And in passing we note that that historic phrase, the Iron Heel, originated in Ernest Everhard’s mind.  This, we may say, is the one moot question that this new-found document clears up.  Previous to this, the earliest-known use of the phrase occurred in the pamphlet, “Ye Slaves,” written by George Milford and published in December, 1912.  This George Milford was an obscure agitator about whom nothing is known, save the one additional bit of information gained from the Manuscript, which mentions that he was shot in the Chicago Commune.  Evidently he had heard Ernest Everhard make use of the phrase in some public speech, most probably when he was running for Congress in the fall of 1912.  From the Manuscript we learn that Everhard used the phrase at a private dinner in the spring of 1912.  This is, without discussion, the earliest-known occasion on which the Oligarchy was so designated.

The rise of the Oligarchy will always remain a cause of secret wonder to the historian and the philosopher.  Other great historical events have their place in social evolution.  They were inevitable.  Their coming could have been predicted with the same certitude that astronomers to-day predict the outcome of the movements of stars.  Without these other great historical events, social evolution could not have proceeded.  Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society.  But it were ridiculous to assert that the Iron Heel was a necessary stepping-stone.  Rather, to-day, is it adjudged a step aside, or a step backward, to the social tyrannies that made the early world a hell, but that were as necessary as the Iron Heel was unnecessary.

Black as Feudalism was, yet the coming of it was inevitable.  What else than Feudalism could have followed upon the breakdown of that great centralized governmental machine known as the Roman Empire?  Not so, however, with the Iron Heel.  In the orderly procedure of social evolution there was no place for it.  It was not necessary, and it was not inevitable.  It must always remain the great curiosity of history—­a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of to-day who speak with certitude of social processes.

Capitalism was adjudged by the sociologists of the time to be the culmination of bourgeois rule, the ripened fruit of the bourgeois revolution.  And we of to-day can but applaud that judgment.  Following upon Capitalism, it was held, even by such intellectual and antagonistic giants as Herbert Spencer, that Socialism would come.  Out of the decay of self-seeking capitalism, it was held, would arise that flower of the ages, the Brotherhood of Man.  Instead of which, appalling alike to us who look back and to those that lived at the time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous offshoot, the Oligarchy.