Daily Inspiration Quote by Josiah Strong

Strong’s line reads like a warning sermon delivered in the language of ledgers: when the big hubs seize up, everyone else catches pneumonia. The phrasing is deliberately inevitable - “will the more surely” doesn’t argue, it pronounces. That certainty is the rhetorical trick. It turns an economic observation into moral weather: distress isn’t a localized problem, it’s a force that “creates” disaster, as if markets were engines capable of manufacturing chaos on command.

As a clergyman writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, Strong stood at the crossroads of rapid industrialization, urban consolidation, and an emerging national economy tied together by rail, finance, and mass production. His era had already seen panics and depressions that traveled fast through bank failures and collapsing credit. “Great business center” is doing heavy work here: Strong is pointing to the new power of cities like New York and Chicago, places that were no longer just crowded marketplaces but command nodes for the whole country’s livelihood.

The subtext is less about economics than accountability. If prosperity is networked, so is suffering; the winners of concentrated commerce can’t pretend their risks are private. Strong’s religious vocation matters because he’s smuggling a social ethic into what sounds like neutral diagnosis. The statement quietly undermines the myth of isolated self-reliance: in a modern economy, your “local” hardship may be someone else’s distant decision. In that sense, it’s an early argument for systemic thinking - and, by implication, for collective responsibility when the system breaks.