74. True foundation of interest of money.
A man then may lend his money as lawfully as he may sell it;
and the possessor of money may either do one or the other, not
only because money is equivalent to a revenue, and a means to
procure a revenue: not only because the lender loses, during the
continuance of the loan, the revenue he might have procured by
it; not only because he risks his capital; not only because the
borrower can employ it in advantageous acquisitions, or in
undertakings from whence he will draw a large profit; the
proprietor of money may lawfully receive the interest of it, by a
more general and decisive principle. Even if none of these
circumstances should take place, he will not have the less right
to require an interest for his loan, for this reason only, that
his money is his own. Since it is his own, he has a right to keep
it, nothing can imply a duty in him to lend it; if then he does
lend, he may annex such a condition to the loan as he chuses, in
this he does no injury to the borrower, since the latter agrees
to the conditions, and has no sort of right over the sum lent.
The profit which money can procure the borrower, is doubtless one
of the most prevailing motives to determine him to borrow on
interest; it is one of the means which facilitates his payment of
the interest, but this is by no means that which gives a right to
the lender to require it; it is sufficient for him that his money
is his own, and this is a right inseparable from property. He who
buys bread, does it for his support, but the right the baker has
to exact a price is totally independent of the use of bread; the
same right he would possess in the sale of a parcel of stones, a
right founded on this principle only, that the bread is his own,
and no one has any right to oblige him to give it up for nothing.
