Sismondi answers this buffoonery which 'very easily' pokes about in a fog, by pointing to the real changes and revolutions which take place before his own eyes. 'It was possible to put barbarous countries under the plough, and political revolutions, changes in the financial system, and peace, at once brought cargoes to the ports of the old agricultural countries which almost equalled their entire harvest. The recent Russian conquest of the vast provinces on the Black Sea, the change in the system of government in Egypt, and the outlawing of piracy in High Barbary, have suddenly poured the granaries of Odessa, Alexandria and Tunis into the Italian ports and have put such an abundance of corn on the markets that all along the coasts the farmer's trade is fighting a losing battle. Nor is the remainder of Europe safe from a similar revolution, caused by the simultaneous ploughing under of immense expanses of new land on the banks of the Mississippi, which export all their agricultural produce. Even the influence of New Holland may one day be the ruin of English industry, if not in the price of foodstuffs, which are too expensive to transport, at least in respect of wool and other agricultural products which are easier to transport.'[190] What would MacCulloch have to advise in view of such an agrarian crisis in Southern Europe? That half the new farmers should turn manufacturer. Whereupon Sismondi counters: 'Such counsel cannot seriously apply to the Tartars of the Crimea or to the fellaheen of Egypt.' And he adds: 'The time is not yet ripe to set up new industries in the regions oversea or in New Holland.'[191] Sismondi's acuity recognised that industrialisation of the lands overseas was only a matter of time. He was equally aware of the fact that the expansion of the world market would not bring with it the solution to the difficulty but would only reproduce it in a higher degree, in yet more potent crises. His prediction for the expansive tendency of capitalism is that it will reveal an aspect of fiercer and fiercer competition, of mounting anarchy within production itself. Indeed, he puts his finger on the fundamental causes of crises in a passage where he states the trend of capitalist production precisely as surpassing all limits of the market. At the end of his reply to MacCulloch he says: 'Time and again it has been proclaimed that the equilibrium will re-establish itself, that work will start again, but a single demand each time provides an impetus in excess of the real needs of trade, and this new activity must soon be followed by a yet more painful glut.'[192] To such a profound grasp of the real contradictions in the movements of capital, the _vulgarus_ on the Chair of London University with his harmony cant and his country-dance of 1,000 beribboned farmers and 1,000 bibulous manufacturers could find no effective answer. FOOTNOTES: