Daily Inspiration Quote by Ezra Stiles

A clergyman is not supposed to sound like a balance-sheet bruiser, which is exactly why Ezra Stiles lands this so sharply. He’s ventriloquizing “the British merchants” to reduce the moral drama of empire to its bluntest motive: profit. The line’s cool accounting tone is the point. By making the merchants “represent” their losses, Stiles hints at the performative nature of imperial complaint - less objective ledger, more lobbying pitch. The subtext: when power talks about principle, listen for the cash register underneath.

Context matters. Stiles is writing in the decades when colonial grievance is curdling into independence, and trade is the language both sides claim to understand. British defenders of the imperial system often framed the colonies as beneficiaries of protection and markets; Stiles flips that framing by putting a cynical argument in British mouths: outside a few lucrative nodes (tobacco, rice, sugar), the continent is a money sink. That concession functions like intellectual judo. If even merchants admit the relationship is unprofitable, then the empire’s insistence on control starts to look less like rational economics and more like pride, coercion, or strategic obsession.

There’s a quiet regional tell, too: Virginia, South Carolina, the West Indies - slavery-saturated export engines - are named as the “profit indeed.” The rest are “losers.” Stiles doesn’t sermonize; he lets the geography accuse. The line invites readers to see that the imperial argument isn’t really about mutual flourishing. It’s about which places can be extracted, and how quickly.