Oswald, it may be mentioned, though still a young man—­only eight years older than Smith—­had already made his mark in Parliament where he sat for their native burgh, and had been made a Commissioner of the Navy in 1745.  He had made his mark largely by his mastery of economic subjects, for which Hume said, after paying him a visit at Dunnikier for a week in 1744, that he had a “great genius,” and “would go far in that way if he persevered.”  He became afterwards commissioner of trade and plantations, Lord of the Treasury, and Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, and would have certainly gone further but for his premature death in 1768 at the age of fifty-two.  Lord Shelburne once strongly advised Lord Bute to make him Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Smith thought as highly of Oswald as Hume.  He used to “dilate,” says Oswald’s grandson, who heard him, “with a generous and enthusiastic pleasure on the qualifications and merits of Mr. Oswald, candidly avowing at the same time how much information he had received on many points from the enlarged views and profound knowledge of that accomplished statesman."[24] Dugald Stewart saw a paper written by Smith which described Oswald not only as a man of extensive knowledge of economic subjects, but a man with a special taste and capacity for the discussion of their more general and philosophical aspects.  That paper, we cannot help surmising, is the same document of 1755 I have just mentioned in which Smith was proving his early attachment to the doctrines of economic liberty, and would naturally treat of circumstances connected with the growth of his opinions.  However that may be, it is certain that Smith and Oswald must have been in communication upon economic questions about that period, and Oswald’s views at that period are contained in the correspondence to which reference has been made.

Early in 1750 David Hume sent Oswald the manuscript of his well-known essay on the Balance of Trade, afterwards published in his Political Essays in 1752, asking for his views and criticisms; and Oswald replied on the 10th of October in a long letter, published in the Caldwell Papers,[25] which shows him to have been already entirely above the prevailing mercantilist prejudices, and to have very clear conceptions of economic operations.  He declares jealousies between nations of being drained of their produce and money to be quite irrational; that could never happen as long as the people and industry remained.  The prohibition against exporting commodities and money, he held, had always produced effects directly contrary to what was intended by it.  It had diminished cultivation at home instead of increasing it, and really forced the more money out of the country the more produce it prevented from going.  Oswald’s letter seems to have been sent on by Hume, together with his own essay, to Baron Mure, who was also interested in such discussions.  The new light was thus breaking in on groups of inquirers in Scotland as well as elsewhere, and Smith was from his earliest days within its play.