like the French industrial taille, would, if the demand for labour and the price of provisions remained the same, have the effect of raising the wages of labour by the sum required to pay the tax.  He held, again, with them that an indirect tax on the commodities consumed by the labourers would act in exactly the same way if the commodities taxed were necessaries of life, because a rise in the price of necessaries would imperil the labourer’s ability to bring up his family.  But what seemed new to Dupont was that Smith now in his book held that if the commodities taxed were luxuries, the tax would not act in that way.  It would act as a sumptuary law.  The labourer would merely spend less on such superfluities, and since this forced frugality would probably increase rather than diminish his ability to bring up a family, he would neither require nor obtain any rise of wages.  The high tobacco duty in France and England and a recent rise of three shillings on the barrel of beer had no effect whatever on wages.

That is what Dupont says Smith would not have contended in France.  He would not have drawn this distinction between the taxation of a necessary and the taxation of a luxury, and he only drew it in his book to avert the clamour of offended interests, though against his real convictions.  The imputation of dissimulation, though explicitly enough made, may be disregarded.  The alternative of a real change of opinion is quite possible, inasmuch as the position Smith has actually reached on this question in his book is far from final or perfect; it is obvious at a glance that in a community such as he supposes, where the labourers are in the habit of consuming both necessaries and luxuries, a tax on necessaries would have exactly the same effect as he attributes to a tax on luxuries; it would force the labourer to give up some of his luxuries.  But there might be no real change of opinion, and yet a good deal of apparent difference between the loose statements of a speaker in a language of which he had only imperfect command and his more complete and precise statements in a written book.  Dupont, it may be added, seems to think that Smith in his talks with the French economists expressed much more unfavourable views of the inconveniences, changes, and general evils of the English system of taxation than would be gathered from the Wealth of Nations.

Before Smith left France he had occasion, unhappily, to resort to Quesnay the physician as well as to Quesnay the economist.  He had been in the habit while in Paris of taking his pupils for excursions to interesting places in the vicinity, as he had done from Toulouse, and in August 1766 they went to Compiegne to see the camp and the military evolutions which were to take place during the residence of the Court there.  In Compiegne the Duke of Buccleugh took seriously ill of a fever,—­the consequence of a fall from his horse while hunting, says his aunt, Lady Mary Coke,—­and, as will be seen from the following letter, he was watched and nursed by his distinguished tutor with a care and devotion almost more than paternal.  The letter is written to Charles Townshend, the Duke’s step-father:—­