tself[102] to
compromise, although public opinion was as bitter as ever. The State
gave Astor $500,000 in five per cent stock, specially issued, in
surrender of his claim.[103] Thus were the whole people taxed to buy, at
an exorbitant price, the claim of a man who had got it by artifice and
whose estate eventually applied the interest and principal of that stock
to buying land in New York City. Thus also can a considerable part of
the Astor fortune be traced to Adolphus Phillips, son of Frederick, the
partner, protector and chief spoil-sharer of Captain Burgess, sea
pirate, and whose estate, the Phillips manor, had been obtained by
bribing Fletcher, the royal governor.

But while Astor gradually appropriated vast tracts of land in
Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa and other parts of the West, and levied his
toll on one-third of Putnam County, it was in New York City that he
concentrated the great bulk of his real estate speculations. To buy
steadily on the scale that he did required a constant revenue. This
revenue, as we have seen, came from his fur trading methods and
activities and the profits and privileges of his shipping. But these
factors do not explain his entire agencies in becoming a paramount
landocrat. One of these was the banking privilege--a privilege so
ordained by law that it was one of the most powerful and insidious
suctions for sapping the wealth created by the toil of the producers,
and for enriching its owners at a most appalling sacrifice to the
working and agricultural classes. And above all, Astor in common with
his class, made the most valuable asset of Law, whether exploiting the
violation, or the enforcement, of it.

If we are to accept the superficial, perfunctory accounts of Astor's
real estate investments in New York City, then he will appear in the
usual eulogistic light of a law-loving, sagacious man engaged in a
legitimate enterprise. The truth, however, lies deeper than that--a
truth which has been either undiscerned or glossed over by those
conventional writers who, with a panderer's instinct, give a
wealth-worshipping era the thing it wants to read, not what it ought to
know. Although apparently innocent and in accord with the laws and
customs of the times, Astor's real estate transactions were inseparably
connected with consecutive evasions, trickeries, frauds and violations
of law. Extraordinarily favorable as the law was to the propertied
classes, even that law was constantly broken by t