‘I cannot say now. I _had_ my idea; but something has driven it quite out of my head within the last few minutes.’
‘Well, we shall soon see what he is like without cudgelling our brains about it. He will be here in a week or two, if he is as sharp about coming as he was about my going. Of course he will meet you, even if he persists in refusing to see anybody else; and I hope he won’t do that. Our plan must be to bring him to reason somehow; and I am ready to submit to a good deal in order to bring that about.... But I say, Madge, now that we have had just as much worry as if I had really gone away for ever so long, you are not going to stick to that stupid idea of putting off till next harvest?’
‘We are to wait till then—at least,’ she answered, shaking her head and laughing.
But Philip did not regard this decision as irrevocable.
A short time ago, an English County Court judge made some remarks on money-lending, which apparently were listened to by those who heard him with considerable interest, and perhaps with a certain amount of surprise. The case upon which he was adjudicating was one of those money-lending bills-of-sale transactions that so frequently come before County Court judges, and with which the public are unfortunately only too familiar. The judge said that he would take that opportunity of making some observations on the general question of money-lending, suggested by the particular case before him.
There was, he said, one important matter forgotten by persons who indiscriminately denounced money-lenders, which was, that ‘poor people must have loans.’ He did not see how, in special circumstances, they could get on without loans. Nor did he believe that borrowers were the innocent, ignorant victims—the deceived, foolish, and unsuspecting ‘flies’ lured into the ‘spider’s web’—that they generally were represented to be. He would say there what he had already said to the Government. The Board of Trade had requested all County Court judges to give their experience relative to usury, loan societies, and bills of sale. The object of the President of the Board of Trade in applying to County Court judges was of course to obtain guidance in some prospective and promised legislation on the above subjects, intended more effectually to protect inoffensive and worthy men from the wolves and Shylocks of society. The judge of whom we are speaking gave as his answer, that borrowers of money were quite competent to look after their own interests. His experience had led him to the conclusion that in bills-of-sale transactions there were as many knaves among the borrowers as there were among the lenders. For if the money-lender was often unscrupulous, extortionate, and ready to take every undue advantage of his needy clientèle; the borrower was as frequently a tricky, lying rogue, who misrepresented his circumstances, who rarely intended to repay the loan, and who thought there was nothing very far wrong in cheating and defrauding the Society or the person who lent him money.