FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER LXX.
I have been not a little pestered this month by the quantities of letters, which I can’t wholly cure myself of the weakness of reading, from people who fancy that, like other political writers of the day, I print, on the most important subjects, the first thing that comes into my head; and may be made immediately to repent of what I have said, and generally to see the error of my ways, by the suggestions of their better judgment.
Letters of this sort do not surprise me if they have a Scottish postmark, the air of Edinburgh having always had a curiously exciting quality, and amazing power over weak heads; but one or two communications from modest and thoughtful English friends have seriously troubled me by the extreme simplicity of their objections to statements which, if not acceptable, I had at least hoped would have been intelligible to them. [[312]]
I had, indeed, expected difficulty in proving to my readers the mischievousness of Usury; but I never thought to find confusion in their minds between Property itself, and its Interest. Yet I find this singular confusion at the root of the objections made by most of my cavilling correspondents: “How are we to live” (they say) “if, when we have saved a hundred pounds, we can’t make a hundred and five of them, without any more trouble?”
Gentlemen and ladies all,—you are to live on your hundred pounds, saved; and if you want five pounds more, you must go and work for five pounds more; just as a man who hasn’t a hundred pounds must work for the first five he gets.
The following sentence, written by a man of real economical knowledge, expresses, with more than usual precision, the common mistake: “I much fear if your definition of Usury be correct, which is to the effect that it is a sin to derive money from the possession of capital, or otherwise than by our own personal work. Should we follow this proposition to its final logical conclusion, we must preach communism, pure and simple, and contend that property is theft,—which God forbid.”
To this correspondent I answered briefly, “Is my house not my property unless I let it for lodgings, or my wife not my property unless I prostitute her?” [[313]]
But I believe it will be well, though I intended to enter on other matters this month, to repeat instead once more, in the shortest and strongest terms I can find, what I have now stated at least a hundred times respecting the eternal nature and sanctity of ‘Property.’
A man’s ‘Property,’ the possession ‘proper’ to him, his own, rightly so called, and no one else’s on any pretence of theirs—consists of,