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.