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496
THE DECLINE AND FALL
of four per cent.; six was pronounced to be the ordinary and legal standard of interest; eight was allowed for the convenience of manufacturers and merchants; twelve was granted to nautical insurance, which the wiser ancients had not attempted to define; but, except in this perilous adventure, the practice of exorbitant usury was severely restrained.[1] The most simple interest was condemned by the clergy of the East and West;[2] but the sense of mutual benefit, which had triumphed over the laws of the republic, has resisted with equal firmness the decrees of the church and even the prejudices of mankind.[3]
Injuries3. Nature and society impose the strict obligation of repairing an injury; and the sufferer by private injustice acquires a personal right and a legitimate action. If the property of another be entrusted to our care, the requisite degree of care may rise and fall according to the benefit which we derive from such temporary possession; we are seldom made responsible for inevitable accident, but the consequences of a voluntary fault must always be imputed to the author.[4] A Roman pursued and recovered his stolen goods by a civil action of theft; they might pass through a succession of pure and innocent hands, but nothing less than a prescription of thirty years could extinguish his original claim. They were restored by the sentence of the prætor, and the injury was compensated by double, or threefold, or even quadruple damages, as the deed had been perpetrated by secret fraud or open rapine, as the robber had been surprised in the fact or detected by a subsequent research. The Aquilian law[5] defended the living property of a citizen, his slaves and cattle, from the stroke of- ↑ Justinian has not condescended to give usury a place in his Institutes; but the necessary rules and restrictions are inserted in the Pandects (l. xxii. tit. i. ii.), and the Code (l. iv. tit. xxxii. xxxiii.).
- ↑ The fathers are unanimous (Barbeyrac, Morale des Pères, p. 144, &c.): Cyprian, Lactantius, Basil, Chrysostom (see his frivolous arguments in Noodt, l. i. c. 7, p. 188), Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Jerom, Augustin, and a host of councils and casuists.
- ↑ Cato, Seneca, Plutarch, have loudly condemned the practice or abuse of usury. According to the etymology of fœnus and τόκος, the principal is supposed to generate the interest: a breed of barren metal, exclaims Shakspeare — and the stage is the echo of the public voice. [Cp. Aristotle, Politics, i. 10 ad fin.]
- ↑ Sir William Jones has given an ingenious and rational Essay on the law of Bailment (London, 1781, p. 127, in 8vo). He is perhaps the only lawyer equally conversant with the year-books of Westminster, the commentaries of Ulpian, the Attic pleadings of Isæus, and the sentences of Arabian and Persian cadhis.
- ↑ Noodt (Opp. tom. i. p. 137-172) has composed a separate treatise, ad Legem Aquiliam (Pandect. l. ix. tit. ii.).
