labourers themselves, in producing the articles for their own consumption.
Nothing can be more chimerical than the fear that the accumulation of
capital should produce poverty and not wealth, or that it will ever take
place too fast for its own end. Nothing is more true than that it is
produce which constitutes the market for produce, and that every increase
of production, if distributed without miscalculation among all kinds of
produce in the proportion which private interest would dictate, creates,
or rather constitutes, its own demand.

This is the truth which the deniers of general over-production have
seized and enforced; nor is it pretended that anything has been added
to it, or subtracted from it, in the present disquisition. But it is
thought that those who receive the doctrine accompanied with the
explanations which we have given, will understand, more clearly than
before, what is, and what is not, implied in it; and will see that, when
properly understood, it in no way contradicts those obvious facts which
are universally known and admitted to be not only of possible, but of
actual and even frequent occurrence. The doctrine in question only
appears a paradox, because it has usually been so expressed as
apparently to contradict these well-known facts; which, however, were
equally well known to the authors of the doctrine, who, therefore, can
only have adopted from inadvertence any form of expression which could
to a candid person appear inconsistent with it. The essentials of the
doctrine are preserved when it is allowed that there cannot be permanent
excess of production, or of accumulation; though it be at the same time
admitted, that as there may be a temporary excess of any one article
considered separately, so may there of commodities generally, not in
consequence of over-production, but of a want of commercial confidence.