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.