The interest of the contest is sufficiently great from the candidature of one philosopher of the first rank, and to Smith himself—­already that philosopher’s very close friend—­it must have been engrossing.  It will be observed that in his letter to Cullen he expresses himself with great caution on the subject.  He is quite alive to the fact that the appointment of a notorious sceptic like Hume might be so unpopular with the Scottish public as to injure the interests of the University.  But when Hume came forward Cullen threw himself heart and soul into his cause, as we know from Hume’s own acknowledgments; and if Cullen and Smith are found acting in concert at the initiation of the candidature, it is not likely that Smith lagged behind Cullen in the prosecution of the canvass, though nothing remains to give us any decisive information on the point.  Their exertions failed, however, in consequence, Hume himself always believed, of the interference of the Duke of Argyle, and the chair was given to a young licentiate of the Church named Clow, who was at the time entirely unknown, and indeed never afterwards established any manner of public reputation.

Smith’s preference for the Moral Philosophy chair came mainly no doubt from preference for the subjects he would be called upon to teach in it, but the emoluments also seem to have been somewhat better, for Smith was expressly required, as a condition of acceptance of the office, to content himself until the 10th of October of that year (the opening day of the new session) “with the salary and emoluments of his present profession of Logic,” even though he might be actually admitted to the other professorship before that date.  It must not be supposed, however, that the emoluments of his new office were by any means very lordly.  They accrued partly from a moderate endowment and partly from the fees paid by the students who attended the lectures—­a principle of academic payment which Smith always considered the best, because it made the lecturer’s income largely dependent on his diligence and success in his work.  The endowment was probably no more than that of the Mathematical chair, and the endowment of the Mathematical chair was L72 a year.[34] The fees probably never exceeded L100, or even came up to that figure, for Dr. Thomas Reid, Smith’s successor in the Moral Philosophy chair, writes an Aberdeen friend, after two years’ experience of Glasgow, that he had more students than Smith ever had, and had already touched L70 of fees, but expected, when all the students arrived, to make L100 that session.[35] The income from fees in the Scotch chairs in last century seems to have been subject to considerable variations from session to session.  A bad harvest would sometimes tell seriously on the attendance, and a great crisis like that of 1772, when the effects of a succession of bad harvests were aggravated by ruinous mercantile speculations, deprived Adam Ferguson in the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy chair of half his usual