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.