The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 263 pages of information about The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3.

The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 263 pages of information about The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3.
owners.  Perhaps the final outcome will be that more drastic regulations are adopted than would have been the case had the shifting in ownership not taken place.  There would still remain the possibility of the evasion of the law, and it is not at all improbable that the progress in the technique of evasion would outstrip the progress in regulation, thus leaving the tenant with a balance of disadvantage from the process as a whole.

The most illuminating instance of a business interest subjected first to excommunication—­literally—­and then to outlawry, is that of the usurer, or, in modern parlance, the loan shark.  To the mediaeval mind there was something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to the furnishing of personal loans.  We need not stop to defend the mediaeval position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an opportunity for profit—­that is, a potential property interest—­was outlawed.  In consequence it became impossible for reputable citizens to engage in the business.  Usury therefore came to be monopolized by aliens, exempt from the current ethical formulation, who were “protected,” for a consideration, by the prince, just as dubious modern property interests may be protected by the political boss.

Let us summarize the results of eight hundred years of experience in this method of dealing with the usurer’s trade.  The business shifted from the control of citizens to that of aliens; from the hands of those who were aliens merely in a narrow, national sense, to the hands of those who are alien to our common humanity.  Such lawless, tricky, extortionate loan sharks as now infest our cities were probably not to be found at all in mediaeval or early modern times.  They are a product of a secular process of selection.  Their ability to evade the laws directed against them is consummate.  It is true that from time to time we do succeed in catching one and fining him, or even imprisoning him.  For which risk the small borrower is forced to pay, at a usurer’s rate.

Social improvement through the excommunication of property interests is inevitably a disorderly process.  Wherever it is in operation we are sure to find the successive stages indicated in the foregoing examples.  First, a gradual substitution of the conscienceless property holder for the one responsive to public sentiment.  Next, under the threat of hostile popular action, the timid and resourceless property owner gives way to the resourceful and the bold.  The third stage in the process is a vigorous political movement towards drastic regulation or abolition, evoking a desperate attempt on the part of the interests threatened to protect themselves by political means—­that is, by gross corruption; or, if the menaced interest is a vast one, dominating a defensible territory, by armed rebellion, as in our own Civil War.  If the interest is finally overwhelmed politically, and placed completely under the ban of the law, it has been given ample time to develop an unscrupulousness of personnel and an art of corruption that long enable it to exist illegally, a lasting reproach to the constituted authorities.

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The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.