Now suppose a man to come to you if you were a baker and say: “Lend me half a dozen loaves. My family have no bread and I cannot see my way to earning anything for a day or two. But when I begin to earn I will get another half dozen loaves and see that you are not out of pocket.” Then if you were to reply: “I will not let you have half a dozen loaves on those terms. I will let you owe me the bread for a month if you like, but at the end of the month you must give me back _seven_ loaves”: that would be usury. The man is not using the loan productively; he is consuming the loaves immediately. No more wealth is created by the act. The world is not the richer, nor are you the richer, nor is society in general the richer. No more wealth at all has appeared through the transaction. Therefore the extra loaf that you are claiming is claimed out of nothing. It has to come out of the wealth of the community--in this particular case out of the wealth of the man who borrowed the loaves--instead of coming out of an increment or excess or new wealth. That is why usury is called “usury”--which means: “wearing down,” “gradually dilapidating.” It is clear that if the whole world practised usury and nothing but usury, if wealth were never lent to be used productively, but only to be consumed unproductively, and yet were to demand interest on the unproductive transaction, then the wealth that was lent would soon eat up all the other wealth in the community until you came to a situation in which there was no more to take. Everyone would be ruined except those who lent; then these, having no more blood to suck, would die themselves, and society would end. As in the case of the ship, it matters not in the least whether the actual thing, the loaves of bread, are lent, or money is lent with which to buy them. _The test is whether the loan is productive or not._ The _intention_ of Usury is present _when the money is lent at interest on what the lender_ KNOWS _will be an unproductive purpose_, and the actual _practice_ of usury is present _when the loan, having as a fact been used unproductively, interest is none the less demanded_. As in every other case of right and wrong whatsoever, there is, of course, a broad margin in which it is very difficult to draw the line. A man guilty of usury and trying to excuse himself might say, even in the case of food lent to a starving man: “The loan may not look directly productive, but indirectly it _was_ productive, for it saved the man’s life and thus later on he was able to work and produce wealth.” The other way about (though there is not much danger of that nowadays), a man trying to get out of interest on a productive loan might say in many cases: “The loan was not really productive. It is true I made a profit on it, but that profit was not additional wealth for the community. It only represented what I got out of somebody else on a bargain.”