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Endemann, however, in spite of his colossal research and unrivalled acquaintance with original authorities, was essentially hostile to the system which he undertook to explain, and thus lacked the most essential quality of a satisfactory expositor, namely, sympathy with his subject.
According to Endemann, the labour of production, the cost and risk of transport, and the condition of the markets had all to be kept in mind when a fair price was being fixed. We may mention in passing that the power of fixing the just price might be delegated; prices were frequently fixed by the town authorities, the guilds, and the Church.
Endemann treats this subject very fully and ably; but for the purpose of the present essay it is not necessary to do more than to state the main conclusions at which he arrives.
Ashley says that 'the prohibition of usury was clearly the centre of the canonist doctrine. Roscher expresses the same opinion in practically the same words; and Endemann sees the whole economic development of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the victorious destruction of the usury law by the exigencies of real life.
Endemann, for instance, devotes a great part of his invaluable books on the subject to demonstrating how impracticable the canonist teaching was when it was applied to real life, and recounting the casuistical devices that were resorted to in order to reconcile the teaching of the Church with the accepted mercantile customs of the time.
Even Endemann says: 'The teaching of the canon law presents a noble edifice not less splendid in its methods than in its results.
Cunningham adds his tribute of praise: 'The conceptions of national wealth and national power were ruling ideas in economic matters for several centuries, and Oresme appears to be the earliest of the economic writers by whom they were explicitly adopted as the very basis of his argument.... A large number of points of economic doctrine in regard to coinage are discussed with much judgment and clearness. Endemann alone is inclined to quarrel with the pre-eminence of Oresme; but on this question, he is in a minority of one.
Endemann points out how the theologians and jurists unanimously insisted that cambium could not be justified except when the just price was observed, and that, when the doctrine attained its full development, the element of labour was but one of the constituents in the estimation of that price. Lib. The former two species of cambium were justifiable, whereas the last was condemned.
He then goes on to state the very important principle, that in cambium money is not to be considered a measure of value, but a vendible commodity, a distinction which Endemann thinks was productive of very important results in the later teaching on the subject.
Endemann, having thoroughly studied all the fifteenth-century writers on the subject, says that commerce might be rendered unjustifiable either by subjective or objective reasons.
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