vidence now that Adam Smith owed this
perception to his acquaintance with Quesnay and Turgot; but they may
well have confirmed him in it, and they show that the older philosophy
was attacked on every side.

Nor must we miss the general atmosphere of the time. On the whole his
age was a conservative one, convinced, without due reason, that
happiness was independent of birth or wealth and that natural law
somehow could be made to justify existing institutions. The poets, like
Pope, were singing of the small part of life which kings and laws may
hope to cure; and that attitude is written in the general absence of
economic legislation during the period. Religiously, the Church exalted
the _status quo_; and where, as with Wesley, there was revolt, its
impetus directed the mind to the source of salvation in the individual
act. It may, indeed, be generally argued that the religious teachers
acted as a social soporific. Where riches accumulated, they could be
regarded as the blessing of God; where they were absent their
unimportance for eternal happiness could be emphasized. Burke's early
attack on a system which condemned "two hundred thousand innocent
persons ... to so intolerable slavery" was, in truth, a justification of
the existing order. The social question which, in the previous century,
men like Bellers and Winstanley had brought into view, dropped out of
notice until the last quarter of the century. There was, that is to say,
no organized resistance possible to the power of individualism; and
resistance was unlikely to make itself heard once the resources of the
Industrial Revolution were brought into play. Men discovered with
something akin to ecstasy the possibilities of the new inventions; and
when the protest came against the misery they effected, it was answered
that they represented the working of that natural law by which the
energies of men may raise them to success. And discontent could easily,
as with the saintly Wilberforce, be countered by the assertion that it
was revolt against the will of God.

II

Few lives represent more splendidly than that of Adam Smith the
speculative ideal of a dispassionate study of philosophy. He was
fortunate in his teachers and his friends. At Glasgow he was the pupil
of Francis Hutcheson; and even if he was taught nothing at Oxford, at
least six years of leisure gave him ample opportunity to learn. His
professorship at Glasgow not only brought him into contact with m