s, I doubt whether it has ever been fully
developed and sufficiently explained but in the writings of an author
of our own time, now unfortunately no more (I mean the author of the
celebrated treatise on the _Wealth of Nations_), whose extensive
knowledge of detail and depth of philosophical research will, I
believe, furnish the best solution of every question connected with
the history of commerce and with the system of political
economy."[249] In the same year it was quoted by Mr. Whitbread and by
Fox (from the exposition of the division of labour in the first book)
in the debate on the armament against Russia, and by Wilberforce in
his speech introducing his Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

It was not mentioned in the House of Lords till 1793, when in the
debate on the King's Message for an Augmentation of the Forces it was
referred to by Smith's two old friends, the Earl of Shelburne (now
Marquis of Lansdowne) and Alexander Wedderburn (now Lord Loughborough,
and presiding over the House as Lord Chancellor, of England). The
Marquis of Lansdowne said: "With respect to French principles, as they
had been denominated, those principles had been exported from us to
France, and could not be said to have originated among the population
of the latter country. The new principles of government founded on the
abolition of the old feudal system were originally propagated among us
by the Dean of Gloucester, Mr. Tucker, and had since been more
generally inculcated by Dr. Adam Smith in his work on the _Wealth of
Nations_, which had been recommended as a book necessary for the
information of youth by Mr. Dugald Stewart in his _Elements of the
Philosophy of the Human Mind_." The Lord Chancellor in replying merely
said that "in the works of Dean Tucker, Adam Smith, and Mr. Stewart,
to which allusion had been made, no doctrines inimical to the
principles of civil government, the morals or religion of mankind,
were contained, and therefore to trace the errors of the French to
these causes was manifestly fallacious."[250]

Lord Lansdowne's endeavour to shield Smith's political orthodoxy under
the countenance lent to his book by so safe and trusted a teacher of
the sons of the Whig nobility as Dugald Stewart, is hardly less
curious than his unreserved identification of the new political
economy with that moving cloud of ideas which, under the name of
French principles, excited so much alarm in the public mind of that
time. Fo