ery large family, he gave sixty thousand dollars. He gave to each
of the captains then in his employ who had made two voyages in his
service, and who should bring his ship safely into port, fifteen hundred
dollars. To each of his apprentices he gave five hundred dollars. To his
old servants he gave annuities, ranging from three to five hundred
dollars each.

He gave thirty thousand dollars to the Pennsylvania Hospital, in which
his wife had been cared for; twenty thousand to the Deaf and Dumb
Asylum; ten thousand to the Orphan Asylum; ten thousand to the Lancaster
schools; ten thousand for the purpose of providing the poor in
Philadelphia with free fuel; ten thousand to the Society for the Relief
of Distressed Sea-Captains and their Families; twenty thousand to the
Masonic Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, for the relief of poor members; six
thousand for the establishment of a free school in Passyunk, near
Philadelphia; five hundred thousand dollars to the Corporation of
Philadelphia for certain improvements in the city; three hundred
thousand to the State of Pennsylvania for her canals; and a portion of
his valuable estates in Louisiana to the Corporation of New Orleans, for
the improvement of that city.

The remainder of his property, worth then about six millions of dollars,
he left to trustees for the erection and endowment of the noble College
for Orphans, in Philadelphia, which bears his name.

Thus it will be seen that this man, who seemed steeled to resist appeals
for private charity in life, in death devoted all the results of his
unusual genius in his calling to the noblest of purposes, and to
enterprises of the most benignant character, which will gratefully hand
his name down to the remotest ages of posterity.

CHAPTER II.

JOHN JACOB ASTOR.

Those who imagine that the mercantile profession is incapable of
developing the element of greatness in the mind of man, find a perfect
refutation in the career of the subject of this memoir, who won his
immense fortune by the same traits which would have raised him to
eminence as a statesman. It may be thought by some that he has no claim
to a place in the list of famous Americans, since he was not only German
by birth, but German in character to his latest day; but it must be
borne in mind that America was the theater of his exploits, and that he
owed the greater part of his success to the wise and beneficent
institutions of the "New Land," as he termed it.