Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/27

 because they are not all in the possession of the means to live; and where a small number of individuals in a community enjoy powers and privileges which are denied to the rest, there must be inequality and there cannot possibly be fraternity.

Much as the "free-born Briton" may dislike to hear the painful truth recited, it is a fact not to be controverted that four-fifths of our total population are bound as completely and as miserably as ever was a black African slave to a Western planter. There is no real freedom which is not economic freedom. He is a slave who depends for his bread upon the will or the whim of a man like himself, or of a number of such masters, who can and will and, owing to the trials and exigencies of modern commercial life, must cease to employ him as soon as it is no longer profitable to find him work.

It is reasonable to suppose, and necessary for a belief in the power for human happiness of the establishment of Socialism to understand, that the liberty, equality, and fraternity which are the Socialist’s hope, will be the portion of women as well as men when the good time comes.

Women are economically bound as well