Thomas Paine (1737-1809).

Thomas Paine, the son of a small farmer at Thetford in Norfolk, was born in 1737, served in the navy, was dismissed from the excise, and migrated in 1774 to Philadelphia. Thence in 1776 he issued his short pamphlet entitled Common Sense, addressed to the inhabitants of America. Few pamphlets have had a career so triumphant. Written in a trenchant style, and with remarkable vigour and clearness, the brochure explains how America was going to ruin because of her connection with Britain. Our plan is commerce. What advantages do we derive from the connection? 'Tis time to part'-thus with breathless haste he argues, enforces, and concludes. His Rights of Man (1791), in answer to Burke's Reflections, exhibits no little controversial skill; but there is in Paine's style none of the organ's roll which hushes Burke's listeners into a state of veneration and awe. At the same time he has a clear, practical manner of exposition, and he develops the absurd sides of aristocracy, and monarchy, and primogeniture, and other such archaic institutions, with an acrid cleverness that is by no means destitute of point or humour. He was a perfectly sincere believer in the efficacy of theories about equality and fraternity. Robespierre pleaded eloquently for the abolition of the death penalty. Paine, as unscrupulous as William Godwin' in many of his private relations, was an enthusiastic humanitarian and philanthropist. In January, 1793, being then in Paris, he pleaded with a self-effacing warmth for the life of Louis XVI., and made this practical proposal: 'Let the United States of America be the safeguard and asylum of Louis Capet. There, hereafter, far removed from the miseries and crimes of royalty, he may learn to appreciate a true system of government.'

Paine has little sense of continuity in history and 1 See The Age of Wordsworth.

no historical sentiment, but he develops his doctrines with a logical precision which is indeed frequently superior to that of Burke. He assumes that man is a purely logical machine without a past and without a future-entirely overlooking the complex processes by which human society has been built up from elementary passions, which are indeed humoured and purged, but never extinguished. Man, as we see him, is the product of innumerable forces; his character has been inherited from a long line of ancestors; his beliefs are a tradition from remote ages, modified but superficially by his own activity. This, the basis of Burke's optimistic view of prescription and established usage, is the conception to which all sensible men incline, but of which the revolutionary optimists such as Paine and Godwin were wholly unconscious. Time, the stern summarist, tends to show the shallowness of Paine's mathematical demonstrations and the depth of Burke's apologies and suggestions.

Paine's health was rickety, and his last years appear to have been spent under more or less deplorable conditions in America, where he died in June, 1809. His views, like those of not a few anarchists and insurgents, were in many respects progressive and humane; at the same time he identified himself so completely with those whose life was devoted to agitation against constitutional government, and who aimed at the 'subversion in England of institu tions dear to the mass of the people, that he was ostracised and long regarded as a pariah. His controversial humour inclined him ever to the side of opposition, and his epithets in addressing the crowned brigands of Europe go far to justify such adjectives as crude and vitriolic. Nodier sums him up, not inaptly, as good by nature and a sophist by conviction. His life was the reverse of edifying; his writings cannot be overlooked by any serious student of the period.

Adam Smith (1723-1790).

CHAPTER IV.

STUDY AND RESEARCH.

I. Economists and Philosophers.

ADAM SMITH was born at Kirkcaldy, Fifeshire, on June 5th, 1723, thirty-four years after Montesquieu. He was the son of Adam Smith, Writer to the Signet, Judge Advocate for Scotland, and Comptroller of the Customs in the Kirkcaldy district, by Margaret, the daughter of John Douglas, a landed proprietor. The father died a few months before his famous son was born. The mother lavished the utmost care on the upbringing of young Adam, who repaid her affection with a beautiful devotion. From the Burgh School the boy passed to Glasgow College, and then to Balliol at Oxford. Like other students of the century who were to achieve great eminence, he found the atmosphere of Oxford dull, heavy, and repressive. The Scots scholars at Balliol were regarded as Galileans; the authorities devoted themselves to the fortunes of James III.; the one advantage of the place was the fine library (now adorned by a statuette of Adam Smith), in which Smith had a free range. Though sociably inclined, he seems to have made no friends at Oxford, and suffered much from lassitude and laziness, which he tried to cure with 'tar water.' In 1746 he shook the dust of Oxford from his feet, and after two years without regular occupation, he

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began some public lectures in the college at Edinburgh upon the then novel subject of English literature.' He had a talent for quoting poetry, and dreamed of becoming a poet himself. But he found rhyming beyond him, and he had a contempt for blank verse (for which Johnson 'could have hugged him '): They do well to call it blank, for blank it is.' It was in the following year, 1749, being then but twenty-six, that Adam Smith first addressed himself to what is pre-eminently his own subject-economics; and in this early course he already adumbrates his great idea of natural liberty in industrial affairs.

On

The Edinburgh lectures bore an immediate fruit. the death of Mr. Loudon, professor of logic in Glasgow College, in 1750, Smith was appointed to the vacant chair, and so began that period of thirteen years of active academic work which he always looked back upon as by far the most useful, and therefore by far the happiest and most honourable period' of his life. His popularity as a lecturer rapidly grew, and he had practically converted his fellow-citizens at Glasgow to free trade views long before he expounded them in a great book. His first publication of any importance, however, was not economic, but was the fruit of his lectures as professor of moral philosophy (he had been transferred to this chair from that of logic in 1752), and was called The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). It met with an unequivocal success when published in London by Millar, and received the approbation of so good a judge as Burke. 'The author,' wrote Burke in The Annual Register, 'seeks for the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in most common and most allowed passions, and making approbation and disapprobation the tests of virtue and vice, and showing that these are founded on sympathy, he raises from this simple truth

one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory that has perhaps ever appeared. The illustrations are numerous and happy, and show the author to be a man of uncommon observation. His language is easy and spirited, and puts things before you in the fullest light; it is rather painting than writing.' David Hume also, who had become one of Adam Smith's warmest friends, and with whom Smith always stayed on his visits to Edinburgh, commended the book highly. One of the indirect results was that, largely through Hume's influence, the author was selected, in the autumn of 1763, to be travelling tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, and set out in February, 1764, for Paris, Toulouse, Geneva. He did not omit to pay a visit to Voltaire, whom he held in profound veneration, and on his return through Paris in 1766 he visited Quesnay. Upon his return, Smith, whose pecuniary position was henceforward assured by a pension of £300 from the Duke of Buccleuch, spent some two years in retirement at Kirkcaldy, and it was during the period 1767-70 that he was perfecting the draft of his great book; but, nevertheless, between 1770 and 1776 the work was incessantly being altered, modified, and improved. These revisions were made for the most part in London, and the book also grew in size by the natural process of accretion. In 1775, while residing in London (where his headquarters were the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street), Adam Smith was admitted a member of the literary club--where the general verdict seems to have been that his talk was rather too professional-and, like Gibbon, he attended Hunter's famous lectures on anatomy.

The Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, promised as long ago as 1759, was at length published on March 9th, 1776. The year 1776 is accordingly an epoch. If Horne's aphorism be true, and those