For the same reasons, the labourers do not need to combine when capital superabounds. They can naturally obtain as large a share of the subsistence fund as will leave ordinary profits to the capitalist: and this happens of course, as is well known from the examples of newly settled countries, and newly invented manufactures, where the profits of the capitalist are invariably prevented by the dearness of labour from much exceeding the ordinary rate. In cases of equal proportion, the labourers run even a greater risk from a strike than the capitalists. Some of the capitalists will, if the balance be exact, withdraw their capital from business rather than stand a strike; and thus is caused an immediate superabundance of labour, with all its disadvantages to the labourers. But if no capitalist withdraws, the waste of capital necessarily caused by a strike causes also a superabundance of labour; and thus also the labourers suffer for having destroyed the balance. But when combination is resorted to in the absence of all other power, its results are the most disastrous to the weak party which employs it. The labourers who superabound are already at a disadvantage, which can only be increased by any resistance which helps to impoverish the capitalists. They may injure the capitalists by impairing the capitalists’ share of the subsistence fund: but they injure themselves much more by impairing, at the same time, the labourers’ share. That such means of injuring capitalists are ever resorted to in such a condition of affairs proves most forcibly that the largest of the parties concerned is not yet fully aware how the case stands, and that a far greater power of competition with the capitalists is lodged with them than that which they are too ready to employ to the injury of both parties and the good of neither.