Perhaps this seems monstrous; but it really is not—it is a perfectly inevitable consequence of industrial competition, and of the “constantly increasing mass of capital.” Mr. John Jacob Astor, who owns the hotel, has an income of more than its value every year, and he is in desperate straits to find any way of investing it by which he can make profits. There are seven thousand millionaires in this country, who want the best, the only best they know being what costs the most; and so he knew that if he built a hotel exceeding in cost any other hotel in the world, that hotel would pay him profits. For precisely the same reason a number of buildings are now being torn down in Brooklyn to make room for a graveyard for wealthy people’s pet dogs. The founder of the Astor fortune came to New York a century ago and bought land while it was cheap. Millions of men have since contributed their labour to the building up of New York; and no one of them did anything without adding to the wealth of the Astors—who merely sat by and watched. Now the property of the family is estimated to be worth four hundred and fifty millions of dollars, according to Mr. Burton J. Hendricks’s recent account of it in _McClure’s Magazine_. It includes half a dozen hotels like the St. Regis; it includes also innumerable slum-tenements with “dark rooms.” Its value grows by leaps and bounds—one corner lot on Fifth Avenue “made” them seven hundred thousand dollars in two years. To Mr. William Waldorf Astor alone the harried and overdriven population of Manhattan Island delivers eight or ten millions of tribute money every year; and Mr. William Waldorf Astor resides at Clieveden, Taplow, Bucks, England—giving as his reason the fact that “America it not a fit place for a gentleman to live in.” The fundamental characteristic of the régime under which we live is that it values a man only in so far as he is capable of producing wealth. Hence one of the signs of the increasing difficulty of making profits will be an increasing recklessness of human life. Our railroads killed six thousand people in 1895, seven thousand in 1899, eight thousand in 1902, nine thousand in 1903, and ten thousand in 1904; they injured thirty-three thousand in 1895, forty-four thousand in 1899, sixty-four thousand in 1902, seventy-six thousand in 1903, and eighty-four thousand in 1904. According to the statistics of the Interstate Commerce Commission, our railways injured one passenger out of every one hundred and eighty-three thousand passengers they carried in 1894; in 1904 they injured one out of every seventy-eight thousand. If casualties are to continue increasing at the same rate until 1912, there are one hundred thousand people under sentence of sudden death, and a number doomed to be maimed greater than the entire population of the District of Columbia, Delaware, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho and the Hawaiian Islands.