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perpetuity; for as often as they have eaten up one supply of food, this, through the agency of the machine, will have been replaced by another.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.