Yet in spite of all this, the first time that Sismondi crossed swords with the heirs of the classical school, he proved himself by no means the weaker party. On the contrary, in the end he routed his opponent. If Sismondi misunderstood the most elementary principles of social reproduction and ignored constant capital, quite in keeping with Adam Smith's dogma, he was in this respect no worse at any rate than his opponent. Constant capital does not exist for MacCulloch either, his farmers and manufacturers 'advance' merely food and clothing to their workers, and food and clothing between them make up the aggregate product of society. If there is, then, nothing to choose between the two as far as this elementary blunder is concerned, Sismondi towers heads above Mac because of his intuitive understanding of the contradictions in the capitalist mode of production. In the end, the Ricardian was at a loss to answer Sismondi's scepticism concerning the possibility of realising the surplus value. Sismondi also shows himself more penetrating in that he throws the Nottingham proletarians' cry of distress in the teeth of the apostles and apologists of harmony with their smug complacency, of those who deny 'any surplus of production over demand, any congestion of the market, any suffering', when he proves that the introduction of the machine must of necessity create a 'superabundant population', and particularly in the end, when he underlines the tendency of the capitalist world market in general with its inherent contradictions. MacCulloch denies outright that general over-production is possible. He has a specific for every partial over-production up his sleeve: 'It may be objected, perhaps, that on the principle that the demand for commodities increases in the same ratio as their supply, there is no accounting for the gluts and stagnation produced by overtrading. We answer very easily--A glut is an increase in the supply of a particular class of commodities, unaccompanied by a corresponding increase in the supply of those other commodities which should serve as their equivalents. While our 1,000 farmers and 1,000 master-manufacturers are exchanging their respective surplus products, and reciprocally affording a market to each other, if 1,000 new capitalists were to join their society, employing each 100 labourers in tillage, there would be an immediate glut in agricultural produce ... because in this case there would be no contemporaneous increase in the supply of the manufactured articles which should purchase it. But let one half of the new capitalists become manufacturers, and equivalents in the form of wrought goods will be created for the new produce raised by the other half: the equilibrium will be restored, and the 1,500 farmers and 1,500 master-manufacturers will exchange their respective surplus products with exactly the same facility with which the 1,000 farmers and 1,000 manufacturers formerly exchanged theirs.'[189]