Meanwhile, Astor was setting about making himself the richest and largest landowner in the country. His were not the most extensive land possessions in point of extent but in regard to value. He aimed at being a great city, not a great rural, landlord. It was estimated that his trade in furs and associated commerce brought him a clear annual revenue of about two million dollars. This estimate was palpably inadequate. Not only did he reap enormous profits from the fur trade, but also from banking privileges in which he was a conspicuous factor. It was on one of his visits to London, so the recital goes, that he first became possessed of the idea of founding an extraordinarily rich landed family. He admired, it is told, the great landed estates of the British nobility, and observed the prejudice against the caste of the trader and the corresponding exalted position of the landowner. Whether this story is true or not, it is evident that he was impressed with the increasing power and the stability of a fortune founded upon land, and how it radiated a certain splendid prestige. The very definition of the word landlord--lord of the soil--signified the awe-compelling and authoritative position of him who owned land--a definition heightened and enforced in a thousand ways by the laws. The speculative and solid possibilities of New York City real estate held out dazzling opportunities gratifying his acquisitiveness for wealth and power--the wealth that fed his avarice, and the power flowing from the dominion of riches. ASTOR NOT AN EXCEPTION. It may here be observed that Astor's methods in trade or in acquiring of land need not be indiscriminately condemned as an exclusive mania. Nor should they be held up to the curiosity of posterity as a singular and pernicious exhibition, detached from his time and generation, and independent of them. Again and again the facts disclose that men such as he were merely the representative crests of prevailing commercial and political life. Substantially the whole propertied class obtained its wealth by methods which, if not the same, had a strong relationship. His methods differed nowise from those of many cotton planters of the South who stole, on a monstrous scale,[91] Government land and then with the wealth derived from their thefts, bought negro slaves, set themselves up in the glamour of a patriarchal aristocracy and paraded a florid display of chivalry and honor. And it was this same grandiose class that plundered Whitney of the fruits of his invention of the cotton-gin and shamelessly defrauded him.[92]