Wilberforce did not think quite so highly of Smith as Pitt did, being disappointed to find him too hard-headed to share his own enthusiasm about a great philanthropic adventure of the day, which, to the very practical mind of the economist, seemed entirely wanting in the ordinary conditions of success.  With some of the other philanthropic movements in which Wilberforce was interested—­with his anti-slavery agitation, for example, begun in that very year 1787—­he would have found no more cordial sympathiser than Smith, who had condemned slavery so strongly in his book.  The Sunday school movement, too, started by Thomas Raikes two or three years before, won Smith’s strongest commendation; for Raikes writes William Fox on 27th July of this same year, and writes as if the remark had been made in conversation with himself, “Dr. Adam Smith, who has very ably written on the Wealth of Nations, says:  ’No plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity since the days of the Apostles.’” These schools were instituted for the purpose of giving gratuitous instruction to all comers for four or five hours every Sunday in the ordinary branches of primary education, and they were opposed by some leading ecclesiastics—­among others by a liberal divine like Bishop Horsley—­on the ground that they might become subservient to purposes of political propagandism.  The ecclesiastical mind is too often suspicious of the consequences of mental improvement and independence, but to Smith these were merely the first broad conditions of all popular progress.

No man could be less chargeable with indifference to honest and practicable schemes of philanthropy, but the particular scheme towards which Wilberforce found him “characteristically cool” was one which, in his opinion, held out extravagant expectations that could not possibly be realised.  It was a project—­first suggested, I believe, by Sir James Steuart, the economist, and taken up warmly after him by Dr. James Anderson, and especially by that earliest and most persistent of crofters’ friends, John Knox, bookseller in the Strand—­for checking the depopulation and distress of the Scotch Highlands by planting a series of fishing villages all round the Highland coast.  Knox’s idea was to plant forty fishing villages at spots twenty-five miles apart between the Mull of Cantyre and the Dornoch Firth at a cost of L2000 apiece, or at least as many of them as money could be obtained to start; and the scheme rose high in public favour when the parliamentary committee on Scotch Fisheries gave it a general recommendation in 1785, and suggested the incorporation of a limited liability company by Act of Parliament in order to carry it out.