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Henry Charles Carey (December 15, 1793 - October
13, 1879), United States|American economist, was
born in Philadelphia.

At the age of twenty-eight he succeeded his
father, Mathew Carey (1760-1839) an influential
economist, political reformer, editor, and
publisher, of Irish birth, but for many years a
resident of Philadelphia as a member of the
publishing firm of Carey & Lea, which was long the
most conspicuous in America.

Among Mathew Carey's many writings had been a
collection (1822) of Essays on Political Economy,
one of the earliest of American treatises favoring
protectionism|protection, and Henry C Carey's
life-work was devoted to the propagation of the
same theory. He retired from business in 1838,
almost simultaneously with the appearance
(1837-1840) of his Principles of Political
Economy. This treatise, which was translated into
Italian language|Italian and Swedish
language|Swedish, soon became the standard
representative in the United States of the school
of economic thought which, with some
interruptions, has since dominated the tariff
system of that country.

Carey's first large work on political economy was
preceded and followed by many smaller volumes on
wages, the credit system, interest, slavery,
copyright, etc.; and in 1858-1859 he gathered the
fruits of his lifelong labours into The Principles
of Social Science, in three volumes. This work is
a most comprehensive as well as mature exposition
of his views. In it Carey sought to show that
there exists, independently of human wills, a
natural system of economic laws, which is
essentially beneficent, and of which the
increasing prosperity of the whole community, and
especially of the working classes, is the
spontaneous resultcapable of being defeated only
by the ignorance or perversity of man resisting or
impeding its action. He rejected the Thomas
Malthus|Malthusian doctrine of population,
maintaining that numbers regulate themselves
sufficiently in every well-governed society, and
that their pressure on subsistence characterizes
the lower, not the more advanced, stages of
civilization. He denied the universal truth, for
all stages of cultivation, of the law of
diminishing returns from land.

His fundamental theoretic position relates, to the
antithesis of wealth and value. Carey held that
land, as we are concerned with it in industrial
life, is really an instrument of production which
has been formed as such by man, and that its value
is due to the labour expended on it in the
past--though measured, not by the sum of that
labour, but by the labour necessary under existing
conditions to bring new land to the same stage of
productiveness. He studied the occupation and Land
reclamation|reclamation of land with peculiar
advantage as an American, for whom the traditions
of first settlement were living and fresh, and
before whose eyes the process was indeed still
going on. The difficulties of adapting a primitive
soil to the work of yielding organic products for
mans use can be lightly estimated only by an
inhabitant of a country long under cultivation.

It is, in Carey's view, the overcoming of these
difficulties by arduous and continued effort that
entitles the first occupier of land to his
property in the soil. Its present value forms a
very small proportion of the cost expended on it,
because it represents only what would be required,
with the science and appliances of our time, to
bring the land from its primitive into its present
state. Property in land is therefore only a form
of invested capital a quantity of labour or the
fruits of labour permanently incorporated with the
soil; for which, like any other capitalist, the
owner is compensated by a share of the produce. He
is not rewarded for what is done by the powers of
nature, and society is in no sense defrauded by
his sole possession.

The so-called David Ricardo|Ricardian theory of
rent is a speculative fancy, contradicted by all
experience. Cultivation does not in fact, as that
theory supposes, begin with the best, and move
downwards to the poorer soils in the order of
their inferiority. The light and dry higher lands
are first cultivated; and only when population has
become dense and capital has accumulated, are the
low-lying lands, with their greater fertility, but
also with their morasses, inundations, and
miasmas, attacked and brought into occupation.
Rent, regarded as a proportion of the produce,
sinks, like all interest on capital, in process of
time, but, as an absolute amount, increases. The
share of the labourer increases, both as a
proportion and an absolute amount. And thus the
interests of these different social classes are in
harmony. But, Carey proceeded to say, in order
that this harmonious progress may be realized,
what is taken from the land must be given back to
it. All the articles derived from it are really
separated parts of it, which must be restored on
pain of its exhaustion. Hence the producer and the
consumer must be close to each other; the products
must not be exported to a foreign country in
exchange for its manufactures, and thus go to
enrich as manure a foreign soil. In immediate
exchange value the landowner may gain by such
exportation, but the productive powers of the land
will suffer.

Carey, who had set out as an earnest advocate of
free trade, accordingly arrived at the doctrine of
protection: the coordinating power in society must
intervene to prevent private advantage from
working public mischief. He attributed his
conversion on this question to his observation of
the effects of liberal and protective tariffs
respectively on American prosperity. This
observation, he says, threw him back on theory,
and led him to see that the intervention referred
to might be necessary to remove (as he phrases it)
the obstacles to the progress of younger
communities created by the action of older and
wealthier nations. But it seems probable that the
influence of Friedrich List|List's writings, added
to his own deep-rooted and hereditary jealousy and
dislike of English predominance, had something to
do with his change of attitude.

==Reference==
*This entry incorporates public domain text
originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.