§ 6. SPECIAL CAUSES OF RAPID PROGRESS OF NORTH § 7. ADVANTAGES то EUROPE OF COLONIES IN NEW § 8. NATIONAL ADVANTAGES FROM COLONIES, IN MILITARY PAGE § 6. THE PUBLIC DEBTS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. § 8. IMPERIAL TAXATION AND REPRESENTATION § 1. DIFFERENT IDEAS OF COLONIAL POLICY § 2. GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT-PREFERENTIAL DUTIES § 4. "NOT AN EMPIRE BUT THE PROJECT OF AN EMPIRE" 231 § 1. Personality and Character. By way of preliminary it is necessary to get rid of some popular prejudices about the character and personality of Adam Smith. Those who think he was a kind of parrot who could only say cheap food," "competition," "let alone," "devil take the hindmost," and other simple cries, will be surprised to hear that, with the possible exception of Lord Bacon, he was the most broadminded and most sympathetic of all the philosophers who have condescended to make themselves intel ligible to the common man. He had planned "a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts." For this purpose he had collected a mass of material and written a variety of papers, some of which, published by his executors, illustrate in a curious manner his breadth of view, There is, for example, a fragment on the affinity between music, dancing, and poetry. This is of special interest at the present time with the revival of the methods Adam Smith of the classical" pantomime" dances. shows, by "philosophic art," that dancing (of the descriptive kind) is capable of affecting us much more than statuary or painting, and that like epic poetry it can represent all the events of a long story. In another paper he made a comparison of English and Italian metres to the admiration of Dr. Johnson, who said he could have hugged him for his preference of rhyme to blank verse. There is an essay on the formation of languages and a history of astronomy. His appreciation of Newton's great discovery shows that it was not for want of mathematics that he did not set much store by political arithmetic. The influence of Newton is shown by the analogies adopted to illustrate two of the fundamental principles of the Wealth of Nations. First, the theory of natural and market values: "The natural price, therefore, is as it were the central price to which the [market] prices of all commodities are continually gravitating. But whatever may be the obstacles which hinder them from settling in this centre of repose and continuance, they are constantly tending towards it."1 Secondly, the theory that "naturally every individual endeavours to employ his capital as near home as he can "—a principle that is constantly appealed to -is expressed in similar terms: "Home is in this manner the centre, if I may say so, round which the capitals of the inhabitants of every country are continually circulating and towards which they are Book 1. chap. ii. |