and the Glasgow Senatus thought them perfectly justified in complaining.  In a letter of 22nd May 1776, in which they go over the whole long story of grievances, the Glasgow Senatus tell the Master and Fellows of Balliol plainly that the Scotch students had never been “welcomely received” at Balliol, and had never been happy there.  If an English undergraduate committed a fault, the authorities never thought of blaming any one but himself, but when one of the eight Scotch undergraduates did so, his sin was remembered against all the other seven, and reflections were cast on the whole body; “a circumstance,” add the Senatus, “which has been much felt during their residence at Balliol.”  Their common resentment against the injustice of this kind of tribal accountability that was imposed on them naturally provoked a common resistance; it developed “a spirit of association,” say the Senatus, which “has at all periods been a cause of much trouble both to Balliol and to Glasgow Colleges."[15] In 1744, when Smith himself was one of them, the Snell exhibitioners wrote an account of their grievances to the Glasgow Senatus, and stated “what they wanted to be done towards making their residence more easy and advantageous";[16] and in 1753, when some of Smith’s contemporaries would still be on the foundation, Dr. Leigh, the master of Balliol, tells the Glasgow Senatus that he had ascertained in an interview with one of the Snell exhibitioners that what they wanted was to be transferred to some other college, because they had “a total dislike to Balliol."[17]

This idea of a transference, I may be allowed to add, continued to be mooted, and in 1776 it was actually proposed by the heads of Balliol to the Senatus of Glasgow to transfer the Snell foundationers altogether to Hertford College; but the Glasgow authorities thought this would be merely a transference of the troubles, and not a remedy for them, that the exhibitioners would get no better welcome at Hertford than at Balliol if they came as “fixed property” instead of coming as volunteers, and that they could never lose their national peculiarities of dialect and their habits of combination if they came in a body.  Accordingly, in the letter of 22nd May 1776, which I have already quoted,[18] they recommended the arrangement of leaving each exhibitioner to choose his own college,—­an arrangement, it may be remembered, which had just then been strongly advocated as a general principle by Smith in his newly-published Wealth of the Nations, on the broader ground that it would encourage a wholesome competition between the colleges, and so improve the character of the instruction given in them all.