Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey isn’t trying to win a polite policy argument; he’s trying to detonate a moral one. By calling the British system a "gigantic system of slavery", he raids the era’s hottest ethical vocabulary and turns it outward, away from plantation slavery and toward empire, finance, and trade. The provocation is strategic: if Britain can be framed as the great enslaver of nations, then American industrial policy, tariffs, and economic independence become not just prudent but righteous.

The line works because it collapses the distance between economic structure and political liberty. Carey implies that domination doesn’t require chains; it can arrive via "control" that looks legal, modern, even mutually beneficial. "Enabled to obtain control" is doing quiet work here, suggesting complicity: local elites, dependency on British markets, debt, and trade arrangements that surrender sovereignty without a formal conquest. Freedom "gradually disappears" is a warning about slow violence - the kind that doesn’t announce itself as tyranny until the options are already gone.

Context matters. Carey wrote in a century when Britain was the global commercial hegemon and the United States was still arguing over what kind of economy it would be: agrarian appendage or industrial rival. As a leading American protectionist, Carey wanted to break the cultural spell of free trade as liberation. The subtext is nationalist and anti-imperial at once: a claim that economic policy is destiny, and that the real battlefield for freedom is the balance sheet, not the barricade.