Excerpt from An Address on the Subject of the Usury Laws: An Answer to the Hon. John Whipple, of Rhode Island The pamphlet of Mr. Whipple, on the Usury Laws, demands our attention, from the importance of the subject, and from the claim made by the advocates of stringent usury laws, of his having treated the question with great ability; moreover, his pretensions in the outset are of a nature to excite no inconsi derable degree of expectation. He lays down the object of his treatise in the following words: To make an attempt to re move the prejudices which prevail (to a limited extent) among some men in trade, on account of the gross misrepresentations which have been made by Mr. Bentham, and others of his school, I am satisfied that most men have not given them selves the trouble of investigating the true policy and design of those laws, nor the principle upon which they are founded.' It is not my intention to attempt to demonstrate all the fal lacies with which his treatise everywhere abounds. It cannot be considered as an investigation merely tinctured with doubt ful or erroneous theory, but as a collection of positions, all of them either self-evident or obviously false, and founded on errors which the slightest attention is sufficient to detect. This is my fair and candid opinion, and I can scarcely doubt that it will also be that of every man who reads his pamphlet, with any reasonable knowledge of the subject. He has proceeded upon the common idea, that money is not the product of labor, but is brought into existence solely by the action of govern ment that it has no inherent value of itself; that the stamp of the government upon it is not a certificate as to the quantity of pure silver or gold contained in each coin respectively, but merely makes it a representative or test of the value of other articles. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.