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 been either corrupting public officials or availing themselves of the benefits of corrupt politics, many of them, not in New York alone, but in every American city, have been, at the same time, metamorphosing themselves into reformers. Not reformers, of course, in the true, high sense of the word, but as ingenious