em that year.

No memorial of all their intercourse, however, has survived except the
slight and rather indefinite reminiscence of Dupont de Nemours, to
which allusion has been made. Dupont remembers that Smith used to
discuss with them a question, which they no doubt would be often
discussing, for they were greatly interested in it,--the question of
the effect upon the wages of labour of a tax upon the commodities
consumed by the labourers; and he says that Smith, in the freedom of
private intercourse with them, expressed quite a different opinion
upon that subject from that which he delivered in the _Wealth of
Nations_, with the fear of vested interests before his eyes. Dupont
could not have read the _Wealth of Nations_ very carefully when he
hinted this accusation of timidity before vested interests, for there
was scarcely a vested interest existing at the time that has not
incurred in its turn most vigorous censure in that work. But as the
alleged difference amounts merely to this, that Smith in his book
asserts a principle with a certain specific limitation to it which he
used to assert in conversation without the limitation, it probably
represents no real change of opinion, but only a difference between
the more exact expositions of the book and the less exact expositions
of conversation. The point was this. Smith held, with Dupont and his
friends, that a direct tax on the wages of labour, like the French
industrial _taille_, would, if the demand for labour and the price of
provisions remained the same, have the effect of raising the wages of
labour by the sum required to pay the tax. He held, again, with them
that an indirect tax on the commodities consumed by the labourers
would act in exactly the same way if the commodities taxed were
necessaries of life, because a rise in the price of necessaries would
imperil the labourer's ability to bring up his family. But what seemed
new to Dupont was that Smith now in his book held that if the
commodities taxed were luxuries, the tax would not act in that way. It
would act as a sumptuary law. The labourer would merely spend less on
such superfluities, and since this forced frugality would probably
increase rather than diminish his ability to bring up a family, he
would neither require nor obtain any rise of wages. The high tobacco
duty in France and England and a recent rise of three shillings on the
barrel of beer had no effect whatever on wages.

That is what Dupont