Success Quote by Joel Barlow

Barlow is warning that liberty isn’t a mood; it’s a muscle. Let it atrophy and you don’t just become weaker in a practical sense - you become morally compromised, the kind of person who can be pushed around and then talked into believing it’s normal. The line’s bite comes from how it yokes “physical forces” to “the moral,” insisting that virtue isn’t simply private conscience or refined sensibility. For Barlow, moral agency requires the capacity to act, to resist, to defend a boundary. When that capacity falls into “habitual disuse,” it’s not just the body that softens but the citizen.

The subtext is pointedly republican and suspicious of comfort. Barlow is speaking out of the late-18th-century Atlantic world, where revolution had made self-defense and civic militancy feel like virtues, not vices. In that context, “physical forces” reads as more than personal fitness: it’s preparedness, the willingness to bear risk, maybe even an armed populace as a backstop against tyranny. His real fear is the feedback loop of dependence: once people stop practicing protection, they not only lose the power to resist oppression; they lose the interpretive skill to recognize it. Oppression becomes misnamed as order, safety, or inevitability.

Rhetorically, he’s doing something clever: framing passivity as epistemic collapse. The worst outcome isn’t defeat; it’s confusion - citizens so untrained in self-reliance they can’t trace suffering to its source. Barlow’s sentence is a provocation dressed as diagnosis: you don’t get to keep freedom’s moral self-image if you outsource freedom’s hard work.