“Ah!” said Astor, “don’t you know the reason?  It isn’t fine yet.  Wait till it is fine, and you’ll say you never tasted such Madeira.”  The captain never heard of that wine again.

These traits show the moral weakness of the man.  It is only when we regard his mercantile exploits that we can admire him.  He was, unquestionably, one of the ablest, boldest, and most successful operators that ever lived.  He seldom made a mistake in the conduct of business.  Having formed his plan, he carried it out with a nerve and steadiness, with such a firm and easy grasp of all the details, that he seemed rather to be playing an interesting game than transacting business.  “He could command an army of five hundred thousand men!” exclaimed one of his admirers.  That was an erroneous remark.  He could have commanded an army of five hundred thousand tea-chests, with a heavy auxiliary force of otter skins and beaver skins.  But a commander of men must be superior morally as well as intellectually.  He must be able to win the love and excite the enthusiasm of his followers.  Astor would have made a splendid commissary-general to the army of Xerxes, but he could no more have conquered Greece than Xerxes himself.

The reader may be curious to know by what means Mr. Astor became so preposterously rich.  Few successful men gain a single million by legitimate commerce.  A million dollars is a most enormous sum of money.  It requires a considerable effort of the mind to conceive it.  But this indomitable little German managed, in the course of sixty years, to accumulate twenty millions; of which, probably, not more than two millions was the fruit of his business as a fur trader and China merchant.

At that day the fur trade was exceedingly profitable, as well as of vast extent.  It is estimated that about the year 1800 the number of peltries annually furnished to commerce was about six millions, varying in value from fifteen cents to five hundred dollars.  When every respectable man in Europe and America wore a beaver skin upon his head, or a part of one, and when a good beaver skin could be bought in Western New York for a dollar’s worth of trash, and could be sold in London for twenty-five English shillings, and when those twenty-five English shillings could be invested in English cloth and cutlery, and sold in New York for forty shillings, it may be imagined that fur-trading was a very good business.  Mr. Astor had his share of the cream of it, and that was the foundation of his colossal fortune.  Hence, too, the tender love he felt for a fine fur.

In the next place, his ventures to China were sometimes exceedingly fortunate.  A fair profit on a voyage to China at that day was thirty thousand dollars.  Mr. Astor has been known to gain seventy thousand, and to have his money in his pocket within the year.  He was remarkably lucky in the war of 1812.  All his ships escaped capture, and arriving at a time when foreign commerce was almost annihilated and tea had doubled in price, his gains were so immense, that the million or more lost in the Astorian enterprise gave him not even a momentary inconvenience.