I shall now explain the relation of the insular monopoly to God's designs. It may be predicted that the views of the Creator on this point will not be in agreement with the opinions of civilised men who, in matters of politics, have always vegetated, scarcely raising themselves from insignificance to mediocrity. They might as well have stayed at the bottom of the ladder as drag themselves one rung above it.

In centuries more religious than our own it was rightly thought that God sometimes punished nations; and if ever this opinion was plausible it is today, when the whole of humanity is persecuted and degraded by a single scourge, the island monopoly that ravages every aspect of the social world.

It destroys industry at its base by closing the lines of communication.

It attacks humanity en masse by financing and sustaining wars that force peoples to tear each other apart.

It degrades sovereigns by making them slaves to a subsidy that neutralises their political systems.

It outrages honour by subordinating the whole social mechanism to cheap mercantile calculations.

Such are the depths to which our economic sciences have brought us: the insular monopoly has re-opened Pandora's box, and the multitude of calamities which have come from it should have been recognised as a punishment from the supreme being, except that our metaphysical subtleties have habituated the moderns to doubting providence and degrading God by lacklustre arguments about his existence, and by a half-hearted belief that is just as impertinent as atheism.

Of Corruption in general

If the fortune of nations, and their tendency to aggrandisement, or to ruin, were to be estimated by merely balancing, on the principles of the last section, articles of profit and loss, every argument in politics would rest on a comparison of national expence with national gain; on a comparison of the numbers who consume, with those who produce or amass the necessaries of life. The columns of the industrious, and the idle, would include all orders of men; and the state itself, being allowed as many magistrates, politicians, and warriors, as were barely sufficient for its defence and its government, should place, on the side of its loss, every name that is supernumerary on the civil or the military list; all those orders of men, who, by the possession of fortune, subsist on the gains of others, and by the nicety of their choice, require a great expence of time and of labour, to supply their consumption; all those who are idly employed in the train of persons of rank; all those who are engaged in the professions of law, physic, or divinity, together with all the learned, who do not, by their studies, promote or improve the practice of some lucrative trade. The value of every person, in short, should be computed from his labour; and that of labour itself, from its tendency to procure and amass the means of subsistence.

Of the question relating to the State of Nature

Natural productions are generally formed by degrees. Vegetables grow from a tender shoot, and animals from an infant state. The latter being destined to act, extend their operations as their powers increase: they exhibit a progress in what they perform, as well as in the faculties they acquire. This progress in the case of man is continued to a greater extent than in that of any other animal. Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization. Hence the supposed departure of mankind from the state of their nature; hence our conjectures and different opinions of what man must have been in the first age of his being. The poet, the historian, and the moralist, frequently allude to this ancient time; and under the emblems of gold, or of iron, represent a condition, and a manner of life, from which mankind have either degenerated, or on which they have greatly improved. On either supposition, the first state of our nature must have borne no resemblance to what men have exhibited in any subsequent period; historical monuments, even of the earliest date, are to be considered as novelties; and the most common establishments of human society are to be classed among the incroachments which fraud, oppression, or a busy invention, have made upon the reign of nature, by which the chief of our grievances or blessings were equally with-held.

Adam Ferguson was bora in 1723 in the village of Logierait, Perthshire, on the border between the Scottish lowlands and highlands. His father was a Presbyterian minister, his mother a distant relation of the dukes of Argyll. The young Adam excelled in Greek and Latin and became an avid reader of the ancient authors. Like other contributors to the Scottish Enlightenment, his thought was shaped by his Presbyterian background and classical education; but what made him an unusual Enlightenment thinker was his acquaintance with the Gaelic-speaking society of the highlands. The first-hand and early encounter with both ‘raw’ clansmen and ‘polished’, anglicized lowlanders was a formative experience in his life.

At the age of sixteen Ferguson went to the University of St Andrews. After taking his MA degree in 1742 he began preparing himself for the ministry and moved to the University of Edinburgh. There he joined a circle of young divinity students who were similarly on their way to becoming clergymen, scholars and men of letters. Among them were the future preacher and professor, Hugh Blair, the future playwright, John Home, and the future historian and principal of the University of Edinburgh, William Robertson. These men were to become part of the Edinburgh kernel of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Edinburgh in the early 1740s was a place of tension between rival political powers and competing ideas of national identity.

Of the Informations on this subject which are derived from Antiquity

The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning. Nations, distinguished by the possession of arts, and the felicity of their political establishments, have been derived from a feeble original, and still preserve in their story the indications of a slow and gradual progress, by which this distinction was gained. The antiquities of every people, however diversified, and however disguised, contain the same information on this point.

In sacred history, we find the parents of the species, as yet a single pair, sent forth to inherit the earth, and to force a subsistence for themselves amidst the briers and thorns which were made to abound on its surface. Their race, which was again reduced to a few, had to struggle with the dangers that await a weak and infant species; and after many ages elapsed, the most respectable nations took their rise from one or a few families that had pastured their flocks in the desert.

The Grecians derive their own origin from unsettled tribes, whose frequent migrations are a proof of the rude and infant state of their communities; and whose warlike exploits, so much celebrated in story, only exhibit the struggles with which they disputed for the possession of a country they afterwards, by their talent for fable, by their arts, and their policy, rendered so famous in the history of mankind.

Of supposed National Eminence, and of the Vicissitudes of Human Affairs

No nation is so unfortunate as to think itself inferior to the rest of mankind: few are even willing to put up with the claim to equality. The greater part having chosen themselves, as at once, the judges and the models of what is excellent in their kind, are first in their own opinion, and give to others consideration or eminence, so far only as they approach to their own condition. One nation is vain of the personal character, or of the learning, of a few of its members; another, of its policy, its wealth, its tradesmen, its gardens, and its buildings; and they who have nothing to boast, are vain, because they are ignorant. The Russians, before the reign of Peter the Great, thought themselves possessed of every national honour, and held the Nenei, or dumb nations, (the name which they bestowed on their western neighbours of Europe), in a proportional degree of contempt. The map of the world, in China, was a square plate, the greater part of which was occupied by the provinces of this great empire, leaving on its skirts a few obscure corners, into which the wretched remainder of mankind were supposed to be driven. ‘If you have not the use of our letters, nor the knowledge of our books,’ said the learned Chinese to the European missionary, ‘what literature, or what science, can you have?’

Of the Separation of Arts and Professions

It is evident, that, however urged by a sense of necessity, and a desire of convenience, or favoured by any advantages of situation and policy, a people can make no great progress in cultivating the arts of life, until they have separated, and committed to different persons, the several tasks, which require a peculiar skill and attention. The savage, or the barbarian, who must build and plant, and fabricate for himself, prefers, in the interval of great alarms and fatigues, the enjoyments of sloth to the improvement of his fortune: he is, perhaps, by the diversity of his wants, discouraged from industry; or, by his divided attention, prevented from acquiring skill in the management of any particular subject.

The enjoyment of peace, however, and the prospect of being able to exchange one commodity for another, turns, by degrees, the hunter and the warrior into a tradesman and a merchant. The accidents which distribute the means of subsistence unequally, inclination, and favourable opportunities, assign the different occupations of men; and a sense of utility leads them, without end, to subdivide their professions.

The artist finds, that the more he can confine his attention to a particular part of any work, his productions are the more perfect, and grow under his hands in the greater quantities.

Of the Influences of Climate and Situation

What we have hitherto observed on the condition and manners of nations, though chiefly derived from what has passed in the temperate climates, may, in some measure, be applied to the rude state of mankind in every part of the earth: but if we intend to pursue the history of our species in its further attainments, we may soon enter on subjects which will confine our observation to more narrow limits. The genius of political wisdom and civil arts appears to have chosen his seats in particular tracts of the earth, and to have selected his favourites in particular races of men.

Man, in his animal capacity, is qualified to subsist in every climate. He reigns with the lion and the tyger under the equatorial heats of the sun, or he associates with the bear and the raindeer beyond the polar circle. His versatile disposition fits him to assume the habits of either condition, or his talent for arts enables him to supply its defects. The intermediate climates, however, appear most to favour his nature; and in whatever manner we account for the fact, it cannot be doubted, that this animal has always attained to the principal honours of his species within the temperate zone. The arts, which he has on this scene repeatedly invented, the extent of his reason, the fertility of his fancy, and the force of his genius in literature, commerce, policy, and war, sufficiently declare either a distinguished advantage of situation, or a natural superiority of mind.