Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations

Some books arrive as arguments; a few arrive as descriptions, and it is the descriptions that change the world. The man who writes one rarely sets out to overturn anything. He sets out to look at what is the case, and to set it down in plain order, and the overturning follows because the case, once seen plainly, will not consent to be unseen.

THE PHILOSOPHER AT KIRKCALDY

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy in Fife in the summer of 1723, the posthumous son of the Comptroller of Customs, and was raised in the small house in the High Street by his mother Margaret Douglas. He went up to Glasgow at fourteen, on to Balliol at seventeen, and back to Scotland for the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1752, which he resigned in 1764 to tutor the young Duke of Buccleuch through France. The tutorship gave him a salary for life on the Buccleuch estate and the freedom of a man who no longer has to teach for his bread. He returned to the High Street in 1767. For nine years he had read, and walked on the strand below the house in the afternoons, and put down a great work in his own hand at the upper sitting-room desk: an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, set out from first principles, beginning with a pin-maker.

THE EVENING OF THE EIGHTH OF FEBRUARY

It is the early evening of the eighth of February 1776. The light has gone over the Forth and Edinburgh stands on the far shore as a pattern of small lights. The town is quiet because the herring fleet is at Anstruther for the night. He is fifty-two. The fire is low; the candles are good; he has been at the desk since six, and on the strand for an hour after dinner. He has spoken to no-one this afternoon except his mother, who has been ill, and the cook. On the writing-desk lies the manuscript: nine hundred quarto pages in his own hand, with three boxes of corrections in the hand of his cousin Janet Douglas who has helped him through the spring. Beside it, a separate sheet of foolscap carries the title in three lines, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S., formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, with the year set in Roman. The press, William Strahan of New Street in London, expects the parcel by the next packet from Leith. He has it tied with green ribbon. The carrier comes at first light on Tuesday.

THE LAST HESITATION

A man finishing a long book, if he is honest, knows in the last hour exactly whom he is about to offend, and the knowledge does not move his hand. The chapter on the division of labour will displease the manufacturers because it places the pin-maker's apprentice at the source of their wealth and the manufacturers in the channel only. The chapter on the colonies will displease the colonists because it tells them their economic interest does not lie in monopoly trade with London, and will displease London because it tells the same story from London's side. The chapter on rent will displease the landlords; the chapter on the wages of labour, the masters; the chapter on the public debt, Lord North. He has not written a book to displease anyone. He has written a book to describe what is the case, and the case, by being what it is, will displease. He weighs the ribbon in his palm, and it is light as a feather, and it is the weight of every year since he came home. There is, too, David in Edinburgh, dying by inches, who has been told a presentation copy is coming and will not see one if the parcel does not move. He has, for an instant, the old habit of the lecturer, which is to want another winter to read it through once more. He sets the habit down. The case will not improve by waiting. He ties the ribbon. He writes the cover-letter to Strahan in his clear small hand. He carries the parcel to the chair by the door, for the carrier in the morning, and goes down to sit a little with his mother before bed.

THE PRESS AT NEW STREET

The packet sailed from Leith with the tide and was put into Strahan's hands inside a fortnight. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published by William Strahan and Thomas Cadell on the ninth of March 1776, in two quarto volumes, at one pound sixteen shillings the set. The first edition of one thousand copies sold out within six months. By May, careful readers in London and Edinburgh had begun to see that European economic argument had a new spine. In July, an assembly in Philadelphia issued a Declaration which quoted no passage of it and assumed every one; the colonies were lost to monopoly trade in the same season that the book explaining why was bound.

A LETTER FROM EDINBURGH

David Hume received his presentation copy at his house in St Andrew Square in March and read it through in two weeks of declining health. On the first of April he wrote to Smith from his bed. Euge! Belle! Dear Mr Smith, I am much pleas'd with your performance, the letter ran, and went on to say that the perusal of it had taken him out of a state of great anxiety. He had three months to live. He died on the twenty-fifth of August, calmly, having put his affairs in order and refused the consolations of religion. Smith wrote his eulogy in the form of a letter to Strahan, which set down with quiet exactness that his friend had approached his death as a wise and virtuous man ought, and so did Hume's defence to a Christian public. By the volume of clerical answer it drew in 1777, the letter was, of all his prose, the piece most disliked in his lifetime; he set the disliking aside and did not retract a sentence.

THE COMMISSIONER OF CUSTOMS

In 1778 Smith was given the post of Commissioner of Customs at Edinburgh, three hundred pounds a year, light duties, the same office his father had held at Kirkcaldy. He took rooms with his mother at Panmure House in the Canongate and lived there for the next twelve years among his books, walking up the High Street to the Customhouse in the morning and home in the afternoon, dining quietly, working at the revisions for the third and fourth and fifth editions of the Wealth of Nations and at a Theory of Moral Sentiments he had begun thirty years before and meant to bring to a final form. His mother died in 1784. He directed his executors that on his death his unpublished manuscripts were to be burned, and would not be moved from the instruction. Sixteen folio volumes went into the kitchen fire at Panmure House in the week before he died. He died at Edinburgh on the seventeenth of July 1790, and was buried in Canongate Kirkyard, a few hundred yards from his desk.

THE BOOK ON THE SHELF

The book has not been out of print in the English-speaking world since the second edition of 1778. Some books arrive as arguments and pass with their season; a few arrive as descriptions, and the descriptions, once made, become the air. What was set down in green ribbon on a winter evening in Kirkcaldy, in a sitting-room above the Forth, by a man of fifty-two who had walked on the strand that afternoon and meant to offend no-one, is on every economist's shelf two and a half centuries later, in two quarto volumes, with the title still in three lines and the year still in Roman.