Wealth & Money Quote by William Kirby

“Enormously daunting” is the kind of sober understatement that signals a scientist stepping into political economy with his eyes open. Kirby isn’t selling a revolution; he’s warning you where the real resistance lives. By pairing “state industry” with “most directly related… the banking sector,” he points to a structural truth: you can’t modernize production while leaving finance untouched, because banking is the circulatory system that decides what gets oxygen and what withers. The line reads like a diagnostic, not a manifesto.

The intent is pragmatic triage. “Reform” sounds technocratic, even polite, but the subtext is that reform is a fight with entrenched incentives: state enterprises that function as employment engines, patronage networks, and symbols of sovereignty; banks that allocate credit in ways that keep those enterprises alive. The phrase “most directly related” quietly narrows the target from a sprawling industrial apparatus to the lever that can actually move it. He’s implying that industrial reform without banking reform is theater.

Context matters: Kirby’s lifetime spans the Industrial Revolution, the rise of joint-stock finance, recurrent banking panics, and the expanding administrative state. A scientist in that era would be attuned to systems, feedback loops, and unintended consequences. That sensibility shapes the rhetoric here. No moral grandstanding, no romantic faith in markets - just a clear-eyed recognition that once the state is both owner and creditor, changing “industry” means rewiring power. The daunting part isn’t the policy design; it’s the collision with the machine that benefits from the status quo.