Politics & Power Quote by James J. Hill

Hill’s sentence reads like a moral balancing act, but it’s really a piece of class politics disguised as civic hygiene. He sets up an apparent symmetry - “predatory poor” and “predatory rich” - to sound evenhanded, almost antiseptically pragmatic. The trick is in the pivot: “but above all from the predatory politician.” That “above all” is doing the heavy lifting, shifting the audience’s anger away from capital and toward the state. It’s the businessman’s ideal villain: the officeholder who can tax, regulate, and redistribute.

Context matters. Hill, a railroad magnate, built an empire in an era when “credit” wasn’t just a financial term; it was the nervous system of national expansion, speculation, and periodic panic. Populists were attacking monopolies and demanding reforms that threatened the latitude of men like Hill. Organized labor was growing. Antitrust was in the air. In that atmosphere, calling politicians “predatory” recasts democratic pressure as theft: not citizens negotiating power, but parasites feeding on “capital” and “credit,” the sacred foundations of growth.

The subtext is a warning: the biggest risk to prosperity isn’t private extraction; it’s public interference. Hill concedes that rich predators exist, but he implies they’re manageable, even natural, compared to political predators who can legitimate taking through law. It’s a shrewd rhetorical move: defend wealth by framing the state as the ultimate con artist, and you make private wealth seem like the last honest thing left.