The Rate Of Interest

The usual rate of interest in the West is ten per cent., and it is generally believed that this is the oorrect measure of the valué of money. If the mensuro of the vahie of oommodity is what it will bring, this is true ; but if the true measure of value is what thearticle can be made to yield, it is not true. Experienced capitalists and Immniiss men give it as their mature opinión that there is no kind of property as profi table as money loaned at ten per cent. - which is tantamount to saying that tbo average yield of industries, enterprises and speculations is less than ten per cent. on the amount invested, or in other wordg, that money is not really worth ten per oent. There are several considerationg that strengthen this conclusión. Money loaned at ten per cent. will doublé itself in seven and a half pears ; ten thousand dollars will grow into twenty thousand in that time, and twenty thousand will grow into forty thousand. That the average invest ments in business ventures and industries will not. do this ia too well-known to need a demonstration. Whilea hundfed men who loan money at ten por oent. compound interest, will, with prudent management, doublé their fortunes in seven and a half years, one hundred men who borrow money at that rato will fail, in spite of all the prudeuco and toresight they may exercise, to doublé theirs. So f ar f rom it, fifty of theiu if not more, will break. There is nothing more clearly ostablished by thu experience of business than the fact tnat a man who conducís hiB enteryrises on borrowed capital - whose only re- source, or chief resouroes, are the produots of bilis drawn on bis Bhipinents, will, in four cases out of five, come to bankruptcy, and a farmer who mortgages his farm for half its value to secure money at ten per cent. in hope that its net yield will pay the principal, will, in four cases out of five be sold out. These plain and well-known facts appear to piove that the average annual product of money invested in commerce, speculation, industry and agriculture is not ten per cent., and that, while it may bring that price, it is really not worth it. If all classes of borrowers in the West could be brought to appreciate this important fact, it woudl be worth millions to this región. There is a world of financial philosophy in it. Nothing is more absurd, and, in the long run, more disastrous then the delusion that a man can get rich by borrowing money to speculate on ; it is the secret of four-fifths of the cases of bankruptcy that occur in business and of the sherifFs sales that take place in the