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Updated: May 11, 2025
The usurer takes the service as due to the thing he owns. It is his property that is exalted, and for which he claims the service must be rendered, and if the borrower will think closely, he will find that in paying usury he is serving a thing.
The sordid straits which reduce existence to a matter of food and a roof, the ceaseless anxiety destroying every vestige of personal charm, the necessity of asking for loans that both borrower and lender know to be gifts grudgingly given accepted in mingled bitterness and relief Helen Dunbar had seen it all. The pictures which rose before her were real.
If I sell money for one-fourth part of that profit, certain persons will be so unjust as to cry, Shame upon me, for taking such advantage of my neighbour's distress; not considering, that the trader took four times the same advantage of those people who bought his cargo, though his risk was not half so great as mine, and although the money I sold perhaps retrieved the borrower from the very jaws of destruction.
Why should the price of a loan be governed by the skill and strength of the borrower, rather than by the utility sacrificed by the proprietor? Now, this production, what is it? In other words, What can the lord and master of a piece of land justly claim to have sacrificed in lending it to a tenant?
He had a most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easy-going and comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most august wealth. He always had work, he never saved a penny, he was a most persuasive borrower, he was in debt to every pilot on the river, and to the majority of the captains.
The borrower of an article, as a horse, carriage, or book, without reward, is liable for damage in case of slight neglect. But if the article is applied only to the use for which it is borrowed, is used carefully by the borrower only, and returned within the time for which it was borrowed, he is not liable.
It produced fruits of intellect, some original, especially in the political sphere, others merely borrowed from Greece, yet evincing on the part of the borrower a power of appreciating the superior excellence of another, and that a conquered nation, the value of which, as breaking through the iron boundary of national self-love, has perhaps not received sufficient notice.
Should the borrower fail to pay, he was always suavely ready to renew the loan at increased interest provided the security was sound. And, in the end, every ounce of his pound of flesh, plus not less than fifty per cent. interest, would come back to him. After Verner Lablache had done with him, the unfortunate rancher who borrowed generally disappeared from the neighborhood.
At all events, fifty or sixty miles was a long, laborious journey; and at whatever hour the traveller might set out upon his way, he was not likely to reach the end of it, without becoming a "borrower from the night of a dark hour or two."
This contract could not be considered a partnership, inasmuch as the property in the money passed to the borrower; but it probably escaped condemnation as usurious on the ground that the lender shared in the risk of the enterprise. The payment of some additional sum over and above the money lent might thus be justified on the ground of periculum sortis.
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