ous factor.

It was on one of his visits to London, so the recital goes, that he
first became possessed of the idea of founding an extraordinarily rich
landed family. He admired, it is told, the great landed estates of the
British nobility, and observed the prejudice against the caste of the
trader and the corresponding exalted position of the landowner. Whether
this story is true or not, it is evident that he was impressed with the
increasing power and the stability of a fortune founded upon land, and
how it radiated a certain splendid prestige. The very definition of the
word landlord--lord of the soil--signified the awe-compelling and
authoritative position of him who owned land--a definition heightened
and enforced in a thousand ways by the laws.

The speculative and solid possibilities of New York City real estate
held out dazzling opportunities gratifying his acquisitiveness for
wealth and power--the wealth that fed his avarice, and the power flowing
from the dominion of riches.

ASTOR NOT AN EXCEPTION.

It may here be observed that Astor's methods in trade or in acquiring of
land need not be indiscriminately condemned as an exclusive mania. Nor
should they be held up to the curiosity of posterity as a singular and
pernicious exhibition, detached from his time and generation, and
independent of them. Again and again the facts disclose that men such as
he were merely the representative crests of prevailing commercial and
political life. Substantially the whole propertied class obtained its
wealth by methods which, if not the same, had a strong relationship. His
methods differed nowise from those of many cotton planters of the South
who stole, on a monstrous scale,[91] Government land and then with the
wealth derived from their thefts, bought negro slaves, set themselves up
in the glamour of a patriarchal aristocracy and paraded a florid display
of chivalry and honor. And it was this same grandiose class that
plundered Whitney of the fruits of his invention of the cotton-gin and
shamelessly defrauded him.[92]

Far more flagrant, however, were the means by which other Southern
plantation owners and business firms secured landed estates in Alabama,
Georgia and in other States. Their methods in expropriating the
reservations of such Indian tribes as the Creeks and Chickasaws were not
less fraudulent than those that Astor used elsewhere. They too, those
fine Southern aristocrats, debauched Indian tribes with whis