nd disappeared, its place will have been taken by a
machine which will enable forever afterwards one-half of the two hundred
men to produce food for the whole. A hundred men, therefore, are left
for whom food can be permanently provided, without any effort to produce
it being made by these men themselves; and since of this annual surplus
a part--let us call it half--will be taken as interest on the machine by
the man with whose capital it was constructed, he will now have the
means of making fifty men dance for his pleasure in perpetuity; for as
often as they have eaten up one supply of food, this, through the agency
of the machine, will have been replaced by another.

Our second capitalist, meanwhile, who deals with his capital as income,
starts with setting the dancers to dance for his behoof at once; and he
keeps the whole two hundred dancing and doing nothing else, so long as
he has food with which to feed them. This life is charming so long as it
lasts, but in two years' time it abruptly comes to an end. The
capitalist's cupboard is bare. He has no means of refilling it. The
dancers will dance no more for him, for he cannot keep them alive; and
the efforts for two years of two hundred men, as directed by a man who
treats his capital as income, will now have resulted in nothing but the
destruction of that capital itself, and a memory of muscular movements
which, so far as the future is concerned, might just as well have been
those of monkeys before the deluge.

Now, if we take the careers of our two capitalists as standing for the
careers of two individuals only, and estimate them only as related to
these men themselves, we might content ourselves with indorsing the
judgment which conventional critics would pass on them, and say of the
one that he had acted as his own best friend, and dismiss the other as
nobody's enemy but his own. But we are, in our present inquiry, only
concerned with individuals as illustrating kinds of conduct which are,
or which might be, general; and the effects of their conduct, which we
here desire to estimate, are its effects of it, not on themselves, but
on society taken as a whole. If we look at the matter in this
comprehensive way, we shall find that the facile judgments to which we
have just alluded leave the deeper elements of our problem altogether
untouched.

The difference between the ultimate results of the two ways of treating
capital will, to the conventional critic, seem to h