gather that he was a man of parts. The office of Judge Advocate for
Scotland, which was founded at the Union, and which he was the first
to fill, was a position of considerable responsibility, and was
occupied after him by men, some of them of great distinction.
Alexander Fraser Tytler, the historian, for example, was Judge
Advocate till he went to the bench as Lord Woodhouselee. The Judge
Advocate was clerk and legal adviser to the Courts Martial, but as
military trials were not frequent in Scotland, the duties of this
office took up but a minor share of the elder Smith's time. His chief
business, at least for the last ten years of his life, was his work in
the Custom-house, for though he was bred a Writer to the Signet--that
is, a solicitor privileged to practise before the Supreme Court--he
never seems to have actually practised that profession. A local
collectorship or controllership of the Customs was in itself a more
important administrative office at that period, when duties were
levied on twelve hundred articles, than it is now, when duties are
levied on twelve only, and it was much sought after for the younger,
or even the elder, sons of the gentry. The very place held by Smith's
father at Kirkcaldy was held for many years after his day by a Scotch
baronet, Sir Michael Balfour. The salary was not high. Adam Smith
began in 1713 with £30 a year, and had only £40 when he died in 1723,
but then the perquisites of those offices in the Customs were usually
twice or thrice the salary, as we know from the _Wealth of Nations_
itself (Book V. chap. ii.). Smith had a cousin, a third Adam Smith,
who was in 1754 Collector of Customs at Alloa with a salary of £60 a
year, and who writes his cousin, in connection with a negotiation the
latter was conducting on behalf of a friend for the purchase of the
office, that the place was worth £200 a year, and that he would not
sell it for less than ten years' purchase.[1]