But though the ancients desired riches as much as we do, they were not infatuated by the desire to multiply them to the same extent as the moderns. In this respect, the ancients may truly be said to have been more austere and disinterested than we. And the difference between their thoughts and feelings on the subject and our own is seen most strikingly in one fundamental principle, which is, as it were, the keystone of the whole fabric of ideas and sentiments which concern riches; I mean, the question of putting money out at interest. To modern society it seems the most natural thing in the world that money should earn interest. Nowadays, the number of those who lend or invest capital in the countless ways offered by modern finance is infinite. Every one of these big and little capitalists, who possess State bonds, shares in railways or industrials, or bank or commercial securities, would be thunderstruck if anyone told him that he was behaving in an unseemly way. Matters have reached a point at which the distinction between investment and usury is fading from our minds. And yet numberless generations, and not a few of the most brilliant civilisations in history, professed the idea that any business of that sort was unbecoming. The ancients as a rule, with but few casual exceptions, judged it unfitting for a man of the respectable classes to earn money in any other way than either from land and houses—realty—or from direct participation in commerce and the arts; never from money lent at interest to others. That was usury; and was considered nearly always, with but few exceptions of time and place, as the exercise of a degrading profession. Wealthy men, with large sums of money at their disposal, were able, and were expected, to help those who needed money; but with gratuitous, not with interest-bearing loans. The letters of Cicero, for instance, are full of references to these gratuitous loans, for which the great orator, when short of money, often asked his friends. When he was in funds, he lent to those who were in need. In short, the lending of money without interest to upright and honourable persons was considered in those days a duty of the rich. Of course, ideas like these about money and interest were bound to retard the development of the ancient world and the increase of wealth. But they were ideas which kept alive in men’s minds a certain noble disinterestedness of which it would be difficult to find traces to-day, and which makes amends for many of the asperities of ancient civilisation.