Smith was, as I have said, one of the original members of the club, and from Carlyle’s list would appear to have continued a member till 1774; but he was not a member of the Younger Poker Club, established in 1786.  In the interval he had expressed in the Wealth of Nations a strong preference for a standing army over a national militia,[101] after instituting a very careful examination of the whole subject.  Whether his views had changed since 1762, or whether he had joined in the agitation for a militia merely as a measure of justice to Scotland or as an expedient of temporary necessity, without committing himself to any abstract admiration for the institution in general, I have no means of deciding; but we can hardly think he ever shared that kind of belief in the principle of a militia which animated men like Ferguson and Carlyle, and which, according to them, animated the other members of the club also at its birth.  Ferguson says the club was founded “upon the principle of zeal for a militia and a conviction that there could be no lasting security for the freedom and independence of these islands but in the valour and patriotism of an armed people";[102] and when, during his travels in Switzerland in 1775, he saw for the first time in his life a real militia—­the object of his dreams—­actually moving before him in the flesh, and going through their drill, his heart came to his mouth, and he wrote his friend Carlyle:  “As they were the only body of men I ever saw under arms on the true principle for which arms should be carried, I felt much secret emotion, and could have shed tears."[103] He was deeply disappointed a year later with Smith’s apostasy on this question, or at least opposition, for Ferguson makes no accusation of apostasy.  After reading the Wealth of Nations, he wrote Smith on the 18th of April 1776:  “You have provoked, too, so far the Church, the universities, and the merchants, against all of whom I am willing to take your part; but you have likewise provoked the militia, and there I must be against you.  The gentlemen and peasants of this country do not need the authority of philosophers to make them supine and negligent of every resource they might have in themselves in the case of certain extremities, of which the pressure, God knows, may be at no great distance.  But of this more at Philippi."[104]

But many others besides Smith had in this interval either found their zeal for a militia grown cool or their opinion of its value modified, and when Lord Mountstuart introduced his new Scotch Militia Bill in 1776, it received little support from Scotch members, and its rejection excited nothing like the feeling roused by the rejection of its predecessor in 1760, although it was attended this time with the galling aggravation that what was refused to the Scotch was in the same hour granted to the Irish, then the less disliked and distrusted nation of the two.  Opinions had grown divided.  Old Fletcher of Saltoun’s