In the sentiment of an early society, as in the old Roman law, a distinction is commonly made between the principal and the interest of a loan, though the creditors have sought to blend them indissolubly together. If the borrower cannot fulfil his promise to repay the principal, the public will regard him as having committed a wrong which he must make good by his person. But there is not the same unanimity as to his promise to pay interest: on the contrary, the very exaction of interest will be regarded by many in the same light in which the English law considers usurious interest, as tainting the whole transaction. But in the modern mind, principal, and interest within a limited rate, have so grown together, that we hardly understand how it can ever have been pronounced unworthy of an honorable citizen to lend money on interest. Yet such is the declared opinion of Aristotle and other superior men of antiquity; while at Rome, Cato the censor went so far as to denounce the practice as a heinous crime. It was comprehended by them among the worst of the tricks of trade--and they held that all trade, or profit derived from interchange, was unnatural, as being made by one man at the expense of another; such pursuits therefore could not be commended, though they might be tolerated to a certain extent as a matter of necessity, but they belonged essentially to an inferior order of citizens. What is remarkable in Greece is, that the antipathy of a very early state of society against traders and money-lenders lasted longer among the philosophers than among the mass of the people--it harmonized more with the social _ideal_ of the former, than with the practical instincts of the latter.