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 have been sufficiently explained, by saying that the energy stored up in a given accumulation of food reappears when employed in one way, in the efficiency of a permanent machine; and is, when employed in the other, so far as human purposes are concerned, as completely lost as it would have been had it never existed.  But if we reconsider a fact which was dwelt upon in our last chapter, we shall see that the difference is really much greater than this.

When the potential energy residing in so much food has been converted into the energy of so much human labour, and when this is so directed that a productive machine results from it, there is in the machine, as Dr. Crozier puts it, an indefinitely larger amount of “pure economic power,” than that which has been expended in the work of the labourers’ muscles.  While the energy of the labourers has merely resulted in a bottle, or a cage, we may say, of sufficient strength, the genius of the man who directed them has captured and imprisoned an elemental slave in it, who, so long as the cage confines him, will supplement the efforts of human muscle with his own.  But when the energy latent in food is converted into such efforts as dancing, the result produced is the equivalent of the human effort only.  Thus in the modern world of scientific enterprise and invention, to invest capital in machinery and then live on the interest from it, means to press into the service of mankind an indefinite number of non-human auxiliaries, and year by year to live on a part of the products which these deathless captives are never tired of producing.