Sismondi, justly impatient, now exclaims: 'The moment we want to find out what is to constitute the surplus of production over consumption of the workers, it will not do to abstract from that surplus which forms the due profit of labour and the due share of the master.'[184] MacCulloch's only reaction is to multiply his silly argument by a thousand. He asks the reader to assume '1,000 farmers', and 'also 1,000 master-manufacturers' all acting as ingenuously as the individuals. The exchange, then, proceeds as smoothly as can be desired. Finally, he exactly doubles labour productivity 'in consequence of more skilful application of labour and of the introduction of machinery--thus that every one of the 1,000 farmers, by advancing food and clothing for 100 labourers, obtains a return consisting of ordinary food for 200 together with sugar, grapes and tobacco equal in production cost to that food', while every manufacturer obtains, by an analogous procedure, in addition to the previous quantity of clothing for all workers, 'ribbands, cambrics and lace, equal in productive cost, and therefore in exchangeable value, to that clothing'.[185] After such complete reversal of the chronological order, the assumption, that is, of first the existence of private property with wage labour, and then, at a later stage, such level of labour productivity as makes exploitation possible at all, he now assumes labour productivity to progress with equal speed in all spheres, the surplus product to contain precisely the same amount of value in all branches of industry, and to be divided among precisely the same number of people. When these various surplus products are then exchanged against one another, is it any wonder that the exchange proceeds smoothly and completely to everybody's satisfaction? It is only another of his many absurdities that MacCulloch makes the capitalists who had hitherto lived on air and exercised their profession in their birthday suits, now live exclusively on sugar, tobacco and wine, and array themselves only in ribbons, cambrics and lace.