buy land; they get more land by fraud; the Law
throws its shield about the property so obtained. They cheat the city
out of enormous sums in taxation; the Law does not molest them. On the
contrary it allows them to build palaces and to keep on absorbing up
more forms of property. In 1875 William Astor builds a railroad in
Florida; and as a gift of appreciation, so it is told, the Florida
Legislature presents him with 80,000 acres of land. It is wholly
probable, if the underlying circumstances were known, that it would be
found that an influence more material than a simple burst of gratitude
prompted this gift. Where did the money come from with which this
railroad was built? And what was the source of other immense funds which
were invested in railroads, banks, industrial enterprises, in buying
more land and in mortgages--in many forms of ownership?

The unsophisticated acceptor of current sophistries or the apologist
might reply that all this money came from legitimate business
transactions, the natural increase in the value of land, and thus on.
But waiving these superficial explanations and defenses, which really
mean nothing more than a forced justification, it is plain that the true
sources of these revenues were of a vastly different nature. The
millions in rents which flowed in to the Astor's treasury every year
came literally from the sweat, labor, misery and murder of a host of
men, women, and children who were never chronicled, and who went to
their death in eternal obscurity.

THE BASIS OF WEALTH'S STRUCTURE.

It was they who finally had to bear the cost of exorbitant rents; it was
their work, the products which they created, which were the bases of
the whole structure. And in speaking of murder, it is not deliberate,
premeditated murder which is meant, in the sense covered by statute, but
that much more insidious kind ensuing from grinding exploitation; in
herding human beings into habitations unfit even for animals which need
air and sunshine, and then in stubbornly resisting any attempt to
improve living conditions in these houses. In this respect, it cannot be
too strongly pointed out, the Astors were in nowise different from the
general run of landlords. Is it not murder when, compelled by want,
people are forced to fester in squalid, germ-filled tenements, where the
sunlight never enters and where disease finds a prolific breeding-place?
Untold thousands went to their deaths in these unspeakable pl