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 Although in general there is no limit on the amount of interest which a borrower may agree to pay, equity has always been ready to grant relief from unconscionable bargains. This equitable relief is still available, though it is not so wide as the relief now given to borrowers under the Money-lenders Act 1900. This act provides that where proceedings are taken in any court by a money-lender for the recovery of money lent, and there is evidence which satisfies the court that the interest charged on the loan, or the amounts charged for expenses, inquiries, fines, bonus, premium, renewals, &c., are excessive, and that in either case the transaction is harsh and unconscionable, or is otherwise such that a court of equity would grant relief, the court may reopen the transaction and take an account between the money-lender and the person sued, and may, notwithstanding any statement or settlement of account or any agreement purporting to close previous dealings and create a new obligation, reopen any account already taken between them and relieve the person sued from payment of any sum in excess of the sum adjudged by the court to be fairly due in respect of such principal, interest and charges as the court, having regard to the risk and all the circumstances, may adjudge to be reasonable.

The Money-lenders Act of 1900 was passed in consequence of grave abuses which had arisen. It had been the practice of a certain class of lender to trade under a variety of names; so that under one name the same individual would lend money to a person who borrowed from him under another name; the second loan would be spent in liquidating the first, and the borrower finding it always easy to obtain more money would continue borrowing until he became hopelessly involved. The act struck at the root of this pernicious system by providing that every money-lender, as defined by the act, must register himself as such, under his own or usual trade name, and in no other name, and with the address, or all the addresses if, more than one, at which he carries on his business of a money-lender. If a money-lender fails to register himself, or if he carries on a money-lending business otherwise than in his registered name, or in more names than one, or elsewhere than at his registered address, he is liable on summary conviction to a fine, not exceeding one hundred pounds. For the purposes of the act “money-lender” is defined as including every person whose business is that of money-lending, but it does not include pawnbrokers, in respect of business carried on by them under the Pawnbrokers Act, Registered Friendly, Loan or Building Societies, corporate bodies incorporated or empowered by special act of parliament to lend money, persons bona fide carrying on the business of banking or insurance, or bona fide carrying on any business not having for its primary object the lending of money, or bodies corporate for the time being exempted from registration by order of the Board of Trade.

MONFORTE, or, a town of north-western Spain, in the province of Lugo, on the Cabe, a small right-hand tributary of the Sil, and at the junction of the railways from Tuy and Astorga to Corunna. Pop. (1900), 12,912. Monforte is built on a hill surmounted by a ruined medieval citadel; it contains an ancient Benedictine monastery converted into a hospital, a Jesuit college, and a fine Renaissance parish church, besides several convents and palaces of the Leonese nobility. Monforte has manufactures of soap and linen, and some trade in timber and livestock.

 MONGE, GASPARD (1746–1818), French mathematician, the inventor of descriptive geometry, was born at Beaune on the 10th of May 1746. He was educated first at the college of the Oratorians at Beaune, and then in their college at Lyons—where, at sixteen, the year after he had been learning physics, he was made a teacher of it. Returning to Beaune for a vacation, he made, on a large scale, a plan of the town, inventing the methods of observation and constructing the necessary instruments; the plan was presented to the town, and preserved in their library. An officer of engineers seeing it wrote to recommend Monge to the commandant of the military school at Mézières, and he was received as a draftsman and pupil in the practical school attached to that institution; the school itself was of too aristocratic a character to allow of his admission to it. His manual skill was duly appreciated: “I was a thousand times tempted,” he said long afterwards, “to tear up my drawings in disgust at the esteem in which they were held, as if I had been good for nothing better.” An opportunity, however, presented itself: being required to work out from data supplied to him the “défilement” of a proposed fortress (an operation then only performed by a long arithmetical process), Monge, substituting for this a geometrical method, obtained the result so quickly that the commandant at first refused to receive it—the time necessary for the work had not been taken; but upon examination the value of the discovery was recognized, and the method was adopted. And Monge, continuing his researches, arrived at that general method of the application of geometry to the arts of construction which is now called descriptive geometry (see ). But such was the system in France before the Revolution that the officers instructed in the method were strictly forbidden to communicate it even to those engaged in other branches of the public service; and it was not until many years afterwards that an account of it was published.

In 1768 Monge became professor of mathematics, and in 1771 professor of physics, at Mézières; in 1778 he married Mme Horbon, a young widow whom he had previously defended in a very spirited manner from an unfounded charge; in 1780 he was appointed to a chair of hydraulics at the Lyceum in Paris