MONEYLENDERS AND THEIR CUSTOMERS.
ACORRESPONDENT, who has much experience in the subject on which he writes, makes this week in our columns a proposal for a serious restriction of the detested moneylender's trade. He would make it a penal offence to lend money to a minor without the consent of his parent or his guardian. That is, at all events, a definite proposal, and one that would have effects ; and we have little doubt that "A Guardian and Trustee" will find plenty of sympathisers in the well-to-do section of the community, and even perhaps in the House of Commons. The tendency of the day is to believe that every evil can be put down by legislation, and this evil, besides being a widespread, is a peculiarly exasperating one. It is most irritating to a father or a guardian who has taken great trouble for many years to protect a son's or a ward's, it may be slender, fortune, to find that, just as majority approaches, the lad has been tempted by some moneylender to cut deep into his capital, that he has been spending, often on vicious enjoyment, half the sum which was to have started him in life or enabled him to marry, and that—for this is an additional pang—he has not even had the money which he is called upon to pay, but another sum much less in amount, swollen by interest, commission, renewals, and fines for irregular performance of promises. Alike as disciplinarian and as trustee, the guardian feels horribly aggrieved; and as he cannot punish the borrower except by a lecture which has, he fears, but little effect, he would like very much to have the power to punish the lad's associate in extravagance, whom he suspects of being the real instigator of the offence. He has a good deal of reason on his side too. There can be no doubt that a large number of rascals with capital make a regular trade of offering money to lads with expectations, that they help to create the ex- travagance they feed, and that they take every possible advantage of the rawness and ignorance of their inex- perienced clients. The mischief they do and the misery they cause are often very great indeed, and if it were possible to put a stop to their proceedings there would be no more opposition than there is to the laws against lotteries, the laws against betting, or the laws which place the pawnbroking trade tinder such strict restraints. Society has a perfect right to protect itself, if it right- fully can, against nuisances of the kind, and to declare, if it pleases, that it will protect minors, whatever their age, as it
would lunatics or idiots or persons under durance. There are plenty of laws the only justification for which is evident expediency, and nobody doubts that it is expedient to prevent a minor from wasting the cash which a few years afterwards he may so sorely need.
Nevertheless, our correspondent's proposal will not be, and cannot be, embodied in law. To begin with, it goes altogether beyond what the general conscience will tolerate. The offence as a moral offence depends too entirely on the character of the "victim." He may be a child in knowledge of the world, as little able to defend himself as if he were still in swaddling clothes; but he may also be a keen young man, knowing exactly what he is about, as little capable of being cheated as the moneylender himself, and only a borrower because he thinks, after consideration, that, say, 2300 at twenty is worth more to him than £600 will be at twenty-one. No Parliamentary draftsman could distinguish shades of character in minors, and in the second case, no jury would return a verdict entailing penal consequences. They would think it quite sufficient that the lender should lose his money, and the law, even if it could not be evaded, would be dead as soon as it had been passed. It could, however, be evaded with ease. The moneylender would only have to sell to the borrower something which the latter could pawn—say diamonds or bonds—and the criminal transaction would become an ordinary matter of business, which it would be as impossible to punish criminally as to imprison a tailor for selling a mis- fit, or to send a man to Portland for selling a jewelled bicycle to the fool who wanted one. To carry out the law it would be necessary to make all dealings with minors not previously sanctioned by parents or guardians criminal offences, and we need not say that in a community like ours no body of electors would endure, and no legislature would accept, any legislation of the kind. It is as much as the public conscience will bear that a minor who chooses to plead minority need not pay for anything not necessary ; and even that, as all lawyers know, irritates the Courts, and is denounced by plaintiffs' counsel with general approval as "a shameful plea." The moneylender has not cheated the community as a smuggler does, and as regards the individual, opinion demands that before a penal sentence can be passed some kind of offence against the general conscience shall be clearly proved. There may be such an offence in moneylending if the borrower is virtually an idiot ; but if he is not, the offence is too clearly a civil one to entail penal consequences. You might as well imprison the companions who so often stimulate by their admiration a youngster's extravagance. After all, a lad is not so hopelessly ruined by being a little poorer at twenty-one than he was expected to be, that the ordinary principles which govern English criminal law should be sus- pended in his favour ; nor are parents and guardians so sacred that a first principle of justice, a proportionate relation between offence and punishment, should be set aside to shield them from annoyance.
We have placed the argument from expediency first because it is the one which will first strike our readers ; but we have a much stronger one in reserve. Our corre- spondent, like almost every one who discusses this question, is interested only for parents and guardians, and entirely for- gets to consider the effect of his proposal, if it were carried oat, upon the new generation. That could only be disastrous. Every lad who borrowed money unknown to the "people at home" would be consciously and knowingly a participant in a criminal transaction, would be helping the lender to defy the law, and would himself nine times out of ten become an actual criminal. It is perfectly certain that if he wants money exceed- ingly, the average youngster of the day will try to borrow. It is perfectly certain that whatever the law may be, somebody, probably a disreputable jackal of the capitalist behind, will lend him the money at a price, and it is perfectly certain that declarations essential to the transaction would become as much "common form" as oaths not to wear coloured breeches in College, or the declarations of " travellers " who on Sunday want a glass of beer. The borrower of twenty would declare that he was of age without a scruple, and pledge his personal honour besides never to reveal the transaction. There is nothing more demoralising than the former kind of perjury, while in the latter case, if the borrower resisted the debt, or 'volunteered evidence against the lender, he would lower him- self irreparably in his own eyes, and probably be cut by all
his most reputable acquaintances. It is the ward of whom the "Trustee and Guardian" ought to think, not of himself, and his proposal would infallibly, if it were accepted, tend to lower the character of every ward, whose penchant for ex- travagance, though it may ruin him, need not necessarily debase the foundations of his nature. We are by no means certain that we have not gone too far in this direction already. The irresponsibility of minors does not tend to diminish their general extravagance; it enormously increases their losses, the moneylender protecting himself against the law by extrava- gant rates ; while only too often a sharp and unscrupulous lad relies on it as a weapon with which he will fight his "Jew" when the hour of settlement arrives. There must, of course, be a limit of age below which there is no respon- sibility, and Parliament must fix it ; but we are not clear that as regards debts it is not fixed too high, or that a lad in a University or a military school or a merchant's office would not be much more economical if fully aware that his respon- sibility for his own conduct was complete. We mean this seriously. It seems to us that the first use of law is to stimulate a conscience apt to be asleep, and that in a pleasure- seeking age we have in this matter of debt relaxed it at least as far as it is at all advisable. A lad of nineteen knows per- fectly well that if he borrows he ought to repay, and if he borrows of a comrade always does repay, and the law, in carefully teaching him that he is under no such obligation, does him a disservice which is only not great because nine times out of ten his instinct as a gentleman induces him to treat the law as non-existent.
We have not the slightest objection to a law limiting the legal rate of interest for money, except that it is of no manner of use, and we do not care how strictly the law presses upon any moneydealer who is guilty of fraud; but we do not like the proposals, now so incessant, to increase the irrespon- sibility of the young. Boys, no doubt, remain child! n much longer than they used to do, the whole tendency of life being to postpone its discipline ; but at eighteen they know, or ought to know, what pecuniary obligation means, and we are not clear that the knowledge ought not to. be enforced by law. We do not declare all stupid men irre- sponsible for their debts, and if we may judge by the cases which come into Court, University lads of twenty are far better able than the stupid to protect themselves. Of all weaknesses perhaps extravagance has the most disastrous results, but then of all foibles it is the one as regards which punishment teaches most, and in averting or lightening punishment we may be doing nothing but mischief. That is an unpopular doctrine just now, but we are afraid that the next generation will find that it was a true one.
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