=3. Charge of Usury.=――Usury was a favourite accusation and a plausible excuse for ill-treatment of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Charges of killing Christian children and using their blood in passover rites, and accusations of poisoning the drinking wells, were both excellent means in their way of provoking a riot, and of justifying an ignorant populace in the plunder of Jewish quarters; but such charges had this drawback, that Passover, the presumed season for the bloodshedding, came only once a year, and an epidemic of disease, the effect not of poisoned wells, but of unclean living, was an even less regular and to be reckoned upon occurrence. Borrowing, however, was always going on, and there was just enough of dangerous half-truth in that charge of ‘usury,’ as applied to Jews, to make it always a safe cry to raise when creditors became urgent. ‘A lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright; A lie which is half a truth is a harder matter to fight.’ The word usury has a Latin root, and means simply interest on money; Shakespeare speaks of usance.[23] When Jews first became traders, instead of scholars and agriculturists, especial Rabbinical legislation was found necessary, and was brought to bear on the subject of lending on ‘interest’ (נֶשֶׁךְ, which word is translated, in the Authorised Version of the Bible, ‘usury’). The strict Mosaic prohibition, ‘Thou shalt not lend to thy brother upon interest,’ was then, as in Bible times, in full force. But because of the altered condition of things, Jews of a more elastic conscience were gradually led to give a wider meaning to the 19th and 20th verses of the 23rd chapter of Deuteronomy. Large trading operations involved the employment of capital, and capital could not be employed without interest. Transactions, therefore, which necessitated the use of money as a marketable commodity, gained, in course of time, a sort of sanction from precedent, and fair interest on money passed between Jew and Jew as between Jew and Christian, or between Jew and Mahomedan. Money, and just ‘interest’ on money, could be legally taken by either, or from either, it being always understood that the borrower should be of full age, of sound judgment, capable of completely understanding the full conditions, direct and indirect, of the bargain, and that the transaction should be, in every sense, a matter of public business and of mutual convenience. For the abuse of this state of things, for the demand of a usurious rate of interest for the loans required of them in those days, the Jews were not responsible. The value of money is variable. The lender may legally make his rate of interest vary with, and be more or less in proportion to, the risk to which his capital is exposed. The worse the security and the less the chance of ultimate repayment, the higher naturally would be the ‘interest’ asked. Usury is unjust interest, and ‘divers weights and