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English law by what are called legal fictions. Lawyers have been able in many most important cases to alter the law by ingenious devices for applying to one case rules primarily and ostensibly intended for others. The same system in casuistry involved the doctrine of 'intention' and its application may be made clear by one very important case. The Church had condemned usury absolutely. It is wrong to take interest, because you have only a right to the return of exactly what you have lent. When it became clear that to condemn usury was to condemn commerce, the law had to be tacitly modified to conform to the new conditions. The casuists achieved this result, as Pascal tells us, by an ingenious device called the contrat Mohatra—the main principle of which is simple. I give £1000 to a man and agree to receive £1100 a year hence. Have I not lent money at ten per cent, and committed the sin of usury? Not a bit of it! I simply bought goods at a low price and paid the money. That, every one agrees, is permissible. Soon afterwards, indeed, I sold the same goods to the same man at a much higher price, and allowed him to pay me for them at a later date. These were two separate transactions, and in each of them I was