Imperial Parliament
in London was to make laws for the local affairs of the provinces
across the Atlantic exactly as it made laws for the local affairs of
the province across the Tweed. He shrank from none of the consequences
of his scheme, admitting even that when the Colonies grew in
population and wealth, as grow they must, till the real centre of
empire changed, the time would then arrive when the American members
of the Imperial Parliament would far outnumber the British, and the
seat of Parliament itself would require to be transferred from London
to some Constantinople on the other side of the Atlantic.

He was quite sensible that this scheme of his would be thought wild
and called a "new Utopia," but he was not one of those who counted the
old Utopia of Sir Thomas More to be either useless or chimerical, and
he says that this Utopia of his own is "no more useless or chimerical
than the old one." The difficulties it would encounter came, he says,
"not from the nature of things, but from the prejudices and opinions
of the people both on this and on the other side of the Atlantic." He
held, moreover, very strongly that a union of this kind was the only
means of making the Colonies a useful factor instead of a showy and
expensive appendage of the empire, and the only alternative that could
really prevent their total separation from Great Britain. He pleaded
for union, too, not merely for the salvation of the Colonies to the
mother country, but even more for the salvation of the Colonies to
themselves. Separation merely meant mediocrity for Great Britain, but
for the Colonies it meant ruin. There would no longer be any check on
the spirit of rancorous and virulent faction which was always
inseparable from small democracies. The coercive power of the mother
country had hitherto prevented the colonial factions from breaking out
into anything worse than brutality and insult, but if that coercive
power were entirely taken away they would probably soon break out into
open violence and bloodshed.[243]

The event has falsified the last anticipation, but this is not the
place to criticise Smith's scheme. It was only requisite to recall for
a moment the ideas which, according to the Duke of Buccleugh's
statement to Hume, Smith was at this time so zealously working for in
the important circles in which he then moved in London.

FOOTNOTES:

[229] _Hume MSS._, R.S.E. Library.

[230] Add. MSS., 32,336. It must have been d