his
treatise, and saw the third edition of his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_
through the press.
In an undated letter to Strahan, who was now a partner in Millar’s
publishing firm, about the title-page to this volume, the author desired
to be called “simply Adam Smith, without any addition either before or
behind.” He had received the honorary degree of LL.D. before leaving
Glasgow, but he did not like to be called Dr. Smith, and seldom used the
title. But politics, which had just taken a strange turn, soon commanded
his attention; and a curious letter from Smith to Shelburne (February
12, 1767) raises for a moment the curtain that divides the spectator
from the actors, and allows us to survey the scene behind which the most
enlightened member of the Government was working to introduce common
sense into the colonial policy of Great Britain. It was a scene, too, in
the greatest political drama of Adam Smith’s lifetime, which left deep,
decipherable marks on the pages of the _Wealth of Nations_.
While Smith was discussing the new principles with the philosophers of
Paris, an active spirit of dissatisfaction had been spreading in distant
communities of men. The spirit of liberty seemed to have walked forth
over the face of the earth and to threaten revolutions in every part.
The Georgians under the valiant Heraclius had revolted against their
ignominious tribute to the Turkish seraglios. The tyrannies of a French
governor had provoked insurrections in St. Domingo. The first tramp of a
revolutionary march was heard in the Spanish dominions of South America;
above all, the long and smouldering discontent in our own American
colonies had suddenly been fanned into a blaze. But Europe, whose policy
had been the source of all these woes, was for once in a peaceful mood.
The Empress of Russia was busy entertaining her savants. The Swede was
occupied at home, and the tall Pomeranian was content to drill. A
financial crisis in France and England made the two Governments
friendly; and though there were bloody feuds and insurrections in
Turkey, Poland, and Spain, the historian of Europe, surveying the year
1766 and comparing it with its predecessors, marked it with a white
chalk and fancied he could at last spell a drift towards peace in the
hollow states and bankrupt empires of the old world. Ambition indeed
seldom stoops to calculations, but the most acquisitive imperialist
seeing multitudes of unemployed, food at famine prices, and manufactures
at a standstill, began to wonder whether after all the conquests of the
war had been worth such a price. For once the governing classes were
sobered and were ready to make some grudging atonement for one of their
worst blunders. The same commercial stress which constrained the French
King to pacify his parliaments inclined the parliament of Great Britain
to appease the colonial assemblies.
The session of 1766 was one of the longest, most momentous, and stirring
within living memory. It had begun, as we have said, with sharp distress
at home, and that distress had been aggravated by the disturbances in
America; for the colonists, incensed by the Stamp Act, refused to pay
for English goods (to the value of several millions) with which their
shops and warehouses were stocked. No wonder, then, that in all parts of
the realm traders and manufacturers did their best to persuade the
Rockingham ministry to adopt conciliatory measures. Parliament was
besieged by petitions from the merchants of London, Bristol, Lancaster,
Liverpool, Hull, Glasgow, and most of the trading and manufacturing
towns in the kingdom, setting forth the great damage done to their trade
by the new laws and regulations made for America. They pointed out that
the Stamp Act and other harassing legislation had not only sown a crop
of discontent in the colonies, but had already produced many
bankruptcies at home and were rapidly leading to widespread distress.
A contemporary writer of great power tells us that no matter of debate
was ever more ably or learnedly handled in both Houses than the colonial
policy which Lord Rockingham and his colleagues laid before Parliament.
Those who denied the right of taxing the colonies cited Locke and
Selden, Harrington and Puffendorf, to show that the very foundation and
ultimate point in view of all government is the good of the society.
They inferred from the Magna Charta and Bill of Rights, and from the
whole history of our constitution, that no British subject can be taxed
save by himself or his own representative; and they further quoted in
support of their argument the constitutions of the Tyrian colonies in
Africa, and of the Greek colonies in Asia. On this last head the
supporters of the Stamp Act (Charles Townshend’s fatal measure)
observed, sensibly enough, that arguments about the British colonies
drawn from the colonies of antiquity were a mere useless display of
learning, for the Tyrian and Greek colonies were planned on a totally
different system. Besides, they said, the Romans were the first to form
a regular colonial system, and Rome’s jurisdiction over her colonies was
“boundless and uncontrollable.” As for Locke, Selden, and Puffendorf,
they were only _natural_ lawyers, and their refinements were little to
the purpose in arguing the law and practice of a particular
constitution.
The Rockinghams carried the Repeal of the Stamp Act; but the effect of
this wise and generous policy was marred by a Declaratory Act for better
securing the dependence of His Majesty’s dominions in America, which set
forth the supremacy of Parliament over all the colonies and its right to
impose taxes. At the end of July, after the conclusion of a satisfactory
session, the Marquis of Rockingham was suddenly, to the surprise of the
nation, ejected from office by the king, and a new ministry of strangely
assorted talents, with Chatham at its head, in which Shelburne, Charles
Townshend, the Duke of Grafton, and Camden were the leading figures, was
pushed into office. Accordingly when Adam Smith returned to England he
found not only that those commercial, fiscal, and colonial questions in
which he was so deeply versed were the first questions in politics, but
also that the two statesmen with whom he was most intimate occupied two
of the most important posts—for Charles Townshend was Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and Shelburne was a Secretary of State.
These events sufficiently explain why a real statesman like Shelburne,
one of the leading members of the ministry, was seeking information at
the beginning of the session of 1767 upon colonial topics. It seems
astonishing to us now that the Roman analogy should have so exercised
the minds of practical statesmen; but Greek and Latin were the only
subjects in those days with which educated members of the governing
classes were sure to be familiar, and it was to these men in Parliament
that political arguments were exclusively addressed. Probably Shelburne
wanted classical precedents to check his colleagues from reverting to a
coercive policy, and was anxious to meet the argument from Rome that had
been used in the debates of the previous year. At any rate, he had asked
help of Adam Smith, and received the following reply, which was more
helpful than it should have been: “Within these two days I have looked
over everything I can find relating to the Roman colonys. I have not yet
found anything of much consequence.... They seem to have been very
independent. Of thirty colonys of whom the Romans demanded troops in the
second Carthaginian War, twelve refused to obey. They frequently
rebelled and joined the enemies of the republic; being in some measure
little independent republics, they naturally followed the interests
which their peculiar situation pointed out to them.” His first studies
on Roman colonisation had a decidedly whiggish complexion. Further
reading led him to the juster view expressed in the _Wealth of Nations_,
that a Roman colony was quite different from the autonomous Greek
ἀποικία, “at best a sort of corporation, which, though it had the power
of enacting byelaws for its own government, was at all times subject to
the correction, jurisdiction, and legislative authority of the mother
country.” And this explains why the Greek colonies were so much more
prosperous: “As they were altogether independent of the mother city,
they were at liberty to manage their own affairs in the way they judged
was most suitable to their own interests.” But before the colonial
debates of 1767 came on Adam Smith had left London.
On March 25th he wrote from Lower Grosvenor Street to Thomas Cadell, one
of the partners in Millar’s firm, which combined bookselling with
publishing, to ask him to insure four boxes of books for £200, and
despatch them to Kincaid, his publisher in Edinburgh.[24] He probably
stayed in London till the third of May, when the Duke of Buccleuch was
married. He would then pick up his valuable parcels in Edinburgh and go
on without delay to Kirkcaldy to rejoin his mother and his cousin, Miss
Jane Douglas, from whom he had been separated for more than two years.
His first letter to Hume (Kirkcaldy, June 9th) describes his daily life.
“My business here is study, in which I have been very deeply engaged for
about a month past. My amusements are long solitary walks by the
seaside. You may judge how I spend my time. I feel myself, however,
extremely happy, comfortable, and contented. I never was perhaps more so
in all my life.” He goes on to ask about his friends in London, and
wishes to be remembered to all, particularly to Mr. Adams the architect,
and to Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu. He inquires about Rousseau: “Has he gone
abroad, because he cannot contrive to get himself sufficiently
persecuted in Great Britain?” He also wants to know the meaning of “the
bargain that your ministry have made with the India Company,” and
rejoices that they have refused to prolong its charter. At the end of
August Smith paid a visit to Dalkeith House to help the newly married
couple to entertain their tenants and friends on the occasion of the
Duke’s birthday. “The Duke and Dutchess of Buccleugh,” he wrote to Hume
on September 15th, “have been here now for almost a fortnight. They
begin to open their house on Monday next, and I flatter myself, will
both be very agreeable to the people of this country. I am not sure that
I have ever seen a more agreeable woman than the Dutchess. I am sorry
that you are not here, because I am sure you would be perfectly in love
with her. I shall probably be here some weeks.”
Dr. Carlyle was among the guests at Dalkeith House, and in his
autobiography takes some credit to himself for the success of the
proceedings. “Adam Smith,” he says, “was but ill qualified to promote
the jollity of a birthday,” and but for Carlyle’s exertions the meeting
might have been dissolved without even drinking the proper toasts. His
conclusion is that the Duke and Duchess should have brought down a man
of “more address,” and he leaves little doubt as to who that man should
have been. Incidentally Dr. Carlyle has to admit that the new Duke
proved a great credit to his tutor. The Buccleuch family had always been
good landlords, but Duke Henry “surpassed them all as much in justice
and humanity as he did in superiority of understanding and good sense.”
Lord Brougham relates a story which illustrates what Carlyle meant by
“want of address.” On one occasion, during dinner at Dalkeith, our
philosopher broke out into a discourse on some political matters of the
day, and was bestowing a variety of severe epithets on a certain
statesman, when he suddenly perceived the statesman’s nearest relative
sitting opposite, and stopped; but he was heard to mutter, “Deil care,
deil care, it’s all true!”
After two months at Dalkeith he returned to his mother and his studies,
and remained for the next six years, so far as we know, uninterruptedly
at Kirkcaldy, save for an occasional visit to Edinburgh, whither he was
constantly and with much importunity invited by his friend Hume. Dugald
Stewart remarks that this retirement “formed a striking contrast to the
unsettled mode of life he had been for some time accustomed to, but was
so congenial to his natural disposition, and to his first habits, that
it was with the utmost difficulty he was ever persuaded to leave it.” He
was never happier than now, living with his mother in Kirkcaldy;
“occupied habitually in intense study, but unbending his mind at times
in the company of some of his old school-fellows, whose sober wishes’
had attached them to the place of their birth. In the society of such
men Mr. Smith delighted; and to them he was endeared, not only by his
simple and unassuming manners, but by the perfect knowledge they all
possessed of those domestic virtues which had distinguished him from his
infancy.”[25]
The High Street of Kirkcaldy contained some excellent houses, and that
occupied by Smith was one of the best. It was large and substantially
built, four stories high, with twenty windows facing into the High
Street. It had a frontage of about fifty feet, and a garden of the same
width ran back a hundred yards or more eastwards down to the sands. On
either side of the garden was a high wall, and on the north side a
narrow public footpath divided Smith’s garden from his neighbour’s. This
quaint passage, enclosed by two high walls, is still called Adam Smith’s
Close.
The house was pulled down in 1844. Robert Chambers, who saw it in the
twenties, noticed a mark on the wall of Smith’s study, and was told that
the philosopher used to compose standing. As he dictated to his clerk he
would rub his wig sideways against the wall, and so left a mark which,
says the antiquary regretfully, “remained till lately, when the room
being painted anew it was unfortunately destroyed.” Hume, who had just
removed to James’s Court, Edinburgh, wrote to his friend in August 1769
to tempt him from his retreat:—
“I am glad to have come within sight of you, and to have a view of
Kirkaldy from my windows: but as I wish also to be within speaking
terms of you, I wish we could concert measures for that purpose. I am
mortally sick at sea, and regard with horror and a kind of hydrophobia
the great gulf that lies between us. I am also tired of travelling, as
much as you ought naturally to be of staying at home. I therefore
propose to you to come hither and pass some days with me in this
solitude. I want to know what you have been doing, and propose to
exact a rigorous account of the method in which you have employed
yourself during your retreat. I am positive you are in the wrong in
many of your speculations, especially where you have the misfortune to
differ from me. All these are reasons for our meeting, and I wish you
would make me some reasonable proposal for that purpose. There is no
habitation on the island of Inchkeith, otherwise I should challenge
you to meet me on that spot, and neither of us ever to leave the place
till we were fully agreed on all points of controversy.”
By the following February the book had made such progress that Hume was
expecting to see his friend in Edinburgh for a day or two on his way to
London, where Smith already talked of arranging for immediate
publication. He changed his mind, however, though he went to Edinburgh
in June, where with the Duke of Buccleuch and John Hallam he received
the freedom of the city. In January 1772 we find the friends
corresponding about Italian literature. Smith recommends Hume to read
Metastasio. Hume replies that he is reading Italian prose, again reminds
him of the promised visit, and refuses to take the excuse of ill-health,
which he calls a subterfuge invented by indolence and love of solitude.
“Indeed, my dear Smith, if you continue to hearken to complaints of this
nature, you will cut yourself out entirely from human society to the
great loss of both parties.”
This year was marked by a severe commercial crisis; nearly all the banks
in Edinburgh came to grief, and the Duke of Buccleuch and other friends
of Smith were in the greatest difficulty. In a letter to Pulteney
(September 5, 1772), Smith says, though he has himself suffered no loss
in the public calamities, some of his friends have been deeply
concerned, and he has been much occupied about the best method of
extricating them. He continues:—
“In the book which I am now preparing for the press, I have treated
fully and distinctly of every part of the subject which you have
recommended to me; and I intended to send you some extracts from it;
but upon looking them over I find that they are too much interwoven
with other parts of the work to be easily separated from it. I have
the same opinion of Sir James Steuart’s book[26] that you have.
Without once mentioning it, I flatter myself that any fallacious
principle in it will meet with a clear and distinct confutation in
mine.... My book would have been ready for the press by the beginning
of this winter, but interruptions occasioned partly by bad health,
arising from want of amusement and from thinking too much upon one
thing, and partly by the avocations above mentioned, will oblige me to
retard its publication for a few months longer.”
It appears that Pulteney had recommended the Directors of the East India
Company to appoint Smith as a commissioner to examine their
administration and accounts. Smith says he is much honoured and obliged:
“You have acted in your old way, of doing your friends a good office
behind their backs, pretty much as other people do them a bad one. There
is no labour of any kind which you can impose upon me which I will not
readily undertake.” He believes he is in agreement with Pulteney as to
the proper remedy for the disorders of the coin in Bengal. The
commission, however, was not appointed. No reforms worth mentioning were
made, and the _Wealth of Nations_ teems with severe criticisms of the
Company.[27]
A month after this letter to Pulteney, Hume drafts a little programme
for the completion and publication of the work, evidently in reply to
one of Smith’s dilatory notes: “I should agree to your reasoning if I
could trust your resolution. Come hither for some weeks about Christmas;
dissipate yourself a little; return to Kirkcaldy; finish your work
before autumn; go to London; print it; return and settle in this town,
which suits your studious, independent turn even better than London.
Execute this plan faithfully, and I forgive you.”
Before following our hero to London with the fateful manuscript, we must
repeat a local tradition belonging to this period which is recorded in
Dr. Charles Rogers’s _Social Life in Scotland_. One Sunday morning
Smith, falling into an unusually profound reverie (brought on perhaps by
thought upon the disorders of the Bengal currency), walked into his
garden in an old dressing-gown. Instead of returning to the house, he
made his way by a small path into the turnpike road, and eventually
marched into the town of Dunfermline, fifteen miles from his home. The
people there were flocking to church, and the bustle restored the
philosopher to his wits. In April 1773, after six years of seclusion, he
at last left home with his manuscript, intending no doubt to have it
printed and published in the course of a few months. He broke his
journey at Edinburgh, and there wrote a formal letter constituting Hume
his executor:—
“As I have left the care of all my literary papers to you, I must tell
you that except those which I carry along with me, there are none
worth the publishing but a fragment of a great work which contains a
history of the astronomical systems that were successively in fashion
down to the time of Descartes. Whether that might not be published as
a fragment of an intended juvenile work I leave entirely to your
judgment, tho’ I begin to suspect myself that there is more refinement
than solidity in some parts of it. This little work you will find in a
thin folio paper book in my writing-desk in my book-room. All the
other loose paper which you will find either in that desk or within
the glass folding-doors of a bureau which stands in my bedroom,
together with about eighteen thin paper folio books, which you will
likewise find within the same glass folding-doors, I desire may be
destroyed without any examination. Unless I die very suddenly, I shall
take care that the Papers I carry with me shall be carefully sent to
you.”
He reached London in May, and seems to have remained there until after
the publication of the _Wealth of Nations_ in March 1776. But the
records of his stay are of the slightest. There is left but one
important letter, a long and earnest plea against the principle of
monopoly in medical education. It was to his friend Dr. Cullen. Some of
the Scottish universities had been conferring medical degrees without
examination on incompetent men. The Duke of Buccleuch was willing to
join in a petition to Parliament to stop the mischief. Smith’s views
upon the subject are highly characteristic. He considers that the Scotch
universities, though of course capable of amendment, are “without
exception the best seminaries of learning that are to be found anywhere
in Europe.” A visitation (that is, a Royal Commission) would be the only
proper means of reforming them:—
“Before any wise man, however, would apply for the appointment of so
arbitrary a tribunal in order to improve what is already, upon the
whole, very well, he ought certainly to know with some degree of
certainty, first, who are likely to be appointed visitors, and
secondly, what plan of reformation those visitors are likely to
follow; but in the present multiplicity of pretenders to some share in
the prudential management of Scotch affairs, these are two points
which, I apprehend, neither you nor I, nor the Solicitor-General nor
the Duke of Buccleugh, can possibly know anything about.”
Perhaps in the future a better opportunity might present itself. An
admonition, or other irregular means of interference, was out of the
question. Dr. Cullen had proposed that no person should be admitted to
examination for his degrees unless he brought a certificate of his
having studied at least two years in some university. Smith (who was
himself at this very time, with Gibbon, attending a course given by Dr.
William Hunter) objects: “would not such a regulation be oppressive upon
all private teachers, such as the Hunters, Hewson, Fordyce, etc.? The
scholars of such teachers surely merit whatever honour or advantage a
degree can confer much more than the greater part of those who have
spent many years in some universities.... When a man has learnt his
lesson very well, it surely can be of little importance where or from
whom he has learnt it.”
The last sentence is one that men should lay to heart. It is one of
those obvious truths which few have the candour to assert and still
fewer the courage to act upon. A very clever person, on reading the
_Wealth of Nations_, complained that it seemed to be little more than a
well arranged succession of truisms. Yet for the want of those truths
mankind has stumbled along in the dark from the beginning. “The less you
restrain trade, the more you will have.” A truism, if you like, but its
denial has caused an infinitude of avoidable suffering. “If a man has
learnt his lesson well, never mind about his university or his degree.”
A truism, without doubt, but one that is constantly neglected and
despised to the grave detriment of justice and learning.
Smith held that the effect of degrees injudiciously conferred was not
very considerable. “That doctors are sometimes fools as well as other
people is not in the present time one of those profound secrets which is
known only to the learned.” Apothecaries and old herb-women practised
physic without complaint, because they only poisoned the poor people.
“And if here and there a graduated doctor should be as ignorant as an
old woman, can great harm be done?” Smith rubbed in his moral about
university degrees with evident relish, comparing degrees which could
only be conferred on students of a certain standing to the statutes of
apprenticeship and other corporation laws, which had expelled arts and
manufactures from so many boroughs.
In boroughs, monopoly had made work bad and dear; in universities, it
had led to quackery, imposture, and exorbitant fees. One remedy for the
inconveniences of town corporations had been found in the outgrowth of
manufacturing villages; and, in a similar way, the private interest of
some poor professors of physic had done something to check the
exorbitance of rich universities, which made a course of eleven or even
sixteen years necessary before a student could become a Doctor of Law,
Physic, or Divinity. The poor universities could not stipulate for
residence, and sold their degrees to any one who would buy them, often
without even a decent examination. “The less trouble they gave, the more
money they got, and I certainly do not pretend to vindicate so dirty a
practice.” Nevertheless these cheap degrees, though extremely
disagreeable to graduates whose degrees had cost much time and expense,
were of advantage to the public in that they multiplied doctors, and so
sunk fees. “Had the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge been able to
maintain themselves in the exclusive privilege of graduating all the
doctors who could practise in England, the price of feeling a pulse
might by this time have risen from two and three guineas, the price
which it has now happily arrived at, to double or triple that sum; and
English physicians might, and probably would, have been at the same time
the most ignorant and quackish in the world.”[28]
This trenchant reasoning seems to have prevailed. At any rate, the idea
of obtaining governmental interference was dropped. Some time
afterwards, however, Dr. Cullen took an opportunity of pointing out that
there is a good deal more to be said for the corporate regulation of
medicine than for ordinary trade guilds. Adam Smith probably pushed his
argument for free trade in medical degrees to this extreme mainly from
anxiety to prevent the interference of an unwise Government in his
favourite universities, though partly no doubt because he thought
fraudulent competition better than none, partly again for love of
maintaining a paradox. A more spacious handling of this theme is found
in the _Wealth of Nations_, more especially in the famous tenth chapter
of the first book, with its account of “Inequalities occasioned by the
Policy of Europe,” and in a later criticism of universities.
During his stay in London Smith was in close intercourse with the ruling
kings of art, science, and letters, as well as with some of the leading
statesmen. We hear of him in January 1775 with Johnson, Burke, and
Gibbon at a dinner given by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In December, Horace
Walpole met him at Beauclerk’s. With Gibbon, as we have seen, he
attended Dr. William Hunter’s lectures on Anatomy. Hume’s letters to him
were addressed to the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street, a club
kept by a clever sister of Bishop Douglas and much favoured by Scots in
London, though Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, and Richard Cumberland were
also members. In 1775 he was elected a member of the famous Literary
Club which met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street. The members present
on the night of his election were Gibbon, Reynolds, Beauclerk, and Sir
William Jones, three of whom appear in Dean Barnard’s lines:—
“If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,
Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em
In form select and terse;
Jones teach me modesty and Greek,
Smith how to think, Burke how to speak,
And Beauclerk to converse.”
The still small voice of a detractor was heard: Boswell wrote to a
friend that with Smith’s accession the club had “lost its select merit.”
All this time the fatal quarrel with America was drawing near. Upon
this, as upon all other economical questions, Smith was in full sympathy
with Burke, “the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects
exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed
between us.” This compliment, as we know, was highly valued by the
author of the speech on American Taxation. But Smith had another friend
and counsellor for his critical chapter on the colonies and their
administration. Dr. Franklin is reported to have said, that “the
celebrated Adam Smith when writing his _Wealth of Nations_ was in the
habit of bringing chapter after chapter as he composed it to himself,
Dr. Price, and others of the literati”; that he would then patiently
hear their observations, sometimes submitting to write whole chapters
anew, and even to reverse some of his propositions. Franklin’s remark
has probably been inaccurately reported. We know from one of Smith’s
letters that he had not a high opinion of Dr. Price as an economist; but
Parton, Franklin’s biographer, justly points to the countless colonial
illustrations with which the _Wealth of Nations_ abounds, and to that
intimate knowledge of American conditions which Franklin was of all men
the best fitted to impart. And there is internal evidence in the text
itself that the important chapter on the colonies in Book IV. was
written, or at least considerably enlarged, in the years 1773 and 1774.
Franklin’s papers contained problems which seemed to have been jotted
down at meetings of philosophers, and no doubt Price as well as Smith
would take a prominent part. At Glasgow Smith must have heard a good
deal about the colonial trade; but colonial policy did not become the
question of the day until after he left, and in the lectures there is
nothing about the colonies. We may conjecture that the idea of devoting
a large section of the book to the history and economics of colonial
dominions did not strike him until after his return from France. The
great debates of 1766 and of the early seventies, the intimate
acquaintance with British policy and finance in large outline and in
official detail, which his friendships with Burke and Franklin, with
Oswald, Pulteney, and Shelburne helped him to acquire, and his eagerness
to prevent war and to discredit expenditure on colonial establishments,
or indeed upon any provinces which could not support themselves,
conspired to make colonial policy and imperial expenditure large and
imposing themes in the _Wealth of Nations_.