ous folio was published in Venice upon the same subject and with the same title, by Onorato Leotardo. So far from showing any signs of yielding, he is even more extreme than Vilagut had been, and quotes with approval the old declaration that lenders of money at interest are not only robbers but murderers.
So far as we can learn, no real opposition was made in either century to this theory, as a theory; as to practice, it was different. The Italian bankers and traders did not answer the theological argument; they simply overrode it. Nowhere was commerce carried on in more complete defiance of this and other theological theories hampering trade than in the very city where these great treatises were published. The sin of usury, like the sin of commerce with the Mohammedans, seems to have been settled for by the Venetian merchants on their death-beds, and greatly to the advantage of the magnificent churches and ecclesiastical adornments of the city.
But in the eighteenth century there came a change. The first effective onset of political scientists against the theological opposition in southern Europe was made in Italy; the most noted leaders in the attack being Galiani and Maffei.
Here and there feeble efforts were made to meet them, but it was felt more and more by thinking churchmen that entirely different tactics must be adopted.
About the same time came an attack in France, and, though its results were less immediate at home, they were much more effective abroad. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. In this famous book were concentrated twenty years of study and thought by a great thinker on the interests of the world about him. In eighteen months it went through twenty-two editions; it was translated into every civilized language; and among the things on which Montesquieu brought his wit and wisdom to bear with especial force was the doctrine of the Church regarding interest on loans. In doing this he was obliged to use a caution in forms which seems strangely at variance with the boldness of his ideas. In view of the strictness of ecclesiastical control in France, he felt it safest to make his whole attack upon those theological and economic follies of Mohammedan countries which were similar to those which the theological spirit had fastened on France.[1]
By the middle of the eighteenth century the Church authorities at Rome clearly saw the necessity of a concession: the world would endure theological restriction no longer; a way of escape
- ↑ For Vilagut, see his Tractatus de Usuris, Venice, 1589, especially pp. 21, 25, and 399. For Leotardus, see his De Usuris, Venice, 1655, especially preface, pp. 6, 1 et seq. For the eighteenth century attack in Italy, see Böhm-Bawerk, pp. 48 et seq. For Montesquieu's view of interest on loans, see the Esprit des Lois.
