Steuart was a most persuasive talker; Smith himself said he understood Sir James’s system better from his talk than from his books,[3] and those Glasgow merchants must have obtained from Smith’s expositions a very clear and complete hold indeed of the doctrines of commercial freedom, when Steuart failed to shake it, and was fain to leave such theorists to their theories.  Long before the publication of the Wealth of Nations, therefore, the new light was shining clearly from Smith’s chair in Glasgow College, and winning its first converts in the practical world.  One can accordingly well understand the emotion with which J.B.  Say sat in this chair when he visited Glasgow in 1815, and after a short prayer said with great fervour, “Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace."[53]

Dugald Stewart further states, on the authority of gentlemen who were students in the moral philosophy class at Glasgow in 1752 or 1753, that Smith delivered so early as that lectures containing the fundamental principles of the Wealth of Nations; and in 1755—­the year Cantillon’s Essai first saw the light, and the year before Quesnay published his first economic writing—­Smith was not only expounding his system of natural liberty to his students, but publicly asserting his claim to the authorship of that system in a Glasgow Economic Society—­perhaps the first economic club established anywhere.  The paper in which Smith vindicates this claim came somehow into the possession of Dugald Stewart, and so escaped the fire to which Smith committed all his other papers before his death, but it is believed to have been destroyed by Stewart’s son, very possibly after his father’s directions.  For Stewart thought it would be improper to publish the complete manuscript, because it would revive personal differences which had better remain in oblivion, and consequently our knowledge of its contents is confined to the few sentences which he has thought right to quote as a valuable evidence of the progress of Smith’s political ideas at that very early period.  It will be observed that, as far as we can collect from so small a fragment of his discourse, he presents the doctrine of natural liberty in a more extreme form than it came to wear after twenty years more of thought in the Wealth of Nations.  Stewart says that many of the most important opinions in the Wealth of Nations are detailed in this document, but he cites only the following:—­

“Man is generally considered by statesmen and projectors as the materials of a sort of political mechanics.  Projectors disturb nature in the course of her operations on human affairs, and it requires no more than to leave her alone and give her fair play in the pursuit of her ends that she may establish her own designs....  Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of affluence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all