STEWART-DENHAM (Sir James) was born at Edinburgh on the 10th of October, O. S. in the year 1713. His father was Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees, Bart. Solicitor-general for Scotland; and his mother
ther was Anne, daughter of Sir Hugh Dalrymple of North Berwick, Bart. president of the college of justice.
The first rudiments of his education he received at the grammar-school of North-Berwick, which at the time of his father's death he quitted at the age of fourteen, with the reputation of being a good scholar, but without any extraordinary advancement in knowledge.
It is remarkable, that many men who have been singularly useful to society have not shewn early symptoms of the greatness of their intellectual powers. A great understanding must be the offspring of happy organization in a healthy body, with co-operation of time, of circumstance, and of institution, without being forced into prematurity by excessive cultivation. This holds with respect to the growth and perfection of every creature; and the truth appears remarkable with respect to our own species, because we are apt to mistake the flimsy attainments of artificial education for the steady and permanent foundations of progressive knowledge.
From the school of North-Berwick Sir James was sent to the university of Edinburgh, where he continued until the year 1735, when he passed advocate before the Court of Session, and immediately afterwards went abroad to visit foreign countries. He was then in the 23d year of his age, had made himself well acquainted with the Roman law and history, and the municipal law of Scotland. He had likewise maturely studied the elements of jurisprudence; was versed in the general, as well as the particular, politics of Europe; and was bent upon applying his knowledge to the investigation of the state of men and of manners in other nations, with a view to promote the benefit of his own, and to confirm himself in the love of a free constitution of government, by contemplating the baneful effects of unlimited monarchy in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and of extravagant attachment to a king and nobility, to war, and to pernicious splendour in France.
He travelled first, however, into Holland, with a view to study the constitution of the empire before he should visit Germany, and to attend some of the lectures of the most eminent professors at Utrecht and Leyden, on public law and politics. From thence he passed into Germany, resided about a year in France, travelled thro' some part of Spain, where he had a fever, that obliged him, for his perfect recovery from its effects, to go by the advice of his friends to the sea-coast of the lovely province of Valencia; thence returning, he crossed the Alps, and by Turin made the tour of Italy, where chiefly at Rome and Florence he resided till the beginning of the year 1740; when, having spent five years on his travels, he returned to Scotland, and married the Lady Frances Wemyss, eldest daughter of the Earl of Wemyss, about two years after his return.
A few months after his marriage the representation of the county of Mid-Lothian became vacant, by the member being made a lord of trade and plantation. The candidates were the late member and Sir John Baird of Newbyth. On the day of election Mr Dundas of Arniston, one of the senators of the college of justice, was chosen preses of the meeting; and some how or other omitted to cause the name of Sir James Stewart to be called on the roll of freeholders. For this illegal use of his temporary power, Sir James commenced a suit against the president; and resuming the
gown as an advocate, pleaded his own cause with great energy and eloquence, and with the applause of the bench, the bar, and the public. This called Lord Arniston from the bench to plead in his own defence at the bar; and Sir James could not have been opposed to an antagonist better qualified to call forth all his powers; for that judge is talked of at this day in Edinburgh as the profoundest lawyer and the ablest pleader that ever graced the Scottish bench or the Scottish bar.
With the issue of this contest we are not acquainted; but it drew upon Sir James Stewart very general attention, and convinced the public, that had he continued at the bar, he must have risen rapidly to the head of his profession. On his travels, however, he had contracted friendships with Lord Marischal, and other eminent men, attached to the pretensions of the royal family of Stuart, and had received flattering attentions from the Pretender to the British throne; the impression arising from which, added to the irritations of his controversy with the powerful party in Scotland attached to the court, led him, unadvisedly, into connections with the movers of the rebellion in 1745.
As he was by far the ablest man of their party, the Jacobites engaged him to write the Prince Regent's manifesto, and to assist in his councils. Information having been given of his participation in these affairs, he thought it prudent, on the abhorrence of this unhappy attempt, to leave Britain; and by the zeal, it is said, of Arniston, he was excepted afterwards from the bill of indemnity, and rendered an exile from his country.
He chose France for his residence during the ten first years of his banishment; and was chiefly at Angoulême, where he superintended the education of his son; from thence he went to Tubingen in Suabia, for the benefit of its university, in prosecution of the same dutiful and laudable design; but in the end of the year 1756, having been suspected by the court of Versailles of communicating intelligence to the court of London, he was seized at Spa, and kept some time in confinement; from which being liberated, after the accession of the present king of Great Britain, he came, by toleration, to England, and resided at London, where he put the last hand to his System of Political Economy, the copy-right of which he sold to Andrew Millar; and being permitted to dedicate this work to the king, he applied for a noli prosequi, which, after some malicious objections, he obtained, and had the comfort of returning to his family estate in Scotland.
Having nothing professional to do during his long residence in France, the active mind of Sir James was occupied in study. His book on the Principles of Political Economy contains most of the fruits of it. He turned himself, in the intervals of leisure, to consider the resources of France, that he might the better compile that part of his great work which was to treat of revenue and expenditure. It was by studying the language of the finances, without which nobody can ask a proper question concerning them, so as to be understood, that he attained his great purpose.
As soon as he could ask questions properly, he applied in familiar conversation to the intendants and their substitutes in the provinces where he resided, whom he found extremely desirous to learn the state of the British finances, under the branches of the land-tax, customs, excise, and other inland duties. This led him to
compare
compare the state of the two nations. The information he gave was an equivalent for the information he received; curiosity balanced curiosity, each was satisfied and instructed. The department of the intendants in France was confined to the taxes which composed the recettes generales, namely, the taille, the capitation, and the townships, or vignettes. All the intendants had been Maitres des Requêtes, bred at Paris, and could not fail to have much knowledge of the general formes and other branches of the revenue. He carefully noted down at all times the answers he got; and when he came to reside at Paris, he obtained more ample information, both from the gentlemen of the revenue, and from persons of the parliament of Paris, who to the number of 25 had been for 15 months exiled in the province where he had so long resided at Angoulême.
With these advantages, with much study and attention to arrangement, he was enabled to compose the sixth chapter of the fourth part of the fourth book of his System of Political Economy; a portion of that great work well worthy the attention of those who wish to know the state of France in respect of revenue under the old government.
Although Sir James Stewart's leisure, during the first ten years of his exile, was chiefly employed in social intercourse with the most learned, elegant, and polished characters in France, who delighted in the conversation and friendship of a man who possessed at once immense information, on almost every subject, important or agreeable to society, and the talent of clearly and beautifully expressing his sentiments in flowing and animated conversation; yet he did not allow the pleasures of the circle and of the table to blunt the fine feelings of a man of genius and science. The labour of collecting materials for his great political work was oppressive, and he relieved himself with various enquiries, suited to the exalted ambition of his cultivated understanding, while he turned the charms of conversation to the permanent delight of his associates and of posterity. The motto of Apelles, "Nulla dies sine linea," was the emblem of his employment; and it is amazing what may be done by daily attention for improvement, without appearing to abstract any extraordinary time from the common offices and rational pleasures of society.
In the beginning of the year 1755, Sir James wrote his Apology, or Defence of Sir Isaac Newton's Chronology, which at that time he intended to publish, but was prevented by other engagements. It was communicated to several persons of eminence in France and Germany in MS. and produced, in the month of December that year in the "Mercure de France," an answer from M. Deshoulières, to which Sir James soon after replied.
The great Newton, applying astronomical and statistical principles to the ancient chronology of Greece, had chastised the vanity of nations, and arrested the progress of infidelity in delineating the history of the world. Lost in the confusion of excessive pretensions to an antiquity beyond all measure, and disguised by the superstitious aids that were assumed to support these pretensions among ancient nations, the revivers of learning in Europe, during the last and the preceding century, turmoiled themselves with controversies between the comparative merits of the ancients and moderns; and
the abettors of the latter, entrenching themselves behind the falsehoods of the ancients, on the scope of their remote history, gave the lie to all antiquity, and in despair plunged themselves into the ocean of scepticism.
Happy had it been for society if this scepticism had confined itself to the history of ancient nations in general; but the same spirit, taking disguise at the horrors of Christian ambition and bigotry, and contemplating with derision the ridiculous legends of modern miracles, gave the lie to all religious scripture of the Jews and Christians, and attempted to banish divine intelligence, the superintending providence of Deity, and the true dignity of the human species, from the face of the earth!
It was a noble undertaking, therefore, in Sir James, to attempt to disperse this mist of error, by dispassionately and scientifically explaining and supporting the chronology of Sir Isaac Newton. He has done it with great precision and effect; and it is a book well worth the perusal of those who wish to read ancient history with improvement, or to prevent themselves from being bewildered in the mazes of modern conjecture. It was printed in 4to at Franckfort on the Maine, for John Bernard Eichenberg the Elder, in 1757.
In the year 1758, and the following, the British House of Commons took up the consideration of a statute to regulate a general uniformity of weights and measures throughout the united kingdoms, which had been so often unsuccessfully attempted.
This called the attention of Sir James, not only to the investigation of the particular subject that engaged that of the House of Commons, but to devise a method of rendering an uniformity of weights and measures universal. He thought the cause of former disappointments in this useful pursuit had been the mistaken notion that one or other of our present measures should be adopted for the new standard. After the plan had been relinquished by the parliament of England, he digested his notes and observations on this important disquisition into the form of an epistolary dissertation, which he transmitted to his friend Lord Barrington, and resolved, if there had been a congress assembled, as was once proposed, to adjust the preliminaries of the general peace in 1763, to have laid his plan before the ministers of the different nations, who were to prepare that salutary pacification of the contending powers.
This epistolary dissertation Sir James afterwards reduced at Coltness, in the year 1777, into a form more proper for the public eye, and sent a corrected copy to a friend, reserving another for the press, which was printed 1790 for Stockdale in Piccadilly.
In this tract the author shows, from the ineffectual attempts that have been made to alter partially, by innovation, the standards of measures or weights, that the effectual plan to be adopted, is to depart entirely from every measure whatsoever now known, and to take, ad libitum, some new mafs instead of our pound, some new length instead of our ell, some new space instead of our acre, and some new solid instead of our gallon and bushel.
For this purpose Sir James proposes as the unit a mafs to be verified with the greatest possible accuracy, equal in weight to ten thousand Troy grains. The pendulum, as it swings at London, to beat seconds of time,
time, he proposes to be the measure of length; and after having laid down his fundamental principles, he proposes an ingenious plan for rendering their adoption universal through the whole world.
Having obtained his pardon, Sir James Stewart retired to Colthess, in the county of Lanark, the paternal estate of his family, where he turned his attention to the improvement of his neighbourhood by public works and police, and drew the first good plan for a turnpike bill, suited to the circumstances of Scotland, which has been since generally adopted. He repaired his house, planted, improved, and decorated his estate, and in social intercourse rendered himself the delight of his neighbourhood and country.
Never was there a man who, with so much knowledge, and so much energy of expression in conversation, rendered himself more delightful to his company, or was more regretted by his acquaintance when he died. Nor was the active mind of Sir James unemployed for the general benefit of his country during his retreat. He was engaged by the directors of the East India Company of England to digest a code for the regulation of the current coin of Bengal; the plan for which important regulation he printed, and received from the court of directors a handsome diamond ring, as a mark of their approbation.
He prepared for the press, but never published, an antidote to the System de la Nature by Mirabeau, wherein the parallelisms and foolish reasoning of that infidel work are examined, detected, and confuted. It is written in French; and were the work of Mirabeau worth refutation, might be printed with much advantage to Sir James's reputation as a controversial writer.
This great and good man died in November 1780, and was buried at Cambusnethan, in Lanarkshire, on the 28th of the same month; the Duke of Hamilton and his neighbours performing the last offices to the remains of their highly valued friend, and bedewing his ashes with their tears.
For this short sketch of the principal events in the
life of Sir James Stewart-Denham, we are indebted to his nephew the Earl of Buchan, who, justly proud of his relation to such a man, cannot be supposed to view all his projects, or even all his reasonings, with the cool impartiality of strangers. His plan, for instance, of a universal standard of weights and measures for the whole world, though certainly a grand conception, we cannot help considering as romantic and impracticable. The author indeed was sensible, that time would be requisite for its execution; and so large a portion of time, that, compared with it, a thousand years are but as one day, when compared with the ordinary life of man: but schemes of this magnitude are not for creatures so blind and weak as we are, who, when we wander to a distance beyond the limits of our narrow sphere, with the ambitious view of benefiting posterity, are almost certain to injure ourselves, without a probability of serving those for whom we dream that we are exerting our abilities. Sir James's Political Economy, however, is a very great work, which has not received half the praises to which it is entitled, and which, we suspect, provoked the envy of another great writer on similar subjects, who exerted himself privately to lessen its fame. The defence of Newton's chronology is likewise very valuable, though we certainly do not think that part of the system invulnerable, in which the great astronomer attempts to prove, that Osiris, Sesotris, and Sesac, are three names of the same Egyptian king. This, however, is a very trifling mistake; and the modern sciolist, who can lay hold of it to reject the whole, has certainly never read, or, if he has read, does not understand the defence of the system by Sir James Stewart.