The contention went to the courts and there dragged along for many years. Astor, however, won his point; it was decided that he had a valid title. Finally in 1827 the Legislature allowed itself[102] to compromise, although public opinion was as bitter as ever. The State gave Astor $500,000 in five per cent stock, specially issued, in surrender of his claim.[103] Thus were the whole people taxed to buy, at an exorbitant price, the claim of a man who had got it by artifice and whose estate eventually applied the interest and principal of that stock to buying land in New York City. Thus also can a considerable part of the Astor fortune be traced to Adolphus Phillips, son of Frederick, the partner, protector and chief spoil-sharer of Captain Burgess, sea pirate, and whose estate, the Phillips manor, had been obtained by bribing Fletcher, the royal governor. But while Astor gradually appropriated vast tracts of land in Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa and other parts of the West, and levied his toll on one-third of Putnam County, it was in New York City that he concentrated the great bulk of his real estate speculations. To buy steadily on the scale that he did required a constant revenue. This revenue, as we have seen, came from his fur trading methods and activities and the profits and privileges of his shipping. But these factors do not explain his entire agencies in becoming a paramount landocrat. One of these was the banking privilege--a privilege so ordained by law that it was one of the most powerful and insidious suctions for sapping the wealth created by the toil of the producers, and for enriching its owners at a most appalling sacrifice to the working and agricultural classes. And above all, Astor in common with his class, made the most valuable asset of Law, whether exploiting the violation, or the enforcement, of it. If we are to accept the superficial, perfunctory accounts of Astor's real estate investments in New York City, then he will appear in the usual eulogistic light of a law-loving, sagacious man engaged in a legitimate enterprise. The truth, however, lies deeper than that--a truth which has been either undiscerned or glossed over by those conventional writers who, with a panderer's instinct, give a wealth-worshipping era the thing it wants to read, not what it ought to know. Although apparently innocent and in accord with the laws and customs of the times, Astor's real estate transactions were inseparably connected with consecutive evasions, trickeries, frauds and violations of law. Extraordinarily favorable as the law was to the propertied classes, even that law was constantly broken by the very classes to whom it was so partial.