his time,
we see money freely lent upon this same security throughout the
historical times of Athens, and the evidentiary mortgage-pillars
remaining ever after undisturbed.

In the sentiment of an early society, as in the old Roman law, a
distinction is commonly made between the principal and the interest of a
loan, though the creditors have sought to blend them indissolubly
together. If the borrower cannot fulfil his promise to repay the
principal, the public will regard him as having committed a wrong which
he must make good by his person. But there is not the same unanimity as
to his promise to pay interest: on the contrary, the very exaction of
interest will be regarded by many in the same light in which the English
law considers usurious interest, as tainting the whole transaction. But
in the modern mind, principal, and interest within a limited rate, have
so grown together, that we hardly understand how it can ever have been
pronounced unworthy of an honorable citizen to lend money on interest.
Yet such is the declared opinion of Aristotle and other superior men of
antiquity; while at Rome, Cato the censor went so far as to denounce the
practice as a heinous crime. It was comprehended by them among the worst
of the tricks of trade--and they held that all trade, or profit derived
from interchange, was unnatural, as being made by one man at the expense
of another; such pursuits therefore could not be commended, though they
might be tolerated to a certain extent as a matter of necessity, but
they belonged essentially to an inferior order of citizens. What is
remarkable in Greece is, that the antipathy of a very early state of
society against traders and money-lenders lasted longer among the
philosophers than among the mass of the people--it harmonized more with
the social _ideal_ of the former, than with the practical instincts of
the latter.

In a rude condition such as that of the ancient Germans described by
Tacitus, loans on interest are unknown. Habitually careless of the
future, the Germans were gratified both in giving and receiving
presents, but without any idea that they thereby either imposed or
contracted an obligation. To a people in this state of feeling, a loan
on interest presents the repulsive idea of making profit out of the
distress of the borrower. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that the
first borrowers must have been for the most part men driven to this
necessity by the pressure of want, and