His cruel death, too, may be almost said to have continued his services to society. It proved, with irresistible force, the true character of Infidel Revolution. It showed a noble-minded and benevolent man the victim of revolutionary rage; an intelligent, studious, and retired man, obnoxious to the rabble love of ruin; a mild, generous, and patriotic man, the instant prey of revolutionary government, which boasted of its superiority to the vices of kings, of its homage to intellect, and of its supreme value for the virtues of private life. Yet it murdered Lavoisier without a moment's hesitation, or a moment's remorse, and flung the first philosopher of France into a felon's grave.
The biography of Adam Smith gives Lord Brougham an opportunity of pouring out, at the distance of nearly half a century, that knowledge of Political Economy which first brought him into notice. His Colonial Policy, a remarkable performance for a student of eighteen, exhibited in miniature the principles and propensities which his long career has been expended in maturing and moulding. Adam Smith was the idol of all Scottish worship in the last century; and his originality of conception, the weight of his subject, and the clearness of his judgment, made him worthy of the elevation.
Adam Smith's birth was of a higher order than is often to be found in the instance of men destined to literary eminence. He was the son of a comptroller of the customs, who had been private secretary to Lord Loudoun, secretary of state, and keeper of the great seal.
An accident in infancy had nearly deprived the age of its first philosopher, even if it had not trained him to be hanged. At three years of age he was stolen by travelling tinkers, a race resembling the gipsies, and which in that day formed a numerous population in Scotland. But a pursuit being speedily set on foot, he was fortunately recovered. He was well educated, and, after the routine of school, was sent to Glasgow for three years, where he obtained an Exhibition to Baliol College. At Oxford he remained for seven years, chiefly addicted to mathematics – a study, however, which he subsequently wholly abandoned. He had been intended for the Church of England; but whether from dislike of its discipline, or from disappointment in his views, he retired to Scotland, to take his chance of employment in its colleges. In 1748 he settled in Edinburgh, and, for three years, read a course of lectures on rhetoric. His contemporaries, then obscure, became, in some instances, conspicuous; for among them were Hume, Robertson, and Wedderburne. In 1751, Smith was elected to the professorship of Logic in the University of Glasgow, which he soon after exchanged for that of Moral Philosophy.
Thus far we run on smoothly with Lord Brougham; but when he comes to discuss religion, we must occasionally doubt his guidance. For example, in speaking of Smith's lectures on Natural Theology, he denounces the jealousy of those who regard it as other than "the very foundation essential to support its fabric." From this opinion we totally dissent. It is perfectly true that natural religion and revelation are consistent with each other, as must be presumed from their being the work of the same Divine wisdom. But their foundations are wholly distinct. Why did the Jew believe the Mosaic revelation? Simply and solely, because it was delivered to him with such evidences of supernatural origin, in the thunders of Sinai, and substantiated at subsequent periods by miracle and prophecy, that he must receive it as divine. Why did the early converts receive Christianity? Simply on the same direct evidence supplied to their senses. No apostle sent them to examine their notions of the Godhead, or left them to inculcate the doctrines of the gospel by their reason. But he declared his doctrine as a new truth, and gave proof of its truth being divine, by working wonders palpably beyond the power of man. Of course, unless man knew what was meant by the power of the Deity, he could not have comprehended the simplest communication of the apostle. But we are speaking of the foundation of a belief – not the intelligibility of a language. We are entitled to go further still, and say, that the first idea of the being of a God was itself a revelation – a much plainer solution of the extraordinary circumstance, that so lofty and recondite a conception should have existed in the earliest and rudest ages of society; than to suppose that the antediluvian shepherd, or the postdiluvian hunter, should have ever thought of tracing effects and causes up to that extreme elevation, where a pure and supreme Spirit creates and governs the whole. We are entitled even to doubt whether the idea of Spirit was ever naturally conceived in the mind of any human being, difficult as is the conception to a creature surrounded with materiality, with every thought derived from his senses, and with the total incapacity of defining to this hour, or even imagining, the nature of Spirit. It will be fully admitted, that when the idea was once communicated, its reality was substantiated by the frame of nature, by the regularity, the extent, and the beneficence of the great physical system. But the origin was revelation. Lord Brougham quotes Tillotson; but the archbishop had earned his mitre by other means than the vigour of his understanding, and often trifles like other men.
In 1759, Smith published his Theory of Moral Sentiments– a work of skill and invention, but which has long since fallen into disuse with the intelligent world. It, however, had the rare good fortune of attracting the notice of an individual, possessed at once of the taste to honour, and the will to befriend, a man of original ability. This volume fell into the hands of the celebrated Charles Townsend, who proposed that the author should take charge of the young Duke of Buccleuch, whose mother, the dowager-duchess, he had married. Nothing in the life of Townsend was more honourable to him than this choice, not only for its judgment but for its rarity. The generality of men in possession of affluence think only of themselves, and would value the most common-place gratification more highly than the encouragement of the obscure genius, which wanted only that encouragement to shed a new lustre on its generation. The man of power in general feels its possession the primary object of his patronage, and sees no purpose in the immense opportunity given to him by his rank, but to obtain adherents, and make his power impregnable. Though there may be exceptions, such is the rule; and with this recollection of the established course of things, we give all honour to the memory of the man, without whose patronage the world would probably have lost the ablest work of its century, the immortal Wealth of Nations.
In 1763, Smith was appointed tutor to the young nobleman, resigned his professorship, and went with his pupil to France. After a residence of a year and a half at Toulouse, he travelled in Switzerland, and then, returning to Paris, spent ten months there. His French residence was peculiarly fortunate. It rubbed off the rust of his seclusion; it introduced him to the best society of courtly life; and it brought him into direct intercourse with that whole circle of active intellect and novel philosophy, which made the Parisian coteries at once the most bustling and brilliant of Europe. However the horrid profligacy of the court, and the contemptuous infidelity of high life, might have either disgusted the morals, or startled even the scepticism of the stranger, there can be no doubt of the interest which he felt in the society of such men as Turgot, Necker, D'Alembert, and Quesnay. Smith, some fifteen or twenty years before, had drawn up a sketch of the principles which he afterwards developed in his Wealth of Nations. Political economy was then beginning to take a form in French science. Whether it ever deserved the name of science, or will ever deserve it, may be a grave question. It depends upon such a multitude of facts, and the facts themselves vary so perpetually, the "principles" derived from those facts are so feeble and fluctuating, and common experience so provokingly contradicts, from day to day, the most laboured conclusions, that every new professor has a new theory, and every new theory turns the former into ridicule, itself to be burlesqued by the next that follows. This at least is known, that Fox declared his suspicion of the whole, saying, that it was at once too daring to be intelligible, and too indefinite to be reducible to practice.