Defence of Usury [35]
be registered in one of the patent-offices or elsewhere. After this, affidavits once a year, or oftener, during the subsistence of the contract, declaring what has been done in execution of it. If the leading-string is not yet thought tight enough, boards of controul might be instituted to draw it tighter. Then opens a scene of vexation and intrigue: waste of time consumed in courting the favour of the members of the board: waste of time, in opening their understandings, clenched perhaps by ignorance, at any rate by disdain, and self-sufficiency, and vanity, and pride: the favour (for pride will make it a favour) granted to skill in the arts of self-recommendation and cabal, devoid of inventive merit, and refused to naked merit unadorned by practice in those arts: waste of time on the part of the persons themselves engaged in this impertinent inquiry: waste of somebody's money in paying them for this waste of time. All these may be necessary evils, where the money to be bestowed is public money: how idle where it is the party's own! I will not plague you, nor myself, with enquiring of whom shall be composed this board of nurses to grown gentlemen: were it only to cut the matter short, one might name at once the committees of the Society of Arts. There you have a body of men ready trained in the conduct of enquiries, which resemble that in question, in every circumstance, but that which renders it ridiculous: the members or representatives of this democratic body would be as likely, I take it, to discharge such a trust with fidelity and skill, as any aristocracy that could be substituted in their room.
Crichoff, in White Russia, March 1787.
To Dr Smith
A little tract of mine, in the latter part of which I took the liberty of making use of your name, (the Defence of Usury), having been some time out of print, I am about publishing a new edition of it. I am now therefore at a period at which, if I have done you or any body any injustice, I shall have the opportunity, and assuredly I do not want the inclination, to repair it: or if in any other respect I have fallen into an error, I could give myself and the public the benefit of its being set right. I have been Battered with the intelligence that, upon the whole, your sentiments with respect to the points of difference are at present the same as mine: but as the intimation did not come directly from you, nor has the communication of it received the sanction of your authority, I shall not without that action give any hint, honourable as it would be to me, and great as the service is which it could not but render to my cause. I have been favoured with the communication from Dr Reid of Glasgow of an inedited paper of his on the same subject, written a good many years ago. He declares himself now fully of my opinion on the question of expediency, and had gone a considerable length towards it at that time. The only ground on which he differs from me, is that of the origination of the prejudice, of which his paper gives, as might be expected, an account more ecclesiastical than mine. Anxious to do my cause as much service as it is capable of receiving, I write to him now, to endeavour to persuade him to give his paper to the world, or if he looks upon so much of it as concerns the question of utility [as] superseded by mine, that he will either communicate the historical part -- that part which he prefers to mine -- to some general repository for short publications, or allow me the honour of forwarding it to the world in company with mine. The account that has been given by the Marquis de Condorcet of the sentiments of Turgot on the same subject, is already every body's without leave: I shall accordingly annex, by way of appendix to my new edition, the original as well as a translation of that short passage. I am the more anxious to collect all the force I can muster, in as far as I find from the printed debates, as well as from private intelligence, that the project of reducing the rate of interest in Ireland is not yet given up: though this perseverance
Crichoff, in White Russia, March 1787.
To Dr Smith
A little tract of mine, in the latter part of which I took the liberty of making use of your name, (the Defence of Usury), having been some time out of print, I am about publishing a new edition of it. I am now therefore at a period at which, if I have done you or any body any injustice, I shall have the opportunity, and assuredly I do not want the inclination, to repair it: or if in any other respect I have fallen into an error, I could give myself and the public the benefit of its being set right. I have been Battered with the intelligence that, upon the whole, your sentiments with respect to the points of difference are at present the same as mine: but as the intimation did not come directly from you, nor has the communication of it received the sanction of your authority, I shall not without that action give any hint, honourable as it would be to me, and great as the service is which it could not but render to my cause. I have been favoured with the communication from Dr Reid of Glasgow of an inedited paper of his on the same subject, written a good many years ago. He declares himself now fully of my opinion on the question of expediency, and had gone a considerable length towards it at that time. The only ground on which he differs from me, is that of the origination of the prejudice, of which his paper gives, as might be expected, an account more ecclesiastical than mine. Anxious to do my cause as much service as it is capable of receiving, I write to him now, to endeavour to persuade him to give his paper to the world, or if he looks upon so much of it as concerns the question of utility [as] superseded by mine, that he will either communicate the historical part -- that part which he prefers to mine -- to some general repository for short publications, or allow me the honour of forwarding it to the world in company with mine. The account that has been given by the Marquis de Condorcet of the sentiments of Turgot on the same subject, is already every body's without leave: I shall accordingly annex, by way of appendix to my new edition, the original as well as a translation of that short passage. I am the more anxious to collect all the force I can muster, in as far as I find from the printed debates, as well as from private intelligence, that the project of reducing the rate of interest in Ireland is not yet given up: though this perseverance