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The latter went to Albany and bribed the legislature. In short, politics, monopoly, and bribery constitute the key to banking in the early history of the state." The intervention of the courts which made the conditions above described possible, while ostensibly limiting the power of the state legislature, in reality enlarged and extended it in the interest of the capital-owning class.
These decisions have been almost uniformly advantageous to the capital-owning class in preserving property rights and corporate privileges which the unhindered progress of democracy would have abridged or abolished. But we need not confine our attention to these comparatively few instances in which laws have actually been declared null and void.
The tools of production were simple and inexpensive and their ownership widely diffused. There was no capital-owning class in the modern sense. Business was carried on upon a small scale. The individual was his own employer, or, if working for another, could look forward to the time when, by the exercise of ordinary ability and thrift, he might become an independent producer.
Another advantage which these provisions seemed likely to secure to the capital-owning class deserves at least a passing mention.
For them individual initiative in the sense of an effective control over the industrial process has disappeared almost as completely as it has in the case of the mere wage-earner. Individual initiative even for the capital-owning class has thus largely disappeared.
The right of individual initiative in the sense of the right to exercise a real control over production was lost by the masses when the substitution of machinery for tools made them directly dependent upon a class of capital-owning employers. The subsequent growth of large scale production has centralized the actual control of industry in the hands of a small class of large capitalists.
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