indly disposed and innately opposed to
duplicity and fraud, were compelled to adopt the methods of their more
successful but thoroughly unprincipled competitors. And, indeed,
realizing the impregnating nature of example and environment, one cannot
but conclude that the tragedies of the capitalist class represented so
many victims of the competitive system, the same as those among the
wageworkers, although in a very different way. Yet in this bewildering
jumble of fortune-snatching, an extraordinary circumstance failed to
impress itself upon the class which took over to itself the claim to
superior intelligence and virtue. The workers, for the most part,
instinctively, morally and intellectually, knew that this system was
wrong, a horror and a nightmare. But even the capitalist victims of the
competitive struggle, which awarded supremacy to the knave and the
trickster, went to their doom praising it as the only civilized,
rational system and as unchangeable and even divinely ordained.

THE PREVAILING CORRUPTION.

If corruption was flagrant in the early decades of the nineteenth
century, it was triply so in the middle decades. This was the period of
all periods when common councils all over the country were being bribed
to give franchises for various public utility systems, and legislatures
and Congress for charters, land, money, and laws for a great number of
railroad and other projects. The numerous specific instances cannot be
adverted to here; they will be described more appropriately in
subsequent parts of this work. For the present, let this general and
sweeping observation suffice.

The important point which here obtrudes itself is that in every case,
without an exception, the wealth amassed by fraud was used in turn to
put through more frauds, and that the net accumulation of these
successive frauds is seen in the great private fortunes of to-day. We
have seen how the original Astor fortune was largely derived by the use
of both force and fraud among the Indians, and by the exercise of
cunning and corruption in the East. John Jacob Astor's immense wealth
descends mostly to William B. Astor. In turn, one of the third
generation, John Jacob Astor, Jr., representing his father, William B.
Astor, uses a portion of this wealth in becoming a large stockholder in
the New York Central Railroad, and in corrupting the New York
Legislature still further to give enormously valuable grants and special
laws with incalculab