The Memphis Appeal

Wealth Changes Hands

From the New York Sun.

Forty years ago you could count the millionaires of New York on the fingers of one hand, and the possessors of half a million and a quarter of a million were few. Next to the Astor estate the greatest of the fortunes were then held by the Stuyvesants and the Rhinelanders, and they were old fortunes for this new country. The families which most pride themselves on their descent are either relatively or actually poor. They have declined in pecuniary importance during the last century, while others, upon whose hereditary claims they look down with contempt, are today at the front in the matter of wealth. For the most part the wealth of a hundred years ago has passed out of the families which then possessed it; and even where it remains, with the increase brought about by the growth of the town, it is comparatively small. There has come up a new crop of rich men, beside whom the older seems poor and insignificant as to fortune. The Astors, the Goelets, Jay Gould, the Rockefellers, the Moses Taylor estate and many others are at the front in that respect, and the former wealth is cast far into the shade.