belonged to the people of the city of New York_. During the
last fifty years of the life of John Jacob Astor, his property has
been augmented and increased in value by the aggregate
intelligence, industry, enterprise and commerce of New York, fully
to the amount of one-half its value. The farms and lots of ground
which he bought forty, twenty and ten and five years ago, have all
increased in value entirely by the industry of the citizens of New
York. Of course, it is plain as that two and two make four, that
the half of his immense estate, in its actual value, has accrued
to him by the industry of the community.

THE WONDER OF THE AGE.

The analyst might well be tempted to smile at the puerility of this
logic. If Astor was entitled to one-half of the value created by the
collective industry of the community, why was he not entitled to all?
Why make the artificial division of one-half? Either he had the right to
all or to none. But this editorial, for all its defects of reasoning,
was an unusual expression of newspaper opinion, although of a single
day, and was smothered by the general course of that same newspaper in
supporting the laws and institutions demanded by the commercial
aristocracy.

So the arch multimillionaire passed away, the wonder and the emulation
of the age. His friends, of whom he had a few, deeply mourned him, and
his bereaved family suffered a deep loss, for, it is related, he was a
kind and indulgent husband and father. He left a legacy of $400,000 for
the establishment of the Astor Library; for this and this alone his
memory has been preserved as that of a philanthropist. The announcement
of this legacy was hailed with extravagant joy; yet such is the value of
meretricious glory and the ideals of present society, that none has
remarked that the proceeds of one year's pillage of the Indians were
more than sufficient to found this much-praised benevolence. Thus does
society blind itself to the origin of the fortunes, a fraction of which
goes to gratify it with gifts. The whole is taken from the collective
labor of the people, and then a part is returned in the form of
institutional presents which are in reality bits of charity bestowed
upon the very people from whose exploitation the money has come. Astor,
no doubt, thought that, in providing for a public library, he was doing
a service to mankind; and he must be judged, not according to the
precepts