thefts of money and the franchise, tax-exemption, and other measures put through the legislature or common council were men of wealth in the background, who thereby immensely increased their riches and whose descendants now possess towering fortunes and bear names of the highest "respectability."[154] The original money of the landholders came from trade; and then by a combination of cunning, bribery, and a moiety of what was considered legitimate investment, they became the owners of immense tracts of the most valuable city land. The rentals from these were so great that continuously more and more surplus wealth was heaped up. This surplus wealth, in slight part, went to bribe representative bodies for special laws giving them a variety of exclusive property, and another part was used in buying stock in various enterprises the history of which reeked with corruption. From being mere landholders whose possessions were confined mainly to city land, they became part owners of railroad, telegraph, express and other lines reaching throughout the country. So did their holdings and wealth-producing interests expand by a cumulative and ever-widening process. The prisons were perennially filled with convicts, nearly all of whom had committed some crime against property, and for so doing were put in chains behind heavy bars, guarded by rifles and great stone walls. But the men who robbed the community of its land and its railroads (most of which latter were built with _public_ land and money) and who defrauded it in a thousand ways, were, if not morally exculpated, at least not molested, and were permitted to retain their plunder, which, to them, was the all-important thing. This plunder, in turn, became the basis for the foundation of an aristocracy which in time built palaces, invented impressive pedigrees and crests and coats-of-arms, intermarried with European titles, and either owned or influenced newspapers and journals which taught the public how it should think and how it should act. It is one thing to commit crimes against property, and a vastly different thing to commit crimes _in behalf_ of property. Such is the edict of a system inspired by the sway of property. RENTALS FROM DISEASE AND DEATH. But the sources of the large rentals that flowed into the exchequers of the landlords--what were they? Where did these rents, the volume of which was so great that the surplus part of them went into other forms of investments, come from? Who paid them and how did the tenants of these mammoth landlords live?