In penetrating into the origin and growth of the great fortunes, this vital fact is constantly forced upon the investigator: that Law has been the most valuable asset possessed by the capitalist class. Without it, this class would have been as helpless as a babe. What would the medieval baron have been without armed force? But note how sinuously conditions have changed. The capitalist class, far shrewder than the feudalistic rulers, dispenses with personally equipped armed force. It becomes superfluous. All that is necessary to do is to make the laws, and so guide things that the officials who enforce the laws are responsive to the interests of the propertied classes. Back of the laws are police forces and sheriffs and militia all kept at the expense of city, county and State--at public expense. Clearly, then, having control of the laws and of the officials, the propertied classes have the full benefit of armed forces the expense of which, however, they do not have to defray. It has unfolded itself as a vast improvement over the crude feudal system. In complete control of the laws, the great propertied classes have been able either to profit by the enforcement, or by the violation, of them. This is nowhere more strikingly shown than in the growth of the Astor fortune, although all of the other great fortunes reveal the same, or nearly identical, factors. With the millions made by a career of crime the original Astors buy land; they get more land by fraud; the Law throws its shield about the property so obtained. They cheat the city out of enormous sums in taxation; the Law does not molest them. On the contrary it allows them to build palaces and to keep on absorbing up more forms of property. In 1875 William Astor builds a railroad in Florida; and as a gift of appreciation, so it is told, the Florida Legislature presents him with 80,000 acres of land. It is wholly probable, if the underlying circumstances were known, that it would be found that an influence more material than a simple burst of gratitude prompted this gift. Where did the money come from with which this railroad was built? And what was the source of other immense funds which were invested in railroads, banks, industrial enterprises, in buying more land and in mortgages--in many forms of ownership? The unsophisticated acceptor of current sophistries or the apologist might reply that all this money came from legitimate business transactions, the natural increase in the value of land, and thus on. But waiving these superficial explanations and defenses, which really mean nothing more than a forced justification, it is plain that the true sources of these revenues were of a vastly different nature. The millions in rents which flowed in to the Astor's treasury every year came literally from the sweat, labor, misery and murder of a host of men, women, and children who were never chronicled, and who went to their death in eternal obscurity. THE BASIS OF WEALTH'S STRUCTURE.