Adam Smith The Target:
Eulogy for Alexander Hamilton,
The Albany Sentinel, 1804

Although Hamilton never named Adam Smith, this excerpt from a eulogy printed in the Albany Sentinel after Hamilton's death in 1804 shows that his target was understood:

``His Report on Manufactures is a chef d'oeuvre of the kind, and the most labored performance that he ever gave to the world. It is not more distinguished for knowledge and investigation, than for having given a deep wound to the tenets of the sect of the French capital economists, and also to another system of politics which had grown fashionable among political philosophers. The system I allude to, is to be met with in Smith's Enquiry into the Wealth of Nations.... The secretary combats with great ability some of the fundamental principles of this doctrine, and he adopts the mercantile system upon the basis of self-defense, and as most wise, because Europe perseveres in the same system.''