Nicholas Phillipson

by Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

  *

  By 1763 Smith had developed a system of moral philosophy and a system of jurisprudence that threw new philosophical light on the idea of improvement which lay at the heart of the culture of enlightened Scotland, and in doing so he transformed European jurisprudence. He had shown that commerce and improvement were natural to human beings, a function of their natural indigence, their need for society and their love of the satisfactions improvement brings. He had orchestrated Hume’s claim that commerce and the arts of exchange had a natural tendency to make men sociable and had shown that encouraging the progress of the division of labour was the best and surest way of making men sociable and society secure. And he had done all of this as his professorial career at Glasgow was reaching its climax. The university had just recognized its debt to him by awarding him a Doctorate of Laws in October 1762, in recognition of his ‘universally acknowledged Reputation in letters and particularly that he has taught jurisprudence these many years in this University with great applause and advantage to the Society’.44 On the other hand it had also taken a toll on his health. As early as 1753, Hume had warned him that ‘the Fatigues of your Class have exhausted you too much, and that you require more Leizure and Rest than you allow yourself’.45 In 1760 he was clearly in bad shape, run down through overwork and what sounds like recurrent flu. He told Lord Shelburne, only partly jokingly, that his friend and doctor William Cullen had warned him ‘that if I had any hope of surviving next winter I must ride at least five hundred miles before the beginning of September’. This was expensive advice, which he took, adding mordantly: ‘If, indeed, I run down as fast for these ten days to come as I have done for these ten days past, I think I shall save myself the trouble and My Mother, who is my heir, the expence of following my freinds prescription.’46 Overwork, signs of physical wear and tear, a vast new philosophical opportunity, and the renewed offer of serious patronage from an important Scottish family convinced Smith that it was time to move on. A year later, on 8 November he resigned, to take up an appointment as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch.

  9

  Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch in Europe 1764–6

  The success of the Theory of Moral Sentiments had not only made Smith’s philosophical reputation in Scotland and beyond; it had established his reputation as a teacher of the first rank, and was to play its part in ending his academic career. In April 1759, Hume had reported that Charles Townshend, the young Duke of Buccleuch’s stepfather and guardian, ‘is so taken with the Performance, that he said to Oswald he wou’d put the Duke of Buccleugh under the Authors Care, and woud endeavour to make it worth his while to accept of that Charge’. Hume wanted Townshend to follow Shelburne’s example by sending Buccleuch to Glasgow, ‘For I coud not hope, that he coud offer you any Terms, which woud tempt you to renounce your Professorship: But I missd him.’1 Nothing happened, but the offer was serious and was soon to be revived.

  Townshend was one of the most glamorous and ambitious politicians of his generation, a brilliant House of Commons orator of whom great things were expected. His marriage to Buccleuch’s mother, the Countess of Dalkeith, in 1755 meant that he was now closely connected with a family with vast estates in Scotland and England and was in a position to use his marriage and his connection with the young Duke to bolster his own political position. Townshend and the Countess made their first visit to Scotland in the summer of 1759 and did it in style, holding large and lavish weekly receptions at Dalkeith Palace for the Scottish establishment and the Edinburgh literati. Townshend was amusing and good company, even though he was apt to put his foot in it, on one occasion gratuitously offending straitlaced opinion by making fun of the king. The Select Society elected him a member in order to hear his famous oratory, only to find that ‘Like a Meteor Charles Dazzled for a Moment, But the Brilliancy soon faded away, and left no very strong Impression’, as Alexander Carlyle put it.2 It was during this visit that Smith first met him. He seems to have agreed in principle to tutor Buccleuch when he was older; he was thirteen at the time and had only just begun to settle down at Eton. And to show his willingness, Smith agreed to order a small collection of thirty-one Latin and Greek texts to prepare the boy for his future education. The collection was notable for the number of literary and historical texts Smith prescribed, in addition to appropriate texts on ethics. A menu of Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Euripides and Theophrastus, as well as Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus – one copy of the latter in large print, the other a pocket edition – was a diet of literary as well as Stoic and Ciceronian texts to sensitize the Duke to questions about character and public duty in an imperfect world. Smith also took care to include in the collection the sumptuous and expensive Foulis Press edition of Homer, one of the glories of modern Scottish editing and book production.3

  Townshend renewed his offer on 25 October 1763. His tone was friendly, serious and businesslike. This time there was no talk of the Duke becoming a student at Glasgow.

  Dear Sir,

  The time now drawing near when the Duke of Buccleugh intends to go abroad, I take the liberty of renewing the subject to you: that if you should still have the same disposition to travel with him I may have the satisfaction of informing Lady Dalkeith and His Grace of it, and of congratulating them upon an event which I know that they, as well as myself, have so much at heart. The Duke is now at Eton: He will remain there until Christmass. He will then spend some short time in London, that he may be presented at Court, and not pass instantaneously from school to a foreign country; but it were to be wished He should not be long in Town, exposed to the habits and companions of London, before his mind has been more formed and better guarded by education and experience.

  I do not enter at this moment upon the subject of establishment, because if you have no objection to the situation, I know we cannot differ about the terms. On the contrary, you will find me more sollicitous than yourself to make the connection with Buccleugh as satisfactory and advantageous to you as I am persuaded it will be essentially beneficial to him.

  The Duke of Buccleugh has lately made great progress both in his knowledge of ancient languages and in his general taste for composition. With these improvements his amusement from reading and his love of instruction have naturally increased. He has sufficient talents: a very manly temper, and an integrity of heart and reverence for truth, which in a person of his rank and fortune are the firmest foundation of weight in life and uniform greatness. If it should be agreeable to you to finish his education, and mould these excellent materials into a settled character, I make no doubt but he will return to his family and country the very man our fondest hopes have fancied him.

  I go to Town next Friday, and should be obliged to you for your answer to this letter. I am, with sincere affection and esteem, dear sir, your most faithful and most obedient humble servant,

  C. Townshend.

  Lady Dalkeith presents her compliments to you.4

  Townshend’s terms were extremely generous – a salary of £500 to be followed by an annual pension of £300 for the rest of his life, as compared with Smith’s professorial income of between £150 and £300 per year. Moreover, as Townshend had indicated and as Smith was to find to his considerable profit, the Buccleuch connection would help to pave the way to public office, a well-paid place on the Scottish Customs Board. It was not an offer to be refused. Smith accepted promptly and unequivocally, warning the university on 8 November of his intention to resign his professorship. As he told Hume, the only outstanding problem was finishing his current jurisprudence course. The matter was quickly resolved in the conventional manner by arranging for his assistant, Thomas Young, a young man from Fife about whom nothing is known, to stand in for him.

  Smith’s career as a university teacher ended with a pleasing incident. He was determined repay the fees he thought he owed his students for not completing the course. The students would have none of it.

  But Mr Smith was not to be bent from his purpose. After warmly expressing his
feelings of gratitude, and the strong sense he had of the regard shewn to him by his young friends, he told them, this was a matter betwixt him and his own mind, and that he could not rest satisfied unless he performed what he deemed right and proper. ‘You must not refuse me this satisfaction. Nay, by heavens, gentlemen, you shall not;’ and seizing by the coat the young man who stood next to him, he thrust the money into his pocket, and then pushed him from him. The rest saw it was in vain to contest the matter, and were obliged to let him take his own way.5

  He left for London in January 1764. It was a clean break with his academic past, underlined by his refusal to take part in the hotly contested election to appoint his successor, and in spite of cries for help from old friends like William Cullen and John Millar who feared that his chair and much he had stood for would be undermined by the appointment of the favourite and successful candidate, Thomas Reid, Hume’s most powerful and influential critic. Smith would not return to Glasgow until 1784.

  Smith met his new pupil for the first time in London and they travelled together to France, arriving in Paris on 13 February. It was the start of a genuinely close friendship that was to last for the rest of Smith’s life. After Smith’s death Buccleuch told Dugald Stewart, ‘In October 1766, we returned to London, after having spent near three years together, without the slightest disagreement or coolness 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; and I shall always remain with the impression of having lost a friend whom I loved and respected, not only for his great talents, but for every private virtue.’6 Like Smith’s previous student Thomas Fitzmaurice, Buccleuch was an Etonian, but he had none of the cockiness and self-assurance Smith had found in his earlier aristocratic pupil. His childhood had not been happy, having been ‘almost neglected by my mother, [and] neglected in every respect as to my learning’ by the masters of his first school. He might have added that he had grown up in the shadow of two notably assured and self-confident siblings. It was Townshend who had insisted on sending him to Eton and, the Duke wrote, ‘I must confess, however little I was afterwards obliged to him, he then did me a service that amply made up for every future inattention to my affairs.’7 Buccleuch actively distrusted his stepfather’s plans for turning him into a ‘hereditary senator’ who would be able to enter national politics under his direction. It must have been disappointing that Townshend had not taken the obvious step of asking his stepson’s much-liked Eton tutor to take him on the Grand Tour and he probably regarded the appointment of an academic grandee like Smith with some apprehension.8

  Smith’s appointment did not pass without comment in Edinburgh, for while no one doubted his ability as a professor there were questions to be asked about his suitability as a mentor for a young nobleman who had to be groomed in the courtly skills expected of his rank. Smith’s French was poor and his manners were decidedly awkward. Carlyle thought he ‘still appear’d very unfit for the intercourse of the World as a Travelling Tutor’, and the lawyer and antiquarian Sir David Dalrymple agreed, commenting that ‘Mr Charles Townshend will make a very indifferent compagnon de voyage out of a very able professor of ethics. Mr Smith has extensive knowledge and in particular has much of what may be termed constitutional knowledge, but he is awkward and has so bad an ear that he will never learn to express himself intelligibly in French.’9 Even David Hume thought it worth warning his friend the Comtesse de Boufflers that ‘his sedentary recluse life may have hurt his air and appearance, as a man of the world’.10

  But Buccleuch’s character mattered much more to Townshend than his manners and, like Shelburne, he was convinced that Smith was the right man to make a statesman of his stepson, a point he underlined in June 1765.

  Mr. Smith, among many other advantages, possesses that of being deeply read in the constitution & laws of your own country: he is ingenious, without being over-refin’d; he is general, without being too systematical in his notions of our government, and from him, you will grow to be a grounded politician in a short course of study. When I say a politician, I do not use the word in the common acceptance, but rather as a phrase less severe, for that reason more proper to your age, than statesman, tho’ the one is the beginning of the other, and they differ chiefly as this is the work of study, & that the same work finish’d by experience & a course of office. Mr Smith will make you a politician, and time will afterwards, in your example, demonstrate the truth of my opinion.11

  Toulouse, the second city of France, was chosen as a suitable place for the intensive education Smith and Townshend had in store for the Duke for the next eighteen months. It was a choice almost certainly made with the advice of Hume, and his kinsman, the Abbé Colbert, Vicar-General of Toulouse, who undertook to introduce them to local society and probably to arrange suitable accommodation. Thereafter, Smith was to accompany his pupil to Geneva, Paris and Germany. By then, the Duke would have reached his majority and be ready to take up personal management of his estates and his career and Smith would have become a close friend and mentor who had introduced him to a much more congenial conception of the public role of a great territorial magnate than his stepfather had been able to do. Luckily for the Duke, Townshend died suddenly in 1767, and with his death, plans to turn Buccleuch into a statesman perished.

  Smith could not have made his first and only visit to Europe at a more interesting moment. The Seven Years War, which had been brought to a conclusion in 1763 by the treaty of Paris, had resulted in the loss of much of France’s colonial empire, had inflicted incalculable damage on the French economy, and had raised difficult questions about the management of the country’s public finances and the principles of French government itself. It was only natural that a politician with a serious interest in public finance like Townshend should have urged Smith and Buccleuch to pay particular attention to recent French history and to the all-important question of how ‘this insidious & vast Monarchy, so enormous in it’s extent, at the completion, as it should seem, of it’s ambitious plan, renowned in arms, formidable in Navy, & flourishing in Commerce, should have been found, in the last minute of decisive trial, a monster in size & Proportion, weak from that very size, and by some secret error in it’s constitution, the most incapable power by land & sea that modern Times have exhibited’.12

  Toulouse was an excellent vantage point from which a critical Scottish observer could view the progress of civilization in contemporary France. It was the sort of city that anyone who knew Edinburgh could understand. Its social, professional and political life was dominated by lawyers and the parlement of the surrounding province, an elite and an institution which were gaining a reputation for fostering improvement and politeness in a city renowned for being ‘one of the most superstitious in Europe’, as Pierre Bayle once described it.13 The Jesuits had been expelled in 1762, the same year that had seen the appointment of the notably free-thinking and ambitious Loménie de Brienne to the archbishopric. The new archbishop was a friend of philosophes such as Turgot, Morellet and d’Alembert, a habitué of the leading Paris salons and the owner of a magnificent library of books on politics, trade and public finance; Smith must have looked forward to meeting him and must have hoped for access to his library. There were other signs of improvement to catch the visitor’s attention. Toulouse was a university city with a well-known Faculty of Law, three royal academies and ambitious plans for urban redevelopment on neo-Palladian lines. Most striking of all, it was a city that had seen the construction of the Canal des Deux Mers in the later seventeenth century, linking the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and, by the mid-eighteenth century, serving to stimulate the agricultural economy of the Midi Toulousain. Smith approved of the provisions that had been made for the upkeep of this enormous project. The engineer who had built the canal and his family had been allowed to keep the income from tolls in exchange for bearing the cost of maintaining it. While this had made them rich they now had ‘a great interest to keep the work in
constant repair. But had those tolls been put under the management of commissioners, who had no such interest, they might perhaps have been dissipated in ornamental and unnecessary expences, while the most essential parts of the work were allowed to go to ruin.’14

  But for all these signs of improvement, these nods towards commerce and politeness had only penetrated the surface of Toulousian culture by 1764. In 1762 Jean Calas, an entirely innocent Protestant merchant, had been broken on the wheel, hanged and burned for a murder he did not and could not have committed, after a trial which demonstrated the depth of local religious fanaticism and the vulnerability of the province’s courts and parlement to religious pressure. It was an atrocity that shocked Europe and was the occasion of one of Voltaire’s most memorable pamphlets. Calas’ last words were remembered by Smith in the last edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments as those of a man who had suffered the ‘most cruel misfortune which it is possible for innocence to suffer’.15 There must have been moments when Smith, Hume and Townshend wondered whether the city would be a suitable place for Buccleuch’s education. What was equally striking, if less appalling, was Toulouse’s long-standing reputation as a city without a commercial ethos or much of a will to develop one. In 1742 the Bourse des Marchands had claimed that the city ‘is not a commercial town’ and owed its standing and character to ‘the multitude of lawyers’, to the service industries, the network of guilds and corporations in which they were enmeshed, and ‘the love of repose, the horror of work, the refusal to take trouble [l’eloignement de toute peine]’ that Louis de Mandran thought characterized the local labour force.16 What must also have caught Smith’s attention at the time the tour was being planned was the crisis which was developing in relations between the French parlements and the Crown in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. The Toulouse parlement had been at the forefront of resistance to the Crown’s attempt to triple the notorious tax, the Vingtième, in 1763, had seen the city occupied by royal troops, and was still engaged in a long and acrimonious quarrel with the Crown when Smith and Buccleuch arrived. Smith was to collect the voluminous pamphlet literature the quarrel provoked and send it back to Scotland: taxation and the pressure of war on public finances was and would remain of central importance to his political economy.