Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey writes like an economist who has watched “free trade” become a kind of polite coercion. The key move is in his phrase “submission, even in part”: the danger isn’t only total capitulation to a global system, but any incremental buy-in that starts to reorganize a country’s priorities around extraction. He’s not describing commerce as mutual exchange; he’s describing it as discipline. A “system” that “looks to compelling” doesn’t merely incentivize raw exports - it pressures nations into a role: supplier of unprocessed goods, importer of finished value, permanent junior partner.

The rhetoric is doing moral work. “Natural consequence” sounds neutral, almost scientific, yet what follows is a cascade of degradations: land exhausted, labour cheapened, the labourer exported. Carey’s subtext is that the economy is an ecology. Strip-mining soil and strip-mining wages are versions of the same logic: short-term gains purchased by long-term depletion. The final clause, “export of the labourer,” lands like an indictment of emigration as policy outcome, not personal choice - people forced to leave because the domestic economy has been engineered to shed them.

Context matters. Carey was a leading American advocate of the “American System” and protectionism in the 19th century, arguing that industrial development and internal markets build national independence. Read against British-dominated trade networks and colonial patterns, this line is less a technical complaint than a political warning: when a country is locked into raw-product export, it doesn’t just lose pricing power; it loses people, soil, and sovereignty.