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.

Too late did the socialist movement of the early twentieth century
divine the coming of th