When we find that the chief of the Paris police in 1697 was expected to provide cheapness as well as security and cleanliness, we wonder less at the inclusion of “cheapness or plenty” or the “opulence of a state” in “jurisprudence” or “the general principles of law and government.” “Cheapness is in fact the same thing with plenty,” and “the consideration of cheapness or plenty” is “the same thing” as “the most proper way of securing wealth and abundance.” If Adam Smith had been an old-fashioned believer in state control of trade and industry he would have described the most proper regulations for securing wealth and abundance, and there would have been nothing strange in this description coming under the “general principles of law and government.” The actual strangeness is simply the result of Smith’s negative attitude—of his belief that past and present regulations were for the most part purely mischievous.
The two items, cleanliness and security, he managed to dismiss very shortly: “the proper method of carrying dirt from the streets, and the execution of justice, so far as it regards regulations for preventing crimes or the method of keeping a city guard, though useful, are too mean to be considered in a general discourse of this kind.” He only offered the observation that the establishment of arts and commerce brings about independency and so is the best police for preventing crimes. It gives the common people better wages, and “in consequence of this a general probity of manners takes place through the whole country. Nobody will be so mad as to expose himself upon the highway, when he can make better bread in an honest and industrious manner.”
He then came to “cheapness or plenty, or, which is the same thing, the most proper way of securing wealth and abundance.” He began this part