r Dugald Stewart was in that same year 1793 (on the evenings
of 21st January and 18th March) reading his _Memoir of Adam Smith_ to
the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and he tells us himself (in 1810) how
he was compelled to abandon the idea of giving a long account of
Smith's opinions which he intended to have done, because at that
period, he says, "it was not unusual, even among men of some talents
and information, to confound studiously the speculative doctrines of
political economy with those discussions concerning the first
principles of government, which happened unfortunately at that time to
agitate the public mind. The doctrine of a Free Trade was itself
represented as of a revolutionary tendency, and some who had formerly
prided themselves on their intimacy with Mr. Smith, and on their zeal
for the propagation of his liberal system, began to call in question
the expediency of subjecting to the disputation of philosophers the
arcana of State policy, and the unfathomable wisdom of feudal
ages."[251] People's teeth had been so set on edge by the events in
France that, as Lord Cockburn tells us, when Stewart first began to
give a course of lectures in the University on political economy in
the winter 1801-2, the mere term "political economy" made them start.
"They thought it included questions touching the constitution of
governments, and not a few hoped to catch Stewart in dangerous
propositions."[252]

The French Revolution seems to have checked for a time the growing
vogue of Smith's book and the advance of his principles in this
country, just as it checked the progress of parliamentary and social
reform, because it filled men's mind with a fear of change, with a
suspicion of all novelty, with an unreasoning dislike of anything in
the nature of a general principle. By French principles the public
understood, it is true, much more than the abolition of all commercial
and agrarian privilege which was advocated by Smith, but in their
recoil they made no fine distinctions, and they naturally felt their
prejudices strongly confirmed when they found men like the Marquis of
Lansdowne, who were believers in the so-called French principles and
believers at the same time in the principles of Adam Smith, declaring
that the two things were substantially the same. Whether and how far
Smith or Tucker had any influence on that development of opinion which
eventuated in the Revolution, it would be difficult to gauge. Before
Lord L