And the moral is that the logic of usury is in its nature at war with life, and might logically end in breaking into the bloody house of life.
In other words, if a creditor can always claim a man's tools or a man's home, he might quite as justly claim one of his arms or legs.
This principle was not only embodied in medieval satires but in very sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying to take away a man's livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying to take away a man's life.

And if anybody thinks that usury can never go to lengths wicked enough to be worthy of so wild an image, then that person either knows nothing about it or knows too much.
He is either one of the innocent rich who have never been the victims of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential rich who are money-lenders themselves.
All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side to the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered.
What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attempt to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer.
It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert that the usurer was a man.

And the Elizabethan dramatist does make him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster.
Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectly sincere and self-respecting man.

But the point is this: that he is a sincere man who sincerely believes in usury.
He is a self-respecting man who does not despise himself for being a usurer.

In one word, he regards usury as normal.
In that word is the whole problem of the popular impression of the Jews.
What Shakespeare suggested about the Jew in a subtle and sympathetic way, millions of plain men everywhere would suggest about him in a rough and ready way.