Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey’s sentence reads like a mild-mannered footnote, but it’s doing the sharp work of persuasion: it turns a messy political era into a narrative of progress that only needed the right final push. The phrase “tendency was steadily” is a rhetorical soft sell. He avoids naming villains, parties, or policies; history becomes an impersonal drift, as if the nation were naturally moving toward the “former direction” (a prior point he’s relying on the reader to accept) until someone finally made it “really efficient.” That vagueness is strategic. It invites agreement without triggering partisan resistance.

The subtext is classic nineteenth-century political economy: good outcomes aren’t about moral crusades, they’re about institutional design. Carey is quietly privileging “efficiency” as the proof of correctness. If a trend becomes “really efficient” late in the period, that implies earlier efforts were half-measures, and the mature version deserves credit and continuation. It’s not just description; it’s a template for policy justification: we were already headed here, the only question was when we’d get serious.

Context matters. Between 1824 and 1833 the U.S. fought over tariffs (“American System”), industrial development, the Second Bank of the United States, and Jacksonian attacks on concentrated financial power. Carey, a leading protectionist, regularly argued that national prosperity required coordinated policy, not laissez-faire. So “efficient” is a loaded word: it smuggles in his belief that deliberate national economic planning - especially protective tariffs and a managed credit system - is what converts mere momentum into real results.