f courtly life; and it brought him
into direct intercourse with that whole circle of active intellect and
novel philosophy, which made the Parisian coteries at once the most
bustling and brilliant of Europe. However the horrid profligacy of the
court, and the contemptuous infidelity of high life, might have either
disgusted the morals, or startled even the scepticism of the stranger,
there can be no doubt of the interest which he felt in the society of
such men as Turgot, Necker, D'Alembert, and Quesnay. Smith, some fifteen
or twenty years before, had drawn up a sketch of the principles which he
afterwards developed in his _Wealth of Nations_. Political economy was
then beginning to take a form in French science. Whether it ever
deserved the name of science, or will ever deserve it, may be a grave
question. It depends upon such a multitude of facts, and the facts
themselves vary so perpetually, the "principles" derived from those
facts are so feeble and fluctuating, and common experience so
provokingly contradicts, from day to day, the most laboured conclusions,
that every new professor has a new theory, and every new theory turns
the former into ridicule, itself to be burlesqued by the next that
follows. This at least is known, that Fox declared his suspicion of the
whole, saying, that it was at once too daring to be intelligible, and
too indefinite to be reducible to practice. Even in our day, no two
authors on the subject agree; all the successful measures of revenue and
finance have been adopted in utter defiance of its dogmas; while all the
modern attempts to act upon what are called its principles, have only
convulsed commerce, shaken public credit, and substituted fantastic
visions of prosperity for the old substantial wealth of England. No
occupation could have been fitter for the half-frivolous, half-factious
spirit of France. A revolution in revenue was openly regarded as the
first step to revolution in power; the political economists indulged
themselves in a philosophic conspiracy, and vented their sneers against
the government, under pretext of recognising the rights of trade. It
took but a little more than twenty years to mature this dexterous
contrivance, and the meek friends of free trade had the happiness of
seeing France in a blaze.

Smith, on his return, shut himself up in his study in Kirkcaldy for ten
years. His friends in vain attempted to draw him from his solitude to
Edinburgh: he steadily, we may