Success Quote by William Graham Sumner

Sumner opens with a stage prop: a "newspaper slip", clipped evidence of a rising heresy. The detail matters. He’s not debating an economist in a journal; he’s swatting at a mass-circulated idea, the kind that travels quickly, sounds righteous in a paragraph, and can be mistaken for policy. The slip is shorthand for what he fears most: politics driven by moral excitement rather than hard constraints.

The phrasing "a writer expresses the opinion" is a quiet demotion. This isn’t expertise; it’s mere opinion with a printing press. Then comes the line’s real trigger: "no one should be allowed". The coercive verb is the point. Sumner’s intent isn’t to defend millionaires out of personal affection; it’s to frame wealth caps as an authorization of force against lawful possession. He wants the reader to feel the chill of that passive construction, as if "no one" just naturally "is allowed" - by whom, exactly? The state, newly empowered to decide when enough is enough.

Context tightens the subtext. Sumner was writing in the Gilded Age’s long argument over inequality, labor unrest, and the legitimacy of big fortunes. Reformers were flirting with confiscatory impulses; industrialists were insisting property was the firewall protecting liberty from envy dressed as justice. By anchoring the dispute in a round number - one million - he also exposes the arbitrariness: why that figure, and why should a moral intuition become a legal ceiling? The quote works because it doesn’t need to say "slippery slope". It lets the reader supply it.