For our next meeting, our local Distributist club is reading selections from that usury book I told you about. Selections, in fact, selected by yours truly. So if you can’t make the meeting, and are too timid to read the whole book, you can still read a few pithy pages.

The reading: Selections from Usury: A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View

(To prevent confusion, in case anyone attending the meeting gets their copy here, I’m leaving the PDF formatted for letter paper. Usually I’d want a more screen-friendly format, but that doesn’t print well.)

It is only intelligent energy that can produce wealth. Even the natural resources must be subdued and shaped by intelligent energy to be of service to man. Trees do not betake themselves into the form of houses. Land does not transform itself into farms and gardens. Coal does not come to our fires without hands. Ore is not iron, nor is clay pottery. They must be carefully manipulated by the intelligent laborer.

The usurer hands his goods to another to build the barns and keep for him, while he is free from its care; and, more, he requires of his victim not only that he shall preserve, resisting all decay, but that he shall actually pay him for the privilege.

The island upon which New York stands was bought from the Indians for the value of twenty-four dollars by Peter Minuits in 1626. Yet, if the purchaser had put his twenty-four dollars at interest, where he could have added it to the principal at the rate of seven per cent., the accumulation would now exceed the total value of the entire city and county of New York.