Suppose a man to-day, for instance, to put money into an Insurance Company. It pays him, let us say, 5 per cent. interest on his money. He does not know, and cannot know--no one can know--exactly how that particular bit of money is being used. It is merged in the whole lump of the funds the Insurance Company has to deal with. A great deal of it will be used productively. It will go to the purchase of steam engines and stores of food, ships, and so on, which in use increase the wealth of the world; and the money spent in buying these things has a perfect right to profit and does no harm to anyone by taking profit. But a certain proportion will be used unproductively. The original investor knows nothing about that, and even the managers of the company know nothing about it. A client comes to them and says: “I want a loan of a thousand pounds.” They are quite unable, under modern conditions, to go into an examination of what he is going to do with it. He gives security and gets his loan. He may be a man in distress who gets it in order to pay his debts, or he may be a man who is going to start a business. The company cannot go into that. It has to make a general rule of so much interest upon what it lends, under the implied supposition, of course, that the loan is normally productive. But the borrower _can_ use it unproductively, and often does and intends to do so. Thus, with a very large volume of impersonal business, the presence of usury is inevitable. But though inevitable, and though therefore the practice of it, being indirect and distant, cannot be imputed to this man or that, usury inevitably produces its disastrous effects, and the modern world is at last coming to feel those effects very sharply. A few pence lent out at usury some twenty centuries ago would amount now, at compound interest, to more wealth than there is in the whole world; which is a sufficient proof that usury is unjust and, as a permanent trade method, impossible. The large proportion of usurious payments which are now being made on account of the impersonal and indirect character of nearly all transactions, is beginning to lay such a burden upon the world as a whole that there is danger of a breakdown.