I put in large print—it would be almost worth capital letters—the following statement of the principle of interest as “necessary to the existence of money.” I suppose it is impossible to embody the modern view more distinctly:— “Money, the representation and measure of value, has also the power to accumulate value by interest (italics not mine). This accumulative power is essential to the existence of money, for no one will exchange productive property for money that does not represent production. The laws making gold and silver a public tender impart to dead masses of metal, as it were, life and animation. They give them powers which without legal enactment they could not possess, and which enable their owner to obtain for their use what other men must earn by their labour. One piece of gold receives a legal capability to earn for its owner, in a given time, another piece of gold as large as itself; or in other words, the legal power of money to accumulate by interest compels the borrower in a given period, according to the rate of interest, to mine and coin, or to procure by the sale of his labour or products, another lump of gold as large as the first, and give it, together with the first, to the lender.”—Kellogg on Labour and Capital, New York, 1849. FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER XLV. Lucca, 2nd August, 1874. The other day, in the Sacristan’s cell at Assisi, I got into a great argument with the Sacristan himself, about the prophet Isaiah. It had struck me that I should like to know what sort of a person his wife was: and I asked my good host, over our morning’s coffee, whether the Church knew anything about her. Brother Antonio, however, instantly and energetically denied that he ever had a wife. He was a ‘Castissimo profeta,’—how could I fancy anything so horrible of him! Vainly I insisted that, since he had children, he must either have been married, or been under special orders, like the prophet Hosea. But my Protestant Bible was good for nothing, said the Sacristan. Nay, I answered, I never read, usually, in anything later than a thirteenth century text; let him produce me one out of the convent library, and see if I couldn’t find Shearjashub in it. The discussion dropped upon this,—because the library was inaccessible at the moment; and no printed Vulgate to be found. But I think of it again to-day, because I have just got into another puzzle about Isaiah,—to wit, what he means by calling himself a “man of unclean lips.” [51] And that is a vital question, surely, to all persons venturing to rise up, as teachers;—vital, at all events, to me, here, and now, for these following reasons.