I think we should not have differed in the
term necessary. We differed essentially in the article of interest. For
while the principal, and interest preceding and subsequent to the war,
seem justly due from us, 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 for 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.
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