Note 3 — LETTER LXVIII.

How we usurers are to live, with the hope of our gains gone, is precisely the old temple of Diana question. How Robin Hood or Cœur de Lion were to live without arrow or axe, would have been as strange a question to them, in their day. And there are many amiable persons who will not directly see their way, any more than I do myself, to an honest life; only, let us be sure that this we are leading now is a dishonest one; and worse, (if Dante and Shakspeare’s mind on the matter are worth any heed, of which more in due time,) being neither more nor less than a spiritual manner of cannibalism, which, so long as we persist in, every word spoken in Scripture of those who “eat my people as they eat bread,” is spoken directly of us.3 It may be an encouragement to some of us—especially those evangelically bred—in weaning ourselves slowly from such habits, to think of our dear old converted friend, Friday. We need not fear our power of becoming good Christians yet, if we will: so only that we understand, finally and utterly, that all gain, increase, interest, or whatever else you call it or think it, to the lender of capital, is loss, decrease, and dis-interest, to the borrower of capital. Every farthing we, who lend the tool, make, the borrower of the tool loses. And all the idiotical calculations of what money comes to, in so many years, simply ignore the debit side of the book, on which the Labourer’s Deficit is precisely equal to the Capitalist’s Efficit. I saw an estimate made by some blockhead in an American paper, the other day, of the weight of gold which a hundred years’ ‘interest’ on such and such funds would load the earth with! Not even of wealth in that solid form, could the poor wretch perceive so much of the truth as that the gold he put on the earth above, he must dig out of the earth below! But the mischief in real life is far deeper on the negative side, than the good on the positive. The debt of the borrower loads his heart, cramps his hands, and dulls his labour. The gain of the lender hardens his heart, fouls his brain, and puts every means of mischief into his otherwise clumsy and artless hands.