the post if he received the offer of
it, does not seem to have taken any steps to procure it, and did not
even answer Pulteney's letter till September. Stuart's candidature was
defeated, Horace Walpole says, by Lord Mansfield, but eventually no
appointment was made, because Parliament intervened, and forbade any
such commission to be sent out at all.

In sending the letter to the _Academy_ for publication Professor
Rogers observes that it is plain the delay in the publication of the
_Wealth of Nations_ was due to the negotiations which Mr. Pulteney was
evidently making for the purpose of getting Smith appointed to this
place. "Had he succeeded," proceeds Mr. Rogers, "it is probable that
the _Wealth of Nations_ would never have seen the light; for every one
knows that in the first and second books of that work the East India
Company is criticised with the greatest severity.... I have no doubt
that owing to Pulteney's negotiations it lay unrevised and unaltered
during four years in the author's desk."

With all respect, this is a strange remark to fall from an editor of
the _Wealth of Nations_, for the evidences of continuous revision and
alteration during those four years are very numerous in the text of
the work itself. He made many changes or additions in 1773; for
example, the remarks on the price of hides,[219] in the chapter on
Rent, were written in February 1773; and those on the decline of
sugar-refining in colonies taken from the French, in the chapter on
the Colonies,[220] were written in October; while the passage on
American wages, in the chapter on Wages, was inserted some time in the
same year. The extensive additions in the chapters on the Revenue,
occasioned by reading the _Memoires concernant les Droits_, must have
been written after 1774, because Smith probably obtained that book
after Turgot became Minister in the middle of that year; his remarks,
in the chapter on Colonies, on the effects of recent events on the
trade with North America,[221] and his remarks on the Irish revenue in
the chapter on Public Debts, were added in 1775.[222] The chapter on
the Regulated Companies, in which the East India Company receives most
systematic attention, and which did not appear in the first edition of
the book, was apparently not written till 1782.[223]

The book therefore did not lie "unrevised and unaltered" in the
author's desk from 1772 to 1776; on the contrary, the chief cause of
the four years' delay was t