een really done.

Let us start, then, with noting this. Whether a man invests his capital
in any productive machine and then lives on the interest, or else spends
it as income on his own personal pleasures, he is doing in one respect
precisely the same thing. He is giving something to other men in order
that they in return may make certain efforts for his benefit, of a kind
which he himself prescribes. This is obviously true when, spending his
capital as income, what he pays for is personal service, such as that of
a butler or footman who polishes his silver plate. It is equally true
when he pays for the plate itself. He is paying the silversmith so to
exert his muscles that an ounce or a pound of silver may be wrought into
a specific form. If he pays a toy-maker to make him a dancing-doll, he
is virtually paying him to dance in his own person. He is paying him to
go through a series of prescribed muscular movements. Similarly when he
pays a large number of men to construct a productive machine instead of
a doll or an ornament, he is paying for the muscular movements from
which the machine results. Here we come back to one of the main economic
truths to the elucidation of which our earlier chapters were devoted. It
was there pointed out that the machinery of the modern world owes its
existence to the fact that men of exceptional talent, by possessing the
control of goods which a number of other men require, are able in return
for the goods to make these other men exert themselves in a variety of
minutely prescribed and elaborately co-ordinated ways. In short, all
spending is, on the part of those who spend, a determination of the
efforts of others in such ways as the spender pleases. Further, as was
pointed out in an earlier chapter also, the only goods thus generally
exchangeable for effort are those common necessaries of existence for
which most men must always work, and which may here be represented by
food, the first and the most important of them. Hence, whenever the
question arises of how any given capital shall be treated--of whether it
shall be invested or else spent as income--this capital must be regarded
as existing in the indeterminate form of food, which is equally capable
of being treated in one way or the other. And any man's capital
represents for him, according to its amount, the power of feeding, and
so determining the actions of a definite number of other men for some
definite period. Since, therefore,