Here we see again at work that fertile agency which has assisted in impoverishing the masses. Rentals are exacted from them, which represent on the average the fourth part of their wages. These rentals are based upon the full assessment of the houses that they live in. In turn, the landlords defraud the city of one-half of this assessment. In order to make up for this continuous deprivation of taxes, the city proceeds time and time again to increase taxes and put out interest-bearing bond issues. These increased taxes, as in the case of all other taxes, fall upon the workers and the results are seen in constantly rising rents and in higher prices for all necessities.
LICENSED PIRACY RAMPANT.
Was any criminal action ever instituted against these rich defrauders? None of which there is any record.
Not a publicist, editor, preacher was there who did not know either generally or specifically of these great frauds in taxation. Some of them might protest in a half-hearted, insincere or meaningless way. But the propertied classes did not mind wordy criticism so long as it was not backed by political action. In other words, they could afford to tolerate, even be amused by, gusty denunciation if neither the laws were changed, nor the particular enforcement or non-enforcement which they demanded. The essential thing with them was to continue conditions by which they could keep on defrauding.
Virtually all that was considered best in society—the men and women who lived in the finest mansions, who patronized art and the opera, who set themselves up as paramount in breeding, manners, taste and fashions—all of these were either parties to this continuous process of fraud or benefited by it. The same is true of this class to-day; for the frauds in taxation are of greater magnitude than ever before. It was not astonishing, therefore, when John Jacob Astor II died in 1890, and William Astor in 1892, that enconiums should be lavished upon their careers. In all the accounts that appeared of them, not a word was there of the real facts; of the corrupt grasping of city land; of the debauching of legislatures and the manipulation of railroads; of their blocks of tenements in which disease and death had reaped so rich a harvest, or of their gigantic frauds in cheating the city of taxes. Not a word of all of these.
Without an exception the various biographies were fulsomely laudatory. This excessive praise might have defeated the purpose of the authors were it not that it was the fashion of the times to depict and accept the multimillionaires as marvels of ability, almost superhuman. This was the stuff fed out to the people; it was not to be wondered at that a period came when the popular mind reacted and sought the opposite extreme in which it laved in the most violent denunciations of the very men whom it had long been taught to revere. That period, too, passed to be succeeded by another in which a more correct judgment will be formed of the magnates, and in which they will appear not as exceptional criminals, but as products of their times and environment, and in their true relation to both of these factors.
The fortune left by John Jacob Astor II in 1890 amounted to about $150,000,000. The bulk of this descended to his son William Waldorf Astor. The $75,000,000 fortune left by William Astor in 1892 was bequeathed to his son John Jacob Astor. These cousins to-day hold the greatest part of the collective Astor fortune.
Having reached the present generation, we shall not attempt to enter into a detailed narrative of their multifarious interests, embracing land, railroads, industries, insurance and a vast variety of other forms of wealth. The purpose of this work is to point out the circumstances underlying the origin and growth of the great private fortunes; in the case of the Astors this has been done sufficiently, perhaps overdone, although many facts have been intentionally left out of these chapters which might very properly have been included. But there are a few remaining facts without which the story would not be complete, and lacking which it might lose some significance.
THE ASTOR FORTUNE DOUBLES.
