CHAPTER XVII

THE SCARLET LIVERY

With the destruction of the Granger states, the Grangers in Congress disappeared.  They were being tried for high treason, and their places were taken by the creatures of the Iron Heel.  The socialists were in a pitiful minority, and they knew that their end was near.  Congress and the Senate were empty pretences, farces.  Public questions were gravely debated and passed upon according to the old forms, while in reality all that was done was to give the stamp of constitutional procedure to the mandates of the Oligarchy.

Ernest was in the thick of the fight when the end came.  It was in the debate on the bill to assist the unemployed.  The hard times of the preceding year had thrust great masses of the proletariat beneath the starvation line, and the continued and wide-reaching disorder had but sunk them deeper.  Millions of people were starving, while the oligarchs and their supporters were surfeiting on the surplus.* We called these wretched people the people of the abyss,** and it was to alleviate their awful suffering that the socialists had introduced the unemployed bill.  But this was not to the fancy of the Iron Heel.  In its own way it was preparing to set these millions to work, but the way was not our way, wherefore it had issued its orders that our bill should be voted down.  Ernest and his fellows knew that their effort was futile, but they were tired of the suspense.  They wanted something to happen.  They were accomplishing nothing, and the best they hoped for was the putting of an end to the legislative farce in which they were unwilling players.  They knew not what end would come, but they never anticipated a more disastrous end than the one that did come.

* The same conditions obtained in the nineteenth century A.D. under British rule in India.  The natives died of starvation by the million, while their rulers robbed them of the fruits of their toil and expended it on magnificent pageants and mumbo-jumbo fooleries.  Perforce, in this enlightened age, we have much to blush for in the acts of our ancestors.  Our only consolation is philosophic.  We must accept the capitalistic stage in social evolution as about on a par with the earlier monkey stage.  The human had to pass through those stages in its rise from the mire and slime of low organic life.  It was inevitable that much of the mire and slime should cling and be not easily shaken off.

** The people of the abyss—­this phrase was struck out by the genius of H. G. Wells in the late nineteenth century A.D.  Wells was a sociological seer, sane and normal as well as warm human.  Many fragments of his work have come down to us, while two of his greatest achievements, “Anticipations” and “Mankind in the Making,” have come down intact.  Before the oligarchs, and before Everhard, Wells speculated upon the building