present enjoy, or would be compelled to purchase it at an exorbitant rate; because the number of persons to whom they can apply for it being small, those persons have a monopoly against them, and would impose their own terms upon them. That such small dealers would be obliged to allow a rate of discount on their bills somewhat higher than would be charged on the bills of eminent houses is likely enough, and is a consequence of the first principles of commercial credit. Such bills are really of different values. A bill bearing Mr, Rothschild's name would be cashed in any part of the civilized world by any individual who chose to deal in bills. But when A. B., a small manufacturer in some remote county, draws upon C. D.,.an obscure tradesman in London; though they may each, in proportion to the extent of their dealings, be as solvent as Mr. Rothschild, yet the number of persons, who know that they are so, is so small, that any one willing to cash their bill, has a right to consider that if he should happen to want money before it becomes due, he has little chance of being able to get it cashed again; and he may therefore fairly require an increased rate of discount to compensate for this disadvantage. But that an unreasonable compensation could be exacted, we by no means believe. Putting the disadvantages of such small traders in the strongest light possible, it is yet quite clear, that they will not allow a greater discount than their profits enable them to afford; if a greater be demanded, they will not discount at all, and no capitalist will insist upon such terms as will destroy his own market, and put an end at once to a connexion in the continuance of which, upon fair terms, he has as great an interest as the person to whom he affords the requisite accommodation; for in this, as in every other branch of trade, the benefits derived from the intercourse must be mutual, or the intercourse will cease. Fraud in this case is out of the question; for the small and large traders have the same means of knowing the general rate of discount. It has been supposed that the usury laws confer an advantage on the government in its pecuniary transactions, of which it would be unwise to deprive it. It would be impossible to describe with precise accuracy the mode in which the operations of the government in the money market would be affected by the repeal, without a more minute consideration of many complicated circumstances than our limits will allow us to engage in; we may still, however, show, even by a very general view of this branch of our subject, that the supposed advantage is imaginary. As the case stands at present, the government is free from the operation of the law; it can, therefore, give any amount of interest for the money it borrows; and this circumstance is supposed to give it a sort sort of monopoly whenever the market rate of interest is above the legal rate. But they who reason thus, forget the notorious fact that the usury laws are completely evaded upon the Stock Exchange, the great market in which the government does and must carry on its pecuniary operations. It is, indeed, well for the government that they are so. The great contractor who bids for the loan does not carry millions of money in his pocket to Downing Street; but he undertakes to procure the money, in the confidence that he shall be able to do so by a number of subordinate loans, in the negociation of which he will be practically as free as the government itself. If this were not the case he must deal with the government on harder terms, because he would feel that in his own future operations he might be obliged to have recourse to more disadvantageous means of fulfilling his engagements than borrowing at 6 per cent., or any other rate which he may find necessary; as he now knows he shall have the power of doing. That the usury laws are capable of being evaded in practice in other places as well as on the Stock Exchange, we have already shown; but we will here suppose that they are everywhere else implicitly obeyed, both in the letter and the spirit. If that were so, the government would certainly enjoy a monopoly in the money market, as against the landed and trading bodies, whenever the market rate of interest was above 5 per cent. Those bodies however are not strangers to the government, but component parts of that general body politic which wants to borrow; and of which the government is only the representative and agent. Now it is quite clear that an advantage gained by the body politic over all its members is no advantage at all; because, whatever the body gains the members must lose; and, as all the members make up the whole body, the amount of their losses must equal, and conse-' quently neutralize, the gain of the body. But if the gain of the body be at the expense of some only of the members, such gain is still no benefit to the body at large, which suffers by the pressure thrown on some members, exactly as much as it profits by the relief given to others; it is merely an unfair advantage given' to those members who do not contribute to the loss, at the expense of those who do; for by such an arrangement the burthens of the community become unequally distributed, and those who bear the loss which corresponds to the gain of the government, are compelled to support alone a weight which ought to be shared with them by the possessors of other descriptions of property. The government, then, can never enjoy any real advantage in consequence of a monopoly in the money market; the only effect of such a monopoly, if it produce any effect at all, being to shift part part of the public burthens from the shoulders of those who can evade the monopoly to the shoulders of those who cannot. There is still a strong hold left to the supporters of the usury laws the repeal will be an innovation, say they, and nobody can tell what will be the consequence, till it has been tried. The objection is inapplicable, because the laws may be restored at any time, if their abrogation should be found mischievous. Innovations which give new rights may be dangerous, because it may not be safe or practicable to take away such rights when once given, however urgently the general good may require it: but the removal of these restraints will neither entitle nor empower any man or set of men to resist the restoration of them whenever it shall seem good to the legislature. There is then, as it seems to us, no good reason for maintaining the usury laws. They are neither necessary nor effectual for the prevention of fraud; they are not advantageous to the government; they are positively injurious to all classes of the people, to which their operation extends. ART. VIII.-Don Esteban, or Memoirs of a Spaniard, written by himself. In three volumes, 8vo. London. 1825. THẬT a Spaniard has furnished a part of the materials of this work cannot be doubted; but that every thing which the author relates is to be considered as simple matter of fact, with the sole exception of those names which he has assigned to the parties figuring in the merely biographical part of his story,' is an assertion which no attentive reader will credit. Whatever there is of truth in these volumes has been foisted into a tale, which we are strongly inclined to attribute to some one of our English third-rate Novel writers. But even in those portions of the book, in which we discover the hand of a native, there is a something inexplicable to the Spanish scholar, who has studied the manners and habits of Spaniards in their own country. The national features are certainly there; but so distorted, so like a portrait attempted by an unskilful painter, half from recollection, half from description, that we confess we are at a loss to conjecture the whole truth as to the stock and parentage of this work. In the first place, many of the Spanish words, of which there is an affected display, are mangled in a manner which it seems scarcely possible to attribute to the hand of a native; and blunders perpetually occur, betraying that half knowledge of a language, which is sure to mislead the possessor, whenever he is determined to be exceedingly accurate. The word Calatayud, for instance, is spelt Calataguz, as as if the writer had forgotten the guttural sound of g before u, and thought himself a perfect Castilian by substituting a z for the final d. In another place, the inhabitants of Cadiz are called Caditans; from which we suspect that the writer failed to catch the sound of the G in the true Spanish word Gaditanos, which preserves it from the Latin Gades.* It is inconceivable how a Spaniard could have supposed that Pero Botero, a synonime of Old Nick, could be translated literally, Swearing Peter, taking Botero for Votero, and imagining that the word, thus altered, can be derived from Voto, an oath. Botero, in fact, comes from Bota, a skin-bottle, the makers of which, being obliged to use a great quantity of melted pitch, and looking not much whiter than our chimney sweepers, have, unhappily for the honour of the trade, exposed their workshops to be made the emblems of the infernal regions. The measure of the short verses of seven and of eight syllables is so familiar to the Spanish ear, that the most illiterate natives, and even mere children, never fail to discover a halting line. Yet, in a quotation from the modern poet Cienfuegos, we find the following stanza. O quanta dulce imagen The last verse exceeds the measure by a syllable; and the pronoun las, in decirlas, which has caused the mischief, is evidently added by a person, who, misguided by his grammar, and unchecked by his ear, has missed the delicate idiom of the poet. The true reading is Quiere decir, y calla. If a Spaniard inserted these verses he must have quitted his country at an early age. No other supposition can, indeed, reconcile the existence in the work of much that must have come from a native, mixed with inaccuracies and mistakes, which no native but a child could have made. There is scarcely a description of manners and customs in the book, which we could not quote in proof of this assertion. The account of the vintage, at the beginning of the work, is, we believe, the only exception; and that attributable perhaps to the circumstance that the author was familiar with it in his boyhood. One of the sketches nearest to nature is that of a talkative Andalusian muleteer; and yet part of it is so exaggerated, that were it It may not be unacceptable to some of our readers to learn, by the way, that the old English appellation Cales for Cadiz was derived from Calis, the name given to that town in the Chronicle of Don Pedro Niño. + It is curious that, in a Paris edition of Cienfuegos, the same verse is altered into Quiere decira, y calla, which preserves the measure by the absence of the s; the two vowels a and y being in that case pronounced together. We should infer from this circumstance that the Paris editor, though not a good scholar, was a native Spaniard, whose ear was his chief guide. translated translated into Spanish, the Andalusians would be inclined to suspect its having come from the hand of some of the English officers, who during the Peninsular war often amused them with their efforts to understand and assume the peculiar humour of the province. When touching upon church matters, Don Esteban is sure to blunder, in a manner which, without showing complete ignorance, betrays a very imperfect recollection of things, which, had he grown up in Spain, he must have known thoroughly, though a layman. What Spaniard could imagine that an ancient image of the Virgin was washed and scoured to take out the dark colour, which age and the lamps had given it; or that the priest of a country town, removing the pix with the consecrated host from the danger of profanation, on the approach of the French, would have put it into the hands of one of the Guerrilla men, who protected the flight? Such a privilege is not allowed even to a clergyman in sub-deacon's orders. The priest, in the case imagined by Don Esteban, evidently for the sake of a picturesque sketch, would have consumed all the consecrated wafers, or carried them in his own bosom. The account of a Romeria,* or annual visit, to some country sanctuary, though prettily told, appears to us to be taken partly from hearsay and partly from imperfect remembrance. All along the fertile plain, at the foot of the hermitage, groups of persons were seen lying on the ground, with their fiambre (cold meat) and botas (borrachios) of wine before them, singing, laughing, and playing all kinds of tricks, all ranks, ages and sexes huddled together, with a cordiality characteristic only of the Spanish nation. There might be seen persons of the true-blue blood, slighting all etiquette, and offering part of their provisions to the plebeian, who, sensible of the honour, sat himself down to eat with them, and treated them with a joke, or some witty story of his own invention; while the handicraftsman politely offered his bota to the hidalgo, both rendering common what each had brought for his family and friends.' All this is well enough, though there is some exaggeration' as to the primitive familiarity with which the picture is coloured. As for the church festivals, the gigantic dancing figures, and the procession which he describes in another part, we think he has borrowed the materials from books already in the hands of the * Romeria is derived, we believe, from Romero, a pilgrim bound to Rome. As by means of the system of indulgences the merit and spiritual benefits of visiting Rome in person, were often conferred by the pope on such as performed certain devotions before some image or shrine which the monks wished to bring into notice, the short jaunt to a convent or hermitage was probably dignified at an early period with the name of a journey to Rome; or, what is more likely, pilgrimages in Spain took the name of those devotional journeys which were most frequent. It should be also remembered that pilgrims to the Holy Land, generally, if not universally, took Rome in their way, public. |