Sismondi holds the view that crises are partly due to the difficulty of acquiring exact knowledge of a market that has become very extensive, and partly to the fact that producers are guided in their actions by the amount of their capital rather than by the demand of the market.[416] But above all he thinks that they are due to the unequal distribution of revenues. The consequence of the separation of property from labour is that the revenues of those who possess lands increase while the incomes of the workers always remain strictly at the minimum. The natural result is a want of harmony in the demand for products. With property uniformly divided and with an almost general increase in the revenue there would result a certain degree of uniformity in the growth of demand. Those industries which supply our most essential and most general wants would experience a regular and not an erratic expansion. But as a matter of fact at the present time it is the revenue of the wealthy alone that increases. Hence there is a growing demand for the more refined objects in place of a regular demand for the ordinary things of life; a neglect of the more fundamental industries, and a demand for the production of luxuries. If the latter do not multiply quickly enough, then the foreigner will be called in to satisfy the demand. What is the result of these incessant changes? The old, neglected industries are obliged to dismiss their workmen, while the new industries can only develop slowly. During the interval the workmen who have suffered dismissal are forced to reduce their consumption of ordinary goods, and permanent under-consumption, attended by a crisis, immediately follows. “Owing to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few proprietors, the home market is contracted and industry must seek other outlets for its products in foreign markets, where even more considerable revolutions are possible.”[417] Thus “the consumption of a millionaire master who employs 1000 men all earning but the bare necessities of life is of less value to the nation than a hundred men each of whom is much less rich but who employ each ten men who are much less poor.”[418] Sismondi’s explanation of crises, though adopted by many writers since then, is not one of the best. The difficulty of adaptation would in all probability not disappear even if wealth were to be more equally distributed. Moreover, what he attempts to explain is an evil that is chronic in certain industries and not the acute periodical crises. But the theory has the merit of attempting to explain what still remains obscure, and what J. B. Say and Ricardo preferred to pass over in silence or regarded as of secondary importance under pretext that in the long run equilibrium would always be re-established. IV: SISMONDI’S REFORM PROJECTS. HIS INFLUENCE UPON THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINES