Note i-215 — INTRODUCTION

Ibid., 266. See Carey's chapter, "Franklin's Influence on Adam Smith," for an exhaustive survey of the personalia linking Adam Smith and Franklin. Both were in London in 1773-1776 and were occasional companions, having in 1759 met in Edinburgh at the home of Dr. Robertson. Probably they again met in Glasgow during the same year. Smith could have received copies of Franklin's works through Hume and Lord Kames; among Franklin's works in Smith's library was Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind; when Smith in the Wealth of Nations observes that colonial population doubles in every twenty to twenty-five years, it seems reasonable to infer that he was beholden to Franklin for the suggestion. It is within the realm of reasonable inference, says Mr. Carey, that Franklin did, as Parton urges, help to educate Smith in the colonial point of view. T. D. Eliot, in "The Relations Between Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin before 1776," Political Science Quarterly, XXXIX, 67-96 (March, 1924), after calling attention to the lack of extant correspondence between them and the silence of their contemporaries concerning a vital relationship, shows a reasonable hesitancy in observing that little is known about Smith's alleged debt to Franklin. Like Wetzel and Carey, Eliot thinks the debt has been exaggerated. He has been unable to prove Dr. Patten's intuition that in 1759 Franklin went to Smith in Scotland to urge him to write a treatise on colonial policy. In 1765 Turgot met Adam Smith. In the following year he published his Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses, antedating Smith's Wealth of Nations by ten years. See J. Delvaille's Essai sur l'histoire de l'idée de progrès (Paris, 1910), chap. IV, on Adam Smith; and Carey, op. cit., 152, 158-9, for the relationship between Turgot and Franklin.