er were "treated of at length in some
lectures which I have still by me, and which were written in the hand
of a clerk who left my service six years ago"--that is, in 1749--and
adds that "they had all of them been the subjects of lectures which I
read at Edinburgh the winter before I left it, and I can adduce
innumerable witnesses both from that place and from this who will
ascertain them sufficiently to be mine."[23] These ideas of natural
liberty in industrial affairs were actively at work, not only in
Smith's own mind, but in the minds of others in his immediate circle
in Scotland in those years 1749 and 1750. David Hume and James Oswald
were then corresponding on the subject, and though it is doubtful
whether Smith had seen much or anything of Hume personally at that
time (for Hume had been abroad with General St. Clair part of it, and
did not live in Edinburgh after his return), it was in those and the
two previous years that Smith was first brought into real intellectual
contact with his friend and townsman, James Oswald.

Oswald, it may be mentioned, though still a young man--only eight
years older than Smith--had already made his mark in Parliament where
he sat for their native burgh, and had been made a Commissioner of the
Navy in 1745. He had made his mark largely by his mastery of economic
subjects, for which Hume said, after paying him a visit at Dunnikier
for a week in 1744, that he had a "great genius," and "would go far in
that way if he persevered." He became afterwards commissioner of trade
and plantations, Lord of the Treasury, and Vice-Treasurer of Ireland,
and would have certainly gone further but for his premature death in
1768 at the age of fifty-two. Lord Shelburne once strongly advised
Lord Bute to make him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Smith thought as
highly of Oswald as Hume. He used to "dilate," says Oswald's grandson,
who heard him, "with a generous and enthusiastic pleasure on the
qualifications and merits of Mr. Oswald, candidly avowing at the same
time how much information he had received on many points from the
enlarged views and profound knowledge of that accomplished
statesman."[24] Dugald Stewart saw a paper written by Smith which
described Oswald not only as a man of extensive knowledge of economic
subjects, but a man with a special taste and capacity for the
discussion of their more general and philosophical aspects. That
paper, we cannot help surmising, is the same document of 1755