number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself." But Leo wanted to reject the solutions offered by communism in that "those who deny these rights [private ownership] do not perceive that they are defrauding man of what his own labor has produced." He declared a "most sacred law of nature" that humans have the right of private ownership of inheritable property and provision of "all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently" for his children. The "main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected". He disputed one of the central ideas of communism that class war was inevitable and that rich and poor classes were inexorably driven to conflict. Instead he stressed the need for justice to be central to the relationship with religion and the church as the most powerful intermediary to achieve that justice and the peace from strife that would accompany it. That justice relied on equality between rich and poor and extended throughout all citizens of a country. It embodied but went beyond the principle that "the interests of all, whether high or low, are equal" to include the demand that the "public administration must duly and solicitously provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes". He went further by elevating the family unit from any idea of serfdom and pure economic interest or collectivism by placing the interests, moral authority and importance of the family as being "at least equal rights with the State". The state, he wrote, would be guilty of a "pernicious error" if it exercised any intimate control of a family unit but that "extreme necessity be met by public aid" when a family was in such need. The pre-eminence of the needs, protection and independence of a family unit was central to the teaching of the encyclical. For the working relationship he stressed the equity of the relationship between the employer and employee. There must, he wrote, be balance between "respect in every man his dignity as a person" and proper performance of "the work which has been freely and equitably agreed upon". He concluded that "capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital". Where the rights of the poor or the working person are in jeopardy, rights including working conditions and