It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never criticized by your ancestors.

It had been the effort of lawgivers and prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to limit it to the smallest possible rate.

All these efforts had, however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancient social organizations prevailed.

At the time of which I write, the latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given up trying to regulate the subject at all.
By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road.

The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow.