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