The promise is:  “I shall in another discourse endeavour to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society, not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns policy revenue and arms, and whatever else is the object of law.”  In speaking of this promise in the preface of the sixth edition of the Theory in 1790, Smith says, “In the Inquiry concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations I have partially executed this promise, at least so far as concerns policy revenue and arms.”  Now doubtless when Smith began writing his book in Toulouse he began it on the large plan originally in contemplation, and some part of the long delay that took place in its composition is probably to be explained by the fact that he would have possibly been a considerable time at work before he determined to break his book in two, and push on meanwhile with the section on policy revenue and arms, leaving to a separate publication in the future his discussion of the theory of jurisprudence.

The work was published in two vols. 4to, at the price of L1:16s. in boards, and the author uses this time all his honours on the title-page, describing himself as Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S., formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.  What was the extent of this edition, or the terms, as between author and publisher, on which it was put out, is not exactly known.  The terms were not half-profits, for that arrangement is proposed by Smith for the second edition as if it were a new one, and is accepted in the same way by Strahan, who in a letter which I shall presently quote, pronounces it a “very fair” proposal, “and therefore very agreeable to Mr. Cadell and me”; nor was it printed for the author, for the presentation copies he gave away were deducted from the copy money he received.  On the whole, it seems most probable that the book was purchased from him for a definite sum, and as he mentions in his letter of the 13th November 1776 that he had received, L300 of his money at that time, and had still a balance owing to him, one may reasonably conjecture that the full sum was L500—­the same sum Cadell’s firm had paid for the last economic work they had undertaken, Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy.

The book sold well.  The first edition, of whose extent, however, we are ignorant, was exhausted in six months, and the sale was from the first better than the publishers expected, for on the 12th of April, when it had only been a month out, Strahan takes notice of a remark of David Hume that Smith’s book required too much thought to be as popular as Gibbon’s, and states, “What you say of Mr. Gibbon’s and Dr. Smith’s book is exactly just.  The former is the most popular work; but the sale of the latter, though not near so rapid, has been more than I could have expected from a work that requires much