Interest is never confined to money transactions, nor even to those in which terms of money are used. All owners of productive wealth gain interest in its use as truly as in lending it. The farmer is not a money-lender in general, because his wealth will bring him larger profit by its use as stock or machinery. Even when he borrows from his neighbors, it is possible that he secures a larger interest, though he calls it profit, than he pays the lender. Interest is often paid in kind. The laughable story of borrowing a hen from one neighbor and a sitting of eggs from another, to be returned after a time with advantage, is actually paralleled by some transactions. A friend of mine having a magnificent pasture agreed with his neighbor, who owned a fine flock of ewes, to pasture that flock for three years, returning at the end of that time just twice the number of sheep received. He explained to me that he had made a great bargain, since the wool would pay for the use of the pasture, and he should have at the end of the three years a flock about equal to the flock he returned. This bargain involved interest at the rate of 33-{ ~VULGAR FRACTION ONE THIRD~} per cent, without any terms of money, and an indefinite profit to the owner of the pasture in addition to an average price for such use. This profit is his return for the risk undertaken; since he promised to double the flock under any circumstances, and if foot-rot or scab had ruined the flock under his management, he would still have the same obligation toward the owner.
Such bargains will always be made so long as both parties are benefited, for no possible construction of laws and no diatribes of fanatics can prevent them. Any calculation as to the enormous growth of wealth by interest is more than balanced by a similar calculation of the multiplication of wealth by production. If Abraham's shekels at compound interest make an impossible sum of money, Abraham's flock of sheep with the ordinary rate of increase makes an equally impossible worldful.
_Varying rates of interest._--Interest rates are subject to fluctuation and variations under the natural relations of borrowers and lenders very much as are prices of commodities. Variations, in comparison of different regions, are due to several causes. In any community where enterprise is great and industrial forces are unusually productive, the interest rates are high as compared with another community with few competitors in industrial enterprise and less productive forces. Thus in countries having new land producing large crops with moderate exertion and an increasing population ready to put in such crops, the return for the use of capital in provisions, stock and machinery is great, and the lender gets high rates of interest. If, added to this apparent productiveness, there are risks of failure from droughts, storms and injurious insects, the bargain is more favorable to the lender in expressed terms, though it may be less favorable in actual results. Thus risk enters practically into calculations of interest, whatever the circumstances.