Smith’s choice for this post of travelling tutor was thought in many quarters at the time to be a very strange choice.  Shrewd old Dr. Carlyle thought it so strange that he professes to be quite unable as a man of the world to understand Charles Townshend making it, except “for his own glory of having sent an eminent Scotch philosopher to travel with the Duke."[188] He thought Smith had too much “probity and benevolence” in his own soul to suspect ill in another or check it, and that a man who seemed too absent to make his own way about could hardly be expected to look efficiently after the goings of another.  “He was,” says Carlyle, “the most absent man in company I ever knew,” and “he appeared very unfit for the intercourse of the world as a travelling tutor."[189]

Still Townshend’s choice was thoroughly justified by the result, and Carlyle admits it, but thinks that was due less to the efficiency of the tutor than to the natural excellence of the pupil.  And there is no doubt that Smith was exceptionally fortunate in his pupil.  In his after life this Duke Henry took little part in politics, but he made himself singularly beloved among his countrymen by a long career filled with works of beneficence and patriotism, and brightened by that love of science which has for generations distinguished the house of Buccleuch.  It may be true that with such a pupil Smith’s natural defects would find little opportunity of causing trouble, but it seems certain, as I have before said, that these defects were habitually exaggerated by Smith’s contemporaries, and Carlyle himself acknowledges that Smith’s travels with the Duke cured him considerably of his fits of abstraction.  This is confirmed by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, who says that Smith grew smarter during his stay abroad, and lost much of the awkwardness of manner he previously exhibited.

Stewart is disposed to think, however, that the public have not the same reason to be satisfied with Smith’s acceptance of this tutorship as either he himself or his pupil had, and that the world at large has been seriously the loser for it, because “it interrupted that studious leisure for which nature seemed to have designed him, and in which alone he could have hoped to accomplish those literary projects which had flattered the ambition of his youthful genius.”  Now it is, of course, idle to speculate on the things that might have been.  Kant was never forty miles from Konigsberg, and had Smith remained in Glasgow all his days there is no reason to doubt he could have produced works of lasting importance.  But it is a truism to say that the works would have been other and different from what we have.  To a political philosopher foreign travel is an immense advantage, and there never was a country where graver or more interesting problems, both economic and constitutional, offered themselves for study than France in the latter half of last century, nor any political philosopher who enjoyed better opportunities than Smith of discussing