Now, any one judging these men by the current standards of common-sense would, while praising the first as a model of moral prudence, condemn the second as a fool who had brought his ruin upon himself, and curtly dismiss him, if a bachelor, as being nobody’s enemy but his own.  But before we indorse either of these judgments as adequate, let us consider more minutely what in each case has been 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, 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.