Usury / A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View

by Calvin Elliott

1. Usury discourages industry and encourages idleness. The laborer is stirred to diligence when he gets good wages. When his wages are meager he becomes discouraged, relaxes his efforts and may abandon his work altogether. When he knows that he is receiving less than he is earning, and that a part of his earnings are appropriated by another, he is embittered and becomes indifferent. When he receives all he earns, and the more diligent he is in his work the more he receives, he is stimulated to the utmost.

This will be especially true if it is made impossible to secure a gain without earning it. The benefit of full wages may be largely lost by the knowledge of persons who, without productive effort, are appropriating the earnings of others. The influence of their easy, indolent lives may destroy or counteract the beneficent influence of good wages. The laborer may be led to despise his well-paid tasks and yearn for their ease, and thus become indolent.

One is encouraged to idleness when he discovers that he can secure his bread by the sweat of another's face. He is likely to relax his efforts if he does not forsake all personal productive occupations. He may give great care and the closest attention to the management of his wealth, loaning to others and collecting the increase, but not to productive industry.

There are activities that look like virtues, but they are perverted efforts. The slave-driver may work as hard as the slave in his efforts to appropriate the earnings of others. The thief may work in the night and endure more hardness to secure the property of another than would be necessary to honestly earn it. The usurer may give his thought, night and day, to the placing of his wealth the most securely and at the best rates of interest, and at the same time abandon all effort in the direct management of useful productive enterprises.

The complete result of usury upon the habit of industry can be realized in those who have grown up under its influence; those who have an income secure from invested funds. When there is no need, present nor prospective, there is no motive to active industry, and the love of ease and pleasure grows and drives out all heart for productive effort.

The industrious habit coupled with economy is called thrift. It is not parsimony or unwillingness to give, but a disposition to save. Our Lord, who was the prince of givers and inculcated unlimited giving among his followers, gave a lesson in thrift when he said after his miracle, "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost."

Enforced industry and economy is not thrift. When by low wages or grinding conditions the necessities of life are with difficulty secured, the very opposite disposition may be cultivated. When the external restraints are removed, the wildest extravagance may be indulged in. This is sometimes given as an excuse for low, grinding wages; that "the workmen and their wives have no idea of saving;" that higher wages would be wasted in foolish extravagance.

No one in normal conditions will be wasteful of that which has cost him hard labor. His care for it will naturally be in proportion to the effort that was necessary to secure it. Those who waste the wealth of the world are not those who by the sweat of their faces have produced it. The habit of thrift comes from the knowledge of the value of a thing, learned by earning it. Only that which comes without effort will be spent without thought. Those who have livings secured from the increase or interest of "productive" capital, having no need of industry, are wholly occupied with the spending; but in spending only, the value of the thing spent is not appreciated, the habit of extravagance grows and they become the idlers and the spendthrifts of the world.

2. It prevents open and frank honesty. When the thought is turned to an endeavor to secure a dollar that is not earned, there is secretiveness of purpose and inward guile. No person doing business on borrowed capital advertises the number and amount of his loans nor does he welcome inquiry by others. In a column of advertisements by money lenders in a newspaper lying on this table every one promises "privacy" or "no publicity." No one can be so open and frank as the one who earns every dollar that he receives or seeks.

The possibility of speculation is ruinous. The first step in the wreck of integrity in a young man's character is when he becomes absorbed in some scheme by which he can secure gain without honestly earning it. Lotteries are outlaws not only because they defraud but they undermine integrity and honest industry.