n 1774, containing among other names those of the
Duke of Buccleugh, Lords Haddington, Glasgow, Glencairn, Elibank, and
Mountstuart; Henry Dundas, Lord Advocate; Baron Mure, Hume, Adam
Smith, Robertson, Black, Adam Ferguson, John Home, Dr. Blair, Sir
James Steuart the economist, Dempster, Islay Campbell, afterwards Lord
President; and John Clerk of Eldin. The first secretary of the club
was William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney), and, as has been
frequently told, David Hume was jocularly appointed to a sinecure
office created for him, the office of assassin, and lest Hume's
good-nature should unfit him for the duties, Andrew Crosbie, advocate
(the original of Scott's "Pleydell"), was made his assistant. The club
met at first in Tom Nicholson's tavern, the Diversorium, at the Cross,
and subsequently removed to more fashionable quarters at the famous
Fortune's in the Stamp Office Close, where the Lord High Commissioner
to the General Assembly held his levees, and the members dined every
Friday at two and sat till six. However the club may have pulled wires
in private, their public activity seems to have been very little; so
far at least as literary advocacy of their cause went, nothing
proceeded from it except a pamphlet by Dr. Carlyle, and a
much-overlauded squib by Adam Ferguson, entitled "A History of the
Proceedings in the Case of Margaret, commonly called Sister Peg."

Smith was, as I have said, one of the original members of the club,
and from Carlyle's list would appear to have continued a member till
1774; but he was not a member of the Younger Poker Club, established
in 1786. In the interval he had expressed in the _Wealth of Nations_ a
strong preference for a standing army over a national militia,[101]
after instituting a very careful examination of the whole subject.
Whether his views had changed since 1762, or whether he had joined in
the agitation for a militia merely as a measure of justice to Scotland
or as an expedient of temporary necessity, without committing himself
to any abstract admiration for the institution in general, I have no
means of deciding; but we can hardly think he ever shared that kind of
belief in the principle of a militia which animated men like Ferguson
and Carlyle, and which, according to them, animated the other members
of the club also at its birth. Ferguson says the club was founded
"upon the principle of zeal for a militia and a conviction that there
could be no lasting securit