re
themselves likely to recognize: but, as I pause in front of the
infinitude of the evil that I cannot find so much as thought to
follow--how much less words to speak!--a letter is brought to me which
gives what perhaps may be more impressive in its single and historical
example, than all the general evidence gathered already in the pages of
_Fors Clavigera_.

* * * * *

167. "I could never understand formerly what you meant about usury, and
about its being wrong to take interest. I said, truly, then that I
'trusted you,' meaning I knew that in such matters you did not
'opine'--and that innumerable things were within your horizon which had
no place within mine.

"But as I did not understand I could only watch and ponder. Gradually I
came to see a little--as when I read current facts about India--about
almost every country, and about our own trade, etc. Then (one of several
circumstances that could be seen more closely) among my mother's kindred
in the north, I watched the ruin of two lives. They began married life
together, with good prospects and sufficient means, in a lovely little
nest among the hills, beyond the Rochdale smoke. Soon this became too
narrow. 'A splendid trade,' more mills, frequent changes into even finer
dwellings, luxurious living, ostentation, extravagance, increasing year
by year, all, as now appears, made possible by usury--borrowed capital.
The wife was laid in her grave lately, and her friends are _thankful_.
The husband, with ruin threatening his affairs, is in a worse, and
living, grave of evil habits."

"These are some of the loopholes through which light has fallen
upon your words, giving them a new meaning, and making me wonder
how I could have missed seeing it from the first. Once alive to it,
I recognize the evil on all sides, and how we are entangled by it;
and though I am still puzzled at one or two points, I am very clear
about the principle--that usury is a deadly thing,"

Yes; and deadly always with the vilest forms of destruction both to soul
and body.

168. It happens strangely, my Lord, that although throughout the seven
volumes of _Fors Clavigera_, I never have set down a sentence without
chastising it first into terms which could be _literally_ as well as in
their widest bearing justified against all controversy, you could
perhaps not have found in the whole book, had your Lordship read it for
the purpose, an