If an owner, when the first tenant has been prevented from using a thing, shall have let it to another, all the profits accruing from it are due to the first tenant, for it would not be equitable that the owner should be made richer by what belonged to another. XIX. The next topic, that comes under consideration, is the lawfulness of taking interest for the use of a consumable thing; the arguments brought against which appear by no means such as to command our assent. For as to what is said of the loan of consumable property being a gratuitous act, and entitled to no return, the same reasoning may apply to the letting of inconsumable property for hire, requiring a recompence for the use of which is never deemed unlawful, though it gives the contract itself a different denomination. Nor is there any more weight in the objection to taking interest for the use of money, which in its own nature is barren and unproductive. For the same may be said of houses and other things, which are unproductive and unprofitable without the industry of man.[33] There is something more specious in the argument, which maintains, that, as one thing is here given in return for another, and the use and profits of a thing cannot be distinguished from the thing itself, when the very use of it depends upon its consumption, nothing more ought to be required in return for the use, than what is barely equivalent to the thing itself. But it is necessary to remark, that when it is said the enjoyment of the profits of consumable things, whose property is transferred, in the use, to the borrower or trustee, was introduced by an act of the senate, this does not properly come under the notion of Usufruct, which certainly in its original signification answers to no such right. Yet it does not follow that such a right is of no value, but on the contrary money may be required for surrendering it to the proprietor. Thus also the right of not paying money or wine borrowed till after a certain time is a thing whose value may be ascertained, the delay being considered as some advantage. Therefore in a mortgage the profits of the land answer the use of money. But what Cato, Cicero, Plutarch and others allege against usury, applies not so much to the nature of the thing, as to the accidental circumstances and consequences with which it is commonly attended.[34]