The Unpopular Review | Page 4

so serious, so intimately associated with all other evils, social
and political, that you hear men over their very cups rise to proclaim,
with husky voices, "The saloon must go!" At this point the community
is ripe for prohibition: accordingly, it would seem that the initial stages
in the process, unpleasant as were their consequences, were not
ill-advised, after all. But prohibition does not come without a political
struggle, in which the enemy, selected for brazenness and schooled in
corruption, employs methods that leave lasting scars upon the body
politic. And even when vanquished, the enemy retreats into the
morasses of "unenforcible laws," to conduct a guerilla warfare that
knows no rules. Let us grant that the ultimate gain is worth all it costs:
are we sure that we have taken the best possible means to achieve our
ends?
In the poorer quarters of most great American cities, there is much
property that it is difficult for a man to hold without losing the respect
of the enlightened. Old battered tenements, dingy and ill lighted
tumbledown shacks, the despair of the city reformer. Let us say that the

proximity of gas tanks or noisy railways or smoky factories consign
such quarters to the habitation of the very poor. Quite possibly, then,
the replacement of the existing buildings by better ones would
represent a heavy financial loss. The increasing social disapprobation
of property vested in such wretched forms leads to the gradual
substitution of owners who hold the social approval in contempt, for
those who manifest a certain degree of sensitiveness. The tenants
certainly gain nothing from the change. What is more likely to happen,
is a screwing up of rents, an increasing promptness of evictions. Public
opinion will in the end be roused against the landlords; the more timid
among them will sell their holdings to others not less ruthless, but
bolder and more astute. Attempts at public regulation will be fought
with infinitely greater resourcefulness than could possibly have been
displayed by respectable owners. Perhaps the final outcome will be that
more drastic regulations are adopted than would have been the case had
the shifting in ownership not taken place. There would still remain the
possibility of the evasion of the law, and it is not at all improbable that
the progress in the technique of evasion would outstrip the progress in
regulation, thus leaving the tenant with a balance of disadvantage from
the process as a whole.
The most illuminating instance of a business interest subjected first to
excommunication--literally--and then to outlawry, is that of the usurer,
or, in modern parlance, the loan shark. To the mediæval mind there was
something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to
the furnishing of personal loans. We need not stop to defend the
mediæval position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an
opportunity for profit--that is, a potential property interest--was
outlawed. In consequence it became impossible for reputable citizens to
engage in the business. Usury therefore came to be monopolized by
aliens, exempt from the current ethical formulation, who were
"protected," for a consideration, by the prince, just as dubious modern
property interests may be protected by the political boss.
Let us summarize the results of eight hundred years of experience in
this method of dealing with the usurer's trade. The business shifted
from the control of citizens to that of aliens; from the hands of those
who were aliens merely in a narrow, national sense, to the hands of
those who are alien to our common humanity. Such lawless, tricky,

extortionate loan sharks as now infest our cities were probably not to be
found at all in mediæval or early modern times. They are a product of a
secular process of selection. Their ability to evade the laws directed
against them is consummate. It is true that from time to time we do
succeed in catching one and fining him, or even imprisoning him. For
which risk the small borrower is forced to pay, at a usurer's rate.
Social improvement through the excommunication of property interests
is inevitably a disorderly process. Wherever it is in operation we are
sure to find the successive stages indicated in the foregoing examples.
First, a gradual substitution of the conscienceless property holder for
the one responsive to public sentiment. Next, under the threat of hostile
popular action, the timid and resourceless property owner gives way to
the resourceful and the bold. The third stage in the process is a vigorous
political movement towards drastic regulation or abolition, evoking a
desperate attempt on the part of the interests threatened to protect
themselves by political means--that is, by gross corruption; or, if the
menaced interest is a vast one, dominating a defensible territory, by
armed rebellion, as in our own Civil