"After we have calmly stood by and allowed monopolies to grow fat, we should not be asked to make them bloated"
About this Quote
There is a quiet sting in Carlisle's phrasing: the country has already committed the sin, so don't pretend the next step is merely administrative. "Calmly stood by" is the knife twist. It indicts not just robber-baron capital but the public mood that enabled it - complacency disguised as prudence. By the time monopolies are "fat", the real battle has been lost in committee rooms, courts, and laissez-faire habits. Carlisle isn't offering a heroic trust-busting pose; he's diagnosing a failure of will.
The line works because it turns economic policy into bodily consequence. "Grow fat" suggests indulgence and moral slackness; "bloated" evokes sickness, grotesque excess, something past the point of strength and into deformity. That metaphor does political work: it frames monopoly not as efficient scale but as an unhealthy organism fed by state inaction. He also slips in a shrewd rhetorical trap. If lawmakers have tolerated monopoly, they lose the credibility to justify later actions that further entrench it - subsidies, protective tariffs, sweetheart regulations. The passive voice of civic guilt ("we have...allowed") becomes an argument for a more active posture now.
Carlisle, a late-19th-century Democratic statesman shaped by tariff fights and the emerging trust era, is speaking from inside a system that often treated concentrated capital as an unfortunate byproduct of progress. His warning is less "break them up" than "don't complete the corruption". It's a demand that government stop confusing inevitability with innocence - and stop feeding the monster it helped raise.
The line works because it turns economic policy into bodily consequence. "Grow fat" suggests indulgence and moral slackness; "bloated" evokes sickness, grotesque excess, something past the point of strength and into deformity. That metaphor does political work: it frames monopoly not as efficient scale but as an unhealthy organism fed by state inaction. He also slips in a shrewd rhetorical trap. If lawmakers have tolerated monopoly, they lose the credibility to justify later actions that further entrench it - subsidies, protective tariffs, sweetheart regulations. The passive voice of civic guilt ("we have...allowed") becomes an argument for a more active posture now.
Carlisle, a late-19th-century Democratic statesman shaped by tariff fights and the emerging trust era, is speaking from inside a system that often treated concentrated capital as an unfortunate byproduct of progress. His warning is less "break them up" than "don't complete the corruption". It's a demand that government stop confusing inevitability with innocence - and stop feeding the monster it helped raise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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