Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey wraps an argument about tariffs in the moral language of abolition, and that graft is the point. “Adopting the other trade” signals his preferred alternative to Britain-led free trade: a protectionist, industrializing America. He’s not just selling an economic policy; he’s recruiting readers into a righteous coalition. The sentence stages a flattering alignment: choose Carey’s “other trade” and you stand “by the side of” enlightened reformers, the kind of people whose policies uplift “their own subjects” and, conveniently, free slaves “everywhere.”

The subtext is strategic moral leverage. In the mid-19th century, slavery wasn’t a sidebar; it was the national trauma. Carey uses that heat to reframe a technical dispute as an ethical referendum. Protectionism becomes anti-slavery because, in his telling, industrial development loosens the plantation economy’s grip: diversify labor, raise wages, empower small producers, reduce dependence on slave-grown exports. Free trade, implicitly, props up slave systems by rewarding raw material extraction and funneling power to landowners.

Notice the cosmopolitan reach of “everywhere.” It’s an audacious universal claim that lets a domestic economic program masquerade as global emancipation. The rhetorical move is also defensive: it inoculates protectionism against the charge of selfish nationalism by presenting it as humanitarian statecraft. Carey’s genius, and his risk, is binding moral legitimacy to economic architecture; if the economics fail, the ethics look like branding.