Justice & Law Quote by Leland Stanford

A railroad baron talking like a marriage counselor is never just a rhetorical flourish; it's a strategy. Stanford frames wealth as something jointly "produced" by labor and capital through "agreement", a word that smuggles in harmony, voluntarism, and shared agency. In Gilded Age America, where strikes, pinkertons, and brutal hours were the real soundtrack of industrial expansion, that choice of language recasts conflict as a misunderstanding between partners rather than a clash between unequal powers.

The sentence turns on a quiet bait-and-switch: if wealth is co-created, then its distribution must mirror that cooperative origin, "or great injustice will be done". That sounds like a moral warning aimed upward, but it also functions as a constraint aimed outward. By making "the law of its creation" the governing principle, Stanford implies that whatever distribution results from the existing arrangement is the natural, lawful outcome of the original bargain. The word "therefore" does heavy lifting: it converts a contested political question (who gets what?) into an almost technical consequence of how the system is set up.

As a businessman, Stanford is also laundering the asymmetry of "agreement". Labor often agrees under necessity; capital negotiates with options. Calling the relationship employer/employed rather than owner/worker softens the hierarchy and makes wage labor sound like a partnership contract between equals. The subtext is reassurance: don't upend the order with radical redistribution or labor militancy; honor the "agreement" and justice will take care of itself. It is a moral vocabulary built to stabilize an economic regime that was, in practice, anything but mutually agreed upon.