you. For
navigation and general commerce may suffer more than our
manufactures. Should London fall as much in its size as I
have done it will be the better. It is nothing but a Hulk of
bad and unclean Humours.[242]

The American question was of course the great question of the hour,
for the Colonies were already a year in active rebellion, and they
issued their declaration of independence but a few months later. Smith
followed the struggle, as we see from many evidences in the concluding
portion of the _Wealth of Nations_, with the most patriotic interest
and anxiety, and having long made a special study of the whole problem
of colonial administration, had arrived at the most decided opinions
not only on the rights and wrongs of the particular quarrel then at
issue, but on the general policy it was requisite to adopt in the
government of dependencies. Hume was in favour of separation, because
he believed separation to be inevitable sooner or later in the
ordinary course of nature, like the separation of the fruit from the
tree or the child from the parent. But Smith, shunning all such
misleading metaphors, held that there need never be any occasion for
separation as long as mother country and dependency were wise enough
to keep together, and that the sound policy to adopt was really the
policy of closer union--of imperial federation, as we should now call
it. He would not say, "Perish dependencies," but "Incorporate them."
He would treat a colony as but a natural expansion of the territory of
the kingdom, and have its inhabitants enjoy the same rights and bear
the same burdens as other citizens. He did not think it wrong to tax
the Colonies; on the contrary, he would make them pay every tax the
inhabitants of Great Britain had to pay; but he thought it wrong to
put restrictions on their commerce from which the commerce of Great
Britain was free, and he thought it wrong to tax them for imperial
purposes without giving them representation in the Imperial
Parliament--full and equal representation, "bearing the same
proportion to the produce of their taxes as the representation of
Great Britain might bear to the produce of the taxes levied upon Great
Britain." The union he contemplated was to be more than federal; it
was to preclude home rule by local assemblies; it was to be like the
union which had been established with Scotland, and which he strongly
desired to see established with Ireland; and the