He puts us, as Lowe remarked with his usual felicity, in mind of the Sages of Ancient Greece, who, after lives of labour and study, bequeathed half a dozen maxims for the guidance of mankind. CHAPTER X FREE TRADE One of the least edifying features of modern controversy, and particularly of political and economic controversy, is the habit of appealing to precedents and authorities which, if honestly cited, would militate against the opinions of the controversialist. No great writer has suffered more of late years from this species of misrepresentation than Adam Smith; yet his contemporaries and immediate successors both in England and abroad perfectly understood his drift. When Pitt and Shelburne declared themselves disciples of Smith, they thereby declared themselves free traders, and Pitt’s commercial policy from 1784 to 1794 was simply an attempt to carry out Smith’s views. Resolute retrenchment, customs’ reform, the commercial treaty with France, reduction of debt, were all projected under the inspiration and countenance of Mr. Commissioner Smith. Nor did the English economists, from Ricardo to Mill, ever suggest that Adam Smith had doubts about the main doctrine of his book. In France and Germany his opinions were eagerly embraced. To translate, interpret, and systematise the _Wealth of Nations_ was the main function of continental economists in the early years of the nineteenth century; and its influence was seen in a rapid and radical modification of commercial policy. Internal barriers were swept away, feudal restrictions abolished, and tariffs reduced. When the waves of reaction—political rather than economic—began to roll in, and “national” economists tried to reconstruct the case for protection, they paid Smith the compliment of a violent onslaught. “Smithianismus” then became a term of abuse in protectionist circles, and so remained until it was superseded by the equally cacophonous “Manchesterthum.” It was in England that the idea was started of dressing up Adam Smith as a protectionist. While List was inveighing against “cosmopolitical economy,” our own free traders in their agitation against the corn laws found themselves confronted with a new interpretation of their prophet. At one of the League meetings (July 3, 1844) Cobden gave a humorous description of the way in which some protectionist pamphleteers tried to adapt Adam Smith’s opinions to their own views. “They have done it in this manner: they took a passage, and with the scissors snipped and cut away at it, until by paring off the ends of sentences and leaving out all the rest of the passage, they managed to make Adam Smith appear in some sense as a monopolist. When we referred to the volume itself, we found out their tricks, and exposed them. I tell you what their argument reminds me of. An anecdote is told of an atheist who once asserted that there was no God, and said he would prove it from Scripture.