NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

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 [156]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 [ 157 ]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 [158]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 [159]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, [160]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. [161]

FORS CLAVIGERA.