Success Quote by William Graham Sumner

There is a quiet dare in Sumner's phrasing: try to overthrow this if you want, but history has already placed it beyond your reach. By calling joint-stock companies "in their infancy", he isn’t minimizing them; he’s granting them a future. The line works as a prediction dressed up as a sober observation, the kind that makes resistance look not just futile but quaint. "Incorporated capital" becomes less a political choice than a technical necessity, like railroads or electricity: something a modern society simply has to plug into.

The subtext is a rebuttal to late-19th-century anxiety about trusts, labor militancy, and populist demands to rein in corporate power. Sumner frames the corporation as an institution that has moved from optional to indispensable, shifting the argument away from morality (Is it fair?) to functionality (Can you run a nation without it?). That rhetorical move is strategic: if corporate capital is indispensable, then regulation starts to look like tampering with the engine of progress, and anti-corporate politics can be dismissed as romantic sabotage.

Context matters here. This is the Gilded Age, when incorporation, limited liability, and pooled investment were rapidly scaling industry and finance. Sumner, often associated with a hard-edged laissez-faire worldview, is effectively naturalizing corporate growth as the logical endpoint of modernization. The sentence’s calm inevitability is the point: it offers elites reassurance and offers critics a warning - the corporation is not a monster to slay, but the infrastructure of the new economy.