'Foreign trade', he says, 'is related to slumps only as charity is related to poverty. They ultimately only enhance one another.'[251] And further: 'The only possible means of warding off further outbreaks of crises is the application of the two-edged knife of expanding foreign markets. The violent urge towards such expansion is largely no more but a morbid irritation caused by a sickly organ. Since one factor on the home market, productivity, is ever increasing, and the other factor, purchasing power, remains constant for the overwhelming majority of the population, commerce must endeavour to conjure up a similarly unlimited amount of purchasing power on the foreign market.'[252] In this way, the irritation may be soothed to some extent so that at least there will not be a new outbreak of the calamity right away. Every foreign market opened defers the social problem in a like manner. Colonisation of primitive countries would have similar effects: Europe rears a market for herself in places where none had been before. Yet such a medicine would essentially do no more than appease the ill. As soon as the new markets are supplied, the problem will revert to its former state--a conflict between the two factors: limited purchasing power versus unlimited productivity. The new attack would be warded off the small market only to re-appear, in even wider dimensions and with even more violent incidents, on a larger one. And since the earth is finite and the acquisition of new markets must some time come to an end, the time will come when the question can no longer be simply adjourned. Sooner or later, a definite solution will have to be found.'[253] Rodbertus also recognises the anarchical character of capitalist private enterprise to be conducive to crises, but only as one factor among many, seeing it as the source of a particular type of crises, not as the real cause of crises in general. About the crises at v. Kirchmann's _Ort_, e.g., he says: 'I maintain that a slump of this kind does not occur in real life. The market of to-day is large, there are countless wants and many branches of production, productivity is considerable and the data of commerce are obscure and misleading. The individual entrepreneur does not know how much others are producing, and so it may easily happen that he over-estimates the demand for a certain commodity with which he will then overstock the market.'