CHAPTER XXI
THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST
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 intricate 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.
