He was quite sensible that this scheme of his would be thought wild and called a "new Utopia," but he was not one of those who counted the old Utopia of Sir Thomas More to be either useless or chimerical, and he says that this Utopia of his own is "no more useless or chimerical than the old one." The difficulties it would encounter came, he says, "not from the nature of things, but from the prejudices and opinions of the people both on this and on the other side of the Atlantic." He held, moreover, very strongly that a union of this kind was the only means of making the Colonies a useful factor instead of a showy and expensive appendage of the empire, and the only alternative that could really prevent their total separation from Great Britain. He pleaded for union, too, not merely for the salvation of the Colonies to the mother country, but even more for the salvation of the Colonies to themselves. Separation merely meant mediocrity for Great Britain, but for the Colonies it meant ruin. There would no longer be any check on the spirit of rancorous and virulent faction which was always inseparable from small democracies. The coercive power of the mother country had hitherto prevented the colonial factions from breaking out into anything worse than brutality and insult, but if that coercive power were entirely taken away they would probably soon break out into open violence and bloodshed.[243] The event has falsified the last anticipation, but this is not the place to criticise Smith's scheme. It was only requisite to recall for a moment the ideas which, according to the Duke of Buccleugh's statement to Hume, Smith was at this time so zealously working for in the important circles in which he then moved in London. FOOTNOTES: [229] _Hume MSS._, R.S.E. Library. [230] Add. MSS., 32,336. It must have been during this period that Smith entertained Reynolds at dinner at Mrs. Hill's, Dartmouth Street, Westminster, on Sunday 11th March, and not, as Mr. Tom Taylor places it, in 1764, from finding the dinner engagement noted on "a tiny old-fashioned card bearing the name of 'Mr. Adam Smith'" lying in one of Reynolds' pocket-books for 1764. In March 1764 Smith, as we know, was in France, and Mr. Taylor must have mistaken the year for 1774, unless, indeed, it may have been 1767. [231] Walpole's _Letters_, vi. 302. [232] Watson's _Annals of Philadelphia_, i. 533. [233] See above, pp. 256-7. [234] Parton's _Life of Franklin_, i. 537. [235] _Hume MSS._, R.S.E. Library. [236] Playfair's edition of _Wealth of Nations_, I. xiii. [237] Clayden's _Early Life of Samuel Rogers_, p. 168. [238] _Works_, v. 519. [239] Taylor's _Records of my Life_, ii. 262. [240] Thomson's _Life of Cullen_, i. 481. [241] Notes of S. Rogers' Conversation. Add. MSS., 32, 571. [242] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 483. [243] _Wealth of Nations_, Book V. chap. iii. CHAPTER XVIII "THE WEALTH OF NATIONS" 1776. _Aet._ 52