=================== HES POSTING ====================== Despite Smith's influence on Hamilton, they came to be invoked as authorities by rival parties on trade issues. Joseph Dorfman (Economic Mind in American Civilization, I, 326) noted that in 1809 The Wealth of Nations was reprinted by Federalists in Hartford while the Republican Congress ordered a reprint of Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and directed Treasury Secretary Gallatin to prepare a Report on American Manufactures along with a plan to "protect and promote the same." What Hamilton took from Hume and Smith was transformed and reinterpreted by Hamilton's reading. Arguing in 1783 against what he considered a free-trade misreading of Hume's "Of the Jealousy of Trade," Hamilton (as paraphrased by Dorfman, I, 407-8) held that "neither Hume, `that ingenious and sensible thinker,' nor any other authority questions that government interposition is one of those moral influences often necessary to rectify an unfavorable balance of trade and to restore commerce to the natural, invariable laws of profitable activity." (!) One prominent American who would have been acquainted with Smith's political economy before the publication of The Wealth of Nations was Benjamin Franklin, a friend of Hume and Smith who lived in London as agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly and other colonies and as Deputy Postmaster-General of the Colonies for most of the years between 1757 and 1775, and visited Scotland in 1759 (when he met Smith) and 1771 (when he stayed with Hume in Edinburgh for three weeks). Franklin also encountered physiocracy during his visit to France in 1767 (with Turgot writing a summary of physiocratic taxation theory for him), as Smith had while he was in France 1764-66. Robert Dimand Department of Economics Brock University St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1 Canada [log in to unmask] ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]