#james steuart

How many examples I could give, of this assistance given to manufactures in different providences, where I have found the value of a day's work, of spinning, for example, not equal to half the nourishment of the person.

Adam Smith took a sterner and more doctrinaire position on the inviolability of laissez-faire even during times of dearth than did many of his colleagues. He insisted that the interests of dealers (inland) and the "great body of the people" were "exactly the same", "even in years of the greatest scarcity". "The unlimited, unrestricted freedom of the corn trade, as it is the only effectual preventive of the miseries of a famine so it is the best palliative of the inconvenience of a dearth." Smith was not, "the only standard-bearer for 'natural liberty' in grain" but he was one of the more extreme standard-bearers for this liberty to remain uncontrolled even in times of great scarcity. And he must have known very well that it was exactly this point of emergency measures in time of dearth that was most controversial. His notable forerunner in developing Political Oeconomy, Sir James Steuart, had refused this fence, and was an advocate of the stockpiling of grain in public granaries for sale in time of dearth. Smith's successor and biographer, Dugald Stewart, was a true executor when he lectured in unqualified terms on the "unlimited liberty of the corn trade" right through the crisis year of 1800. On this question Adam Smith was neither "vulgarised" nor "misunderstood".

Nothing is so evident... as that war is inconsistent with the prosperity of a modern state.