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, tr