The question of a market, again, is not a mere question of numbers but of wants. A carpet factory, for example, among a people who preferred bare floors would have no market, whatever the numbers and even the wealth of the people. Say does not do full justice to Malthus in this connection. He thinks that the author of the _Essay on Population_ cannot consistently believe in the possibility of a great abundance of products together with a stationary number of parsimonious consumers. But Malthus had allowed that in one case, the case of food, there could be no over-production,[667] the want in that case being constant, whereas, curiously enough, Ricardo thinks that food is the one object of which there might be a glut. “If every man were to forego the use of luxuries and be intent only on accumulation, a quantity of necessaries might be produced for which there could not be any immediate consumption. Of commodities so limited in number there might undoubtedly be a universal glut, and consequently there might neither be demand for an additional quantity of such commodities nor profits on the employment of more capital. If men ceased to consume they would cease to produce. This admission does not impugn the general principle,” for there is no likelihood of such a contingency as it supposes;—there is a limit to the desire of food, but there is no limit to the desire of other good things.[668] The insatiableness of human desires is here assumed by Ricardo to be always full-grown, instead of what it is, in perhaps three-fourths of the world, an undeveloped possibility. Till we know that the possibility has become actual, we cannot take for granted that all we produce will be wanted. Malthus did not enter with sympathy or even with full intelligence into the spirit of modern trade. But he sees that large manufacture, with its complement of speculative trading, must succeed or fail precisely as it has judged rightly or judged wrongly of its markets, for it no longer, like the old English small production, waits for orders—it anticipates, woos, and coaxes them. He believes that the awakening of man’s insatiable wants will tend to secure us against both over-population and over-production, by creating a high standard of living. The taste for luxuries, whatever its positive advantages, from the educational or artistic point of view, confers at least this economical benefit.[669]