# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S332
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

332 Fifteen Theses on Usury.

condition of surrendering one equal to it has become the debtor's
property, is inequitable, since the time lying between the lending
and the repaying is not the lender's property, such that he might
demand compensation for its consumption; also because an advantage
is rightful only when it is reciprocal — that is, when it has its
ground in the differing character of the leased thing and of the
rental money; further, because the usurer has neither trouble nor
expense in preserving the thing lent, since it has become the
debtor's property; in short, because such a claim imposes a payment
for the mere fact that the owner uses his own property. Since, then,
it is an untruth to represent lending at usury as being a contract
of lease essentially different from it, this too is forbidden by the
moral law.

IX. It is against the moral law to regard usurious interest as wages earned for service rendered.

Proof: It belongs to the essence of such a service — one that is not the performance of what others may demand by a certain right, nor that by which one seeks to oblige another, but that by which a definite wage is lawfully earned — that it be labor, that is, the sustained, strenuous exertion of bodily or mental powers toward a fixed end. Since God has ordained that man shall eat his bread in the sweat of his face, it is fair and right that the laborer receive from him for whose benefit he labors the means necessary for life, as compensation for the strength expended. But since the lending out of a capital sum requires no sustained, strenuous exertion of bodily or mental powers for which a wage might fairly be demanded, and since, moreover, the greater or lesser amount stipulated above the sum lent is never reckoned according to the greater or lesser exertion of strength that the lending required, it would be nothing but a mendacious pretext to construe interest as wages for services rendered.

X. The moral law forbids regarding usurious interest as a fair reward for the favor shown in lending.

Proof: Since the favor shown in lending is not labor that could, by justice and equity, demand a definite compensation for expended strength out of the other's goods, the recompense would have to be demanded solely for the friendly disposition. And since, further, a friendly disposition is no salable good that the one could make over to the other for compensation, the fairness of any recompense can have its ground only in the idea of requital. This now demands that like be re-