Faith & Spirit Quote by William Graham Sumner

Sumner’s “forgotten man” isn’t forgotten at all; he’s actively remembered when the bill comes due. The line snaps into place with a bleak rhythm: “He works, he votes, generally he prays” gives you the full civic portrait - labor, democracy, respectable morality - then yanks it into its real punchline: “his chief business in life is to pay.” It’s a compact act of rhetorical demotion, reducing citizenship to a revenue stream.

The intent is polemical. Sumner, a leading voice of Gilded Age laissez-faire thinking, is aiming at reformers and politicians who, in his view, build moral crusades and social programs by quietly conscripting the ordinary taxpayer. The “forgotten man” is the person invoked least in speeches and counted most in budgets. Subtext: public compassion often feels costless only because it offloads costs onto someone with little prestige and limited leverage. He’s not the poor beneficiary of charity, nor the elite architect of policy, but the dependable middle whose compliance is assumed.

Calling him “forgotten” also smuggles in a moral claim: that paying, not receiving, is the true mark of social contribution. The prayer clause matters here - Sumner is not praising religiosity so much as underscoring conformity. Even the citizen who follows the rules gets treated as a fiscal instrument.

The cultural context is the late 19th-century argument over welfare, patronage, and redistribution, when industrial wealth ballooned and the state’s role was being renegotiated. Sumner weaponizes empathy for the overlooked taxpayer to make a case against do-good governance: if politics is a machine, its cleanest fuel is the dutiful person who doesn’t complain.