I have had by me, some time, three eager little fragments from one of
Mr. Sillar’s letters:—too eager, always, in thinking this one sin of
receiving interest on money means every other. I know many excellent
people, happily, whose natures have not been spoiled by it: the more as
it has been done absolutely without knowledge of being wrong. I did not
find out the wrong of it myself, till Mr. Sillar showed me the way to
judge of it.
The passage which I have italicized, from Mr. Lecky, is a very precious
statement of his sagacious creed. The chief jest of it is his having
imagined himself to be of Aristotle’s ‘species’!
“To get profit without responsibility has been a fond scheme as
impossible of honest attainment as the philosopher’s stone or perpetual
motion. Visionaries have imagined such things to exist, but it has been
reserved for this mammon-worshipping generation to find it in that
arrangement by which a man, without labour, can secure a permanent
income with perfect security, and without diminution of the capital.
“A view of it is evidently taken by Lord Bacon when he says that usury
bringeth the treasure of a realm into few hands; for the usurer trading
on a certainty, and other men on uncertainties, at the end of the game
all the money will be in the box.
“We have had now an opportunity of practically testing this theory; not
more than seventeen years have elapsed since all restraint was removed
from the growth of what Lord Coke calls this ‘pestilent weed’ and we
see Bacon’s words verified, the rich becoming richer, and the poor
poorer, is the cry throughout the whole civilized world. Rollin in his
Ancient History, speaking of the Roman Empire, tells us that it has
been the ruin of every state where it was tolerated. It is in a fair
way to ruin this of ours, and ruin it it will, unless England’s sons
calmly and candidly investigate the question for themselves, and
resolutely act upon the conclusions to which the investigation must
lead them.
“There is such a thing as unlimited liability; of the justice of such
laws I do not now speak, but the law exists, and as it was made by
moneyed men in the interest of moneyed men they cannot refuse to be
judged by it. The admission, therefore, of the fact that interest is a
share of the profit, would throw upon the money-lender the burden of
unlimited liability; this he certainly refuses to admit, consequently
he has no alternative but to confess that interest has nothing whatever
to do with profit, but that it is a certain inherent property of money,
viz., that of producing money, and that interest is as legitimately the
offspring of money as a Calf is that of a Cow. That this is really the
stand now taken, may be shown from the literature and practice of the
present day. Mr. Lecky, one of the latest champions of interest, boldly
admits it. In his history of the rise and influence of rationalism in
Europe, p. 284, after quoting Aristotle’s saying, that all money is
sterile by nature, he says, ‘This is an absurdity of Aristotle’s, and
the number of centuries during which it was incessantly asserted
without being (so far as we know) once questioned, is a curious
illustration of the longevity of a sophism when expressed in a terse
form, and sheltered by a great name. It is enough to make one ashamed
of his species to think that Bentham was the first to bring into notice
the simple consideration that if the borrower employs the borrowed
money in buying bulls and cows, and if these produce calves to ten
times the value of the interest, the money borrowed can scarcely be
said to be sterile.’
“And now to remedy all this. Were there no remedy, to parade it in our
view, would be cruel; but there is one, so simple, that like those of
divine making, it may be despised for its simplicity. It consists in
the recognition of the supreme wisdom which forbade the taking of
usury. We should not reimpose the usury laws, which were in themselves
a blunder and a snare, nor would we advocate the forcible repression of
the vice any more than we do that of other vices, such as gambling or
prostitution, but we would put them on precisely the same footing, and
enact thus—
Whereas, usury is a sin detestable and abominable, the law will
refuse to recognize any contract in which it is an element.
The first effect of this would be, that all those who had lent, taking
security into their hands, would have no power of oppression beyond
keeping the pledge,—the balance of their debts being on a similar
footing to those of the men who had lent without security.
“To these their chance of repayment would depend on their previous
conduct. If they had lent their money to honourable men, they would
surely be repaid; if to rogues, they surely would not; and serve them
right. Those, and those only, who have lent without interest would have
the power of an action at law to recover; and as such men must have
possessed philanthropy, they could safely be trusted with that power.
“Regarding the future employment of money, a usurer who intended to
continue his unholy trade, would lend only to such men as would repay
without legal pressure, and from such men trade would not have to fear
competition. But to disreputable characters the money-market would be
hermetically sealed; and then as commerce, freed from the competition
of these scoundrels, began again to be remunerative, we should find it
more to our advantage to take an interest in commerce than usury from
it, and so gradually would equity supersede iniquity, and peace and
prosperity be found where now abound corruption, riot, and rebellion,
with all the host of evils inseparable from a condition of plethoric
wealth on one hand, and on the other hopeless and despairing poverty.”
II. I intended in this note to have given some references to the first
use of the word Franc, as an adjective. But the best dictionary-makers
seem to have been foiled by it. “I recollect,” (an Oxford friend writes
to me,) “Clovis called his axe ‘Francisca’ when he threw it to
determine by its fall where he should build a church,” and in Littré’s
dictionary a root is suggested, in the Anglo-Saxon Franca, ‘javelin.’
But I think these are all collateral, not original uses. I am not sure
even when the word came to be used for the current silver coin of
France: that, at least, must be ascertainable. It is curious that in no
fit of Liberty and Equality, the anti-Imperialists have thought of
calling their golden coins ‘Citizens’ instead of ‘Napoleons’; nor even
their sous, Sansculottes.
III. Some of my correspondents ask me what has become of my promised
additional Fors on the glaciers. Well, it got crevassed, and split
itself into three; and then relegated itself into a somewhat compact
essay on glaciers; and then got jammed up altogether, because I found
that the extremely scientific Professor Tyndall had never distinguished
the quality of viscosity from plasticity, (or the consistence of honey
from that of butter,) still less the gradations of character in the
approach of metals, glass, or stone, to their freezing-points; and that
I wasn’t as clear as could be wished on some of these matters myself;
and, in fact, that I had better deal with the subject seriously in my
Oxford lectures than in Fors, which I hope to do this next autumn,
after looking again at the riband structure of the Brenva. Meantime,
here—out of I don’t know what paper, (I wish my correspondents would
always cross the slips they cut out with the paper’s name and date,)—is
a lively account of the present state of affairs, with a compliment to
Professor Tyndall on his style of debate, which I beg humbly to
endorse.
“An awful battle, we regret to say, is now raging between some of the
most distinguished men of Science, Literature, and Art, for all those
three fair sisters have hurtled into the Homeric fray. The combatants
on one side are Professors G. Forbes, Tait, and Ruskin, with Mr. Alfred
Wills, and on the other—alone, but fearless and undismayed—the great
name of Tyndall. The causa teterrima belli is in itself a cold and
unlikely one—namely, the glaciers of Switzerland; but fiercer the fight
could not be, we grieve to state, if the question of eternal
punishment, with all its fiery accessory scenery, were under
discussion. We have no rash intention of venturing into that terrible
battleground where Professor Ruskin is laying about him with his ‘Fors
Clavigera,’ and where Professor Tait, like another Titan, hurls wildly
into the affrighted air such epithets as ‘contemptible,’ ‘miserable,’
‘disgusting,’ ‘pernicious,’ ‘pestilent.’ These adjectives, for anything
that ignorant journalists can know, may mean, in Scotch scientific
parlance, everything that is fair, chivalrous, becoming, and measured
in argument. But, merely from the British instinct of fair play, which
does not like to see four against one, and without venturing a single
word about the glaciers, we cannot help remarking how much more
consistent with the dignity of science appears Professor Tyndall’s
answer in the last number of the Contemporary Review. If it be true
that the man who keeps his temper is generally in the right, we shall
decidedly back Mr. Tyndall and the late lamented Agassiz in the present
dreadful conflict. Speaking, for instance, of those same furious
adjectives which we have culled from the literary parterre of Professor
Tait, Dr. Tyndall sweetly says, ‘The spirit which prompts them may,
after all, be but a local distortion of that noble force of heart which
answered the Cameron’s Gathering at Waterloo; carried the Black Watch
to Coomassie; and which has furnished Scotland with the materials of an
immortal history. Still, rudeness is not independence, bluster is not
strength, nor is coarseness courage. We have won the human
understanding from the barbarism of the past; but we have won along
with it the dignity, courtesy, and truth of civilized life. And the man
who on the platform or in the press does violence to this ethical side
of human nature discharges but an imperfect duty to the public,
whatever the qualities of his understanding may be.’ This, we humbly
think, is how men of science ought to talk when they quarrel—if they
quarrel at all.”
I hope much to profit by this lesson. I have not my “School for
Scandal” by me—but I know where to find it the minute I get home; and
I’ll do my best. “The man who,” etc., etc.;—yes, I think I can manage
it.