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132.: To WILLIAM PULTENEY - Adam Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 6 Correspondence of Adam Smith [1740]

Edition used:

Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross, vol. VI of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987).

Part of: The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

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132.

To WILLIAM PULTENEY1

  • Address: To William Pulteney Esqr, Member of Parliament, Bath House, London

MS., Pierpont Morgan Libr., New York; Rae 253–4 (misdated 5 Sept.).

Kirkcaldy, 3 Sept. 1772

My Dearest Pulteney

I received your most friendly letter in due course, and I have delayed a great deal too long to answer it. Tho I have had no concern myself in the Public calamities, some of the friends for whom I interest myself the most have been deeply concerned in them; and my attention has been a good deal occupied about the most proper method of extricating them.2 In the Book3 which I am now preparing for the Press I have treated fully and distinctly of every part of the subject which you have recommended to me; and I intended to have sent you some extracts from it; but upon looking them over, I find that they are too much interwoven with other parts of the work to be easily separated from it. I have the same opinion of Sir James Stewarts Book that you have. Without once mentioning it, I flatter myself, that every false principle in it, will meet with a clear and distinct confutation in mine.4

I think myself very much honoured and obliged to you for having mentioned me to the east India Directors as a person who could be of any use to them. You have acted in your old way of doing your friends a good office behind their backs, pretty much as other people do them a bad one. There is no labour of any kind which you can impose upon me which I will not readily undertake. By what Mr Stewart and Mr Ferguson hinted to me concerning your notion of the proper remedy for the disorders of the coin in Bengal, I believe our opinions upon that subject are perfectly the same.5

My book would have been ready for the Press by the beginning of this winter; but the interruptions occasioned partly by bad health arising from want of amusement and from thinking too much upon one thing; and partly by the avocations above mentioned will oblige me to retard its publication for a few months longer. I ever am

My Dearest Pulteney Most faithfully and affectionately your obliged Servant

Adam Smith

[1 ]Formerly William Johnstone: see Letter 11 addressed to James Oswald, dated 19 Jan. 1752.

[2 ]Difficulties of Scottish businessmen and banks, in particular the Ayr Bank of which the Duke of Buccleuch was one of the largest shareholders. See Letters 131 and 133 from Hume, dated 27 June and Oct. 1772.

[3 ]WN.

[4 ]Sir James Steuart (later Steuart–Denham), Inquiry into the Principles of Political Œconomy (1767): the ‘false principles’ may be those concerning government intervention in economic affairs. Smith is said to have observed that he understood Steuart’s system better from his talk than from his books (Rae 61).

[5 ]See Letter 133, n. 6. Pulteney had suggested Adam Ferguson and Andrew Stuart as well as Smith as members of a commission to study the affairs of the East India Company, which in 1772 had fallen into confusion. Sir James Steuart was asked to examine the grave currency problems of the Company, because he had written a book on the German coinage and had friends in the British Government. His report was published as Principles of Money Applied to the State of the Coin in Bengal (1772); see S. R. Sen, Economics of Sir James Steuart (1957), ch. 10; and Stuart, Principles, ed. A. S. Skinner (Edinburgh, 1966), i. xlix and n.