So the arch multimillionaire passed away, the wonder and the emulation of the age. His friends, of whom he had a few, deeply mourned him, and his bereaved family suffered a deep loss, for, it is related, he was a kind and indulgent husband and father. He left a legacy of $400,000 for the establishment of the Astor Library; for this and this alone his memory has been preserved as that of a philanthropist. The announcement of this legacy was hailed with extravagant joy; yet such is the value of meretricious glory and the ideals of present society, that none has remarked that the proceeds of one year's pillage of the Indians were more than sufficient to found this much-praised benevolence. Thus does society blind itself to the origin of the fortunes, a fraction of which goes to gratify it with gifts. The whole is taken from the collective labor of the people, and then a part is returned in the form of institutional presents which are in reality bits of charity bestowed upon the very people from whose exploitation the money has come. Astor, no doubt, thought that, in providing for a public library, he was doing a service to mankind; and he must be judged, not according to the precepts and demands of the scarcely heard working class of his day with its altruistic aspirations, nor of more advanced present ideas, but by the standards of his own class, that commercial aristocracy which arrogated to itself superiority of aims and infallibility of methods.
He died the richest man of his day. But vast fortunes could not be heaped up by him and his contemporaries without having their corresponding effect upon the mass of the people. What was this effect? At about the time that he died there was in New York City one pauper to every one hundred and twenty-five inhabitants and one person in every eighty-three of the population had to be supported at the public expense.9