the two capitalists whose conduct we
have been taking as an illustration have been supposed by us to possess
fifty thousand pounds apiece, we shall give precision to the situation
if we say that each, at starting, has the power of feeding, and so
determining the actions of, two hundred other men for a period of two
years.

So much, then, being settled, let us consider these further facts. Both
the capitalists, as we set out with observing, have in employing their
capital the same ultimate object--namely, that of securing through the
purchased efforts of others a continuous supply of things which will
render their lives agreeable. And now in connection with this fact let
us go back to another, which has also been pointed out before, that all
efforts, the sole object of which is to please from moment to moment the
man who directs and pays for them, are, whether embodied in the form of
commodities or no, really reducible to some kind of personal service,
if a toy-maker, in return for food, makes a dancing-doll for another
man, he might just as well have pirouetted for so many hours himself;
and if the purchaser would be more amused by a man's antics than by a
puppet's, this is precisely what the toy-maker would have been set to
do. In short, if we consider only the economic side of the matter,
without reference to the moral, whenever a man spends anything on his
own personal pleasure, he is virtually paying some other man, or a
number of other men to dance for him.[24] What, therefore, both our
capitalists desire as their ultimate object, is to keep as many men as
they are able to provide with food always dancing for their pleasure, or
in readiness to do so when wanted; but in setting themselves to achieve
this object in their two different ways, what happens is as follows.

Both use their capital by dispensing it in the form of daily rations to
two hundred other men, on condition that these men do something; but the
first feeds the other men, not on condition that they dance for him, or
do anything that ministers to his own immediate pleasure, but on
condition that they construct a machine which will enable, as soon as it
is finished, a given amount of human effort to double the amount of food
which such effort would have produced otherwise. Thus, by the end of two
years--the time which we suppose to be required for the machine's
completion--though the original food-supply of the capitalist will all
have been taken up a