to the Treasury, finding that the University had in the four years specified and the years preceding expended above their revenue the sum of L2631:6:5-11/12.  I mention all these details with the view of showing that during Smith’s residence in Glasgow the University had a variety of important and difficult business to transact in London, which they would be always glad to get one of their own number to attend to personally on the spot, and that as Smith was never asked to transact any of this business for them except in 1761, it may almost with certainty be inferred that he never was in London on any other occasion during his connection with that University.

Now this journey to London in 1761 is memorable because it constituted the economic “road to Damascus” for a future Prime Minister of England.  It was during this journey, I believe, that Smith had Lord Shelburne for his travelling companion, and converted the young statesman to free trade.  In 1795 Shelburne (then become Marquis of Lansdowne) writes Dugald Stewart:  “I owe to a journey I made with Mr. Smith from Edinburgh to London the difference between light and darkness through the best part of my life.  The novelty of his principles, added to my youth and prejudices, made me unable to comprehend them at the time, but he urged them with so much benevolence, as well as eloquence, that they took a certain hold which, though it did not develop itself so as to arrive at full conviction for some few years after, I can truly say has constituted ever since the happiness of my life, as well as the source of any little consideration I may have enjoyed in it."[120]

Shelburne was the first English statesman, except perhaps Burke, who grasped and advocated free trade as a broad political principle; and though his biographer, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, attributes his conversion to Morellet, it is plain from the letter to Stewart that Morellet had only watered, it was Smith that sowed.

It is important, therefore, to fix if possible the date of this interesting journey.  It occurred, Lord Shelburne says, in his own youth, and the only journeys to London Smith made during the period which with any reasonable stretching may be called Shelburne’s youth, were made in 1761, 1763, and 1773.  Now we have no positive knowledge of Shelburne being in Scotland any of these years, but in 1761 his brother, the Hon. Thomas Fitzmaurice, who had been studying under Smith in Glasgow, and living in Smith’s house, left Glasgow for Oxford; and Shelburne, who, since his father’s death that very year, was taking, as we know from his correspondence with Sir William Blackstone on the subject, a very responsible concern in his younger brother’s education and welfare, may very probably have gone to Scotland to attend him back.  This circumstance seems to turn the balance in favour of 1761 and against the other two dates.