Answering the Charge of "Socialist!" "Socialism!"

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"When one shows the masters that half the wealth of Great Britain belongs to 25,000 persons, when one says that this is wrong, that this wrong lies at the bottom of all social injustice, including the wrong of women, the highly respectable newspapers cry "Socialist Agitator! Stirrer of Class Strife!" Well, let us agitate, let us confess that we are thorough-going Social Democrats, or anything else that they please to label us. But let us keep our eyes on the Central fact that a few, a few British men own the majority of British men and all British women. The few own the many, because they possess the means of livelihood of all. In our splendid republic, where at election time all are free and equal, a few Americans own the rest. Eighty percent of our people live in rented houses, and one-half of the rest are mortgaged. The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor."

---- Helen Keller, first published in the Manchester (England) Advertiser, March 3, 1911; Reprinted in part in the New York Call, May 14, 1911.

(Emphasis mine)