trading
companies in Great Britain. These additions I mean not only
to be inserted at their proper places into the new edition,
but to be printed separately and to be sold for a shilling
or half-a-crown to the purchasers of the old edition. The
price must depend on the bulk of the additions when they are
all written out. It would give me great satisfaction if you
would let me know by the return of the Post if this delay
will not be inconvenient. Remember me to Strahan. He will be
so good as excuse my not writing to him, as I have nothing
to say but what I have now said to you, and he knows my
aversion to writing.[313]

The additions of which he speaks in this letter were published
separately in 1783 in quarto, so as to suit the two previous editions
of the work, and the new edition containing them was published in the
end of 1784 in three volumes octavo, at the price of a guinea. The
delay was due to booksellers' reasons. Dr. Swediaur, the eminent Paris
physician, who was resident in Edinburgh at the time studying with
Cullen, wrote Bentham in November 1784 that Smith, whom he used to see
at least once a week, had shown him the new edition printed and
finished, but had told him that Cadell would not publish it till all
the people of fashion had arrived in London, and would then at once
push a large sale. Swediaur adds that he found this was a
bookseller's trick very generally practised, and of Smith himself he
says he found him "a very unprejudiced and good man."[314]

The principal additions are the result of investigations to which he
seems to have been prompted by current agitations of the stream of
political opinion. He gives now, for example, a fuller account of the
working of the bounty system in the Scotch fisheries, which was then
the subject of a special parliamentary inquiry, and on which his
experience as a Commissioner of Customs furnished him with many
opportunities of gaining accurate information; and he enters on a
careful examination of the chartered and regulated corporations, and
especially of the East India Company, whose government of the great
oriental dependency was at the moment a question of such urgency that
Fox introduced his India Bill which killed the Coalition Ministry in
1783, and Pitt established the Board of Control in 1784.

The new matter contains two recommendations which have attracted
comment as ostensible contraventions of