Note 188-6 — Chapter IV

As the symptoms of a condition are very frequently mistaken for its cause, there have been many writers who, blinded especially by the contemplation of Holland, considered the lowness of the rate of interest as the causa causans of all wealth, and who promised really magical results from its legislative regulation by the state. Thus Sir Thomas Culpeper, A Tract against the high Rate of Usury, 1623; continuation 1630; Sir J. Child, Brief Observations concerning Trade and the Interest of Money, 1668; Discourse of Trade, 1690. Anderson (ob. 1765), was of a similar opinion: Origin of Commerce, a. 1601, 1651; and even Ganilh, Dictionnaire analytique, 99 seq. (Infra, § 162.) Per contra, the anonymous essay, Interest of Money mistaken, 1668, and Locke, Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money, 1691. Most moderns have considered the decline of the rate of interest an evil. Thus, for instance, Canard, Principes, ch. 5, who uniformly makes this the starting point of a nation's downfall. See also McCulloch, Principles, III, 8. Malthus draws a comparison between the saving of capital and the generation of children: only a high rate of interest makes the former really useful, and a high rate of wages the latter.

Even great destruction and disturbances of capital by war, by loans to the state, for instance, are soon made good, provided the sources of the saving of capital are not dried up. (Principles, III, 370 ff., 401, ff.) John Stuart Mill expressly counsels rich and highly civilized nations not to neglect beneficent enterprises, although economically unproductive, because capital might be lost in them. The result of such a loss would, under certain circumstances, simply be that less capital would be exported or wasted in speculation. (Principles, II, ch. 5, 1.) Similarly Canard, who, therefore, compares state loans with blood-letting, as a remedy for a plethoric disease. (Ch. 9.) Turgot confounded cause and effect when he compared a high rate of interest to an inundation, below the level of which nothing can be produced; and which, the lower it became, the more dry ground there was for men to work on. (Sur la Formation, etc., § 89.)