oman, I should incline, rather, if there were no other alternative, to
exclude her from society.]

[Footnote 26: "The strong-box of Cosmo de Medici was the grave of
Florentine liberty," said M. Michelet to the College of France.]

[Footnote 27: "My right is my lance and my buckler." General de Brossard
said, like Achilles: "I get wine, gold, and women with my lance and my
buckler."]

[Footnote 28: It would be interesting and profitable to review the
authors who have written on usury, or, to use the gentler expression
which some prefer, lendingat interest. The theologians always have
opposed usury; but, since they have admitted always the legitimacy of
rent, and since rent is evidently identical with interest, they have
lost themselves in a labyrinth of subtle distinctions, and have finally
reached a pass where they do not know what to think of usury. The
Church--the teacher of morality, so jealous and so proud of the purity
of her doctrine--has always been ignorant of the real nature of property
and usury. She even has proclaimed through her pontiffs the most
deplorable errors. _Non potest mutuum_, said Benedict XIV., _locationi
ullo pacto comparari_. "Rent," says Bossuet, "is as far from usury as
heaven is from the earth." How, on{sic} such a doctrine, condemn lending
at interest? how justify the Gospel, which expressly forbids usury? The
difficulty of theologians is a very serious one. Unable to refute the
economical demonstrations, which rightly assimilate interest to rent,
they no longer dare to condemn interest, and they can say only that
there must be such a thing as usury, since the Gospel forbids it.]

[Footnote 29: "I preach the Gospel, I live by the Gospel," said the
Apostle; meaning thereby that he lived by his labor. The Catholic clergy
prefer to live by property. The struggles in the communes of the middle
ages between the priests and bishops and the large proprietors and
seigneurs are famous. The papal excommunications fulminated in defence
of ecclesiastical revenues are no less so. Even to-day, the official
organs of the Gallican clergy still maintain that the pay received by
the clergy is not a salary, but an indemnity for goods of which they
were once proprietors, and which were taken from them in '89 by the
Third Estate. The clergy prefer to live by the right of increase rather
than by labor.]

[Footnote 30: The meaning ordinarily attached to the word "anarchy" is
absence of principle, absence of