Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/107

Rh with such clumsy weapons as they were most skilled in wielding, looting the homesteads, uprooting and trampling down the green blades of wheat and barley, which stood as representatives of the growing heresy, and, with a logic peculiar to theological zealots and ecclesiastical inquisitors in all ages, refuting the new doctrine and resisting the reformatory movement by greater energy and assiduity in the ancient and honorable calling of cattle-lifting.

As we have already seen, the duty of a man to shield and sustain a tribesman against an alien under all circumstances is imperative. Acts of extortion, treachery, or violence, which would be punished by death if committed against a member of the same tribe, are regarded as indifferent or laudable when the injured person is a foreigner. The same tendency to approve or to extenuate the bad conduct of "brethren" enters also more or less into the ethics of communities or collective bodies which are held together by the bond of belief.

All people in a low state of civilization have a strong prejudice against lending money on interest, and look upon all such transactions as sinful. The same notion still prevails among the lower classes of civilized nations, whose superstitions are in most cases mere survivals of savage life. So strong is this feeling, inculcated and consecrated by religious teachings and traditions, that a certain stigma attaches to the money broker even in the minds of otherwise intelligent persons. "Many lend money on interest," says Cato, "but it is not honorable to do so. Our ancestors enacted in their laws that the thief should restore twofold, but the taker of interest fourfold, from which we see how much worse a usurer was thought to be than a thief."

In general, however, usury, like every other supposed crime, was regarded as wrong only when applied to kindred or tribesmen. The Jews were forbidden to "take a breed of barren metal" from those of their own faith, but might exact it from Gentiles. Curiously enough, in the middle ages this privilege was granted to the Jews, not in the spirit of favoritism, but as a necessity to sovereigns and to society and from feelings of utter scorn and contempt. As neither government nor trade could do without this vilely esteemed vocation, the Jews were selected to carry it on, because they were considered a vile people incapable alike of improvement or of deeper degradation. The state and the Church, which felt an interest in the spiritual welfare and safety of the Christian, were wholly indifferent to the future fate of the Jew. That sweet saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, surnamed the honeyflowing teacher (doctor mellifluus), urged the rulers of his day to tolerate the Jews, not because he hated persecution, but in order that Christians might not be constrained to imperil the salvation of their souls by the sin of usury. The Israelitic pariahs of