Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/187

 ALBERT.] SMI T H 171 ever saw, moving his lips and talking to himself and smiling in the midst of large companies." When called on to give his opinion of the matter under discussion he was apt to do so too much in the manner of a lecture. Easy and flowing as is the style of his books, yet to the end he wrote slowly and with difficulty ; he did not usually himself take pen in hand, but dictated to an amanuensis, whilst he walked up and down his apartment. In character he was sincere and earnest, in manner apparently cold, but capable of strong feelings, whether of personal affection or of moral indigna- tion. His frequent acts of beneficence were marked by delicacy no less than by liberality. He was a model of filial love and duty, and took to the last the warmest interest in all that concerned the welfare of his friends. As a moral philosopher Smith cannot be said to have won much acceptance for his fundamental doctrine. This doctrine is that all our moral sentiments arise from sympathy, that is, from the principle of our nature " which leads us to enter into the situations of other men and to partake with them in the passions which those situations have a tendency to excite." Our direct sympathy with the agent in the circumstances in which he is placed gives rise, according to this view, to our notion of the propriety of his action, whilst our indirect sympathy with those whom his actions have benefited or injured gives rise to our notions of merit and demerit in the agent himself. It seems justly alleged against this system by Dr Thomas Brown that "the moral sentiments, the origin of which it ascribes to our secondary feelings of mere sympathy, are assumed as previously existing in the original emotions with which the secondary feelings are said to be in unison." A second objection urged, perhaps with less justice, against the theory is that it fails to account for the authoritative character which is felt to be inherent in our sense of right and wrong for what Butler calls the " supremacy of conscience." But those who most strongly dissent from Smith's general doctrine are warm in their admiration of the eloquence of his style sometimes, however, faulty on the side of redundancy and the felicity of his illustrations. In all its minor details, says Brown, "the work may be considered as presenting a model of philosophic beauty," and it is universally admitted that the author has thrown much light on many delicate and subtle phenoinena of our moral nature. The minute observation and the rare ingenuity which he shows in dealing with the finer traits of character and the less obvious indications of feeling remind us of the similar qualities exhibited in a different field in the Wealth of Nations. It is on the latter work that Smith's fame mainly rests. Under POLITICAL ECONOMY (vol. xix. pp. 365-370) will be found a detailed aiialysis of the economic scheme contained in it, and an examina- tion of its spirit and tendency as a contribution to the philosophy of society. We have there sufficiently exposed the exaggeration which represents Smith as the creator of political economy. But the Wealth of Nations is, without doubt, the greatest existing book on that department of knowledge, the only attempt to replace and so antiquate it that of John Stuart Mill having, notwithstand- ing its partial usefulness, on the whole decidedly failed. Buckle, however, goes too far when he pronounces it " the most important book ever written," just as he similarly exceeds due measure when he makes its author superior as a philosopher to Hume. Mackintosh more justly said of it that it stands on a level with the treatise De Jure Belli ct Pacis, the Essay on the Human Understanding, and the Spirit of Laivs, in the respect that these four works are severally the most conspicuous landmarks in the progress of the sciences with which they deal. And, when he added that the Wealth of Nations was " perhaps the only book which produced an immediate, general, and irrevocable change in some of the most important parts of the legislation of all civilized states," he scarcely spoke too strongly if we understand him as referring to its influence as an agent of demolition. It certainly operated powerfully through the harmony of its critical side with the tendencies of the half-century which followed its publication to the assertion of personal freedom and "natural rights." It discredited the economic policy of the past, and promoted the overthrow of institutions which had come down from earlier times, but were unsuited to modern society. As a theoretic treatment of social economy, and therefore as a guide to social reconstruction and practice in the future, it is provisional, not definitive. But here too it has rendered eminent service : it has established many truths and dissipated many obstinate pre- judices ; it has raised the views of all thinking men on national wealth to a higher level ; and, when the study of its subject comes to be systematized on the basis of a general social philosophy more complete and durable than Smith's, no contributions to that final construction will be found so valuable as his. Buckle has the idea that the two principal works of Smith, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, are mutually complementary parts of one great scheme, in which human nature is intended to be dealt with as a whole, the former exhibiting the operation of the benevolent feelings, the latter of what, by a singular nomenclature, inadmissible since Butler wrote, he calls " the passion of selfishness. " In each division the motor contemplated is regarded as acting singly, without any interference of the opposite principle. This appears to be an artificial and misleading notion. Neither in the plan of Smith's university course nor in the well-known passage at the end of his Moral Sentiments is there any indication of his having conceived such a bipartite scheme. The object of the Wealth of Nations is surely in no sense psychological, as is that of the Moral Sentiments. The purpose of the work is to exhibit social phenomena, not to demonstrate their source in the mental consti- tution of the individual. And Buckle seems to have fallen into the error of confounding "sympathy " with benevolence, or at least of regarding their spheres as coextensive. It is only in his ethical treatise that Smith carries back the pursuit of wealth to its ulti- mate motive ; and, when he does so, instead of tracing it to a selfish principle, which is to be placed in contrast with sympathy, he ex- pressly declares it to have its origin in " a regard to the sentiments of mankind " ; in other words, he makes it a consequence of the desire of sympathy. In relation to Smith's personality, which is at present our princi- pal object, it may be observed that his moral features are exhibited in an interesting way in his great work. The most marked charac- teristics thus reflected are his strong sympathy with the working classes, his contempt for vulgar politics, and his hatred of the spirit of monopoly, the last manifesting itself especially in his suspicion of the public conduct of merchants and manufacturers. The first of these sentiments breaks out in several places, as in the discussion of the laws of settlement and in the remarks on combinations, and notably in the often-quoted passage where he says: "It is but equity that those who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged." He has no respect for that " insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician," and complains that the "sneaking arts of underling tradesmen " are erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire. "All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." The project of shutting out every other nation from a share in the benefits of our colonial trade he brands as an "invidious and malignant " one. He never tires of condemning the "mean rapacity," the "monopolizing spirit," the "impertinent jealousy," the " interested sophistry " of the capitalist class. "Our merchants and manufacturers," he says and the remark is not yet out of date -"complain much of the effect of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale, of their goods both at home and abroad ; they say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits ; they are silent with respect to the pernicious effects of their own gains ; they complain only of those of other people." "Their interest is never exactly the same with that of the public ; they have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public ; and they accordingly have upon many occasions both deceived and oppressed it." This class he regarded, in fact, as corrupting by its selfishness the policy of the European nations and in particular of England, and as con- stituting the strength of the opposition, which he feared would be insuperable, to a system of commercial freedom. The general im- pression of its author which the book leaves behind it is that of a large, healthy, and generous nature, earnest in insisting on fair play for all and prompt to denounce with contemptuous vehemence anything which wore the appearance of injustice. Our principal authority for the biography of Smith is Dugald Stewart's Account of his Life and Writings, originally read (1793) before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and afterwards prefixed to Smith's Essays on Philosophical Subjects, as edited by Black and Hutton. Additional particulars are given in Brougham's Men of Letters and Science, Burton's Life of Hume, and Alexander Carlyle's Autobiography; and some characteristic anecdotes of him will be found in Memoirs of the Life and Works of Sir John Sinclair (1837). For comments on his Theory of Moral Sentiments, see, besides Stewart, as cited above, Dr T. Brown's Philosophy of the Human Mind, lects. 80 and 81 ; Sir J. Mackintosh's Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy ; J. A. Farcer's Adam Smith (1881), in the series entitled English Philosophers ; and the art. ETHICS in the present work. On the Wealth of Nations, the student may consult the prefaces to M'Culloch's,Rogers's, and Nicholson's editions of that work; Rogers's Histori- cal Gleanings (18(39) ; the art. "Smith" in Coquelin and Guillaumin's Diction- naire de I'Economie Politiqiie ; Bagehot's Economic Studies (1SSO) ; and Cossa's Guide to the Study of Political Economy (Eng. trans., 1880), chap, v., where the author has enumerated the most important memoirs by foreign writers on Smith as an economist. (J. K. I.) SMITH, ALBERT (1816-1860), an instance of the jour- nalistic rather than the truly literary type of writer, was one of the most popular men of his time; a favourite humourist in the vein of humour then in vogue, but now already rather out of date ; a leading contributor to Punch ; the author of successful books of light social satire ; and, not least, the exponent of " Mont Blanc " in a pre-scientific popular entertainment descriptive of that famous moun- tain. He was born at Chertsey, Surrey, on 24th May 1816, and was educated to follow his father's profession of a surgeon. Having, in the course of his medical studies, been to the Hotel Dieu, Paris, his first literary effort was an account of his life there, which appeared in the Mirror.