One of Smith’s younger friends was John Sinclair, a Scotch laird of much ability and immense industry, whose _History of the Public Revenue_ is still a standard work. It owed much to the _Wealth of Nations_; for when Smith saw how competent Sinclair was, he helped him in every possible way. In 1777 he dissuaded the young man from printing a pamphlet against the Puritanical observance of the Sabbath, saying, “Your work is very ably written, but I advise you not to publish it; for rest assured that the Sabbath as a political institution is of inestimable value independently of its claim to divine authority.” Late in the following year, when Sinclair brought him the news of Saratoga, and declared that the nation must be ruined, Smith answered coolly, “Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” About the same time he let Sinclair have the use (so long as he did not take it out of Edinburgh) of his own much-prized copy of the _Mémoires concernant les Impositions_, a contemporary survey of European systems of taxation, which he had obtained “by the particular favour of Mr. Turgot, the late Comptroller-General of the Finances.” In one of his letters to Sinclair he expressed his dislike of “all taxes that may affect the necessary expenses of the poor.” “They, according to different circumstances, either oppress the people immediately subject to them, or are repaid with great interest by the rich, _i.e._ by their employers in the advanced wages of their labour. Taxes on the _luxuries_ of the poor, upon their beer and other spirituous liquors, for example, as long as they are so moderate as not to give much temptation to smuggling, I am so far from disapproving, that I look upon them as the best of sumptuary laws.”[43] Sinclair, who had entered Parliament in 1780, discussed foreign policy with Smith in the autumn of 1782, soon after the surrender at Yorktown, when the fortunes of Great Britain had sunk to their lowest ebb. The American colonies were lost; Ireland was almost in revolt; Gibraltar was besieged by the Spanish and French fleets; and the Northern powers were arrayed in an unfriendly armed neutrality. Sinclair had drafted a tract suggesting that we should seek to draw the Northern powers into an alliance against the House of Bourbon by offering them a share in our colonial monopoly. Again Smith advised his young friend not to go into print. The proposal, he thought, would not find favour with the neutrals, and there seemed to be a moral inconsistency in the argument. “If it be just to emancipate the continent of America from the dominion of every European power, how can it be just to subject the islands to such dominion; and if the monopoly of the trade of the continent be contrary to the rights of mankind, how can that of the islands be agreeable to those rights?”