“Before any wise man, however, would apply for the appointment of so arbitrary a tribunal in order to improve what is already, upon the whole, very well, he ought certainly to know with some degree of certainty, first, who are likely to be appointed visitors, and secondly, what plan of reformation those visitors are likely to follow; but in the present multiplicity of pretenders to some share in the prudential management of Scotch affairs, these are two points which, I apprehend, neither you nor I, nor the Solicitor-General nor the Duke of Buccleugh, can possibly know anything about.” Perhaps in the future a better opportunity might present itself. An admonition, or other irregular means of interference, was out of the question. Dr. Cullen had proposed that no person should be admitted to examination for his degrees unless he brought a certificate of his having studied at least two years in some university. Smith (who was himself at this very time, with Gibbon, attending a course given by Dr. William Hunter) objects: “would not such a regulation be oppressive upon all private teachers, such as the Hunters, Hewson, Fordyce, etc.? The scholars of such teachers surely merit whatever honour or advantage a degree can confer much more than the greater part of those who have spent many years in some universities.... When a man has learnt his lesson very well, it surely can be of little importance where or from whom he has learnt it.” The last sentence is one that men should lay to heart. It is one of those obvious truths which few have the candour to assert and still fewer the courage to act upon. A very clever person, on reading the _Wealth of Nations_, complained that it seemed to be little more than a well arranged succession of truisms. Yet for the want of those truths mankind has stumbled along in the dark from the beginning. “The less you restrain trade, the more you will have.” A truism, if you like, but its denial has caused an infinitude of avoidable suffering. “If a man has learnt his lesson well, never mind about his university or his degree.” A truism, without doubt, but one that is constantly neglected and despised to the grave detriment of justice and learning. Smith held that the effect of degrees injudiciously conferred was not very considerable. “That doctors are sometimes fools as well as other people is not in the present time one of those profound secrets which is known only to the learned.” Apothecaries and old herb-women practised physic without complaint, because they only poisoned the poor people. “And if here and there a graduated doctor should be as ignorant as an old woman, can great harm be done?” Smith rubbed in his moral about university degrees with evident relish, comparing degrees which could only be conferred on students of a certain standing to the statutes of apprenticeship and other corporation laws, which had expelled arts and manufactures from so many boroughs.