cannot inherit by the law.”  This is interesting, because they use all the words I have been trying to define; when they say “the children thou shalt get by this civilian,” they mean by this civilian a person who is under the civil, or Roman, or church law; that is, they mean to say, although you marry a woman who is a church member and under the jurisdiction of the bishop, etc., nevertheless the church law won’t help you; your children by her cannot inherit by the law, and the law as used by Beaumont and Fletcher and as used by me and as used in English books means the common law, the common secular law, the law of England, not the civil or canon law.[1] Beaumont and Fletcher evidently thought it was a very illiberal statute; and our modern American States have all come to Beaumont and Fletcher’s conclusion; they have universally reversed the old English statute and gone back to the church law, so that throughout the United States to-day a child born before the marriage of its parents is legitimate if its parents afterward marry.  That is true, no matter how late it is; if the man marries her even on his death-bed, all his children are legitimized.

[Footnote 1:  “And so all the earls and barons answered with one voice, that they would not change the laws of England.”]

In the same Statute of Merton there is a sentence against usury, “no usury permitted against minors”; and there are two things to note here.  One is, that the secular legislature is also taking jurisdiction of minors, who were claimed at that time to be solely under the jurisdiction of the church; and the other is the reference to usury.  Mind you, usury is interest.  It didn’t mean excessive interest, as it does now.  As you probably know, the notion prevailed in the early Middle Ages that all usury—­interest—­was a sin and wrong; and even Ruskin has chapter after chapter arguing that principle, that it is wrong to take interest for money.  I should perhaps add another reason why interest was so disliked in early England:  There was very little money in early England; and it mostly belonged to the Jews.  It was a good deal as it is in Russia to-day; the Jews were persecuted in Russia as in early England, because, in the country districts of Russia, the Jews have all the money, and money-lenders are always unpopular.  So in early England.  The great barons had their land and their cattle and crops, but they had little money.  When they wanted money they got the value of it out of their tenants.  Nobody carried large sums of money around with him then, any more than a woman does to-day—­she relies on her husband or father; they went to the nearest Jew.  When the king wanted cash, he also extorted it from the Jews.  One of the early Henrys said seriously, that he regarded the Jews as a very convenient sponge!  That is, they sucked all the money in the kingdom and got it into a place whence he could easily get it out.  But it made the Jews very unpopular with