The acts were directed to restrain the lending of money at usurious rates.
Maybe you could borrow at very high usurious interest rate.
No government could have paid them, as they are the usurious interest for what has already been paid twenty times over.
They held usury up to detestation, and practically made no distinction between interest on equitable moderate terms and what we now term usurious exactions.
In the rest of the country they had not been allowed to reside in the villages, because their habits of keeping vodka-shops and lending money at usurious interest were found to demoralize the peasantry, and even in the towns their numbers and occupations had been restricted by the authorities.