But cleanliness and security, “though useful,” were “too mean to be considered in a general discourse” of the kind which Adam Smith was delivering. Accordingly, after briefly comparing the amount of crime then prevalent in Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow—a comparison favourable to Glasgow and London—and inferring that the establishment of commerce and manufactures is the best police for preventing crimes, he passes to the consideration of cheapness or plenty—“or, which is the same thing, the most proper way of procuring wealth and abundance.” Then follows in a hundred pages what Mr. Cannan has well called a rough draft of the _Wealth of Nations_, containing (with some noteworthy exceptions) the main arguments and many of the illustrations which appeared a dozen or more years later in the book. By the student who would trace the growth of an idea and the history of a theory the value of the report can hardly be exaggerated. In Mr. Cannan’s words, “it enables us to follow the gradual construction of the work from its very foundation, and to distinguish positively between what the original genius of its author created out of British materials on the one hand, and French materials on the other.” When we consider that this course of political economy was necessarily brief, and could not possibly contain all the arguments and illustrations he had already hammered out in the great workshop of his mind, we are inclined to wonder not that the lectures, when compared with the full body of doctrine, show many gaps, but rather that they correspond so closely with the final treatise evolved after twelve or fourteen years more of meditation, study, and travel. When we reach the crowning year of Adam Smith’s life with its laureate wreath we shall have something to say upon later accretions, such as his colonial policy, his view of expenditure, and that intensely practical theory of taxation which taught so many wholesome lessons to contemporary and succeeding statesmen. Oddly enough, the lecturer began by supplying the very thing his critics have missed in the _Wealth of Nations_—a theory of consumption. He had therefore, if we combine the lectures with the treatise, mapped out in his mind the entire scope of economic science in its natural order. First there is the demand that leads to productive labour, the desire which is satisfied by and therefore induces toil. Then comes his central theme, the division of labour and the subsidiary topic of its distribution (almost ignored in the lectures), with an appendix on revenue or taxation.