VII.
DEBT AND SLAVERY.
“And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”—Leviticus 25:10.
“Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine government and corrupt the people.”—Wendell Phillips.
FROM the earliest dawn of history debt has ever borne a close relationship to slavery and servitude. “It is worthy of remark,” says Grote (History of Greece, vol. III., p. 144), “that the first borrowers must have been for the most part driven to this necessity by the pressure of want, contracting debt as a desperate resource without any fair prospect of ability to pay. Debt and famine run together in the mind of the poet Hesiod. The borrower is in this unhappy state rather a distressed man soliciting aid than a solvent man capable of making and fulfilling a contract; and if he cannot find a friend to make a free gift to him in the former character he would not under the latter character obtain a loan from a stranger except by the promise of exorbitant interest and by the fullest eventual power over his person which he is in a position to grant.”
“This remark,” says Professor Nicholson in the Encyclopedia Britannica, “suggested by the state of society in ancient Greece, is largely applicable throughout the world until the close of the early Middle Ages.” The conditions of ancient usury find a graphic illustration in the account of the building of the second temple at Jerusalem (Nehemiah 5:1-12). Some said: “We have mortgaged our lands, vineyards and houses that we might buy corn, because of the dearth.” Others said: “We have borrowed money for the king’s tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyards, ... and lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants, ... neither is it in our power to redeem them, for other men have our lands and vineyards.”
In ancient Greece we find a law of bankruptcy resting on slavery. In Athens, about the time of Solon’s legislation (594 B. C.), the bulk of the population who had originally been small proprietors became gradually indebted to the rich to such an extent that they were practically slaves; those who nominally owned their property owed more than they could pay, and stone pillars erected on their land showed the amount of the debts and the names of the lenders. Solon’s remedy for this state of affairs was to cancel all debts made on the security of the land or the person of the debtor, and at the same time he enacted that henceforth no loans could be made on the bodily security of the debtor, and the creditor was confined to a share of the property.
In Rome’s early history practically the same conditions prevailed as in Greece. About 500 B. C. an attempt was made to remedy the evil by providing a maximum rate of interest, no alteration being made, however, in the law of debt. In the course of a few centuries the free farmers were utterly destroyed. The pressure of war and taxes and usury drove all into debt and into practical, if not technical, slavery. The old law of debt was not really abolished until the dictatorship of Julius Cæsar, who then practically adopted Solon’s legislation of more than five centuries before, but too late to save the middle class.
In the course of centuries and the evolution of civilization chattel slavery has been abolished; but the slavery of debt still remains, and usury is now, as it was in all the history of mankind, the tool with which debt forges the chains of nations. It is not the province of this work to examine into the conditions of other countries than our own, but the facts now to be presented will convince the thoughtful reader that the American people are bound by chains of debt which it will require the wisest statesmanship to break.
Representative Warner of Massachusetts (Republican), in a speech delivered in Congress in 1894, stated that the interest-bearing debts of the United States, public and private, aggregated a grand total of $32,000,000,000 (thirty-two billions of dollars). This would be bad enough, but careful estimates by conservative students of political economy show that the amount is very much larger.