for a clause for fixing and reducing the price of horses. I need not expatiate on the usefulness of that valuable species of cattle, which might have been as cheap as asses before now, if our lawgivers had been as mindful of their duty in the suppression of jockeyship, as they have been in the suppression of usury.

It may be said, against fixing the price of horse-flesh, that different horses may be of different values. I answer-and I think I shall shew you as much, when I come to touch upon the subject of champerty-not more different than the values which the use of the same sum of money may be of to different persons, on different occasions.

LETTER X.

Grounds of the Prejudices against Usury.

IT is one thing, to find reasons why it is fit a law should have been made : it is another to find the reasons why it was made in other words, it is one thing to justify a law: it is another thing to account for its existence. In the present instance, the former task, if the observations I have been troubling you with are just, is an impossible one. The other, though not necessary for conviction, may contribute something perhaps in the way of satisfaction. To trace an error to its fountain head, says lord Coke, is to

refute

refute it; and many men there are who, till they have received this satisfaction, be the error what it may, cannot prevail upon themselves to part with it. "If our ancestors have been all along "under a mistake, how came they to "have fallen into it?" is a question that naturally presents itself upon all such occasions. The case is, that in matters of law more especially, such is the dominion of authority over our minds, and such the prejudice it creates in favour of whatever institution it has taken under its wing, that, after all manner of reasons that can be thought of, in favour of the institution, have been shewn to be insufficient, we still cannot forbear looking to some unassignable and latent reason for its efficient cause. But if, instead of any such reason, we can find a cause for it in some notion, of the erroneousness of

which

which we are already satisfied, then at last we are content to give it up without further struggle; and then, and not till then, our satisfaction is complete.

In the conceptions of the more considerable part of those through whom our religion has been handed down to us, virtue, or rather godliness, which was an improved substitute for virtue, consisted in self-denial: not in self-denial for the sake of society, but of selfdenial for its own sake. One pretty general rule served for most occasions: not to do what you had a mind to do; or, in other words, not to do what would be for your advantage. this of course was meant temporal advantage: to which spiritual advantage was understood to be in constant and diametrical opposition. For, the proof of a resolution, on the part of a being

By

of

of perfect power and benevolence, to make his few favourites happy in a state in which they were to be, was his determined pleasure, that they should keep themselves as much strangers to happiness as possible, in the state in which they were. Now to get money is what most men have a mind to do: because he who has money gets, as far as it goes, most other things that he has a mind for. Of course nobody was to get money: indeed why should he, when he was not so much as to keep what he had got already? To lend money at interest, is to get money, or at least to try to get it of course it was a bad thing to lend money upon such terms. The better the terms, the worse it was to lend upon them but it was bad to lend upon any terms, by which any thing could