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.

Too late did the socialist movement of the early twentieth century
divine the coming of the Oligarchy. Even as it was divined, the
Oligarchy was there--a fact established in blood, a stupendous and awful
reality. Nor even then, as the Everhard Manuscript well shows, was any