Having reached the present generation, we shall not attempt to enter into a detailed narrative of their multifarious interests, embracing land, railroads, industries, insurance and a vast variety of other forms of wealth. The purpose of this work is to point out the circumstances underlying the origin and growth of the great private fortunes; in the case of the Astors this has been done sufficiently, perhaps overdone, although many facts have been intentionally left out of these chapters which might very properly have been included. But there are a few remaining facts without which the story would not be complete, and lacking which it might lose some significance. THE ASTOR FORTUNE DOUBLES. [Illustration: WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR. Now a British Subject, Self-Expatriated. He Derives an Enormous Income from His American Estate.] We have seen how at William B. Astor's death in 1876 the Astor fortune amounted to at least $100,000,000, probably much more. Within sixteen years, by 1892, it had more than doubled in the hands of his two sons. How was it possible to have added the extraordinary sum of $125,000,000 in less than a decade and a half? Individual ability did not accomplish it; it is ludicrous to say that it could have done so. The methods by which much of this increase was gathered in have already been set forth. A large part came from the rise in the value of land, which value arose not from the slightest act of the Astors, but from the growth of the population and the labor of the whole body of workers. This value was created by the producers, but far from owning or even sharing in it, they were compelled to pay heavier and heavier tribute in the form of rent for the very values which they had created. Had the Astors or other landlords gone into a perpetual trance these values would have been created just the same. Then, not content with appropriating values which others created, the landlord class defrauded the city of even the fractional part of these values, in the form of taxation.