A few years ago it was a favorite occupation of newspaper paragraphers to estimate the Gould and Vanderbilt fortunes; but lately they seem to have given them up as beyond the limits of even their robust guessing abilities. Some idea of the latter's fortune may be gained, however, by realizing the fact that the Vanderbilt railway system now has a total extent of nearly 12,000 miles, the total value of which can hardly be less than one thousand millions of dollars. Probably not less than half of the securities of these companies are owned by the Vanderbilt family, and it is well known that their investments are by no means confined to railways. The important fact is, that this fortune grows so fast now that it is sure to increase; and will double itself every fifteen or twenty years, because all that its owners can spend is but a drop in the bucket toward using up their income. But this fortune, while the largest which is still under one name, is but one of many enormous ones. The names of Gould, Flagler, Astor, Rockefeller, Stanford, Huntington, and a host of others follow close after the Vanderbilts. In the days of our grandfathers, millionaires were no more plentiful than hundred-millionaires are to-day. We have next to show the present and prospective evils which result from this congestion of wealth. The first and most obvious one is its injury to the remainder of the people of the country, by the diversion from them of wealth which they have rightfully earned and which they would receive were it not for the tax of monopoly. It is obvious that a certain amount of wealth is annually produced by the industry of the country from which the whole wants of the country must be supplied. This amount may be greater, indeed, when a Gould or a Flagler or a Crocker directs the enterprise; but for the most part it is indisputable that the owners of these colossal fortunes have made them, not by any stimulus of the production of wealth by their owners, but by a diversion of the produced wealth in the general distribution from others' pockets to their own. In short, all other men are poorer that these many times millionaires may be richer. To show how these fortunes have in many cases been obtained, I cannot do better than to quote a writer not at all likely to err by undue severity to our millionaires, as he is himself the president of a railway system a thousand miles in extent: The great majority of the phenomenal fortunes of the day are the result of what may be called lucky gambling.... Man is a gambling animal by nature, and modern methods have enormously developed both its facilities and its temptations and have opened large fields in which gambling is not held to be disreputable.