It is a fact that the civil law can sometimes create moral rights and obligations. For example; the statute requiring a person to repair losses that he has unintentionally inflicted upon his neighbour is held by the moral theologians to be binding _in conscience_, as soon as the matter has been adjudicated by the court. In other words, this civil regulation confers on the injured man property rights, and imposes on the morally inculpable injurer property obligations. The civil statutes also give moral validity to the title of prescription, or adverse possession. When the alien possessor has complied with the legal provisions that apply, he has a moral right to the property, even though the original owner should assert his claim at a later time. Some moral theologians maintain that a legal discharge in bankruptcy liberates the bankrupt from the moral obligation of satisfying his unpaid debts. Several other situations might be cited in which the State admittedly creates moral rights of individual ownership which would have no definite existence in the absence of such legal action and authorisation.[148] This principle would seem to have received a particularly pertinent application for our inquiry in the doctrine of _præmium_ legale as a title of interest on loans. In the "Opus Morale" of Ballerini-Palmieri can be found a long list of moral theologians living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who maintained that the mere legal sanction of a certain rate of interest was a sufficient moral justification for the lender.[149] While holding to the traditional doctrine that interest was not capable of being justified on intrinsic grounds, these writers contended that by virtue of its power of eminent domain the State could transfer from the borrower to the lender the right to the interest paid on a loan. They did not mean that the State could arbitrarily take one man's property and hand it over to another, but only that, when it sanctioned interest for the public welfare, this extrinsic circumstance (like the other "extrinsic titles" approved by moralists) annulled the claim of the borrower in favour of the lender. In other words, they maintained that the money paid in loan-interest did not belong to either borrower or lender with certainty or definiteness until the matter was determined by economic conditions and extrinsic circumstances. Hence legal authorisation for the common good was morally sufficient to award it to the lender. More than one of them declared that the State had the same right to determine this indeterminate property, to assign the ownership to the lender, that it had to transfer property titles by the device of prescription. And their general position seems to have been confirmed by the response of the Congregation of the Poenitentiaria, Feb., 1832, to the Bishop of Verona, the substance of which was that a confessor might adopt and act upon this position.[150]