“as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.  The patrimony of the poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour is a plain violation of this most sacred property.  It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman and of those who might be disposed to employ him."[57] Watt’s workshop was a favourite resort of Smith’s during his residence at Glasgow College, for Watt’s conversation, young though he was, was fresh and original, and had great attractions for the stronger spirits about him.  Watt on his side retained always the deepest respect for Smith, and when he was amusing the leisure of his old age in 1809 with his new invention of the sculpture machine, and presenting his works to his friends as “the productions of a young artist just entering his eighty-third year,” one of the first works he executed with the machine was a small head of Adam Smith in ivory.[58]

In the Foulis press and the Academy of Design Smith took a particular interest.  He was himself a book-fancier, fond of fine editions and bindings, and he once said to Smellie the printer, whom he observed admiring some of the books in his library, “I am a beau in nothing but my books.”  And he was a man, as Dugald Stewart informs us, with a carefully-cultivated taste for the fine arts, who was considered by his contemporaries an excellent judge of a picture or a sculpture, though in Stewart’s opinion he appeared interested in works of art less as instruments of direct enjoyment than as materials for speculative discussions about the principles of human nature involved in their production.  Smith seems to have been one of Foulis’s chief practical advisers in the work of the Academy of Design, in settling such details, for example, as the pictures which ought to be selected to be copied by the pupils, or the subjects which ought to be chosen for original work from Plutarch or other classical sources, and which would be most likely to suit modern taste.

Sir John Dalrymple, who appears to have been one of Foulis’s associates in the enterprise, and to have taken an active concern in the sale of the productions of the Academy in its Edinburgh agency shop, writes Foulis on the 1st of December 1757 regarding the kind of work that ought to be sent for sale there.  “In the History pictures that you send in, I beg you will take the advice of Mr. Smith and Dr. Black.  Your present scheme should be to execute not what you think the best, but what will sell the best.  In the first you may be the better judge, since you are the master of a great Academa, but in the last I think their advice will be of use to you."[59] The letter concludes:  “Whether it is an idea or not, I am going to give you a piece of trouble.  Be so good as make out a catalogue of your pictures, and as far as you can of your busts, books of drawings,