the effect of small notes? what of notes not payable on demand?  They differed on various points.  For example, Glassford would let the banks issue notes for any sums they liked, and had no objection to the small ten-shilling and five-shilling notes which were then common.  Cochrane would abolish all notes for less than a pound,[69] and Smith—­at least in 1776—­would abolish all notes less than five pounds.[70] But all alike had a firm grasp of the true nature and operation of money.

Another society of which Smith was a member, and indeed a founder, was the Literary Society of Glasgow.  It was a general debating society composed mainly of professors in the University—­Cullen, Black, Wilson the astronomer; Robert Simson, Leechman the divinity professor and principal; Millar, and indeed nearly the whole Senatus; with a few merchants or country gentlemen of literary tastes such as William Craufurd, the friend of Hamilton of Bangour; William Mure of Caldwell, M.P. for Renfrewshire; Sir John Dalrymple, the historian, who was a proprietor in the West country; John Callander of Craigforth, the antiquary; Thomas Miller, Town Clerk of Glasgow, and afterwards Lord Justice-Clerk of Scotland; Robert Foulis, the printer; James Watt, who said he derived much benefit from it; Robert Bogle of Shettleston, the promoter of the theatre already mentioned; David Hume, and the Earl of Buchan, elected while residing as a student in 1762.

The Literary Society was founded in 1752, and met every Thursday evening from November to May at half-past six.  Its minutes are probably still in existence somewhere, but a few extracts from them have been published by the Maitland Club,[71] and from them we learn that Smith was one of the first contributors to its proceedings.  Early in its first session—­on the 23rd of January 1753—­Professor Adam Smith is stated to have read an account of some of Mr. David Hume’s Essays on Commerce.  These essays had then just appeared; and they had probably been seen by Smith before their publication, for in September 1752 Hume writes Smith asking him for any corrections he had to suggest on the old edition of the Political Essays with which the Commercial Essays were incorporated.  We have seen Hume submitting one of these Commercial Essays in 1750 to Oswald and Mure, and when we find him in 1752 asking for suggestions from Smith on the essays already printed, we may safely infer that he had also asked and received suggestions on the new essays which had never been published.

The Maitland Club volume gives us no information about the papers read in this society after the first six months, except those read by Foulis, but no doubt Smith read other papers in the remaining ten years of his connection with the society.  Its debates were often very keen; the metaphysical and theological combats between Professor Millar—­a most brilliant debater—­and Dr. Reid, the father of the common-sense philosophy, were famous in their day; and on one occasion tradition informs us that Smith engaged in a strenuous discussion on some subject for a whole evening against the entire assembly, and, having lost his point by an overwhelming majority, was overheard muttering to himself, “Convicted but not convinced."[72]