had been stated by Locke.[1] and had become popular in France,[2] he could hope to clear the way for the reforms which he approved, and which were, in some of the most obvious points, effected by Pitt. He seems to have had a practical object in view; the alterations in his third edition show that he was ready to write for the times, and his practical purpose required that he should state his case in a fashion in which it would catch public attention. It was easier to discredit his opponents than to refute them by meeting them on their own ground or by showing that their position was untenable; and Adam Smith apparently sacrificed the part of a fair-minded critic, though he has certainly achieved the reputation of a great practical politician.
8. Secondly, the enthusiastic reception accorded to his work by his contemporaries was chiefly due to the extraordinary simplicity and clearness of his treatment, as well as to the excellence of the style. But this simplicity was secured by the definiteness of his new conception of the object of political economy. It had to do with the necessaries and conveniences of life, material commodities, definite concrete things. There was much clever compilation in the book, but it made no demand for additional inquiry as Massie had done, nor was much stress laid on that impalpable abstraction, the spirit of the nation; and the 'disagreeable discussion of metaphysical arguments' was avowedly abjured.[3] It was all to be plain sailing for the man of ordinary intelligence; and within a few months of its publication the book had become a considerable power. In 1777 North had borrowed some suggestions[4] which Adam Smith had incorporated from Moreau de Beaumont; Pitt's French policy followed the principles he had laid down, and which he amplified in the edition[5] of 1784; the great minister explicitly referred to the book in introducing his scheme for modifying the pressure of taxation in 1792, and was determined by it in his action on
- ↑ Lowering of Interest, Works, iv. 55, 60. 'This by the way, if well considered, might let us see that taxes, however contrived, and out of whose hands soever immediately taken, do, in a country where their great fund is land, for the most part terminate upon land. . . . It is in vain, in a country whose great fund is land, to hope to lay the public charge of the Government on anything else: there at last it will terminate.'
- ↑ They were partly commended to Quesnay by the results of agricultural protection in England. Œuvres, 230.
- ↑ Wealth of Nations, (ed. Nicholson) 349.
- ↑ Dowell, History of Taxation, ii. 169.
- ↑ See especially the passage inserted in IV. iii. 'It is in consequence—commerce with the other' (ed. Nicholson, 202); and 'By the second—calicoes and muslins.' pp. 203—205.
