Glasgow, though still but a small place, was already the most prosperous and progressive of Scotch towns. After a century of decay it had found salvation in the Act of Union, which gave it free trade with England and a share in the colonial monopoly. Readers of _Rob Roy_ will remember how the inimitable Jarvie enlarged upon these advantages and on the facilities Glasgow possessed “of making up sortable cargoes for the American market.” It was very loyal, therefore, to the House of Hanover. In the rising of 1745, Charles Edward got considerable support from Edinburgh, and even from Manchester, but none from Glasgow, which, indeed, soon afterwards obtained a parliamentary vote of £10,000 in recognition of its exertions and as compensation for its losses. Glasgow was the only town in Scotland, as a learned writer has observed, to exhibit the same kind of visible progress in the first half of the eighteenth century which the rest of the country developed in the second. Its shipping, sadly cramped by the Navigation Act, began to expand after the Union. In 1716 the “first honest vessel in the West India trade” sailed from the Clyde, and in 1735, two years before Smith’s arrival, Glasgow owned sixty-seven vessels with a total burden of 5600 tons, nearly half of the total Scotch, though only one-eightieth of the total English tonnage. In this rising mart Smith learned to value the English connection, and as he trod its busy streets and watched the merchandise of the West pouring into its warehouses, the boy saw that a new world had been called in to enrich the old. With the new sights and sounds came new ideas that had not yet penetrated the gloom of Holyrood or the rusty pride of the Canongate. From the lips of his master, Hutcheson, he heard that fruitful formula which his own philosophy was to interpret and develop, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” His mind was opened at once to the wisdom of the ancients and to the discoveries of the moderns. He learned from Bacon, and Grotius, and Locke, and Newton to discern through the obscuring mists of mediæval philosophy the splendid dawn of science. To the end of his life he loved to recall “the abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson.” Unorthodox yet not irreligious, radical yet not revolutionary, receptive yet inspiring, erudite yet original, Hutcheson was one of those rare reformers whose zeal is fertilised by knowledge and enforced by practical devotion. In early manhood he had refused to seek an easy advancement by subscribing to the tenets of the Church of England in Ireland, and while Smith was at Glasgow he braved the resentment of the Presbytery by teaching moral principles which were supposed to contravene the Westminster Confession. He was also the first in the University to abandon the practice of lecturing in Latin; and Dugald Stewart tells us that his old pupils were all agreed about his extraordinary talent as a public speaker.