THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE
Astor flourished at that precise time when the traders and landowners, flushed with revenues, reached out for the creation and control of the highly important business of professionally dealing in money, and of dictating, personally and directly, what the supply of the people's money should be.
This signalized the next step in the aggrandizement of individual fortunes. The few who could center in themselves, by grace of Government, the banking and manipulation of the people's money and the restricting or inflating of money issues, were immediately vested with an extraordinary power. It was a sovereign power at once coercive and proscriptive, and a mighty instrument for transferring the produce of the many to a small and exclusive coterie. Not merely over the labor of the whole working class did this gripping process extend, but it was severely felt by that large part of the landowning and trading class which was excluded from holding the same privileges. The banker became the master of the master. In that fierce, pervading competitive strife, the banks were the final exploiters. Sparsely organized and wholly unprotected, the worker was in the complete power of the trader, manufacturer and landowner; in turn, such of these divisions of the propertied class as were not themselves sharers in the ownership of banks were at the mercy of the banking institutions.
At any time upon some pretext or other, the banks could arbitrarily refuse the latter class credit or accommodation, or harass its victims in other ways equally as destructive. As business was largely done in expectations of payment, in other words, credit, as it is now, this was a