mbership.

This extension of the scope of the society's work was not approved by
its founder, Allan Ramsay, who thought it beneath the dignity of such
an institution to take an interest in the making of ruffles or the
brewing of strong ale, and feared besides that it would introduce a
new set of very unintellectual members, to the serious prejudice of
the society's debates. An essay on taste was very well, and when it
came out he would ask Millar, the bookseller, to send it out to him in
Rome, but a prize for the biggest bundle of linen rags! "I could have
wished," he writes Hume, "that some other way had been fallen upon by
which porter might have been made thick and the nation rich without
our understanding being at all the poorer for it. Is not truth more
than meat, and wisdom than raiment?"[86] But however Ramsay might look
down on the project, his coadjutor in the founding of the society,
Adam Smith, entertained a very different idea of its importance. A
stimulus to the development of her industries was the very thing
Scotland most needed at the moment, and he entered heartily into the
new scheme, and took a prominent part in carrying it out. He was not
one of the nine managers to whom the practical execution of the idea
was at first entrusted, but when a few months afterwards the work was
divided among four separate committees or sections of five members
each, all chosen by another committee of five, nominated expressly for
that purpose, Smith is one of this nominating committee, and is by it
appointed likewise a member of one of the four executive committees.
The other four members of the nominating committee were Alexander
Monro _Primus_, the anatomist; Gilbert Elliot, M.P. for Selkirkshire;
the Rev. William Wilkie, author of the _Epigoniad_; and the Rev.
Robert Wallace, the predecessor and at least in part the stimulator of
Malthus in his speculations on the population question. The five
members of this committee were directed by the society to put their
own names on one or other of the four executive committees, and they
placed the name of Smith, together with that of Hume, on the committee
for Belles-Lettres and Criticism. As yet he was evidently best known
as literary critic, though the questions propounded by him in this
society, and the subjects treated by him in the Literary Society of
Glasgow, show that his tastes were already leading him into other
directions.

Sufficient contributions soon flowed in;