Anniversaries

TODAY is the feast day of Saint Boniface, born about 680 in Devon, who set out for Germany with the aim of converting the pagans. This he did with bold displays of the powerlessness of the pagan deities, once felling a sacred oak which crashed to the ground and split into four pieces after just a few blows of the axe. Next he turned his attention to the increasingly corrupt church in France, where church positions were being sold to the highest bidder, achieving wonders in five years. He moved on to convert Friesland where, aged about 73, he was killed by pagans. The book he was reading, dented with sword cuts, is still kept in Fulda, Germany.

5 June, 1723: Adam Smith, political economist, was baptised in Kirkcaldy. He studied moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Oxford, before taking up his great theme of the 'invisible hand' of competition guiding an economic system based on individual self-interest. His major work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), is the classic of laissez-faire economics, still a major, if tattered, strand of modern political economics. Smith died in Edinburgh in 1790, aged 67.

1783: The Montgolfier brothers demonstrated the first hot-air balloon.

1883: John Maynard Keynes, economist, born in Cambridge. His General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money argued, in opposition to laissez-faire economics (see Adam Smith above), for government economic intervention to prevent unemployment and financial crises.