In technical discussion the term rent is usually confined to the compensation secured from appropriation of space, peculiar location, natural fertility, mineral deposits, water privileges, or any natural advantage to be used in production. In this limited meaning rent is confined to the advantage gained by the owner of wealth in any form so affected by the law of supply and demand as to gain a scarcity value. The term unearned increment,—meaning an increase of value without cost of exertion,—has been largely applied to such cases, and illustrations are taken chiefly from the ownership of land and similar natural forces. The same unearned increment, however, accrues to the possessor of any article of value or any personal attainment, which through increasing wants of the community becomes, on that account alone, more valuable in market. Thus a bin full of wheat, saved from a year of plenty to a year of scarcity, has gained a value abnormal,—that is, from the fact of its scarcity. Yet no one would think of applying the term rent in such a ease, because the foresight which stored the grain gains its compensation in profits. If the same kind of foresight has plotted a city upon wild lands, and held a portion of those plotted lots until a crowded population competes for their use, such wealth is said to be gained upon the principle of rent. The difference seems to be chiefly in the greater permanence and the gradual advancement of the profits secured. The every-day operations of a farming community illustrate both interest and rent in all their complications and definitions. Every farmer, in estimating the cost of his wheat crop, may properly calculate both the interest on his capital invested in tools, teams, machinery and wages, and the rent of his land, keeping distinct accounts of interest and rent; or he may combine in one account as interest the use of capital in machinery and land. If he owns the whole establishment, he is likely to combine both interest and rent with the return for his foresight and energy in managing the farm under the name profits. All these returns, however, come for different reasons, though under the same general principle of values expressed in the law of supply and demand. The farmer working a rented farm and the one working a mortgaged farm are alike paying both rent and interest, since every farm involves both the wealth accumulated by exertion and the wealth advanced by increasing population. While the owner of the mortgaged farm apparently pays interest, if at the end of the term of the mortgage the farm is returned to its former owner by foreclosure, the result is that the mortgagee, while nominally owner of the land, has simply been a renter. In a fair settlement of equities he will have paid for the use of the land he has cultivated. Interest and rent are thus seen to be terms separated rather by peculiarities of application than by difference of principle. It is proper, however, to treat them separately