d. MSS. 32,566.

[152] Tocqueville, _State of Society in France_, pp. _265, 271._

[153] _Hume Correspondence_, R.S.E. Library.

CHAPTER XIII

GENEVA

In the end of August Smith and his pupils left Toulouse and made what
Stewart calls an extensive tour in the South of France. Of this tour
no other record remains, but the Duke's aunt, Lady Mary Coke,
incidentally mentions that when they were at Marseilles they visited
the porcelain factory, and that the Duke bought two of the largest
services ever sold there, for which he paid more than L150 sterling.
They seem to have arrived in Geneva some time in October, and stayed
about two months in the little republic of which, as we have seen,
Smith had long been a fervent admirer. In making so considerable a
sojourn at Geneva, he was no doubt influenced as a political
philosopher by the desire to see something of the practical working of
those republican institutions which he regarded speculatively with so
much favour, to observe how the common problems of government worked
themselves out on the narrow field of a commonwealth with only 24,000
inhabitants all told, which yet contrived to keep its place among the
nations, to sit sometimes as arbiter between them, and to surpass them
all in the art of making its people prosperous. He had the luck to
observe it at an interesting moment, for it was in the thick of a
constitutional crisis. The government of the republic had hitherto
been vested in the hands of 200 privileged families, and the rest of
the citizens were now pressing their right to a share in it, with the
active assistance of Voltaire. This important struggle for the
conversion of the aristocratic into the democratic republic continued
all through the period of Smith's visit, and the city of Geneva, which
in its usual state was described by Voltaire as "a tedious convent
with some sensible people in it," was day after day at this time the
animated scene of the successive acts of that political drama.

During his stay there Smith made many personal friends, both among the
leading citizens of the commonwealth and among the more distinguished
of the foreign visitors who generally abounded there. People went to
Geneva in those days not to see the lake or the mountains, but to
consult Dr. Tronchin and converse with Voltaire. Smith needed no
introduction to Tronchin, who, as we have seen, held so high an
opinion of his abilities that he had sent his own son all