luded. But there are a few
remaining facts without which the story would not be complete, and
lacking which it might lose some significance.

THE ASTOR FORTUNE DOUBLES.

[Illustration: WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR.
Now a British Subject, Self-Expatriated. He Derives
an Enormous Income from His American Estate.]

We have seen how at William B. Astor's death in 1876 the Astor fortune
amounted to at least $100,000,000, probably much more. Within sixteen
years, by 1892, it had more than doubled in the hands of his two sons.
How was it possible to have added the extraordinary sum of $125,000,000
in less than a decade and a half? Individual ability did not
accomplish it; it is ludicrous to say that it could have done so. The
methods by which much of this increase was gathered in have already been
set forth. A large part came from the rise in the value of land, which
value arose not from the slightest act of the Astors, but from the
growth of the population and the labor of the whole body of workers.
This value was created by the producers, but far from owning or even
sharing in it, they were compelled to pay heavier and heavier tribute in
the form of rent for the very values which they had created. Had the
Astors or other landlords gone into a perpetual trance these values
would have been created just the same. Then, not content with
appropriating values which others created, the landlord class defrauded
the city of even the fractional part of these values, in the form of
taxation.

Up to the present generation the Astors had never set themselves out as
"reformers" in politics. They had plundered right and left, but withal
had made no great pretenses. The fortune held by the Astors, so the
facts indubitably show, represents a succession of piracies and
exploitation. Very curious, therefore, it is to note that the Astors of
the present generation have avowed themselves most solicitous reformers
and have been members of pretentious, self-constituted committees
composed of the "best citizens," the object of which has been to purge
New York City of Tammany corruption. Leaving aside the Astors, and
considering the attitude of the propertied class as a whole, this posing
of the so-called better element as reformers has been, and is, one of
the most singular characteristics of American politics, and its most
colossal sham. Although continuously, with rare intermissions, the
landholders and the railroad and industrial magnates have b