Success Quote by William Graham Sumner

Sumner’s sentence does a neat rhetorical dodge: it nods at “fraud, swindling, and other financial crimes” only to widen the frame until the crimes almost disappear into the background noise of human nature. The real target isn’t a particular scam or even a particular industry; it’s the public’s periodic surprise that markets produce villains. By calling greed “perpetual,” he turns outrage into naivete and regulation into a kind of sentimental theater.

That move matters in context. Sumner wrote in the late 19th century, when American capitalism was rapidly scaling up, and “financial crimes” were becoming both more visible and more structurally enabled by new corporate forms and speculative markets. His phrasing suggests an intent to reclassify these scandals as inevitable rather than diagnostic. If wrongdoing is simply the eternal fuel of commerce, then the system itself stays morally unindicted; only individual character fails, on a schedule as predictable as interest payments.

The subtext is almost prosecutorial toward reformers: don’t mistake recurring misconduct for a solvable policy problem. He grants the existence of fraud, but refuses it the status of a crisis. “Undoubtedly” functions like a preemptive concession, the kind that neutralizes critics before they speak, while “that is to say” snaps the lens from event to essence. Sumner isn’t just describing greed; he’s trying to domesticate it, to make the audience accept that the marketplace will always have sharks - and that anyone promising otherwise is selling something too.