, and
it was in such times that he stepped in and possessed himself, at
comparatively small expense, of large additional tracts of land.

It was this way that he became the owner of what was then the Cosine
farm, extending on Broadway from Fifty-third to Fifty-seventh streets
and westward to the Hudson River. This property, which he got for
$23,000 by foreclosing a mortgage, is now in the very heart of the city,
filled with many business, and every variety of residential, buildings,
and is rated as worth $6,000,000. By much the same means he acquired
ownership of the Eden farm in the same vicinity, coursing along Broadway
north from Forty-second street and slanting over to the Hudson River.
This farm lay under pledges for debt and attachments for loans. Suddenly
Astor turned up with a third interest in an outstanding mortgage,
foreclosed, and for a total payment of $25,000 obtained a sweep of
property now covered densely with huge hotels, theaters, office
buildings, stores and long vistas of residences and tenements--a
property worth at the very least $25,000,000. Any one with sufficient
security in land who sought to borrow money would find Astor extremely
accommodating. But woe betide the hapless borrower, whoever he was, if
he failed in his obligations to the extent of even a fraction of the
requirements covered by law! Neither personal friendship, religious
considerations nor the slightest feelings of sympathy availed.

But where law was insufficient or non-existent, new laws were created
either to aggrandize the powers of landlordship, or to seize hold of
land or enchance its value, or to get extraordinary special privileges
in the form of banking charters. And here it is necessary to digress
from the narrative of Astor's land transactions and advert to his
banking activities, for it was by reason of these subordinately, as well
as by his greater trade revenues, that he was enabled so successfully to
pursue his career of wealth-gathering. The circumstances as to the
origin of certain powerful banks in which he and other landholders and
traders were large stockholders, the methods and powers of those banks,
and their effect upon the great body of the people, are component parts
of the analytic account of his operations. Not a single one of Astor's
biographers has mentioned his banking connections. Yet it is of the
greatest importance to describe them, inasmuch as they were closely
intertwined with his trade, on the