This proportionment of taxation to wealth he thinks cannot be attained except by means of periodical estimation of the wealth of families, since land taxes unduly oppress landlords in debt and let moneyed men go free, while duties and excises are paid by the consumer, so that “hospitable generous men or such as have numerous families supported genteelly bear the chief burden here, and the solitary sordid miser bears little or no share of it.”
It is quite clear from all this that Smith was largely influenced by the traditions of his chair in selecting his economic subjects. Dr. Scott draws attention to the curious fact that the very order in which the subjects happen to occur in Hutcheson’s System is almost identical with the order in which the same subjects occur in Smith’s Lectures . We are strongly tempted to surmise that when Smith had hurriedly to prepare his lectures for Craigie’s class, he looked through his notes of his old master’s lectures (as hundreds of men in his position have done before and after him) and grouped the economic subjects together as an introduction and sequel to the lectures which he had brought with him from Edinburgh. Hutcheson was an inspiring teacher. His colleague, Leechman, says:—
“As he had occasion every year in the course of his lectures to explain the origin of government and compare the different forms of it, he took peculiar care, while on that subject, to inculcate the importance of civil and religious liberty to the happiness of mankind: as a warm love of liberty and manly zeal for promoting it were ruling principles in his own breast, he always insisted upon it at great length and with the greatest strength of argument and earnestness of persuasion: and he had such success on this important point, that few, if any, of his pupils, whatever contrary prejudices they might bring along with them, ever left him without favourable notions of that side of the question which he espoused and defended.”