RENT 
195 
was regrettable ; but inevitable because 
it was discovered that the law determining 
the annual value of buildings, fences, gates, 
and artificial drainage systems, was no 
different fundamentally from the law deter 
mining the prices of other things freely 
produced. It scarcely need be remarked— 
but perhaps attention should be called to the 
point incidentally—that every value can 
theoretically be expressed as a total in a 
price, or as an income in terms of periodic 
payments. A price can easily be transformed 
into an annual payment and an annual 
payment into a purchase price. The only 
matter to settle is the number of years’ 
purchase which should be allowed in effecting 
the transformation ; and the number of years’ 
purchase is deducible from the durability of 
the thing in question and the ruling rate of 
interest. In order to distinguish rent in the 
restricted economic sense just described from 
rent in the ordinary sense, the former was 
occasionally spoken of as “ economic rent ” 
or “ rent of land.” 
The violence done to the implication of 
“ rent ” did not stop with the rejection of 
all payments for the improvement of land. 
Recent years have seen also an extension of 
the term’s denotation to make it include