Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey’s line is economic argument disguised as moral certainty: slavery isn’t just wrong, it’s inefficient in the face of organized resistance. “Wherever it is resisted” matters more than “slaver.” He’s not describing a natural, inevitable arc toward liberty; he’s outlining a mechanism. Pressure applied at the right points - political, legal, commercial, even cultural - raises the cost of owning people until the system can’t reproduce itself. Slavery “dies away” not because conscience awakens, but because it becomes harder to defend, insure, finance, and normalize.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to fatalism and to polite neutrality. Carey implies that slavery survives on collaboration: markets that absorb its goods, governments that shield it, citizens who treat it as background noise. Resistance, then, isn’t only the work of abolitionists in the street; it’s also tariffs, labor policy, and the deliberate building of an economy that doesn’t need coerced labor to compete. That’s classic Carey, a 19th-century American economist who championed national development and “free labor” industrialization as the alternative to plantation capitalism.

The phrasing is canny propaganda: “slaver” (the trader, the system) is singled out as the thing that withers, while “freedom” is cast as a living organism that “grows.” It’s a mobilizing sentence meant to reassure reformers that their friction counts - every act of refusal is not symbolic but cumulative, turning morality into leverage.