it could not have been with any thought of injuring a struggling and meritorious young author.  He has never shown any such intolerance of public contradiction as Mickle’s friends chose to attribute to him.  Dr. James Anderson, the first and true author of what is known as Ricardo’s theory of rent, won Smith’s friendship by a controversial pamphlet challenging some of his doctrines; Bentham won—­what is rarer—­his conversion from the doctrines impugned, and a very kindly letter still exists which Smith wrote to another hostile critic, Governor Pownall, and which I shall give here, as it was one of the first things he did after now arriving in London.  Pownall had been Governor of Massachusetts, a man of much activity of mind and experience of affairs, and author of respectable works on the Principles of Polity, the Administration of the Colonies, and the Middle States of America.  He was one of the forty-two persons to whom the authorship of the letters of Junius has been attributed.  He differed strongly from many of Smith’s views, especially from his condemnation of the monopoly of the colonial trade, and wrote a pamphlet setting forth his criticisms in the form of a letter to Adam Smith.  This pamphlet Smith received in Edinburgh, just before his departure for London, and when he arrived he wrote the Governor as follows:—­

SIR—­I received the day before I left Edinburgh the very great honour of your letter.  Though I arrived here on Sunday last, I have been almost from the day of my arrival confined by a cold, which I caught upon the road; otherwise I should before this time have done myself the honour of waiting on you in person, and of thanking you for the very great politeness with which you have everywhere treated me.  There is not, I give you my word, in your whole letter a single syllable relating to myself which I could wish to have altered, and the publication of your remarks does me much more honour than the communication of them by a private letter could have done.

I hope in a few days to have the honour of waiting on you, and of discussing in person with you both the points on which we agree and those on which we differ.  Whether you will think me, what I mean to be, a fair disputant, I know not; I can venture to promise you will not find me an irascible one.  In the meantime I have the honour to be, with the highest respect and esteem, etc. etc.

     ADAM SMITH.

     SUFFOLK STREET, 12th January 1777.[280]

The gentleman who forwarded this letter to the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1795, but whose name is not published, states, in further evidence, as he says, of Smith’s liberality of mind, that “he altered in his second edition some of the parts objected to, and instead of a reply, sent to Governor Pownall a printed copy of this second edition so altered, and there all contest closed.”  Smith, however, does not appear to have made any such alterations.  In feet, in the second edition he hardly made more than three or four alterations, and these were confined to the introduction of an additional fact or two in confirmation of his argument; and besides, when we refer to Pownall’s pamphlet we find that their differences were all about points on which Smith’s views were mature and the Governor’s raw.