Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, speaking at Birmingham on Saturday at the
first Trade Union Conference in the Independent Labour Party's campaign to popularize a bold Socialist policy, made the following very significant admissions :— " Their opponents," he said, "were under the fond delusion that the state of society under which they lived was a state of private enterprise. Was there private enterprise in the roads, in the tramways, in education, in public health ? Private enterprise in the factories had been limited by legislation so much that at any rate it was not a very pure form. Yet it was private enterprise that created the unemployment that existed. If the system of private enterprise was so magnificent, then they must judge it by its fruits, and certainly one of the most bitter fruits of the system, whatever it was, was that it prevented men from work and consumption."
Mr. Ramsay MacDonald is here makingthe capital mistake bf those who do not consider the case of their opponents. We, like him, believe that the individualistic system has never been given a fair and full chance. Therefore, the attacks made upon the evils of the existing system by the Socialists as the fruits of individualism leave us cold. In other words, we are entirely at one with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald when he considers that there is little individualism in a system which spends four or five hundred millions a year in Public Assistance, and hampers, sterilizes and paralyses effort by the million meshes wound around the individual.
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