Now Adam Smith seems himself to have felt dimly conscious that there was something in this theory not quite convincing; and in his efforts to put it right, he was betrayed into the single instance of disingenuousness which I can recall in his works. I should not have referred to it, but for the tendency it has to mislead the reader on a question so important as the one we are now considering. It makes its appearance when he has to face the fact that however long his Colonial ships may be away, they must return home at last bringing their enormous profits with them; for then his readers will want to know what will become of this great accession to the wealth of the country. Re-invested in still more ships for the Colonial trade is his first answer; for the capital, he thinks, which this trade is capable of absorbing and withdrawing from agriculture and the home trade is almost unlimited. But as a time must eventually come when the trade can absorb no more, and the question still presses as to what will be done with all this return wealth which must then pile itself up in the mother country; - if he is asked what living reason he has to offer why it should not be reinvested in the land and home trade as well as in the near foreign trade, he executes an insidious flank movement which gives evidence rather of his dialectic skill than of that high-minded candour and truth-loving philosophic character for which he is so justly revered.

For he asks his readers to come with him to Cadiz and Lisbon, and see for themselves what the Spanish and Portuguese merchants there are doing with the enormous wealth which their ships are bringing home from the monopoly of their American gold and silver mines. Are they re-investing it, he asks, in the land and manufactures of their respective countries - which so badly need it? Not at all; on the contrary, he says, you have only to open your eyes to see that they are spending it in idle luxury and ostentation, - in trains of dependents and unproductive labourers, - and so in corrupting the minds of the people by setting them an example which they are only too ready to follow, - especially, he thinks, when merchants set the fashion of extravagance and waste, rather than of parsimony. And then, dropping the subject with a shrug, he leaves the reader with the impression that this is how the wealth that is pouring in on the English merchants engaged in the Colonial trade will, - as that of the nouveaux riches everywhere, - be spent also.

But where is the disingenuousness in this, the reader will ask? To see it, we have only to let Adam Smith tell us himself what would become of the still greater wealth which he contends would accrue to the country as a whole if it followed his own advice, - which was to cancel the monopoly of the Colonial trade whose high profits had seduced the nation from its true path, and to throw it open to all the world; for then you would see that capital would follow that natural order and hierarchy which as we have seen he had laid down, and which would be the most remunerative alike for the individual, for the nation, and for the world as a whole. Hut if, for the nonce, we agree with him in this, and then ask him in turn into whose lap the main part of this great increase of national wealth (vastly greater indeed in his opinion than from the monopoly of the Colonial trade) will fall, he has himself frankly told us - into that of the landlords! Not into the pockets of the farmers, be it remembered, for under any circumstances, he admits, they will get no more than the current rate of profits for their investments, for whatever is over will be skimmed off like cream, and go to the landlords as rent; not into those of the manufacturers or wholesalers, who will also get only the ordinary rate of profits; and least of all into those of the foreign traders and Colonial merchants, who not only have to share the profits of the trade with the foreigner, but have, on account of the distance and expense, to remain out of their capital for the greatest length of time.

Into the pockets of the landlords, then, according to Adam Smith will go that greater increase of wealth which will accrue to the nation by following the natural order of employments which he has laid down, - instead of the inverted order which begins at the tail-end with the hot-house growth of the Colonial trade, stimulated into undue activity by a monopoly, to the starvation of the more productive occupations of agriculture and the home trades lying above them in his scale. And now, if remembering the Cadiz and Lisbon merchants, we ask him in turn; - in what productive employments the landlords were investing their present wealth, or were likely to invest it if it poured in on them in still greater streams, his preconceptions and perhaps his prejudices get the better of his judgment, and he replies extenuatingly that some of it at least is invested in the cultivation of their lands. But as he does not deny that even the Cadiz and Lisbon merchants kept up the equipment of their trading ships, - we want to know, in order to make the comparison fair, what the landlords are supposed to do with the bulk of their incomes, which, with their corn laws as feeders, formed in his day the main part of the wealth of the nation? Did they invest in land a tithe of it compared with what the steady-going British traders and manufacturers invested in every occupation in which they were engaged? On the contrary, unless all history is a fable, the landlords, of all people! and especially the landlords of the eighteenth century, were the most ' chartered libertines,' and spent their rent-rolls, - as indeed, for that matter, they were expected to do, - in every form of idleness, luxury, and ostentation, and in the support of the tribes of menials and other unproductive labourers proper to the good old feudal times.

And Adam Smith knew it, and knew besides that it was not the merchants who corrupted the masses of the people by their extravagance, but that it was the landlords who, beginning by corrupting the merchants, set an example which as it propagated itself downwards to the lower ranks of the people, ended by corrupting all alike. And this is why I have accused him in this particular instance of moral disingenuousness, and of straining at a gnat in playing off the idleness, luxury, and ostentation of the Spanish and Portuguese merchants, in order to eke out his argument against the Colonial trade; while to support his own views, he swallowed a ten times greater idleness, luxury and ostentation, in the case of English landlordism, without a hint of disapproval or a word of comment to veil his inconsistency; - a disingenuousness unworthy of his role as a philosopher.