The Roaring Abysmal Beast

: The Iron Heel

During the long period of our stay in the refuge, we were kept closely

in touch with what was happening in the world without, and we were

learning thoroughly the strength of the Oligarchy with which we were

at war. Out of the flux of transition the new institutions were

forming more definitely and taking on the appearance and attributes

of permanence. The oligarchs had succeeded in devising a governmental

machine, as i tricate as it was vast, that worked--and this despite all

our efforts to clog and hamper.



This was a surprise to many of the revolutionists. They had not

conceived it possible. Nevertheless the work of the country went on.

The men toiled in the mines and fields--perforce they were no more than

slaves. As for the vital industries, everything prospered. The members

of the great labor castes were contented and worked on merrily. For the

first time in their lives they knew industrial peace. No more were they

worried by slack times, strike and lockout, and the union label. They

lived in more comfortable homes and in delightful cities of their

own--delightful compared with the slums and ghettos in which they had

formerly dwelt. They had better food to eat, less hours of labor, more

holidays, and a greater amount and variety of interests and pleasures.

And for their less fortunate brothers and sisters, the unfavored

laborers, the driven people of the abyss, they cared nothing. An age

of selfishness was dawning upon mankind. And yet this is not altogether

true. The labor castes were honeycombed by our agents--men whose

eyes saw, beyond the belly-need, the radiant figure of liberty and

brotherhood.



Another great institution that had taken form and was working smoothly

was the Mercenaries. This body of soldiers had been evolved out of the

old regular army and was now a million strong, to say nothing of the

colonial forces. The Mercenaries constituted a race apart. They dwelt in

cities of their own which were practically self-governed, and they

were granted many privileges. By them a large portion of the perplexing

surplus was consumed. They were losing all touch and sympathy with

the rest of the people, and, in fact, were developing their own class

morality and consciousness. And yet we had thousands of our agents among

them.*



* The Mercenaries, in the last days of the Iron Heel, played

an important role. They constituted the balance of power in

the struggles between the labor castes and the oligarchs,

and now to one side and now to the other, threw their

strength according to the play of intrigue and conspiracy.



The oligarchs themselves were going through a remarkable and, it must

be confessed, unexpected development. As a class, they disciplined

themselves. Every member had his work to do in the world, and this work

he was compelled to do. There were no more idle-rich young men. Their

strength was used to give united strength to the Oligarchy. They served

as leaders of troops and as lieutenants and captains of industry.

They found careers in applied science, and many of them became great

engineers. They went into the multitudinous divisions of the government,

took service in the colonial possessions, and by tens of thousands went

into the various secret services. They were, I may say, apprenticed

to education, to art, to the church, to science, to literature; and

in those fields they served the important function of moulding the

thought-processes of the nation in the direction of the perpetuity of

the Oligarchy.



They were taught, and later they in turn taught, that what they were

doing was right. They assimilated the aristocratic idea from the moment

they began, as children, to receive impressions of the world. The

aristocratic idea was woven into the making of them until it became bone

of them and flesh of them. They looked upon themselves as wild-animal

trainers, rulers of beasts. From beneath their feet rose always the

subterranean rumbles of revolt. Violent death ever stalked in their

midst; bomb and knife and bullet were looked upon as so many fangs

of the roaring abysmal beast they must dominate if humanity were

to persist. They were the saviours of humanity, and they regarded

themselves as heroic and sacrificing laborers for the highest good.



They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization.

It was their belief that if ever they weakened, the great beast would

ingulf them and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its

cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign and

humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it

had so painfully emerged. The horrid picture of anarchy was held

always before their child's eyes until they, in turn, obsessed by this

cultivated fear, held the picture of anarchy before the eyes of the

children that followed them. This was the beast to be stamped upon, and

the highest duty of the aristocrat was to stamp upon it. In short,

they alone, by their unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between

weak humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they believed it, firmly

believed it.



I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical righteousness of

the whole oligarch class. This has been the strength of the Iron Heel,

and too many of the comrades have been slow or loath to realize it. Many

of them have ascribed the strength of the Iron Heel to its system of

reward and punishment. This is a mistake. Heaven and hell may be the

prime factors of zeal in the religion of a fanatic; but for the great

majority of the religious, heaven and hell are incidental to right

and wrong. Love of the right, desire for the right, unhappiness with

anything less than the right--in short, right conduct, is the prime

factor of religion. And so with the Oligarchy. Prisons, banishment and

degradation, honors and palaces and wonder-cities, are all incidental.

The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are

doing right. Never mind the exceptions, and never mind the oppression

and injustice in which the Iron Heel was conceived. All is granted. The

point is that the strength of the Oligarchy today lies in its satisfied

conception of its own righteousness.*



* Out of the ethical incoherency and inconsistency of

capitalism, the oligarchs emerged with a new ethics,

coherent and definite, sharp and severe as steel, the most

absurd and unscientific and at the same time the most potent

ever possessed by any tyrant class. The oligarchs believed

their ethics, in spite of the fact that biology and

evolution gave them the lie; and, because of their faith,

for three centuries they were able to hold back the mighty

tide of human progress--a spectacle, profound, tremendous,

puzzling to the metaphysical moralist, and one that to the

materialist is the cause of many doubts and

reconsiderations.



For that matter, the strength of the Revolution, during these

frightful twenty years, has resided in nothing else than the sense

of righteousness. In no other way can be explained our sacrifices and

martyrdoms. For no other reason did Rudolph Mendenhall flame out his

soul for the Cause and sing his wild swan-song that last night of life.

For no other reason did Hurlbert die under torture, refusing to the last

to betray his comrades. For no other reason has Anna Roylston refused

blessed motherhood. For no other reason has John Carlson been the

faithful and unrewarded custodian of the Glen Ellen Refuge. It does

not matter, young or old, man or woman, high or low, genius or clod,

go where one will among the comrades of the Revolution, the motor-force

will be found to be a great and abiding desire for the right.



But I have run away from my narrative. Ernest and I well understood,

before we left the refuge, how the strength of the Iron Heel was

developing. The labor castes, the Mercenaries, and the great hordes

of secret agents and police of various sorts were all pledged to the

Oligarchy. In the main, and ignoring the loss of liberty, they were

better off than they had been. On the other hand, the great helpless

mass of the population, the people of the abyss, was sinking into a

brutish apathy of content with misery. Whenever strong proletarians

asserted their strength in the midst of the mass, they were drawn away

from the mass by the oligarchs and given better conditions by being made

members of the labor castes or of the Mercenaries. Thus discontent was

lulled and the proletariat robbed of its natural leaders.



The condition of the people of the abyss was pitiable. Common school

education, so far as they were concerned, had ceased. They lived

like beasts in great squalid labor-ghettos, festering in misery and

degradation. All their old liberties were gone. They were labor-slaves.

Choice of work was denied them. Likewise was denied them the right to

move from place to place, or the right to bear or possess arms. They

were not land serfs like the farmers. They were machine-serfs and

labor-serfs. When unusual needs arose for them, such as the building

of the great highways and air-lines, of canals, tunnels, subways, and

fortifications, levies were made on the labor-ghettos, and tens of

thousands of serfs, willy-nilly, were transported to the scene of

operations. Great armies of them are toiling now at the building of

Ardis, housed in wretched barracks where family life cannot exist, and

where decency is displaced by dull bestiality. In all truth, there in

the labor-ghettos is the roaring abysmal beast the oligarchs fear so

dreadfully--but it is the beast of their own making. In it they will not

let the ape and tiger die.



And just now the word has gone forth that new levies are being imposed

for the building of Asgard, the projected wonder-city that will far

exceed Ardis when the latter is completed.* We of the Revolution will go

on with that great work, but it will not be done by the miserable serfs.

The walls and towers and shafts of that fair city will arise to the

sound of singing, and into its beauty and wonder will be woven, not

sighs and groans, but music and laughter.



* Ardis was completed in 1942 A.D., Asgard was not completed

until 1984 A.D. It was fifty-two years in the building,

during which time a permanent army of half a million serfs

was employed. At times these numbers swelled to over a

million--without any account being taken of the hundreds of

thousands of the labor castes and the artists.



Ernest was madly impatient to be out in the world and doing, for our

ill-fated First Revolt, that had miscarried in the Chicago Commune, was

ripening fast. Yet he possessed his soul with patience, and during this

time of his torment, when Hadly, who had been brought for the purpose

from Illinois, made him over into another man* he revolved great plans

in his head for the organization of the learned proletariat, and for the

maintenance of at least the rudiments of education amongst the people of

the abyss--all this of course in the event of the First Revolt being a

failure.



* Among the Revolutionists were many surgeons, and in

vivisection they attained marvellous proficiency. In Avis

Everhard's words, they could literally make a man over. To

them the elimination of scars and disfigurements was a

trivial detail. They changed the features with such

microscopic care that no traces were left of their

handiwork. The nose was a favorite organ to work upon.

Skin-grafting and hair-transplanting were among their

commonest devices. The changes in expression they

accomplished were wizard-like. Eyes and eyebrows, lips,

mouths, and ears, were radically altered. By cunning

operations on tongue, throat, larynx, and nasal cavities a

man's whole enunciation and manner of speech could be

changed. Desperate times give need for desperate remedies,

and the surgeons of the Revolution rose to the need. Among

other things, they could increase an adult's stature by as

much as four or five inches and decrease it by one or two

inches. What they did is to-day a lost art. We have no

need for it.



It was not until January, 1917, that we left the refuge. All had been

arranged. We took our place at once as agents-provocateurs in the scheme

of the Iron Heel. I was supposed to be Ernest's sister. By oligarchs and

comrades on the inside who were high in authority, place had been made

for us, we were in possession of all necessary documents, and our pasts

were accounted for. With help on the inside, this was not difficult,

for in that shadow-world of secret service identity was nebulous. Like

ghosts the agents came and went, obeying commands, fulfilling duties,

following clews, making their reports often to officers they never saw

or cooperating with other agents they had never seen before and would

never see again.