With all respect, this is a strange remark to fall from an editor of the Wealth of Nations, for the evidences of continuous revision and alteration during those four years are very numerous in the text of the work itself.  He made many changes or additions in 1773; for example, the remarks on the price of hides,[219] in the chapter on Rent, were written in February 1773; and those on the decline of sugar-refining in colonies taken from the French, in the chapter on the Colonies,[220] were written in October; while the passage on American wages, in the chapter on Wages, was inserted some time in the same year.  The extensive additions in the chapters on the Revenue, occasioned by reading the Memoires concernant les Droits, must have been written after 1774, because Smith probably obtained that book after Turgot became Minister in the middle of that year; his remarks, in the chapter on Colonies, on the effects of recent events on the trade with North America,[221] and his remarks on the Irish revenue in the chapter on Public Debts, were added in 1775.[222] The chapter on the Regulated Companies, in which the East India Company receives most systematic attention, and which did not appear in the first edition of the book, was apparently not written till 1782.[223]

The book therefore did not lie “unrevised and unaltered” in the author’s desk from 1772 to 1776; on the contrary, the chief cause of the four years’ delay was the revision and alteration to which it was being incessantly subjected during that whole term.  The particular Indian appointment for which Pulteney had recommended him could have nothing to do with the delay, inasmuch as the proposed office was suppressed altogether within two months after this letter was written; and even if he entertained expectations of any other sort from the East India Company, there is no reason why he should on that account have withheld his work from publication.  The more elaborate criticism of that Company in the chapter on Public Works did not appear in the original edition of the book at all, but the only remarks on Indian administration which did appear in that edition, although they are merely incidental in character, are very strong and decided, and might easily have been omitted, had the author been so minded, to please the Company, without any injury to the general argument with which they are connected.

On the other hand, there exists abundance of evidence that Smith was busy for most of three years after this date, and mainly in London, altering, improving, and adding to the manuscript of the book.  New lines of investigation would suggest themselves, new theories to be thought out, and the task would grow day by day by a very simple but unforeseen process of natural accretion.  Hume thought it near completion in 1769; but towards the end of 1772, a couple of months after Smith’s answer to Pulteney, he gives it most of another year yet for being finished.  He writes from his new quarters in St. Andrew Square, asking Smith to break off his studies for a few weeks’ relaxation with him in Edinburgh about Christmas, and then to return and finish his work before the following autumn.