ABSTRACT
THE economic development of a nation shows itself juridically in an organization of credit. Primitive barter allowed of none; it proceeded on a system of give and take. Now credit implies reliance on the word and the solvency of others, supported by a more or less adequate system of guarantees, for it is "the exchange of present wealth for future wealth," the abandonment of what one has in order to obtain something of greater value. Of the two principal operations which it suggests, sale on credit and loan, the first which was unknown to primitive Law never had the importance at Rome which it has in our time. Classical Law said truly that in such cases the vendor was dependent on the good faith of the vendee and assimilated him to one who had received satisfaction, but the guarantees which it offered him against the vendee's insolvency—precarious tenure or provisional hire, lex commissoria, pactum reservatœ hypothecœ—were either too inconvenient to handle or too uncertain for the operation to become an essential element in credit. As a matter of fact loan at interest was the usual and fundamental form of credit in this society, and its history is closely bound up with that of all the revolutions of ancient Rome.
