ra, who set
themselves up as paramount in breeding, manners, taste and fashions--all
of these were either parties to this continuous process of fraud or
benefited by it. The same is true of this class to-day; for the frauds
in taxation are of greater magnitude than ever before. It was not
astonishing, therefore, when John Jacob Astor II died in 1890, and
William Astor in 1892, that enconiums should be lavished upon their
careers. In all the accounts that appeared of them, not a word was there
of the real facts; of the corrupt grasping of city land; of the
debauching of legislatures and the manipulation of railroads; of their
blocks of tenements in which disease and death had reaped so rich a
harvest, or of their gigantic frauds in cheating the city of taxes. Not
a word of all of these.

Without an exception the various biographies were fulsomely laudatory.
This excessive praise might have defeated the purpose of the authors
were it not that it was the fashion of the times to depict and accept
the multimillionaires as marvels of ability, almost superhuman. This was
the stuff fed out to the people; it was not to be wondered at that a
period came when the popular mind reacted and sought the opposite
extreme in which it laved in the most violent denunciations of the very
men whom it had long been taught to revere. That period, too, passed to
be succeeded by another in which a more correct judgment will be formed
of the magnates, and in which they will appear not as exceptional
criminals, but as products of their times and environment, and in their
true relation to both of these factors.

The fortune left by John Jacob Astor II in 1890 amounted to about
$150,000,000. The bulk of this descended to his son William Waldorf
Astor. The $75,000,000 fortune left by William Astor in 1892 was
bequeathed to his son John Jacob Astor. These cousins to-day hold the
greatest part of the collective Astor fortune.

Having reached the present generation, we shall not attempt to enter
into a detailed narrative of their multifarious interests, embracing
land, railroads, industries, insurance and a vast variety of other forms
of wealth. The purpose of this work is to point out the circumstances
underlying the origin and growth of the great private fortunes; in the
case of the Astors this has been done sufficiently, perhaps overdone,
although many facts have been intentionally left out of these chapters
which might very properly have been inc