more than average intelligence a free-trader. Consequently it would be rash to suppose that Smith’s disbelief in the mercantile system was merely the natural outcome of his general belief in economic freedom. Dugald Stewart’s quotations from his paper of 1755 do not contain anything to show that he was pouring contempt on the doctrine before he left Edinburgh and in his early years at Glasgow. It seems very likely that the reference in the lectures to Hume’s “essays showing the absurdity of these and other such doctrines” is to be regarded as an acknowledgment of obligation, and therefore that it was Hume, by his Political Discourses on Money and the Balance of Trade in 1752, who first opened Adam Smith’s eyes on this subject. The probability of this is slightly increased by the fact that in the lectures the mercantile fallacies as to the balance of trade were discussed in connection with Money, as in Hume’s Discourses , instead of in the position which they would have occupied if Smith had either followed Hutcheson’s order, or placed them among the causes of the “slow progress of opulence.” It is, too, perhaps, not a mere coincidence that while both Hume in the Discourses in 1752 and Smith in his lectures ten years later rejected altogether the aim of securing a favourable balance of trade, Hume still clearly believed in the utility of protection for home industries, and Smith is at any rate reported to have made a considerable concession in its favour.
It would be useless to carry the inquiry into the origin of Adam Smith’s views any further here. Perhaps it has been carried too far already. In the course of the Wealth of Nations Smith actually quotes by their own name or that of their authors almost one hundred books. An attentive study of the notes to the present edition will convince the reader that though a few of these are quoted at second hand the number actually used was far greater. Usually but little, sometimes only a single fact, phrase or opinion, is taken from each, so that few authors are less open than Adam Smith to the reproach of having rifled another man’s work. That charge has indeed never seriously been brought against him, except in regard to Turgot’s Réflections , and in that case not a particle of