Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey is doing something sly here: he’s treating “merely revenue duties” as a polite euphemism for national surrender. In the dry language of tariff schedules, he stages a moral drama about what the state is for. “Protection was abandoned” isn’t neutral description; it’s an accusation, loaded with the insinuation that policymakers didn’t just change rates, they renounced a governing philosophy. The phrase “in a few years” adds a slow-burn fatalism, implying a deliberate glide path away from industrial self-development toward dependency.

The context is the early republic’s recurring tariff war: protectionist hopes for American manufacturing versus the free-trade or low-tariff preference of export-oriented, agrarian interests. Carey, a leading voice in the American School tradition, believed national power and social stability required nurturing domestic industry, wages, and internal markets. So when he frames 1833 as a pivot to “merely revenue,” he’s pushing back against the idea that tariffs should be just a fiscal tool. For Carey, a tariff is an architecture of nationhood: it shapes who prospers, what kinds of work exist, and whether the country becomes a producer or a raw-material appendage.

The subtext is also political: “provided that we should” makes the tariff sound like something done to the public, not chosen by it. He’s hinting at elite capture and sectional bargaining - policy dressed up as inevitability. In Carey’s hands, the technocratic becomes existential: a tax line item reimagined as a vote on America’s future.