Up to the present generation the Astors had never set themselves out as "reformers" in politics. They had plundered right and left, but withal had made no great pretenses. The fortune held by the Astors, so the facts indubitably show, represents a succession of piracies and exploitation. Very curious, therefore, it is to note that the Astors of the present generation have avowed themselves most solicitous reformers and have been members of pretentious, self-constituted committees composed of the "best citizens," the object of which has been to purge New York City of Tammany corruption. Leaving aside the Astors, and considering the attitude of the propertied class as a whole, this posing of the so-called better element as reformers has been, and is, one of the most singular characteristics of American politics, and its most colossal sham. Although continuously, with rare intermissions, the landholders and the railroad and industrial magnates have been either corrupting public officials or availing themselves of the benefits of corrupt politics, many of them, not in New York alone, but in every American city, have been, at the same time, metamorphosing themselves into reformers. Not reformers, of course, in the true, high sense of the word, but as ingenious counterfeits. With the most ardent professions of civic purity and of horror at the prevailing corruption they have come forward on occasions, clothed in a fine and pompous garb of righteousness. THE QUALITY OF "REFORMERS." The very men who cheated cities, states and nation out of enormous sums in taxation; who bribed, through their retainers, legislatures, common councils and executive and administrative officials; who corruptly put judges on the bench; who made Government simply an auxiliary to their designs; who exacted heavy tribute from the people in a thousand ways; who forced their employees to work for precarious wages and who bitterly fought every movement for the betterment of the working classes--these were the men who have made up these so-called "reform" committees, precisely as to-day they constitute them.[160]