day before yesterday in my bed and read them thro’ with infinite satisfaction, tho’ they are by no means well written.  The substance of what is in them I knew before, tho’ not in such detail.  I am afraid they are published at an unlucky time, and may throw a damp upon our militia.  Nothing, however, appears to me more excusable than the disaffection of Scotland at that time.  The Union was a measure from which infinite good has been derived to this country.  The Prospect of that good, however, must then have appeared very remote and very uncertain.  The immediate effect of it was to hurt the interest of every single order of men in the country.  The dignity of the nobility was undone by it.  The greater part of the gentry who had been accustomed to represent their own country in its own Parliament were cut out for ever from all hopes of representing it in a British Parliament.  Even the merchants seemed to suffer at first.  The trade to the Plantations was, indeed, opened to them.  But that was a trade which they knew nothing about; the trade they were acquainted with, that to France, Holland, and the Baltic, was laid under new embar(r)assments, which almost totally annihilated the two first and most important branches of it.  The Clergy, too, who were then far from insignificant, were alarmed about the Church.  No wonder if at that time all orders of men conspired in cursing a measure so hurtful to their immediate interest.  The views of their Posterity are now very different; but those views could be seen by but few of our forefathers, by those few in but a confused and imperfect manner.

It will give me the greatest satisfaction to hear from you.  I pray you write to me soon.  Remember me to the Franklins.  I hope I shall have the grace to write to the youngest by next post to thank him, in the name both of the College and of myself, for his very agreeable present.  Remember me likewise to Mr. Griffiths.  I am greatly obliged to him for the very handsom character he gave of my book in his review.—­I ever am, dear Strahan, most faithfully and sincerely yours,

     ADAM SMITH.

     GLASGOW,
     4th April 1760.[119]

The Franklins mentioned in this letter are Benjamin Franklin and his son, who had spent six weeks in Scotland in the spring of the previous year—­“six weeks,” said Franklin, “of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life.”  We know from Dr. Carlyle that during this visit Franklin met Smith one evening at supper at Robertson’s in Edinburgh, but it seems from this letter highly probable that he had gone through to Glasgow, and possibly stayed with Smith at the College.  Why otherwise should the younger, or, as Smith says, youngest, Franklin have thought of making a presentation to Glasgow College, or Smith of thanking him not merely in the name of the College, but in his own?  Strahan was one of Franklin’s most intimate private friends.  They took a pride in one another as old compositors who had risen in the world; and Smith had no doubt heard of, and perhaps from, the Franklins in some of Strahan’s previous letters.