Wealth & Money Quote by William Graham Sumner

"One thing must be granted to the rich: they are goodnatured" lands like a compliment, then curdles into a diagnosis. Sumner’s setup borrows the courtroom tone of reluctant fairness - "must be granted" - as if he’s forcing himself to concede a point to an unpopular defendant. But the payoff, "goodnatured", is a slippery virtue: warm, unserious, almost cosmetic. It praises temperament rather than justice. You can be good-natured while a system you benefit from grinds people down.

The subtext is about how power laundered through charm becomes socially untouchable. The rich, Sumner implies, can afford graciousness because they’re buffered from consequences. Good humor is easier when scarcity isn’t snapping at your heels. In that sense, the line isn’t admiring; it’s forensic. It hints that pleasantness functions as a kind of soft propaganda, a social lubricant that makes inequality feel less like violence and more like the natural order supervised by decent people.

Context matters: Sumner wrote in a Gilded Age atmosphere where wealth was both newly spectacular and publicly contested. As a businessman, he’s not speaking from the barricades; he’s observing from inside the room, where respectability often substitutes for moral accounting. The sentence captures a familiar American bargain: we’ll forgive the concentration of money if its owners seem friendly at dinner. That’s why it still stings. It’s a warning about how easily charisma becomes a shield - and how eager we are to mistake manners for merit.