"John Jacob Astor," says Barrett in a view of admiration, "at one period of his life had several vessels operating in this way. They would go to the Pacific and carry furs from thence to Canton. These would be sold at large profits. Then the cargoes of tea would pay enormous duties which Astor did not have to pay to the United States for a year and a half. His tea cargoes would be sold for good four and six months paper, or perhaps cash; so that for eighteen or twenty years John Jacob Astor had what was actually a free-of-interest loan from the Government of over five millions of dollars."11
"One house," continues Barrett, "was Thomas H. Smith & Sons. This firm went enormously into the Canton trade, and, although possessing originally but a few thousand dollars, Smith imported to such an extent that when he failed he owed the United States three millions and not a cent has ever been paid." Was Smith imprisoned for debt? Not at all.
It is such revelations as these that indicate how it was possible for the shippers to pile up great fortunes at a time when "a house that could raise $260,000 in specie had an uncommon capital." They showed how the same functions of government which were used as an engine of such oppressive power against the poor, were perverted into highly efficient auxiliary of trading class aims and ambitions. By multifarious subtle workings, these class laws inevitably had a double effect. They poured wealth into the coffers of the merchant-class and simultaneously tended to drive the masses into poverty. The gigantic profits taken in by merchants had to be borne by the worker, perhaps not superficially, but in reality so. They came from his slender wages, from the tea and cotton and woolen goods that he used, the sugar and the coffee and so on. In this indirect way the shippers absorbed a great part of the products of his labor; what they did not expropriate the landlord did. Then when the laborer fell in debt to the middleman tradesman to jail he went.12