“The planets and stars of the entire solar and stellar universe, as seen by the great Lick telescope, if they were all of solid gold, would not nearly pay the amount. A single sphere to pay the whole amount, if placed with its center at the sun, would have its surface extending 563,580,000 miles beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, the farthest in our system. “It may be added that if the earth had contained a population of ten billions, each one making a million dollars a second, then to pay for that cent it would have required their combined earnings for 26,938,500,000,000,000,000,000 years.” [Illustration] VII. DEBT AND SLAVERY. “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”—_Leviticus_ 25:10. “Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine government and corrupt the people.”—WENDELL PHILLIPS. FROM the earliest dawn of history debt has ever borne a close relationship to slavery and servitude. “It is worthy of remark,” says Grote (History of Greece, vol. III., p. 144), “that the first borrowers must have been for the most part driven to this necessity by the pressure of want, contracting debt as a desperate resource without any fair prospect of ability to pay. Debt and famine run together in the mind of the poet Hesiod. The borrower is in this unhappy state rather a distressed man soliciting aid than a solvent man capable of making and fulfilling a contract; and if he cannot find a friend to make a free gift to him in the former character he would not under the latter character obtain a loan from a stranger except by the promise of exorbitant interest and by the fullest eventual power over his person which he is in a position to grant.” “This remark,” says Professor Nicholson in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, “suggested by the state of society in ancient Greece, is largely applicable throughout the world until the close of the early Middle Ages.” The conditions of ancient usury find a graphic illustration in the account of the building of the second temple at Jerusalem (Nehemiah 5:1-12). Some said: “We have mortgaged our lands, vineyards and houses that we might buy corn, because of the dearth.” Others said: “We have borrowed money for the king’s tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyards, ... and lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants, ... neither is it in our power to redeem them, for other men have our lands and vineyards.”