2090. DEBTS DUE BRITISH, Interest on.—[continued].
While the principal, and
interest preceding and subsequent to the war,
seem justly due from us [to the British], that
which accrued during the war does not. Interest
is a compensation for the use of money.
Their money, in our hands, was in the form of
lands and negroes. Tobacco, the produce of
these lands and negroes (or as I may call it,
the interest of them), being almost impossible
of conveyance to the markets of consumption,
because taken by themselves in its way there,
sold during the war, at five or six shillings the
hundred. This did not pay taxes, and for tools
and other plantation charges. A man who
should have attempted to remit to his creditor
tobacco, for either principal or interest, must
have remitted it three times before one cargo
would have arrived safe; and this from the
depredations of their own nation, and often of
the creditor himself; for some of the merchants
entered deeply into the privateering business.
The individuals, who did not, say they have
lost this interest; the debtor replies that he
has not gained it, and that it is a case, where a
loss having been incurred, every one tries to
shift it from himself. The known bias of the
human mind from motives of interest should
lessen the confidence of each party in the justice
of their reasoning; but it is difficult to
say which of them should make the sacrifice,
both of reason and interest.—
To James Ross. Washington ed. i, 562.
Ford ed., iv, 218.
(P.
1786)
See Interest on Money.
