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 and 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.