ABSTRACT
In marked contrast to the abundance of devices which the criminal law has invented for the protection of property—antiquated and inefficient as many of them may be—stands its neglect to afford a corresponding protection against property. In a historical development of some thousands of years, there is indeed only one form of anti-social conduct by owners of property that has been persistently made an offence punishable by the law: Usury. No wonder that this illegitimate child of ecclesiastical, legal, and social thought has had to bear the brunt of the most vehement attacks of which the defenders of “Improperty” have been capable. Fortunately, it has survived in many parts of the world, though the loss of many of its teeth is somewhat deplorable. 1 Granted that the Middle Ages had greatly overdone the matter. The prohibition of usury had, in the words of Tawney, 2 become the kernel of its doctrines of economic ethics, and the money-lender the most conspicuous species of unpopular character. Even when Thomas Wilson wrote his famous Discourse of 1572, this was still, “after the land question, the most burning social problem of the day” “too scandalous to be tolerated and too convenient to be altogether suppressed”. 3 Clearly the wholesale penalization of any form of interest for loans of money was, already then, both unjustified and impracticable. One concession after the other had to be made, till Bentham's “Letters in Defence of Usury” of 1787 succeeded, at least for a while, in altogether destroying the last remaining vestiges of faith in the criminal law of usury. Apparently, it seemed impossible to dispose of Bentham's argumen 1 :
For him who takes as much as he can get for the use of any other sort of thing, a house, for instance, there is no particular appellation, nor any mark of disrepute: nobody is ashamed of doing so, nor is it usual so much as to profess to do otherwise. Why a man who takes as much as he can get … for the use of a sum of money should be called usurer … any more than if he had bought a house with it and made a proportionable profit by the house, is more than. I can see.
