ith that opinion in the _Wealth of
Nations_, while admitting that some excuse could be found for it in
the low state of learning into which the English universities had
suffered themselves to fall:--

"In England it becomes every day more and more the custom to send
young people to travel in foreign countries immediately upon their
leaving school, and without sending them to any university. Our young
people, it is said, generally return home much improved by their
travels. A young man who goes abroad at seventeen or eighteen, and
returns home at one-and-twenty, returns three or four years older than
he was when he went abroad; and at that age it is very difficult not
to improve a good deal in three or four years. In the course of his
travels he generally acquires some knowledge of one or two foreign
languages; a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable
him either to speak or write them with propriety. In other respects
he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more
dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application, either to
study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a
time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in
the most frivolous dissipation the most precious years of his life, at
a distance from the inspection and controul of his parents and
relations, every useful habit which the earlier parts of his education
might have had some tendency to form in him, instead of being riveted
and confirmed, is almost necessarily either weakened or effaced.
Nothing but the discredit into which the universities are allowing
themselves to fall could ever have brought into repute so very absurd
a practice as that of travelling at this early period of life. By
sending his son abroad, a father delivers himself, at least for some
time, from so disagreeable an object as a son unemployed, neglected
and going to ruin before his eyes."[136]

Smith must have written Townshend accepting the situation almost
immediately on receiving the offer of it, and he at the same time
applied to the University authorities for leave of absence for part of
the session. He does not as yet resign his chair, nor does he make in
his application any formal mention of the nature of the business that
required his absence; he merely asks for their sanction to some highly
characteristic arrangements which he desired to make in connection
with the conduct of his class by a sub