e delayed a great deal too long to
answer it. Though I have had no concern myself in the Public
calamities, some of the friends in whom I interest myself
the most have been deeply concerned in them; and my
attention has been a good deal occupied about the most
proper method of extricating them.

In the Book which I am now preparing for the press I have
treated fully and distinctly of every part of the subject
which you have recommended to me; and I intended to send you
some extracts from it; but upon looking them over I find
that they are too much interwoven with other parts of the
work to be easily separated from it. I have the same opinion
of Sir James Stewart's book that you have. Without once
mentioning it, I flatter myself that any fallacious
principle in it will meet with a clear and distinct
confutation in mine.[216]

I think myself very much honoured and obliged to you for
having mentioned me to the E. India Directors as a person
who would be of use to them. You have acted in your old way
of doing your friends a good office behind their backs,
pretty much as other people do them a bad one. There is no
labour of any kind which you can impose upon me which I will
not readily undertake. By what Mr. Stewart and Mr. Ferguson
hinted to me concerning your notice of the proper remedy for
the disorders of the coin in Bengal, I believe our opinions
upon that subject are perfectly the same.

My book would have been ready for the press by the beginning
of this winter, but interruptions occasioned partly by bad
health, arising from want of amusement and from thinking too
much upon one thing, and partly by the avocations above
mentioned, will oblige me to retard its publication for a
few months longer.--I ever am, my dearest Pulteney, most
faithfully and affectionately your obliged servant,

ADAM SMITH.

_To_ WILLIAM PULTENEY Esq., _Member of Parliament_,
BATH HOUSE, LONDON.[217]

The public calamities to which Smith refers in the opening paragraph
of his letter are the bankruptcies of the severe commercial crisis of
that year, and the friends he was so much occupied in extricating from
its results were, I think it most likely, the family of Buccleugh. The
crash was especially disastrous in Scotland; only three private ban