Aging & Wisdom Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey is doing something more pointed than praising tariffs: he is staging a controlled comparison that flatters his policy agenda while shaming the free-trade empire of his day. The line divides the world into two camps. On one side sit India, Portugal, and Turkey - places held up in 19th-century Anglo-American discourse as commercial backwaters or semi-dependents, “open” in ways that conveniently served British industry. On the other side are “protected countries,” where the state actively shields domestic producers. The punch is that protection doesn’t merely redistribute wealth inside a nation; it supposedly makes commerce itself grow.

The rhetoric works by treating “commerce” as a measurable, almost biological fact - it “does not grow,” it “does increase” - as if policy were agriculture and the nation a field. That framing smuggles in a moral claim: if a country stays poor under openness, it isn’t fate or culture; it’s because someone else wrote the rules. India’s stagnation, in this telling, is not an accident but a design feature of imperial trade.

Carey’s choice of examples reveals the moment. In the mid-1800s, Spain was a cautionary tale of decline, Germany an emerging industrial contender experimenting with the Zollverein and national development strategies. By pairing them, he offers readers a narrative of turnaround: protection turns “old” Europe into “new” industry.

Subtext: this is economic argument as geopolitical warning. If the United States (Carey’s real audience) embraces British-style free trade, it risks becoming another “open” supplier of raw materials. Protection becomes not just policy, but sovereignty.