Perhaps what most impresses one in reading the _Wealth of Nations_ is its pre-vision. The author seems to have been able to project himself into the centuries. He saw the blades of wheat as well as the tares that were springing up; and it would be hard to mention a single one of his forecasts and Utopias that has not been realised in some degree, or at least taken shape as a political project during the last century. He was, of course, above all, the precursor of Cobden and of the philosophic Radicals, who drew from him not only their economics, but their foreign and colonial policy. It is perhaps remarkable, after so fair a beginning had been made in his own lifetime, that the triumph of his doctrines was so long delayed. But most of what Shelburne, Pitt, and Eden did for commercial emancipation in the eighties was swept away by the French war. And when Napoleon fell, England was so weak, tyranny and superstition were so ground into the principles of her governing classes, that she seemed to be, in Milton’s phrase, beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery. For many years Smith’s disciples, and even the indefatigable Bentham, laboured almost in vain. Parliament was ignorant and bigoted. Until a great agitator arose, very little could be done; and the great agitator did not arrive quite soon enough to fulfil Pulteney’s prediction that Smith would convert his own generation and rule the next. In the early years of the nineteenth century the practical influence of Smith’s teaching was felt principally in France and Germany. In France, as we have seen, Count Mollien was a professed disciple of the new economy. “It was then,” he said, in reviewing the events of his youth, “that I read an English book which the disciples M. Turgot had left eulogised in the highest terms—the work of Adam Smith. I had especially remarked how warmly the venerable and judicious Malesherbes used to speak of it—this book so disparaged by all the men of the old routine.” It is perhaps the most dazzling of all Smith’s posthumous triumphs, that he, through Mollien, should have been the philosophic guide of Napoleonic finance.