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 amiable theories of
the Jacksonian Democrat that the two must substantially coincide.
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