the inevitable result of American business methods and
political ideas and institutions, they constitute a serious problem for
a democracy to face; and this problem has many different aspects. Its
most serious aspect is constituted by the sheer size of the resulting
inequalities. The rich men and the big corporations have become too
wealthy and powerful for their official standing in American life. They
have not obeyed the laws. They have attempted to control the official
makers, administrators, and expounders of the law. They have done little
to allay and much to excite the resentment and suspicion. In short,
while their work has been constructive from an economic and industrial
standpoint, it has made for political corruption and social
disintegration. Children, as they are, of the traditional American
individualistic institutions, ideas, and practices, they have turned on
their parents and dealt them an ugly wound. Either these economic
monsters will destroy the system of ideas, institutions, and practices
out of which they have issued or else be destroyed by them.

III

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL SPECIALIST

The corporations were able to secure and to exercise an excessive and
corrupt influence on legislation, because their aggrandizement coincided
with a process of deterioration in our local political institutions. We
have seen that the stress of economic competition had specialized the
American business man and made him almost exclusively preoccupied with
the advancement of his own private interests; and one of the first
results of this specialization was an alteration in his attitude towards
the political welfare of his country. Not only did he no longer give as
much time to politics as he formerly did, but as his business increased
in size and scope, he found his own interests by way of conflicting at
many points with the laws of his country and with its well-being. He did
not take this conflict very seriously. He was still reflected in the
mirror of his own mind as a patriotic and a public-spirited citizen; but
at the same time his ambition was to conquer, and he did not scruple to
sacrifice both the law and the public weal to his own prosperity. All
unknowingly he began to testify to a growing and a decisive division
between the two primary interests of American life,--between the
interest of the individual business man and the interest of the body
politic; and he became a living refutation of the am