This means that there is no such thing as a genuinely unpayable debt. If there was no conceivable way to salvage the situation, we wouldn’t be calling it a “debt.” Even the French villager could, conceivably, save his patron’s life, or win the lottery and buy the factory. Even when we speak of a criminal “paying his debt to society,” we are saying that he has done something so terrible that he has now been banished from that equal status under the law that belongs by natural right to any citizen of his country; however, we call it a “debt” because it can be paid, equality can be restored, even
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