Astor hated gamblers. He never confused gambling, as a
mode of money getting, with actual production. He knew
that gambling produces nothing--it merely transfers wealth,
changes ownership. And since it involves loss of time and
energy it is a positive waste.

Yet to buy land and hold it, thus betting on its rise in value,
is not production, either. Nevertheless, this was to Astor,
legitimate and right.

Henry George threw no shadow before, and no economist had
ever written that to secure land and hold it unused, awaiting
a rise in value, was a dog-in-the-manger, unethical and
selfish policy. Morality is a matter of longitude and time.

Astor was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, and
yet he lived out his days with a beautiful and perfect
disbelief in revealed religion.

He knew enough of biology to know that religions are not
``revealed''--they are evolved. Yet he recognized the value
of the Church as a social factor. To him it was a good police
system, and so when rightly importuned he gave, with becoming
moderation, to all faiths and creeds.

A couple of generations back in his ancestry there was a
renegade Jew who loved a Christian girl, and thereby moulted
his religion. When Cupid crosses swords with a priest, religion
gets a death stroke. This stream of free blood was the