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Updated: May 29, 2025
Now, as some of our readers may be surprised that a man in his station of life could practise usury or even extortion to any considerable extent, we feel it necessary to inform them that there exists among Irish farmers a class of men who stand, with respect to the surrounding poor and improvident, in a position precisely analogous to that which is occupied by a Jew or moneylender among those in the higher classes who borrow, and are extravagant upon a larger scale.
But the magistrates and cities ought to see to it that the vagabonds, pilgrims and mendicants from foreign lands be debarred, or at least allowed only under restrictions and rules, so that knaves be not permitted to run at large under the guise of mendicants, and their knavery, of which there now is much, be prohibited. I have spoken at greater length of this Commandment in the Treatise on Usury.
It is now twelve years since I landed in Bombay. I have never soiled my hands with usury, though I have twice advanced large sums at legal interest for purposes I am not at liberty to disclose; I have never cheated a customer or underrated a gem I bought of a poor man, and my wealth, as you may judge from what you have seen, is considerable.
He thereupon takes him aside and explains it to him by the illustration of a merchant whose gain on the wares he sells is not called usury, and argues that therefore other forms of gain in business should not be described by this odious name.
And although usury was checked by legislators, who dreaded its pressure on themselves, and debts were often repudiated, the Jews maintained their position of creditors; and, as the Cartilla says, creditors are often unreasonable persons, or, at least, are considered to be such.
As we said in the first chapter, and as we shall prove in detail in the next section, the prohibition of usury was simply one of the applications of the theory of equivalence in contracts in other words, it was the determination of the just price to be paid in an exchange of money for money.
Separated from the enacted statutes of a state the distinction disappears. There is no moral nor is there an economic difference. Blackstone says: "When money is lent on a contract to receive not only the principal sum again, but also an increase by way of compensation for the use, the increase is called interest by those who think it lawful, and usury by those who do not."
But, instead of its being, as was the case among the Romans, the large estate which, through increase and usury, subordinated and absorbed the small one, among the Barbarians fonder of war than of wealth, more eager to dispose of persons than to appropriate things it was the warrior who, through superiority of arms, enslaved his adversary. The Roman wanted matter; the Barbarian wanted man.
And after all, was this difference between them and me so wide? The grandsire of Sir Robert Aleys, I had been told, gathered his wealth by trade and usury in the old wars; indeed, it was said that he was one who dealt in cattle, while Lord Deleroy was reported to be a bastard, if of the bluest blood, so blue that it ran nigh to the royal purple. Well, what was mine?
It is quite impossible to comprehend how modern writers can see in the usury teaching of the scholastics a fatal discouragement to the enterprise of traders and capitalists; and it is equally impossible to understand how socialists can find in that doctrine any suggestion of support for the proposition that all unearned income is immoral and unjust.
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