The State does not concern itself primarily with man as possessor of rights, but with man as the doer of duties. A right is the opportunity of fulfil… - Ramsay MacDonald

They were going to work their own country for all it was worth, to bring human labour into touch with God's natural endowments, so that the land would blossom like the rose and have houses and firesides where there would be happiness and glorious aspirations.

Even if every person in the country had the ideal virtues that the working classes were asked by certain rather thin skinned and somewhat stilted critics of theirs to possess, and the capacity to turn his attention to every skilled trade in the country, and the very finest technical skill at his command, so long as they had the present system of industrial anarchy, when demand was never gauged by those controlling supply, when overproduction was a feature of one series of years and under-consumption a feature of another, they would have to face the unemployed problem. If that were so, it became a matter for the State to settle. The time had come to banish for ever from their thoughts the old-fashioned heresy that unemployment was merely the expression of individual shortcomings. Unemployment was the expression of the failure of social organisation, and so it became the duty of the State to protect the unemployed men from the awful horrors that attended unemployment.

Mr. Rockefeller not only owns the Standard Oil supplies: he controls the railways, the banks, the shops...upon which his Trust depends. The Steel Corporation not only makes steel; it owns coal and iron fields, ore steamers, the Erie and Pittsburgh mineral railway, as well as the operatives in Homestead. We oppose the Trust, not as an organisation, but because it is controlled by individuals for their own ends...But the Trust points out the line of British advance. In this country, however, the introduction of the Trust should be marked by public ownership.