In the emancipation of thought and dispersion of knowledge which mark the century that divides the English from the French Revolution, Adam Smith takes his place in the order of time after Locke, Montesquieu, Newton, and Voltaire, with Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Turgot, and Burke. With all of them he agreed in abhorring religious intolerance; with each of them he had some special affinity. Like the first and the last, he had a truly English reverence for law and order. A Newtonian in his patient and tranquil research for the hidden secrets of Nature, he had Voltaire’s love of Justice, while he resembled Rousseau, the only democrat of the French school, in a new sentiment for popular government, and in what may be called either the Social or Republican instinct. He vied with Diderot in an universal curiosity and an encyclopædic grasp of all the sciences, but surpassed him in originality and creative power. He combined in an extraordinary degree the faculties of observation, meditation, and abstraction. His achievements are not accidents. If the architect’s plans are compared with history, they will be found to have been executed in large part by the builders of the nineteenth century. Of the great Frenchmen who synchronised with him and moved along parallel lines of thought, it cannot be said that any one, or that all together, destroyed the Church or the government, or even the social system of France. It may even be questioned whether they swayed the fortunes of France with an influence so potent as Smith’s sceptre has wielded over the destinies of Europe. The criticisms of Voltaire had mighty consequences, no doubt, but those consequences were not deliberately planned, or even descried. Hume’s scepticism went far deeper than Voltaire’s, tore up by the roots whole systems of debased philosophy, and roused Kant from his dogmatic slumbers. But Hume and Voltaire had little to sow on the land they ploughed and harrowed. In all their anxiety to humble and ridicule religion, they would retain the Church as a useful instrument of the State. In all their appeals to public opinion, they never thought of resting government on a broad basis of popular right. Their view of society was conventional; they were rather satirists than reformers. It has been a commonplace of criticism to compare Adam Smith with Locke. He is supposed to have done for a particular branch of politics what Locke did for the whole science. But Locke’s main achievement, after all, was to find philosophic sanction for a revolution accomplished by others, and to establish in the minds of the Whig aristocracy an unlimited respect for a limited constitution. Smith was the single-handed contriver and sole author of a revolution in thought which has modified the governing policy and prodigiously increased the welfare of the whole civilised world.