Justice & Law Quote by William Graham Sumner

Sumner is doing a neat rhetorical judo move: he concedes the obvious - crime evolves, so law should evolve - then pivots to protect the machinery of finance from moral panic. The sentence is built like a lockbox. First, acknowledge reform ("needs to be improved"), then draw a bright line between tools and misuse ("useful and legitimate" devices versus "use... for fraud"), then shame the critics as childish ("ridiculous") and, worse, backward ("unworthy of the age").

The specific intent is defensive, but not merely self-interested. Sumner is trying to discipline the public conversation: stop treating financial innovation as a suspect category just because it can be weaponized. It's a preemptive strike against the familiar cycle where scandal triggers broad condemnation of the instrument rather than the actor. In modern terms, he's arguing against banning the equivalent of credit, derivatives, or complex corporate structures because scammers exploit them.

The subtext carries a Gilded Age confidence in progress and expertise. "Financial devices" aren’t described as abstractions; they’re presented as productive technologies, part of modernity itself. That makes critics not just wrong but antiquated, people dragging the future into court. It's also a quiet defense of capitalism's right to experiment: regulate the criminal, not the contraption.

Context matters: late-19th-century America was rife with new corporate forms, speculative markets, and periodic panics. Sumner, a leading voice for laissez-faire and suspicion of reform crusades, is speaking into a moment when "fraud" could become a catch-all indictment of the entire system. His line warns that a society can modernize its laws while still succumbing to an older impulse: to treat complexity as corruption.