Visit to London

In April, he had improved enough to travel to London to consult Hunter.

• But he was wasted to a skeleton.

William Playfair:

• was brother of his friend the Professor of Mathematics
• was one of the early editors of the Wealth of Nations
• met Smith soon after his arrival in London

He says Smith looked very ill and was going to decay.

• In the past, he was stout, not fat.
• But he was now reduced to skin and bone.
• However, he was able to see old friends and make new ones.

In his Diary, Windham mentions meeting Smith at several different places.

• When Smith was last in London in 1777, Windham was just a student in the Temple.

Windham was first introduced to Smith now when he was:

• already one of the most powerful ministers England had ever seen, and
• reforming the national finances with the Wealth of Nations in his hand.

Pitt always confessed to be one of Smith’s most convinced disciples.

The first few years of his long ministry saw the daybreak of free trade.

In a way, he brought commercial emancipation for Ireland.

• He carried a commercial treaty with France.

In accordance with Smith’s recommendations, he passed laws simplifying the collection and administration of taxes.

In 1787, he introduced his great[Pg 405] Consolidation Bill.

• It created order out of the previous chaos of customs and excise.
• It was such an extensive work that it took 2,537 separate resolutions to state its provisions.

These resolutions had only just been read on March 7, a few weeks before Smith arrived in London. Therefore, the young Pitt was most interested to meet Smith.

He was carrying Smith’s principles out so extensively in practical legislation.

• They met repeatedly.

One meeting has been preserved, at Dundas’s house on Wimbledon Green:

• Addington, Wilberforce, and Grenville were part of the meeting

Smith was one of the last guests to arrive. When he entered the room, everyone rose from their seats to receive him and remained standing.

Smith said “Be seated, gentlemen.”

Pitt replied “No, we will stand until you are first seated, for we are all your scholars.”

This story seems to rest on Edinburgh tradition.

It was first published in the 1838 edition of Kay’s Portraits, more than 50 years after it happened.

Most of the biographies contained in that work were written by James Paterson.

• But a few of the earliest, including this of Smith, were not.

However, they were all written from materials which had been long collected by Kay himself. He died in 1832.

These were obtained before the time of publication from local residents who had known the men themselves, or had mingled with those who did.

Everything was edited by James Maidment.

• He was the well-known and learned antiquary.
• His acceptance of the story is some security that it came from an authoritative though unnamed source.

Smith was highly taken with Pitt.

On one evening when dining with him, he remarked to Addington after dinner= “What an extraordinary man Pitt is; he understands my ideas better than I do myself.”[342]

Other [Pg 406]statesmen have been converts to free trade. Pitt never had any other creed. It was his first faith.

He was forming his opinions as a young man when the Wealth of Nations appeared. He formed them on it.

Smith saw much of this group of statesmen during his visit to the capital in that year.[343]

Wilberforce sounded to him about some of his philanthropic schemes.

Addington wrote an ode to him after meeting him at Pitt’s.

Pitt sought his counsels on some contemplated legislation.

• He perhaps set him to help him do investigations.

In the early part of 1787, Bentham had sent the manuscript of his Defence of Usury from Russia to his friend George Wilson, a barrister.

It went against Smith’s doctrine on the subject.

On July 14, Wilson writes:

Smith might have been examining papers in the public offices in connection with his own work on Government.

But Wilson’s statement leaves the impression that the researches were instituted in pursuance of some idea of Pitt’s, probably related to financial reform.

If the Dr. Smith of Wilson’s letter is Adam Smith, he would appear to have:

• stayed in London a considerable time, and
• have suffered a serious relapse of ill-health during his stay there.

Wilberforce did not think quite so highly of Smith as Pitt did.

He was disappointed to find him too hard-headed to share his own enthusiasm about a great philanthropic adventure of the day.

To Smith’s very practical mind, it seemed to be entirely unsuccessful.

With some of the in which Wilberforce was interested in other philanthropic movements such as his anti-slavery agitation, begun in that very year 1787.

He would have found the most cordial sympathiser in Smith. Smith had condemned slavery so strongly in his book.

The Sunday school movement started by Thomas Raikes two or three years before, also won Smith’s strongest commendation. Raikes writes William Fox on July 27 of this same year.

He writes as if the remark had been made in conversation with himself:

“Dr. Adam Smith says that ‘No plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity since the days of the Apostles.’”

These schools were instituted to give gratuitous instruction to all comers for four or five hours every Sunday in the ordinary branches of primary education. They were opposed by some leading ecclesiastics—like the liberal divine Bishop Horsley—because they might be used for political propagandism.

The ecclesiastical mind is too often suspicious of the consequences of mental improvement and independence. But to Smith, these were merely the first broad conditions of all popular progress.

No man could be less chargeable with indifference to honest and practicable schemes of philanthropy, but the particular scheme towards which Wilberforce found him “characteristically cool” was one which, in his opinion, held out extravagant expectations that could not possibly be realised.

I believe it was a project first suggested by Sir James Steuart, the economist. It was taken up warmly after him:

• by Dr. James Anderson, and
• especially by John Knox.

He was the earliest and [Pg 408]most persistent of crofters’ friends, He was a bookseller in the Strand. Its goal was to check the depopulation and distress of the Scotch Highlands by planting a series of fishing villages all round the Highland coast.

Knox’s idea was to plant 40 fishing villages at spots 25 miles apart between the Mull of Cantyre.

The Dornoch Firth at a cost of £2000 apiece, or at least as many of them as money could be obtained to start.

The scheme rose high in public favour when the parliamentary committee on Scotch Fisheries:

• gave it a general recommendation in 1785, and
• suggested the incorporation of a limited liability company by Act of Parliament to carry it out.

The Scotch nobility adopted the suggestion with great spirit.