USURY LAWS.

PUBLIC sentiment has been a good deal called forth within the past month on the subject of the Usury Laws, and upon occasion of an attempt, by men claiming to be honest, to exercise the privileges which those laws are intended to confer upon rogues. For the protection they offer against the alleged evils of usury is an insult to an honest man; and among the very legislators who vote for it, probably not one could be found who would not spurn the idea of pleading usury to avoid payment of a debt fairly and understandingly contracted. The law, therefore, assuming the usurer to be a rogue, provides in effect that he shall only cheat or rob honest men, or, at all events, men willing to be considered such, and having some regard for the external appearance and reputation of honor and conscience. Men who have none, are, happily, now rare; and they occupy a footing to which very few who have once been in a situation to obtain credit on any terms can be induced to descend. Usury, therefore, is rarely plead, and when it is, an excitement of the public mind is produced, and the merits and demerits of the Solons of Albany are freely canvassed, and speculations entered into as to the average depth of their understandings, which would end in wagers, were any means in existence to decide them. Is it not marvellous how well, upon the whole, every thing goes on in our community? Is it not certain, that in a vast majority of cases our laws are equitable and efficient; that they go straight to the common sense of a matter, and set chicanery at defiance? Is it not true, to a very great extent, (and perhaps with only this one gross exception,) that common sense is law, and that the most direct applications of it possible are made? The late stop law upon sales of mortgaged property might be cited as another case of exception, if it were assumed to be, in fact, a law; but it comes so decidedly under the objection of impairing the ob. ligation of contracts, that we think, should it be questioned, it cannot stand. There may be other cases, but not enough to invalidate our general remark, that the figs this tree bears predominate vastly over the thistles; and that, considering that there are thistles, it is positively miraculous that there are not more. It is an excellence of republican institutions, which developes itself in practice, which could hardly have been divined by any reasoner before

hand, that no legislature, fairly chosen by free citizens, will make a bad general law. Specific laws they will make as bad as the occasion calls for; they will wink at corruption, they will sell incorporations, they will pass acts even like the one referred to above, of a mortgage stop law, if the interest of a majority among them require it'; but it is to be observed, that the limitation of the effect of that law to mortgages already existing, is a proof that it was present relief it was contrived for; and that the makers of it saw, and recoiled from, the effect of making such a principle permanent. The existing mortgagors, they said, are caughtwe will deal with them as we please, but we must be content with that, or we shall not catch any more. It may be for one man's interest that there should be an act passed to incorporate a certain bank, or for another's that some of his existing contracts should be nullified or impaired, and enough such interests may combine and logroll to do a little present mischief, but rarely any thing per manent. It is for no man's interest, not even for a thief's, that thievery should be encouraged by law, or fraud, or violence; and, therefore, our general legislation is good; and by means of juries, its execution is impartial. These are excellencies of our institu. tions, not benefits conferred by the men in whose hands we place their administration. For a legislature is not a cream rising on the surface of our population by a natural and healthy process; is the secretion of a periodical disorder called an election, with which the body politic is affected, and which seems to be an indispensable condition of its existence. The wisdom, the civilization, and the true interests of the people are not largely represented there; but a set of men are brought together, usually less enlighten. ed a good deal than the average of their constituents. Not less educated, but less enlightened; because they have had light in them, and had it turned to darkness by political sinuosities and burrow. ing, because they have sacrificed in the meannesses of vote-hunting the manliness which would have enabled them to sympathise with the real majority, and to know by intuition what acts would be really popular. They have joined in party war-cries which meant nothing; and won party badges, which were only a livery, till they have forgotten that there is in the nation a thinking mass, which thinking mass, reciprocally and culpably, on the day of elec tion forgets and neglects them.

Whoever heard of a man in his senses defending the usury laws in conversation? Who knows even by what arguments their de fenders, if any there be out of the legislature, seek to maintain them? Their effects, when made visible by public recourse to them, are atrocious; and when invisible, their hourly secret mischiet

it

is incalculably great. The lender dreads them, and demands a premium for his fears; the borrower curses them and pays it; and the tender and careful legislator, who protects us all against the extortion of eight per cent., makes an exception for the poor wretch who takes his coat to the pawnbroker, and allows him on that condition to pay thirty. But this legislator has obtained his seat by unmeaning noise and stump speeches; he has talked about misers and usurers, and the griping hand of oppression squeezing out the life-blood of the industrious poor, till his brain has become callous in this spot, and incapable of apprehending a new idea. He really believes the usury law is popular, and he never looks to see if it is ever appealed to, or, if it is, by whom, and what the public voice has said to the appeal.

In this instance this voice has been distinct and somewhat ef fective. The defendants in the suit in question have heard it, and have attempted to reply to it; and they say they plead usury merely to stave off temporarily an insisting creditor, and avoid making an assignment; intending in any event to pay him his dividend from their estate with the rest, but not choosing to pay him in full to the injury of the rest.

We shall not discuss these points; we have to do only with the law and its effects on society, and not with any body's personal character. The view taken of the morality of the case by these defendants themselves is a severe satire on the legislation which offers a premium to dishonesty; to use the law for the purpose for which it was made, they think evidently, as we do, would be down. right swindling.

The Judge charged the Jury that the law was with the defendants; and the Jury, notwithstanding, found a verdict for the plaintiffs. So would any Jury in this city or this state; for nothing short of an express enactment by law, that bills of exchange are money, could make it usury to sell them dear on credit. And such a law would equally make it usury to buy them cheap for cash; and in order to determine when they were dear or cheap, the law must also furnish a criterion to determine their actual value. A bill in England at sixty days for a hundred pounds is money, but how much money is it? Must it only be sold at par? We think even Albany legislation will not go quite that length. May it be sold at the current rate? But there is a current rate for credit and a current rate for cash, neither of which can ever be fixed exactly. And if you buy at the cash rate and pay cash, you expose yourself, for an error of half per cent., to an action for usury-a bill in chancery calling on you to surrender up the bill of exchange you have paid for, or its proceeds. Such procedure would be infamous, and make the law

so which made it possible; and, on the other hand, the abstinence by common consent from procedure under the laws as they now are, while it dilutes their infamy a little with contempt for their impotence, makes them no way less shameful to our statute book.

But Albany, as we have already said, is no Areopagus of collec tive wisdom; it is a sort of city of refuge for the people who talk, who can be best spared from among those who have something to do. Here and there you find an instance of a good man who sa crifices himself, and whose sacrifice is accepted; his best friends probably vote against him, and do what they can to deter him; but he is mounted on his public spirit, and, like another Curtius, plunges into the gulf, but all in vain. He gathers round him, as well as he can, the better class of those among whom he is thrown; but they are too often a minority, and their voices are lost in the clamor of a many-tongued majority. There is to be heard the shrill pipe of the unfledged lawyer, a scrub Demosthenes, practising to the waves of faction. There is the patientless physician, bestowing on the public the years so useless to himself, and the skill he has in vain endeavored to recommend to individuals. There is the broken-down adventurer of any class, whom politics, as a lowest deep, have received; he has failed in all other pursuits in this land where success waits on merit, and he comes with the recommendation of talents misapplied, of not having been faithful in the few things, and seeking to be lord over many.

Verily the apex of our pyramid is downward, our house stands upon its head. The man whom society drops, falls into the legis lature, and rebounds, peradventure, to Congress, abasing himself most literally and most basely, to be exalted. There are other paths to distinction, honorable ones, but few there be that find them; there is one broad one, leading downwards, and many there be that go

in thereat.

These are sad views of our public servants, but through them we see consolation. Honesty, common sense, and the spirit of progress are so decidedly predominant in our land, that even our rulers are not altogether deficient in them; they will not go wrong for wrong's sake, though often they will for a private inducement. But a republic makes us all one class, on most points all our interests are the same; and therefore it is that the life, liberty, and possession of property, which our admirable institutions promise to us, are assured and preserved through the agency of such instruments as are fur nished us by elections.

How much better, in many minor details, we might be governed than we are, these usury laws may serve to show. How desirable at is that men of education and high standing should come forward

actively in political contests, that they should themselves be candidates for office, and serve the public when it will let them, we feel most deeply. When such men are candidates, they usually succeed; unless, indeed, they trust too proudly to their merits, and neglect the means of making them known. The fault is generally in the individuals, and rarely in the public; and of that vast mass among us, whom the stir of an election never disturbs, who never use their privilege or discharge their duty of voting, the greater part refrain because they know nothing about the candidates on either side, or because, if they know them, they see no very great reason for personal preference.

We want in our elections a certain earnestness, which is supplied in the English ones by the presence of the candidate on the hustings. He is brought into communication with his constituents, he is made to submit to tests and to give pledges. Will you vote, he might be asked, for the repeal of the usury laws, for the repeal of the Restriction act? Will you move it, or seek to effect it? If we could get at our men in this way, more of us would go to the polls. It would be pro tanto like going ourselves to Albany, and it would carry out one step further the principle of our institutions, which say to our rulers in the name of the people, what somebody has coined into immortal doggrel

SIR FRANCIS WILLOUGHBY attempted the first settlement in Charlestown adjoining the old ferry. Afterward Martha Gardner became heir to part of the same estate. What inhabitant of that region, who has passed the meridian of life, cannot remember Martha Gardner? What man or woman of sixty has not bought sweetmeats, nuts, and apples at the shop of Martha Gardner, at her little mansion measuring ten feet by twelve, which during her life was a frontier cottage between Boston and Charlestown, on the Charlestown shore, near the old ferry-way? Those who remember Martha, and recollect how silent, modest, industrious, and unassuming she was,