# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S328
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

328                    Fifteen Theses on Usury.

that among all branches of earning, this one is unnatural in the
highest degree. — Aristotle here calls attention to two things, in
order to ground his moral abhorrence of usury.

1. Usurers regard interest as rightly belonging to them, because
through the use of money a gain comes about which has the ground of
its existence in the capital, and therefore belongs to them, as its
possessors, as an accessory. They therefore treat money like a
fruit-bearing creature that multiplies in itself, whose fruit accrues
to its owner. But since money is not a fruit-bearing thing, its fruit
too is an unnatural, counterfeit product, whereby the order of nature
is inverted — which in this case consists in this: that what belongs
to the debtor is not the creditor's property, and that what is added
to the capital out of another's money does not grow out of the capital
itself.*)

2. Since money is only a token made current by general agreement,
which is received for a good for the purpose of being able to exchange
it for another good that one wishes to have, and since these tokens
can naturally increase only through goods given in exchange, it is
unnatural — that is, here: immoral, rapacious — to obtain an increase
of new tokens by means merely of the tokens lent out. Aristotle is
thus in agreement with Holy Scripture, which declares usury an
abomination. — Further, Aristotle says in his Ethics, 4, 3: Covetousness
extends to many things and is of various kinds. Since it consists
chiefly in two things, namely too little giving and too much taking, it
is not found complete in everyone, but sometimes separated, in that
some take too much, others fall short in giving. Those who exceed the
measure in taking do so by taking from everywhere and every kind of
thing, as for example those who practice a disgraceful trade, gaining
a large profit through repeated small gains — both brothel-keepers and
all of that sort, as well as those who take interest on lent money.
For all these take from where they should not, and as much as they
should not. In all of them alike, however, sordid greed for gain is
evident. For they all subject themselves to shameful actions for the
sake of gain, and a small one at that. For those who, on a large
scale, from where and what

*) So too Shakespeare says with abhorrence of usurers, that they obtain a
brood or breed from the barren metal, a thing that could rightly be practiced
only upon an enemy.