Defence of Usury [37]
force of it, or answered it: but I have not been able to meet with any. I have scarce heard of a reader who has not acknowledged himself convinced. The practical conclusion is the repealing of the laws against usury, together with those others that are here pointed out as depending on the same principle. That matters are at all the nearer to such a measure since the publication of this work than they were before, is more than I can pretend to have any ground for supposing: for in great political questions, wide indeed is the distance between conviction and practice. An intelligent Frenchman, of whom I have not been able to learn enough to distinguish him more particularly, published a few months since a translation he had made for his own amusement, a considerable time before the commencement of the Revolution, he says, not long after the work found its way to France. He kept back the translation, thinking the country not ripe for it. The general slaughter that has been made of all sorts of prejudices in that country may now, he thinks, have opened the way for it. But if its turning to any account in practice depends upon the overthrow of prejudice, who shall calculate the period, at which any good can be expected from it here? It is to the attempt made in Ireland to effect a fresh forced reduction of the legal rate of interest in that country, that the reimpression there published must naturally have been indebted for a circulation proportionably more extensive than here. Between that measure and the laws condemned by this investigation, the connection is close and evident. Had the reduction so proposed been naturally productive of the advantage expected from it, and at the same time not attended with any additional hardship or other inconvenience superior to that advantage, such a reduction would then have had no other objections to combat than the objections, decisive as they are represented in this work, which apply to the original fixation. According to my conception of the matter, however, that advantage is altogether illusory; the measure is attended with hardships much more than sufficient to outweigh the advantage, were it real, and of these, several are distinct from, and superadded to, those which result from the impropriety of ever having fixed any rate at all. Had I divined the politico-economical advantage proposed from this ulterior and fresh reduction, I should have set it down among the reasons capable of being alledged in support of the original fixation: for the advantage, if it were one, of the proposed future reduction, must proportionably have resulted from the precedent ones. The fact is, I must confess, that in the situation I was then in, sequestered not less from political converse than from books, this supposed advantage had equally escaped my recollection and my imagination as applicable to the original fixation, though recollection had represented it as capable of having been supposed to result from successive reductions. From newspapers I had learnt thus much, that in England a fresh reduction had lately been proposed, as tending some how or other to the benefit of trade: but the sound of the word trade being all I was able to collect, what that benefit was, or how it was to be brought about, was more than I could conceive. To apply it to the immediate subject I was treating of, it was necessary I should have some conception of the force of it: and unfortunately I was unable to perceive any force or meaning in it at all. It had equally escaped Dr Smith: for his reasons in support of the limitation of the rate of interest are confined to the discouragement of prodigals and projectors: of any supposed benefit to trade that was to follow from it in any other way, he betrays not the smallest suspicion: and blindness may be confessed without much shame, where eyes like Dr Smith's have failed to see. I little suspected, I must confess, that so many intelligent and ingenious men would so compleatly have mistaken a consequence for a cause. Instructed by the debates of the Irish Parliament. I now