work--_An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations_, by Adam Smith--was by far the most
influential of them all. 'It is,' says Sir James, 'perhaps the only
book which produced an immediate, general, and irrevocable change in
some of the most important parts of the legislation of all civilised
states. Touching those matters which may be numbered, and measured,
and weighed, it bore visible and palpable fruit. In a few years it
began to alter laws and treaties, and has made its way throughout the
convulsions of revolution and conquest to a due ascendant over the
minds of men, with far less than the average obstructions of prejudice
and clamour, which check the channels through which truth flows into
practice.'

And yet, though many of the seeds which this great work served to
scatter sprung up thus rapidly, and produced luxuriant crops,
there were others, not less instinct with the vital principles, of
which the germination has been slow. The nurseryman expects, in sowing
beds of the stone-fruit-bearing trees, such as the plum or the
hawthorn, to see the plants spring up very irregularly. One seed
bursts the enveloping case, and gets up in three weeks; another
barely achieves the same work in three years. And it has been thus
with the harder-coated germens of the _Wealth of Nations_. It is
now exactly eighty years since the philosopher set himself to
elaborate the thinking of his great work in his mother's house in
Kirkcaldy, and exactly seventy years since he gave it to the world.
It appeared in 1776; and now, for the first time, in 1846, the
Queen's Speech, carefully concocted by a Conservative Ministry,
embodies as great practical truths its free-trade principles. The
shoot--a true dicotyledon--has fairly got its two vigorous lobes
above the surface: freedom of trade in all that the farmer rears,
and freedom of trade in all that the manufacturer produces; and there
cannot be a shadow of doubt that it will be by and by a very vigorous
tree. No Protectionist need calculate, from its rate of progress in
the past, on its rate of progress in the future. Nearly three
generations have come and gone since, to vary the figure, the
preparations for laying the train began; but now that the train
is fairly ready and fired, the explosion will not be a matter of
generations at all. Explosions come under an entirely different law
from the law of laying trains. It will happen with the rising of the
free-trade agita