The subject of "taxing all estates," after a careful discussion by counsel on both sides in London, was finally referred to a committee of the privy council for plantations, who reported adversely to the petitioners whom Franklin represented. Disappointed, but not discouraged, he suggested a compromise involving a personal engagement on his part that, among other things, the assembly should pass an act exempting from taxation the _unsurveyed_ waste lands of the Penn's' estate, and secure the assessment of the surveyed waste lands at the usual rate at which other property of that description was assessed. Upon this proposal, to the infinite disgust of the Penns, a favourable report was made, and approved by the king, George II., then within a few weeks of his death. "Thus," wrote Franklin, a few days later, to Lord Kames, "the cause is at length ended, and in a great degree to our satisfaction." Franklin's stipulation gave to the Penns nothing, in fact, which they had not always had, and therefore the assembly never passed the superfluous act for securing it. They did, however, relieve Pennsylvania from the financial embarrassments that must have followed the repeal of a money bill which had already been a year in operation, and it established the principle till then denied by the proprietaries, that their estates were subject to taxation. The success of his first foreign mission, therefore, was substantial and satisfactory. During this sojourn of five years in England, Franklin made many valuable friends outside court and political circles, among whom the names of Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith are conspicuous. In the spring of 1759 he received the degree of doctor of laws from the Scottish university of St Andrews. He also made active use of his marvellous and unsurpassed talent for pamphleteering. He wrote for the _Annual Register_, of which young Edmund Burke was then editor, and with whom, at a later day, he was destined to have closer relations, a paper "On the Peopling of Countries," traces of which may readily be discerned in the first book of The _Wealth of Nations_. In this paper Franklin combated the popular delusion that the people and wealth of the colonies were necessarily so much population and wealth abstracted from the mother country, and he estimated that the population of the colonies, by doubling once in every twenty-five years, would, at the end of a century, give a larger English population beyond the Atlantic than in England, without at all interfering with the growth of England in either direction. Franklin's conjecture, that the population of the colonies would double every twenty-five years, commended itself to the judgment of Adam Smith, who adopted it; and it has thus far been vindicated by the census.