We have already mentioned a complaint that Smith failed to realise the utter misery of France or to foresee the Revolution. The second half of the complaint seems to be an impertinence. He was not called upon to write out the past, or present, much less the future of France. The first part of the complaint is more plausible. The _Wealth of Nations_ abounds in illustrations drawn from the French tour, and from these we certainly get a less melancholy picture than from the pages of Arthur Young, or from the correspondence of Voltaire, D’Alembert, Turgot and the rest. But then, Young’s tour was twenty years later, and the French reformers were thinking exclusively of the stagnant condition of France in a moving and progressive age. They felt bitterly the dreadful difference between their France and the France that should have been but for the impoverishing wars and oppressive misgovernment of Louis XIV. and his successors. Smith took France as she was, and found her still one of the richest and most powerful countries of the world. In the ninth chapter of his first book he compares Holland, England, France, and Scotland. The first, “in proportion to the extent of its territory and the number of its people, is a richer country than England.” Its government can borrow at two per cent.; wages of labour are said to be higher than in England, and the Dutch trade upon lower profits than any people in Europe. They have large investments in foreign countries, and “during the late war the Dutch gained the whole carrying-trade of France, of which they still retain a very large share.” England comes next. “France is perhaps in the present times not so rich a country as England.” Its market rate of interest is generally higher, and so are the profits of trade; “and it is no doubt upon this account that many British subjects chuse rather to employ their capitals in a country where trade is in disgrace than in one where it is highly respected.” Then he shows that, though France was still richer than Scotland, Scotland was making far more rapid progress:— “The wages of labour are lower in France than in England. When you go from Scotland to England, the difference which you may remark between the dress and countenance of the common people in the one country and in the other, sufficiently indicates the difference in their condition. The contrast is still greater when you return from France. France, though no doubt a richer country than Scotland, seems not to be going forward so fast. It is a common and even a popular opinion in the country, that it is going backwards; an opinion which, I apprehend, is ill-founded even with regard to France, but which nobody can possibly entertain with regard to Scotland, who sees the country now, and who saw it twenty or thirty years ago.”