ization with which the dominant commercial classes looked down
upon the writer, the painter, the musician, the philosopher or the
sculptor. Regarding these "sentimentalists" as easy, legitimate and
defenseless objects of prey, and as incidental and impractical
hangers-on in a world where trade was all in all, the commercial classes
at all times affected a certain air of encouragement of the fine arts,
which encouragement, however, never attempted to put a stop to piracies
of publication or reproduction. How sordidly commercial that era was, to
what extremes its standards went, and how some of the basest forms of
theft were carried on and practically legalized, may be seen by the fate
of Peter Cardelli's petition to Congress. Cardelli was a Roman sculptor,
residing in the United States for a time. He prays Congress in 1820 to
pass an act protecting him from commercial pirates who make casts and
copies of his work and who profit at his expense. The Senate Committee
on Judiciary, to whom the petition is referred, rejects the plea. On
what ground? Because he "has not discovered any new invention on which
he can claim the right."[100] Could stupidity go further?

All of the confluent facts of the time show conclusively that every
stratum of commercial society was permeated with fraud, and that this
fraud was accepted generally as a routine fixture of the business of
gathering property or profits. Astor, therefore, was not an isolated
phenomenon, but a typically successful representative of his time and
of the methods and standards of the trading class of that time.

Whatever in the line of business yielded profits, that act, whether
cheating, robbing or slaughtering, was justified by some sophistry or
other. Astor did not debauch, spoliate, and incite slaughter because he
took pleasure in doing them. Perhaps--to extend charitable judgment--he
would have preferred to avoid them. But they were all part of the
formulated necessities of business which largely decreed that the
exercise of humane and ethical considerations was incompatible with the
zealous pursuit of wealth.

In the wilderness of the West, Astor, operating through his agents,
could debauch, rob and slay Indians with impunity. As he was virtually
the governing body there, without fear of being hindered, he thus could
act in the most high-handed, arbitrary and forcible ways. In the East,
however, where law, or the forms of law, prevailed, he had to have
recourse t