people,—it harmonized more with the social _idéal_ of the former, than with the practical instincts of the latter. [185] Aristot. Polit. i, 4, 23; Cato ap. Cicero. de Offic. ii, 25. Plato, in his Treatise de Legg. (v, p. 742) forbids all lending on interest: indeed, he forbids any private citizen to possess either gold or silver. To illustrate the marked difference made in the early Roman law, between the claim for the principal and that for the interest, I insert in an Appendix, at the end of this chapter, the explanation given by M. von Savigny, of the treatment of the nexi and addicti,—connected as it is by analogy with the Solonian seisachtheia. [186] Aristot. Polit. i, 4, 23. Τὴς δὲ μεταβλητικῆς ~ψεγομένης διακίως~ (οὐ γὰρ κατὰ φύσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἀλλήλων ἔστιν), εὐλογώτατα μισεῖται ἡ ὀβολοστατική, etc. Compare Ethic. Nikom. iv, 1. Plutarch borrows from Aristotle the quibble derived from the word ~τόκος~ (the Greek expression for interest), which has given birth to the well-known dictum of Aristotle,—that money being naturally _barren_, to extract _offspring_ from it must necessarily be _contrary to nature_ (see Plutarch, De Vit. Ær. Al. p. 829). In a rude condition, such as that of the ancient Germans described by Tacitus, loans on interest are unknown: habitually careless of the future, the Germans were gratified both in giving and receiving presents, but without any idea that they thereby either imposed or contracted an obligation.[187] To a people in this state of feeling, a loan on interest presents the repulsive idea of making profit out of the distress of the borrower; moreover, it is worthy of remark, that the first borrowers must have been for the most part men driven to this necessity by the pressure of want, and contracting debt as a desperate resource, without any fair prospect of ability to repay: debt and famine run together, in the mind of the poet Hesiod.[188] 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 him a free gift in the former character, he will not, under the latter character, obtain a loan from a stranger, except by the promise of exorbitant interest,[189] and by the fullest eventual power over his person which he is in a condition to grant. In process of time a new class of borrowers rise up, who demand money for temporary convenience or profit, but with full prospect of repayment,—a relation of lender and borrower quite different from that of the earlier period, when it presented itself in the repulsive form of misery on the one side, set against the prospect of very large profit on the other. If the Germans of the time of Tacitus had looked to the condition of the poor debtors in Gaul, reduced to servitude under a rich creditor, and swelling by hundreds the crowd of his attendants, they would not