ity
of poor people. It was done by confining the controversy to a small
world of wealth and refinement, remote from all the real facts involved.
For the rich are the most ignorant people on earth, and the best
that can be said for them, in cases like these, is that their
ignorance often reaches the point of innocence.

I will take a typical case, which sums up the whole of this
absurd fashion. There was a controversy in the columns
of an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subject
of the character of Shylock in Shakespeare. Actors and authors
of distinction, including some of the most brilliant of living Jews,
argued the matter from the most varied points of view.
Some said that Shakespeare was prevented by the prejudices
of his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock.
Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powers
of his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock.
Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queer
story as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly have
to do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock.
In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so much
of an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he must
have been a Pro-Semite. But all of them in a sense admitted
that they were puzzled as to what the play was about.
The correspondence filled column after column and went on for weeks.
And from one end of that correspondence to the other, no human
being even so much as mentioned the word "usury." It is exactly
as if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month about
the play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mention
the word "murder."

The play called _The Merchant of Venice_ happens to be about usury,
and its story is a medieval satire on usury. It is the fashion
to say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact it
is an exceedingly good story. It is a perfect and pointed story
for its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story. And the
moral is that the logic of usury is in its nature at war with life,
and might logically end in breaking into the bloody house of life.
In other words, if a creditor can always claim a man's tools or a
man's home, he might quite as justly claim one of his arms or legs.
This principle was not only embodied in medieval satires but in very
sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying
to t