inflammation on the surfaces of the liver and of the stomach thus glued together. But this inflammation is the effect of the ulcer, an effort of nature to counteract the injuries of the disease, and totally different to that inflammation of the substance of the liver which is called chronic hepatitis, and which a tropical climate occasions. If Antommarchi had ever had any professional reputation, an ignorance of this distinction, whether affected or real, would have effectually destroyed his character, either for honesty or for knowledge. We have the report of the dissection, which was drawn up and signed by the English medical officers who were present on that occasion-Drs. Short, Arnott, Mitchell, Bruton, and Mr. Livingstone. It goes to confirm the statement which we have already made out from the unintentional jargon or the intentional evasions of Antommarchi- that, with the exception of the adhesions, no unhealthy appearance presented itself in the liver.' But besides this, we have before us an account of the scene by one of the professional eye-witnesses.

'O'Meara,' says he, and Antommarchi had stoutly affirmed that his principal disease was in the liver; hence, when the liver was examined, the countenances of the spectators indicated much anxiety. When Antommarchi made his first incision into it, he expected to see a flow of pus from the abscess which had been anticipated in its substance; but no abscess, no hardness, no enlargement, no inflammation were observed; on the contrary, the liver was of natural size, and perfectly healthy in its internal structure--only the convex surface of the left lobe adhered for a small space to the diaphragm, and to that part of the stomach in which the perforation was seated.'

However little our readers may know of medicine, if they have perused attentively the foregoing description they must have drawn for themselves the inference which we are about to statenamely, that the disease of which Napoleon died was not chronic inflammation of the liver, or disease of the liver of any kind, but that it was a most extensive cancerous ulcer of the stomach. But to show how clear and decisive was the evidence for this conclusion, we should state that it was completely satisfactory even to those friends of Napoleon who were with him at St. Helena. In a letter written by Count Montholon to the Countess, dated 6th May, 1821, the day of the dissection, he says,

L'ouverture de son corps a eu lieu ce matin; elle a prouvé qu'il était mort de la même maladie que son père, un schirre ulcéreux à l'estomac; près le pylore, les de la face de l'estomac étaient ulcérés→ il est probable que depuis quatre à cinq ans, l'ulcère avait commencé. C'est dans notre malheur, une grande consolation pour nous que d'avoir acquis la preuve, que sa mort n'est, et n'a pu être, en aucune manière, le

résultat

résultat de sa captivité, ni de la privation de tous les soins que peut-être l'Europe eut pu offrir à l'espérance."

It is clear, indeed, that Napoleon's case was mistaken and mistreated from beginning to end, first by O'Meara, and lastly by Antommarchi; and that additional and unnecessary sufferings were inflicted on him, by mercurial courses and antimonial emetics -the result of the grossest ignorance in those whom he had the misfortune to trust; but it is equally clear that his death was totally independent of the climate of St. Helena, or of any cause within the controul of the English government; and this is the short point which we have been desirous of establishing.

ART. VII.-Reasons against the Repeal of the Usury Laws. London. 1825.

THAT any interference on the part of the legislature with the

management of the property of individuals, by regulating the rate of profit which they shall derive from their dealings with one another, tends to retard the increase of national wealth, and consequently the diffusion of those comforts and conveniences of which wealth supplies the means, is now so universally admitted, that it would be a mere waste of time to demonstrate it. It is become therefore a general rule, that the legislature ought to abstain from such interference. There may be exceptions to this, as well as to other general rules, but the propriety of such exceptions must in all cases be strictly proved, and cannot be presumed merely from the authority of past times; because we know that both the opinions and practice of our ancestors were in many respects opposed to this principle, the establishment of which is one of the modern triumphs of political science. Now that it is established, however, the presumption necessarily arises, that any particular law which can be shown to be irreconcileable with it, is a bad one; and it does not lie upon those who propose an alteration in the law to prove this, but upon those who are for maintaining the law to show that, on account of some special circumstances, it is fit to be preserved. Our business then in delivering our judgment upon the pamphlet before us is to consider whether it makes out such a case as may justify the legislature in continuing to make an exception to the rule in the case of the traffic in money. We believe indeed that the author would be very glad, if he dared, to impeach the soundness of the rule itself, to which he takes every opportunity of showing his dislike. No wonder therefore if he sets about his task with a fretful reluctance to admit its practical application, and is much inclined to cry down those, who propose so to apply it, as speculative theorists.

Under

Under the influence of these feelings he has greatly, we hope hot intentionally, misrepresented both the arguments and conduct of those who are opposed to him. He states the design of his work in the following passage:

'If a fair examination of the practical operation of the usury laws on the different classes of society should show that these laws do in truth produce much good at the expense of little inconvenience; that, while they restrain and limit to a very narrow field those usurious practices, which, whenever and wherever we can trace them as generally prevalent, have produced suffering, discontent, and turbulence, they do not injuriously fetter the internal trade, or foreign commerce of the country; that, on the contrary, their indirect effects have a strong tendency to give solidity and safety to the real progress of the nation: if it should appear, that, far from prejudicing the land-holders, they are certainly highly instrumental, perhaps essentially necessary to preserve to them, as a body, a character of moderate permanence, a character which they could not wholly lose without losing all their wholesome influence on the constitution and the manners of the country; and, that the complete annihilation of the present law must needs be, in all its diversified and widely spreading consequences, a fearful and intricate experiment upon the moral habits of the great body of the people, from which there is every reason to expect a result equally painful and unmanageable; then it will be admitted that the projected change throws a solemn responsibility upon those who, viewing too lightly its probable operations, or following too hastily in the train of theories they have not cautiously examined, may suffer themselves to be persuaded to join in this dangerous game of disturbing, without any proved necessity, the habits and peace of their countrymen.

'I would willingly do something towards the useful task of rescuing the question from the dominion of those wide and sweeping general principles, which the slightest acquaintance with its details will show, may indeed create powerful delusions, but can never throw any useful light upon the subject; and I propose, therefore, to examine, as far as the materials which are in every one's hands will enable me, what the most obvious and important practical effects of the projected repeal would be upon the different classes of the community. So completely however have the maxims and speculations of theoretical writers mixed themselves with the facts of the case in the public mind, that even the practical inquiry I propose can hardly be intelligibly conducted without clearing the way by examining some of those speculations.

'I shall not be accused of shrinking from the task of meeting the arguments on the other side in their greatest strength if I select the treatise of Mr. Bentham and the evidence laid before the committee of the House of Commons, which made its report in 1818, as the basis of the theories and the facts I mean to analyse.'-pp. 2-4.

Having thus selected his antagonists, the author, before he attacks their intellectual strength, seems to think that it may be as well to deprive them of the aid of any public sympathy, by show

ing them in the present argument to be destitute of any moral title to respect. With this good-natured purpose, he insinuates that Mr. Bentham, and of course all who are his disciples in this point, deny the possible existence of moral turpitude in any transaction relating to the interest of money. What our opinion is of this gentleman as a reasoner, and writer, is well known; he has always appeared to us a grand master in the use of a certain figure of composition, which, for want of a more appropriate name, we will venture to call Bedevilment; and a more splendid instance of it can scarcely be conceived, than the absurd title which he prefixed to his clever and sound treatise; when he chose to call it A Defence of Usury,' he not only arrayed a thousand natural prejudices against its favourable reception for the sake of indulging foolish vanity in a startling paradox; but he introduced an unnecessary difficulty into his argument, and gave an untrue description of the work itself. The word usury may be taken in two senses; in one, which is the more ancient, it means the taking of any interest at all for money; in the other, and now common acceptation, the taking of iniqui tously high interest; that is, of such interest as a fair dealing man would not have taken under the same circumstances: and this we will, for the sake of brevity, call moral usury. The first species of usury there was no necessity for Mr. Bentham to defend; it has long been generally agreed to be, to some extent or other, allowable. The other species he never does defend; his whole drift being merely to show that the law ought not to fix any maximum of interest, the exceeding which shall be taken as conclusive proof that a contract for a money loan is morally usurious. Mr. Bentham certainly does not mean that it is impossible for a man to be over-reached in a contract for a loan of money, as well as in a contract for the purchase of a house, to which he frequently compares it; nor is there a sentence in his book from which it can be fairly collected that, if the contract was shown to be fraudulent, he would not have it vacated in the former case as well as in the latter. His moral definition of usury, however, lays his doctrine open to misconstruction; he defines usury, abstracted from the legal notion of it, to be the taking of a greater interest than it is usual for men to give and take; he shows afterwards, as we think, satisfactorily, that to act thus is not, of necessity, morally wrong, and then he infers that there is no such thing as the moral guilt of usury; an inference in terms far too large; by which, however, he merely means that the terms, Usury and Iniquity, as applied to money-transactions are not convertible, but that some actions may be usurious without being iniquitous; as, according to his acceptation of the term, undoubtedly

undoubtedly they may. But if our definition of usury, that it is the taking iniquitously high interest, is in fact consonant to the common acceptation of the word, then, in common understanding, every usurious contract is also iniquitous; and the consequence is, that when Mr. Bentham, speaking of usury according to his own definition, says there is no moral guilt in it, a person who takes his words in the popular sense, may misunderstand or misrepresent him as having taught that there is no sin in overreaching one's neighbour in a contract for interest on a loan; and this imputation the writer of the pamphlet before us throws upon him with all the weight which he can give to it. We repeat that, if Mr. Bentham's reasoning be fairly considered, no such position can be extracted from it; but he certainly has himself to blame in some measure for the misrepresentation of his doctrines.

There is not so good an excuse for an attempt made by the author to extenuate the authority of the evidence collected by the committee of 1818. He says,

"It is impossible to glance at the evidence, without perceiving that it leans extremely on one side, and feeling quite certain that by far the greater number of witnesses must have been selected, and by far the greater part of the examination conducted, by persons who had already formed very decided opinions in favour of the repeal.'—p. 55.

The evidence divides itself into two branches, evidence of facts and evidence of opinion. The evidence of facts is certainly all on one side; it must of necessity have been so. Nobody ever pretended that the good, if any there be, which is produced by the usury laws, is of a positive nature; the merit which their supporters claim for them is the prevention of certain evils. The only question of fact, therefore, to be ascertained in this branch of the inquiry was, whether or not these evils existed notwithstanding the laws. The affirmative of this question, and of course the proof, lay upon the advocates of the repeal; but it was not in the nature of things for the supporters of the law to prove the contrary by evidence; their business was to show by argument, if they could, that the evidence brought forward by their adversaries was insufficient. Whether or not the usury laws do produce positive mischief, is also a question, the affirmative of which is maintained by the advocates of the repeal. They may bring forward evidence to prove it; but it is not possible for the supporters of the laws to establish the negative in the same way; they can only deny the truth or the applicability of the testimony produced on the other side. These are the only questions of fact, and as to these, the positive evidence, let it have been selected by whom it would, let it have been sufficient or insufficient, must have been all on one side. All the rest is mere matter of opinion;

and