Karl Marx wrote that Eden was "the only disciple of Adam Smith during the eighteenth century that produced any work of any importance"' (DNB). However, he also criticized his advocacy of expropriation of the poor and vulnerable by the ruling classes. In "Capital", Marx cites Eden: "It may, perhaps be worthy the attention of the public to consider, whether any manufacture, which, in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages and workhouses should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be employed by turns during the greater part of the night and robbed of that rest which, though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that numbers of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, should be collected together in such a manner that the contagion of example cannot but lead to profligacy and debauchery; will add to the sum of individual or national felicity?"