his books,[3] and those Glasgow merchants must have obtained
from Smith's expositions a very clear and complete hold indeed of the
doctrines of commercial freedom, when Steuart failed to shake it, and
was fain to leave such theorists to their theories. Long before the
publication of the _Wealth of Nations_, therefore, the new light was
shining clearly from Smith's chair in Glasgow College, and winning its
first converts in the practical world. One can accordingly well
understand the emotion with which J.B. Say sat in this chair when he
visited Glasgow in 1815, and after a short prayer said with great
fervour, "Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace."[53]

Dugald Stewart further states, on the authority of gentlemen who were
students in the moral philosophy class at Glasgow in 1752 or 1753,
that Smith delivered so early as that lectures containing the
fundamental principles of the _Wealth of Nations_; and in 1755--the
year Cantillon's _Essai_ first saw the light, and the year before
Quesnay published his first economic writing--Smith was not only
expounding his system of natural liberty to his students, but publicly
asserting his claim to the authorship of that system in a Glasgow
Economic Society--perhaps the first economic club established
anywhere. The paper in which Smith vindicates this claim came somehow
into the possession of Dugald Stewart, and so escaped the fire to
which Smith committed all his other papers before his death, but it is
believed to have been destroyed by Stewart's son, very possibly after
his father's directions. For Stewart thought it would be improper to
publish the complete manuscript, because it would revive personal
differences which had better remain in oblivion, and consequently our
knowledge of its contents is confined to the few sentences which he
has thought right to quote as a valuable evidence of the progress of
Smith's political ideas at that very early period. It will be observed
that, as far as we can collect from so small a fragment of his
discourse, he presents the doctrine of natural liberty in a more
extreme form than it came to wear after twenty years more of thought
in the _Wealth of Nations_. Stewart says that many of the most
important opinions in the _Wealth of Nations_ are detailed in this
document, but he cites only the following:--

"Man is generally considered by statesmen and projectors as
the materials of a sort of political mechanics. Projectors