s the central fact, common to all the
nations; and the solution of it, as a problem, is to be sought in some
vice or disturbing element common to the general system, and not in any
local incident or cause.

Credit has gained so enormous an extension within the last two
centuries, that it may almost be pronounced the distinctive feature
of modern times. It existed, undoubtedly, in ancient days,--for its
correlative, Debt, existed; and we know, that, among the Jews, Moses
enacted a sponging law, which was to be carried into effect every fifty
years; that Solon, among the Greeks, began his administration with the
_Seisachtheia_, or relief-laws, designed to rescue the poor borrowers
from their overbearing creditors; and that the usurers were a
numerous class at Rome, where also the Patrician houses were immense
debtor-prisons. But in ancient times, when the chief source of wealth
(aside from conquest and confiscation by the State) was the labor of
slaves, and the principal exchanges were effected either by direct
barter or the coined metals, the system of credit could not have been
very complicated or general. As for the lending of money on interest, it
appears to have been looked at askance by most of the ancients; and the
prejudice against it continued, under the fostering care of the Church,
far down into the Middle Ages. With the emancipation of the towns,
however, with the splendid development of the Italian republics, with
the noble commercial triumphs of the cities of the Hansa, credit was
recovered from the hands of the Jews, and began a career of rapid and
beneficent expansion. It was in an especial manner promoted by the
magnificent prospects unfolded to colonial and mining enterprise in the
discovery of the New World, by the stimulus and the facilities afforded
to industrial skill by the researches of natural science, and by the
emancipation won for all the activities of the human mind through the
free principles of the Reformation. Thus, by degrees, credit came to
intervene in nearly every operation of commerce and of social exchange,
from the small daily dealings of the mechanic at the shop, to the larger
wholesale transactions of merchant with merchant, and to the prodigious
expenditures and debts of imperial governments. Credit by note of hand,
credit by book account, credit by mortgages and hypothecations, credit
by bills of exchange, credit by certificates of stock, credit by
bank-notes and post-notes, cred