Yes, Russell did use that expression.
Controlling capital of hundreds of millions of dollars, these combinations or trusts are indeed giants; and if matters continue for a few years, as they have during the past twenty, they will soon control the world with the financial lever. Soon they will have the power, not only to dictate the prices of the goods consumed by the world, but, being the chief employers of labor, they will have the control of wages.
True, these combinations of capital have in the past accomplished great enterprises which single individuals could not have accomplished so quickly or so well. Indeed, private corporative enterprise has taken and successfully carried risks which the public would have condemned and defeated if undertaken by the government. We are not to be understood as holding up vast accumulations of capital to wholesale condemnation; but we are pointing out that every year’s experience not only adds largely to their financial power, but also to their sagacity, and that we are rapidly nearing the point where the people’s interests and very liberties are threatened, if indeed we are not already there. Everybody says, Something must be done! but what to do nobody knows. The fact is, mankind is helplessly at the mercy of these giant outgrowths of the present selfish social system, and the only hope is in God.
True, also, these giants are usually headed by men of ability who thus far generally seem disposed to use their power in moderation. Nevertheless, the power is being concentrated; and the ability, guided in the main by selfishness, will be likely from time to time to tighten the screws upon their servants and the public as opportunities permit and circumstances favor.
These giants threaten the human family now as literal giants threatened it over four thousand years ago. Those giants were “men of renown”—men of wonderful ability and sagacity, above the fallen Adamic race; they were a hybrid race, the result of a new vitality united to the Adamic stock.* So with these modern corporate giants: they are great, powerful and cunning, to an extent which discourages the thought of their being conquered without divine interference. Their marvelous powers have never yet been fully called into service. These giants, too, are hybrid: they are begotten by a wisdom that owes its existence to Christian civilization and enlightenment acting in combination with the selfish hearts of fallen men. But man’s necessity and God’s opportunity are simultaneously drawing near; and as the giants of “the world that was before the flood” were swept away in the flood of waters, so these corporative giants are to be swept away in the coming flood of fire—the symbolic “fire of God’s jealousy” or indignation, already kindling; “a time of trouble such as was not since there was a nation.” In that “fire” will be consumed all the giants of vice and selfishness; they will fall, and will never rise again. Isa. 26:13,14; Zeph. 3:8,9 (pp. 368-370)
