Chapter XIV: Paris (2)

The year 1766 was a year of exceptional activity in this economist camp. Turgot, as we have seen, was writing an important work, and Mercier de la Rivière another. The other members of the group were busy too, for they had just for the first time secured an organ in the press in the _Journal de l'Agriculture du Commerce et des Finances_, of which their youngest convert, Dupont de Nemours, was made editor in June 1765, and in which Quesnay himself wrote an article almost every month till Dupont's dismissal in November 1766. The Government, moreover, which had thrown Mirabeau into prison for his first book and had suppressed his second only a year or two before, now ceased from troubling, and gave even a certain official countenance to the _Journal de l'Agriculture_, for after the war it no longer shut its eyes to the distress that prevailed, and began to give an ear to remedies. They were making converts too, among others the Abbé Baudeau, who used to write them down in his journal, the _Éphémérides du Citoyen_, but now offered to make it their organ when they lost the _Journal de l'Agriculture_. They were thus in the first flush of their active propaganda, which in a year or two more made political economy, Grimm says, the _science de la mode_ in France, and won converts to the single tax among the crowned heads of Europe. Quesnay too had taken apartments in town in the house of a disciple to be nearer his friends for pushing the propaganda, so that Smith had especially abundant opportunities of seeing him and them that year.

No memorial of all their intercourse, however, has survived except the slight and rather indefinite reminiscence of Dupont de Nemours, to which allusion has been made. Dupont remembers that Smith used to discuss with them a question, which they no doubt would be often discussing, for they were greatly interested in it,--the question of the effect upon the wages of labour of a tax upon the commodities consumed by the labourers; and he says that Smith, in the freedom of private intercourse with them, expressed quite a different opinion upon that subject from that which he delivered in the _Wealth of Nations_, with the fear of vested interests before his eyes. Dupont could not have read the _Wealth of Nations_ very carefully when he hinted this accusation of timidity before vested interests, for there was scarcely a vested interest existing at the time that has not incurred in its turn most vigorous censure in that work. But as the alleged difference amounts merely to this, that Smith in his book asserts a principle with a certain specific limitation to it which he used to assert in conversation without the limitation, it probably represents no real change of opinion, but only a difference between the more exact expositions of the book and the less exact expositions of conversation. The point was this. Smith held, with Dupont and his friends, that a direct tax on the wages of labour, like the French industrial _taille_, would, if the demand for labour and the price of provisions remained the same, have the effect of raising the wages of labour by the sum required to pay the tax. He held, again, with them that an indirect tax on the commodities consumed by the labourers would act in exactly the same way if the commodities taxed were necessaries of life, because a rise in the price of necessaries would imperil the labourer's ability to bring up his family. But what seemed new to Dupont was that Smith now in his book held that if the commodities taxed were luxuries, the tax would not act in that way. It would act as a sumptuary law. The labourer would merely spend less on such superfluities, and since this forced frugality would probably increase rather than diminish his ability to bring up a family, he would neither require nor obtain any rise of wages. The high tobacco duty in France and England and a recent rise of three shillings on the barrel of beer had no effect whatever on wages.

That is what Dupont says Smith would not have contended in France. He would not have drawn this distinction between the taxation of a necessary and the taxation of a luxury, and he only drew it in his book to avert the clamour of offended interests, though against his real convictions. The imputation of dissimulation, though explicitly enough made, may be disregarded. The alternative of a real change of opinion is quite possible, inasmuch as the position Smith has actually reached on this question in his book is far from final or perfect; it is obvious at a glance that in a community such as he supposes, where the labourers are in the habit of consuming both necessaries and luxuries, a tax on necessaries would have exactly the same effect as he attributes to a tax on luxuries; it would force the labourer to give up some of his luxuries. But there might be no real change of opinion, and yet a good deal of apparent difference between the loose statements of a speaker in a language of which he had only imperfect command and his more complete and precise statements in a written book. Dupont, it may be added, seems to think that Smith in his talks with the French economists expressed much more unfavourable views of the inconveniences, changes, and general evils of the English system of taxation than would be gathered from the _Wealth of Nations_.

Before Smith left France he had occasion, unhappily, to resort to Quesnay the physician as well as to Quesnay the economist. He had been in the habit while in Paris of taking his pupils for excursions to interesting places in the vicinity, as he had done from Toulouse, and in August 1766 they went to Compiègne to see the camp and the military evolutions which were to take place during the residence of the Court there. In Compiègne the Duke of Buccleugh took seriously ill of a fever,--the consequence of a fall from his horse while hunting, says his aunt, Lady Mary Coke,--and, as will be seen from the following letter, he was watched and nursed by his distinguished tutor with a care and devotion almost more than paternal. The letter is written to Charles Townshend, the Duke's step-father:--

COMPIÈGNE, _26th August 1766_.

DEAR SIR--It is, you may believe, with the greatest concern
that I find myself obliged to give you an account of a
slight fever from which the Duke of Buccleugh is not yet
entirely recovered, though it is this day very much abated.
He came here to see the camp and to hunt with the King and
the Court. On Thursday last he returned from hunting about
seven at night very hungry, and ate heartily of a cold
supper with a vast quantity of sallad, and drank some cold
punch after it. This supper, it seems, disagreed with him.
He had no appetite next day, but appeared well and hearty as
usual. He found himself uneasy on the field and returned
home before the rest of the company. He dined with my Lord
George Lennox, and, as he tells me, ate heartily. He found
himself very much fatigued after dinner and threw himself
upon his servant's bed. He slept there about an hour, and
awaked about eight at night in a good deal of disorder. He
vomited, but not enough to relieve him. I found his pulse
extremely quick. He went to bed immediately and drank some
vinegar whey, quite confident that a night's rest and a
sweat, his usual remedy, would relieve him. He slept little
that night but sweat profusely. The moment I saw him next
day (Sunday) I was sure he had a fever, and begged of him to
send for a physician. 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.
Ouenay'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. On Monday he found the
Duke's fever so moderate that he judged it unnecessary to
bleed him.... To-day, Wednesday, upon finding some little
extraordinary heat upon the Duke's skin in the morning, he
proposed ordering a small quantity of blood to be taken from
him at two o'clock, but upon returning at that hour he found
him so very cool and easy that he judged it unnecessary.
When a French physician judges bleeding unnecessary, you may
be sure that the fever is not very violent. The Duke has
never had the smallest headache nor any pain in any part of
his body; he has good spirits; his head and his eye are
both clear; he has no extraordinary redness in his face; his
tongue is not more foul than in a common cold. There is some
little quickness in his pulse, but it is soft, full, and
regular. In short, there is no one bad symptom about him,
only he has a fever and keeps his bed.... De la Saone
imagines the whole illness owing to the indigestion of
Thursday night. Some part of the undigested matter having
got into his blood, the violent commotion which this had
occasioned had burst, he supposes, some small vessel in his
veins.... 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 stirr 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 King has inquired almost every day at his levée of my
Lord George and of Mr. De la Saone concerning the Duke's
illness. The Duke and Dutchess of Fitzjames, the Chevalier
de Clermont, the Comte de Guerchy, etc. etc., together with
the whole English nation here and at Paris, have expressed
the greatest anxiety for his recovery. Remember me in the
most respectful manner to Lady Dalkeith, and believe me to
be with the greatest regard, dear sir, your most obliged and
most humble servant,

ADAM SMITH.

COMPIÈGNE, _26th August 1766_.

Wednesday, 5 o'clock afternoon.[184]

Could there be a more pleasing exhibition of the thorough kindness of a manly heart than this picture of the great philosopher sitting day after day by the bedside of his pupil, watching eagerly every indication of change, and only consenting to leave the room for a time at night out of consideration for the silly jealousy of the valet, who thought the tutor's presence an invasion of his own rights?

The Duke recovered and they returned to Paris. But while still at Compiègne they heard of a sad event that could not fail to shock them greatly, the death of their greatly esteemed young friend and fellow-traveller, Sir James Macdonald. "Were you and I together, dear Smith," writes Hume at this time, "we should shed tears at present for the death of poor Sir James Macdonald. We could not possibly have suffered a greater loss than in that valuable young man."[185]

In this letter Hume had dropped a remark showing that he was still clinging to the idea which he had repeatedly mentioned to Smith of returning and making his home for the remainder of his days somewhere in France--in Paris, or "Toulouse, or Montauban, or some provincial town in the South of France, where"--to quote his words to Sir G. Elliot--"I shall spend contentedly the rest of my life with more money, under a finer sky and in better company than I was born to enjoy." Of this idea Smith strongly disapproved. He thought that Hume would find himself too old to transplant, and that he was being carried away by the great kindness and flatteries he had received in Paris into entertaining a plan which could never promote his happiness, because, in the first place, it would probably prove fatal to work, and in the next, it would certainly deprive him of the support of those old and rooted friendships which could not be replaced by the incense of an hour. For his own part, and with a view to his own future, Smith was of an entirely opposite mind. The contrast between the two friends in natural character stands out very strongly here. Smith had enjoyed his stay in France almost as much as Hume, and had been welcomed everywhere by the best men and women in the country with high respect, but now that the term of his tutorship is approaching its end, he longs passionately for home, feels that he has had his fill of travel, and says if he once gets among his old friends again, he will never wander more. This appears from a letter he wrote Millar, the bookseller, probably after his return from Compiègne, of which Millar sent the following extract to Hume: "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-headed, tell him, when he talks of coming to spend the remainder of his days here or in France. Remember me to him most affectionately."[186]

His return, for which he was then looking with so much desire, came sooner than he anticipated, and came, unfortunately, with a cloud. His younger pupil, the Hon. Hew Campbell Scott, was assassinated in the streets of Paris, on the 18th of October 1766, in his nineteenth year;[187] and immediately thereafter they set out for London, bringing the remains of Mr. Scott along with them, and accompanied by Lord George Lennox, Hume's successor as Secretary of Legation. The London papers announce their arrival at Dover on the 1st of November. The tutorship, which ended with this melancholy event, was always remembered with great satisfaction and gratitude by the surviving pupil. "In October 1766," writes the Duke of Buccleugh to Dugald Stewart, "we returned to London, 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, 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."

Smith's choice for this post of travelling tutor was thought in many quarters at the time to be a very strange choice. Shrewd old Dr. Carlyle thought it so strange that he professes to be quite unable as a man of the world to understand Charles Townshend making it, except "for his own glory of having sent an eminent Scotch philosopher to travel with the Duke."[188] He thought Smith had too much "probity and benevolence" in his own soul to suspect ill in another or check it, and that a man who seemed too absent to make his own way about could hardly be expected to look efficiently after the goings of another. "He was," says Carlyle, "the most absent man in company I ever knew," and "he appeared very unfit for the intercourse of the world as a travelling tutor."[189]

Still Townshend's choice was thoroughly justified by the result, and Carlyle admits it, but thinks that was due less to the efficiency of the tutor than to the natural excellence of the pupil. And there is no doubt that Smith was exceptionally fortunate in his pupil. In his after life this Duke Henry took little part in politics, but he made himself singularly beloved among his countrymen by a long career filled with works of beneficence and patriotism, and brightened by that love of science which has for generations distinguished the house of Buccleuch. It may be true that with such a pupil Smith's natural defects would find little opportunity of causing trouble, but it seems certain, as I have before said, that these defects were habitually exaggerated by Smith's contemporaries, and Carlyle himself acknowledges that Smith's travels with the Duke cured him considerably of his fits of abstraction. This is confirmed by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, who says that Smith grew smarter during his stay abroad, and lost much of the awkwardness of manner he previously exhibited.

Stewart is disposed to think, however, that the public have not the same reason to be satisfied with Smith's acceptance of this tutorship as either he himself or his pupil had, and that the world at large has been seriously the loser for it, because "it interrupted that studious leisure for which nature seemed to have designed him, and in which alone he could have hoped to accomplish those literary projects which had flattered the ambition of his youthful genius." Now it is, of course, idle to speculate on the things that might have been. Kant was never forty miles from Konigsberg, and had Smith remained in Glasgow all his days there is no reason to doubt he could have produced works of lasting importance. But it is a truism to say that the works would have been other and different from what we have. To a political philosopher foreign travel is an immense advantage, and there never was a country where graver or more interesting problems, both economic and constitutional, offered themselves for study than France in the latter half of last century, nor any political philosopher who enjoyed better opportunities than Smith of discussing such problems with the ablest and best-informed minds on the spot. Smith's residence in France, whatever it was to his pupil, must have been an invaluable education to himself, supplying him day after day with constant materials for fresh comparison and thought. Samuel Rogers was greatly struck with the difference between Smith and the historian Robertson. The conversation of Robertson, who, as we know, had never been out of his own country, was much more limited in its range of interest, but Smith's was the rich conversation of a man who had seen and known a great deal of the world. It does not appear that Smith suffered in France from any such want of literary leisure as Stewart speaks of, for he began writing a book in Toulouse because he had so little else to do, and he had not attempted anything of the kind in Glasgow, so far as we know, for five years; but, at all events, for the wealth of illustration which his new book exhibits, the variety of its points of view, the copiousness of its data drawn from personal observation, the world is greatly indebted to the author's residence abroad. And had Smith lived to finish his work on Government we should probably have had more results of his observation of France, but the _Wealth of Nations_ itself contains many.

M'Culloch has expressed astonishment that for all his long stay in France Smith should have never perceived any foreshadowings of the coming Revolution, such as were visible even to a passing traveller like Smollett. But Smith was quite aware of all the gravities and possibilities of the situation, and occasionally gave expression to anticipations of vital change. He formed possibly a less gloomy view of the actual condition of the French people than he would have heard uttered in Quesnay's room at Versailles, because he always mentally compared the state of things he saw in France with the state of things he knew in Scotland, and though it was plain to him that France was not going forward so fast as Scotland, he thought the common opinion that it was going backward to be ill founded.[190] Then France was a much richer country, with a better soil and climate, and "better stocked," he says, "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."[191] In spite of these advantages, however, the common people in France were decidedly worse off than the common people of Scotland. The wages of labour were lower--the real wages--for the people evidently lived harder. Their dress and countenance showed it at once. "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." In England nobody was too poor to wear leather shoes; in Scotland even the lowest orders of men wore them, though the same orders of women still went about barefooted. But "in France they are necessaries neither to men nor to women; the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes barefooted."[192] Another little circumstance struck him as a proof that the classes immediately above the rank of labourer were worse off in France than they were here. The taste for dressing yew-trees into the shape of pyramids and obelisks by "that very clumsy instrument of sculpture" the gardener's shears had gone out of fashion in this country, merely because it got too common, and was discarded by the rich and vain. The multitude of persons able to indulge the taste was sufficiently great to drive the custom out of fashion. In France, on the other hand, he found this custom still in good repute, "notwithstanding," he adds, "that inconstancy of fashion with which we sometimes reproach the natives of that country." The reason was that the number of people in that country able to indulge this taste was too few to deprive the custom of the requisite degree of rarity. "In France the condition of the inferior ranks of people is seldom so happy as it frequently is in England, and you will there seldom find even pyramids and obelisks of yew in the garden of a tallow-chandler. Such ornaments, not having in that country been degraded by their vulgarity, have not yet been excluded from the gardens of princes and great lords."[193]

He discusses one great cause of the poorer condition of the French than of the English people. It was generally acknowledged, he says, that "the people of France was much more oppressed by taxation than the people of Great Britain"; and the oppression he found, by personal investigation, to be all due to bad taxes and bad methods of collecting them. The sum that reached the public treasury represented a much smaller burden per head of population than it did in this country. Smith calculated the public revenue of Great Britain to represent an assessment of about 25s. a head of population, and in 1765 and 1766, the years he was in France, according to the best, though, he admits, imperfect, accounts he could get of the matter, the whole sum passed into the French treasury would only represent an assessment of 12s. 6d. per head of the French population.[194] Taxation ought thus to be really lighter in France than in Great Britain, but it was made into a scourge by vicious modes of assessment and collection. Smith even suggested for France various moderate financial reforms, repealing some taxes, increasing others, making a third class uniform over the kingdom, and abolishing the farming system; but though these reforms would be sufficient to restore prosperity to a country with the resources of France, he had no hope of it being possible to carry them against the active opposition of individuals interested in maintaining things as they were.

Smith was thus perfectly alive to the prevailing poverty and distress of the French population, to the oppression they suffered, to the extreme difficulty, the hopelessness even, of any improvement of their situation while the existing distribution of political forces continued, and was able to defeat all efforts at reform. Now from all this it was not very far to the idea of a political upheaval and a new distribution of political forces, and Smith saw tendencies abroad in that direction also. He told Professor Saint Fond in 1782 that the "Social Compact" would one day avenge Rousseau for all the persecutions he had suffered from the powers that were.

FOOTNOTES:

[159] _Hume MSS._, R.S.E. Partially published in Burton's _Life_.

[160] _Correspondance Littéraire_, I. iv. 291.

[161] _Burton's Letters of Eminent Persons to David Hume_, p. 238.

[162] Lady Minto, _Memoirs of Hugh Elliot_, p. 13.

[163] Morellet's _Mémoires_, i. 237.

[164] Schelle, _Dupont de Nemours et les Physiocrates_, p. 159.

[165] _i.e._ the Royal Society of Edinburgh, to whom Stewart first read his _Life of Smith_.

[166] Stewart's _Works_, v. 47.

[167] Clayden's _Early Life of Samuel Rogers_, p. 95.

[168] _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, Part VI. sec. ii.

[169] Mackintosh, _Miscellaneous Works_, iii. 13.

[170] Brougham's Men of Letters, ii. 226.

[171] Burton's Hume, ii. 348.

[172] Garrick Correspondence, ii. 550.

[173] Garrick Correspondence, ii. 549.

[174] Ibid. ii. 501.

[175] Ibid. ii. 511.

[176] Stewart's _Works,_ x. 49, 50.

[177] "Essay on the Imitative Arts," _Works_, v. 281.

[178] _Works_, v. 294.

[179] Say, _Cours Complet, OEuvres_, p. 870.

[180] Turgot's _OEuvres_, v. 136.

[181] _Wealth of Nations_, Book IV. chap. ix.

[182] Memoirs of Madame du Hausset, p. 141.

[183] Marmontel's Memoirs, English Translation, ii. 37.

[184] Fraser's _Scotts of Buccleuch_, ii. 405.

[185] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 348.

[186] Hill's _Letters of Hume_, p. 59. Original in R.S.E.

[187] _New Statistical Account of Scotland_, i. 490. (Account of Dalkeith by the late Dr. Norman Macleod, then minister of that parish, and Mr. Peter Steel, Rector of Dalkeith Grammar School.)

[188] _Autobiography_, p. 280.

[189] _Ibid._

[190] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I. chap. ix.

[191] _Ibid._, Book V. chap. ii. art. iii.

[192] _Wealth of Nations_, Book V. chap. ii. art. iv.

[193] "Essay on the Imitative Arts," _Works_, v. 260.

[194] _Wealth of Nations_, Book V. chap. ii. art. iv.