Politics & Power Quote by Dudley North

North opens by framing usury limits as a question of governmental competence, not morality. That’s the tell. In late-17th-century England, “interest” isn’t just a price; it’s a proxy for how much the state thinks it can choreograph commerce. The 4 l. per cent cap (effectively a 4% ceiling) sits inside a broader project of post-Restoration governance: stabilizing credit, policing “extortion,” and asserting that Parliament can legislate the proper cost of money as if it were bread.

North’s intent is to puncture that confidence with deceptively polite phrasing. He doesn’t call the cap foolish; he asks whether the government has “reason” to do it. That word smuggles in an Enlightenment move: shift the debate from righteous condemnation of lenders to empirical consequences. The subtext is bluntly proto-market: prices, including the price of credit, carry information; when you cap them, you don’t create virtue, you create workarounds.

The rhetorical balance matters too: “prohibit” versus “leave.” One verb is coercive, the other permissive, and the symmetry of “Borrower and Lender” implies adult parties capable of consent. North is teeing up a critique of paternalism: if risk rises, a legal ceiling doesn’t make loans safer, it makes them rarer, pushes lending into shadowy channels, or re-labels interest as fees and favors. He’s also defending merchants’ reality against landed elites’ preferences; cheap money benefits the politically connected debtor class.

It works because it turns a moral panic into an administrative dilemma: can law override the market’s assessment of risk without distorting credit itself? North is betting the answer is no.