Midway between these extremes are a vast number of subjects that relate to the economy of life,-law, government, administration, production, distribution; subjects which result from the joint action of many and often apparently opposing laws. These become all the more difficult of solution as society advances in civilization and wealth. All, at the outset, so far as they were treated, were necessarily treated after the manner of the Schoolmen. The theories or opinions which related to money, and to loans of money at usury, came directly from Aristotle, and were accepted without examination or res

The results or demonstrations in this rank among the highest achievements, or, rather, the ability to accept them is to be taken as the most decisive and satisfactory proof of the moral elevation of the race. Other kindred sciences are broken up into innumerable Schools, for the reason that, so far, there have in these been no adequate demonstrations, no common points of agreement. Schools are another word for guesses at, or suggestions of probabilities. There are no Schools in Astronomy, for the reason that the truth or falsehood of all propositions in reference to it is a matter of proof. There are, or should be, no Schools in Chemistry. If there are unsolved problems in this science, conclusion is to be held in abeyance. There are Schools in Medicine and Theology for the reason that the claims or propositions put forth by their teachers are inadequate or partial, and are consequently untrue to the general sense of mankind. From a feeling of their inadequacy new hypotheses or explanations are put forth, to give place, in time, to others perhaps equally unfounded and untenable. There are no Schools in Law, in its highest sense, for the reason that its conclusions are based upon sentiments or convictions common to the race. All have a similar sense of right and wrong, and when interest or passion is not involved, every one wishes to see, in the laws, the embodiment of justice, not only for the protection and welfare of others, which every one, ordinarily, desires to see pro,moted, but for his own, when his rights may be assailed. As every legal proposition is open to criticism, every one that is not founded în justice, or in convenience, is sure to be eventually overthrown. The Civil Law affords a splendid illustration of the progress made in legal science long before others, now so prominent, may be said to have had an existence. It is one of the greatest monuments of human wisdom. There never was a similar necessity or occasion. The Roman Empire embraced the known world, with every variety of race and nationality, and with ideas and institutions appropriate to each. There was, so far as administration was concerned, but one method by which all these incongruous elements could be fused into one homogeneous mass, -a Code to which all were subject, and resting upon grounds and reasons appreciable by all, — upon a sense of justice, and of fitness of things. Although it was a maxim of the Roman lawyers, “Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem," yet the legislation of the Emperors, if such it may be called, served as a rule, only to give the force of law to the reasoning and conclusions of the wisest and purest jurists of the Empire. In this way the Civil Law became, as far as possible, the expression of pure reason when it dealt with principles, and of pure convenience when it dealt with their application. It is not probable that the world will ever see a similar code, one so just in principle and so universal and beneficent in its operation, for the reason that the world will never again see a universal Empire.

ervation. With him, money was invented for a specific purpose, and was entitled to no consideration, for the reason that such purposes or objects were contrary to Nature. Those that were according to Nature were war, the chase, the care of herds, and the gathering of the fruits of the fields. Such only were worthy of freemen who had a part in the administration of the government. With him, trade and the mechanical arts were contrary to Nature, were servile; and, as such, were worthy only of those who occupied an inferior political or social condition, and of slaves. Money was held in the same indifference or contempt as were those by whom it was chiefly used. It was unworthy of notice or investigation; it was base because those who used it, and the employments in which it was used, were base. Such was the foundation upon which was reared a superstructure which has outlasted the ages.

The views of Aristotle on the subject of usury are a necessary sequence of his views upon the subject of money. If moneygetting by trade, or by exchanges in which it was used, was contrary to Nature, loans of it at usury could be no less so. They were only an aggravation of the original wrong. Contemptible as such reasoning now appears, it controlled the judgment of mankind for twenty-two hundred years! "This absurdity of Aristotle," says Lecky,1" and the number of centuries during which it was so incessantly asserted, without being, so far as we know, once questioned, is a curious illustration of the longevity of a sophism 2 when expressed in a terse form and sheltered by a great name. It is enough to make one ashamed of his species to think that Bentham, so late as 1787, was the first to bring into notice the simple consideration that, if a farmer employs borrowed money in buying bulls and cows, and if these produce calves to the value of ten times the interest, the money borrowed can scarcely be said to be sterile, or the borrower to be a loser!"

1 History of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii. page 251.

2 The history of Medicine affords a still more striking instance of the "longevity of a sophism when sheltered by a great name." For more than 1,500 years, the system of Medicine established by the celebrated Galen, a Greek physician, held undisputed sway. By this system, to use the words of Sir William Hamilton, "Four elementary fluids, their relations and changes, sufficed to explain the varieties of natural temperament and the cause of disease; while

After Aristotle, the first writer whose works on this subject possess any interest or value was the celebrated John Locke. The silver currency of England (the only one then in use) had become, in 1696, so reduced in value, from clipping and wear, as to cause the greatest inconvenience in all the operations of society. The coins in use, no matter how light, could be still used in the payment of debts and of the taxes due the government. The latter attempted for a long time to correct the evil, by causing large quantities of silver to be coined of the standard weight and fineness; but as the old coins, with one-quarter or one-fifth less of pure metal, were

the genius, eloquence, and unbounded learning with which he illustrated this theory mainly bestowed on it the ascendency, which, without essential alteration, it retained from the conclusion of the second to the beginning of the eighteenth century. . . . Nor was this doctrine merely an erroneous speculation; it exerted the most decisive, the most pernicious influence on practice. The various diseased affections were denominated in accommodation to the theory. In place of saying that a malady affected the liver, the peritoneum, or the organs of circulation, its seat was assumed in the blood, the bile, or the lymph. The morbific causes acted exclusively on the fluids; the food digested in the stomach, and converted into chyle, determined the qualities of the blood; and poisons operated through the corruption they thus effected in the vital humors. All symptoms were interpreted in blind subservience to the hypothesis; and those only attracted attention which the hypothesis seemed calculated to explain. The color and consistence of the blood, mucus, feces, urine, and pus were carefully studied. On the other hand, the phenomena of the solids, if not wholly overlooked, as mere accidents, were slumped together under some collective name, and attached to the theory through a subsidiary hypothesis. By sup posed changes in the humors, they explained the association and consecution of symptoms. Under the terms crudity, coction, and evacuation were designated the three principal periods of diseases, as dependent on an alteration of the morbific matter. In the first, this matter in all its deleterious energy had not yet undergone any change on the part of the organs; it was still crude. In the second, Nature gradually assumed the ascendent; coction took place. In the third, the peccant matter, now rendered mobile, was evacuated by urine, perspiration, dejection, &c., and equilibrium restored. When no critical discharge was apparent, the morbific matter, it was supposed, had, after a suitable elaboration, been assimilated to the humors, and its deleterious character neutralized. Coction might be perfect or imperfect; and the transformation of one disease into another was lightly solved by the transport or emigration of the noxious humor. It was principally on the changes of the evacuated fluids that they founded their judgments respecting the nature, issue, and duration of diseases. The urine, in particular, supplied them with indications to which they attached the greatest importance. Examinations of the dead body confirmed them in these notions. In the redness and tumefaction of inflamed parts, they beheld only a congestion of blood; and in dropsies, merely the dissolution of that fluid; tubercles were simply coagula of lymph; and other organic alterations, in general, naught but obstructions from an increased viscosity of the humors. The plan of cure was in unison with the rest of the hypothesis. Venesection was copiously employed

used as currency equally with the new, the latter were immediately taken up and melted down and exported at their value as bullion or merchandise; so that no progress whatever was made in remedying an evil which, at the time Locke wrote, had become well nigh insupportable.

"The financiers of that age," says Macaulay, in his graphic picture of it, "seem to have expected that the new money, which was excellent, would soon displace the old money which was much impaired. Yet any man of plain understanding might have known that, when the State treats perfect coin and light coin as of equal value, the perfect coin will not drive the light coin out of circulation, but will itself be driven out. A clipped crown, on English ground, went as far in the payment of a tax or a debt as a milled crown. But the milled crown, as soon as it had been flung into the crucible or carried across the channel, became much more valuable than the clipped crown. It might therefore have been predicted, as confidently as any thing can be predicted which depends on the human will, that the inferior pieces would remain in the only market in which they could fetch the same price as the superior pieces; and that the superior pieces would take some form or fly to some place, in which some advantage could be derived from their superiority.

"The politicians of that age, however, generally overlooked these very obvious considerations. They marvelled exceedingly that everybody should be so perverse as to use light money in preference to good money. In other words, they marvelled that nobody chose

to renew the blood, to attenuate its consistency, or to remove a part of the morbific matter with which it was impregnated; and cathartics, sudorifics, and diuretics were largely administered with a similar intent. In a word, as plethora or cacochymia were the two great sources of disease, their whole therapeutic was directed to change the quantity or quality of the fluids. Nor was this murderous treatment limited to the actual period of the disease. Seven or eight annual bleedings and as many purgations, such was the common regimen the theory prescribed to assure continuance of health; and the twofold depletion, still customary, at spring and fall among the peasantry of many European countries is a remnant of the once universal practice. In Spain, every village has even now its Sangrador, whose only art of surgery is blood-letting; and he is rarely idle. The medical treatment of Louis XIII. may be quoted as a specimen of the humoral therapeutic. Within a single year, this theory inflicted on that unfortunate monarch above a hundred cathartics and more than forty bloodings. During the fifteen centuries of Humorism, how many millions of lives did medicine cost mankind? "1

The permanence of such fallacies as the unlawfulness of interest, and the humoral theory in Medicine, will serve to lessen our astonishment at the continuance to the present time of monetary theories, equally absurd, which have never been challenged from the time they were delivered to the world by Aristotle.

1 Sir William Hamilton's "Discussions on Philosophy and Literature," American edition, pp. 246-248.

to pay twelve ounces of silver when ten ounces would serve the turn. The horse at the Tower still paced his rounds. Fresh wagonloads of choice money still came forth from the mill; and still they vanished as fast as they appeared. Great masses were melted down; great masses exported; great masses hoarded: but scarcely one new piece was found in the till of a shop, or in the leathern bag which the farmer carried home from the cattle fair. In the receipts and payments of the Exchequer, the milled money did not exceed ten shillings in a hundred pounds. A writer of that age mentions the case of a merchant who, in the sum of thirty-five pounds, received only a single half-crown in milled silver. . . .

"The evils produced by this state of the currency were not such as have generally been thought worthy to occupy a prominent place in history. Yet it may well be doubted whether all the misery which had been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad kings, bad ministers, bad parliaments, and bad judges was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings. Those events which furnish the best themes for pathetic or indignant eloquence are not always those which most affect the happiness of the great body of the people. The misgovernment of Charles and James, gross as it had been, had not prevented the common business of life from going steadily and prosperously on. While the honor and independence of the State were sold to a foreign power, while chartered rights were invaded, while fundamental laws were violated, hundreds of thousands of quiet, honest, and industrious families labored and traded, ate their meals and lay down to rest, in comfort and security. Whether Whigs or Tories, Protestants or Jesuits were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to market: the grocer weighed out his currants: the draper measured out his broadcloth: the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the towns: the harvest-home was celebrated as joyously as ever in the hamlets: the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire: the apple-juice foamed in the presses of Herefordshire: the piles of crockery glowed in the furnaces of the Trent; and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the timber railway of the Tyne. But when the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry, were smitten as with a palsy...

"Since the Revolution, the state of the currency had been repeatedly discussed in Parliament. In 1689 a committee of the Commons had been appointed to investigate the subject, but had made no report. In 1690 another committee had reported that immense quantities of silver were carried out of the country by Jews, who, it was said, would do any thing for profit. Schemes were formed for encouraging the importation and discouraging the exportation of the precious metals. One foolish bill after another was brought in and dropped. At length, in the beginning of the year 1695, the question assumed so serious an aspect that the Houses applied themselves to it in earnest. The only practical result of their deliberations, however, was a new penal law, which, it was hoped, would prevent the clipping of the hammered coin and the