The Iron Heel

Excerpt: ...the elections. It was not that they were stunned. They were too cool-headed and courageous for that. They were merely incredulous, that was all. Ernest could not get them seriously to fear the coming of the Oligarchy. They were stirred by him, but they were too sure of their own strength. There was no room in their theoretical social evolution for an oligarchy, therefore the Oligarchy could not be. "We'll send you to Congress and it will be all right," they told him at one of our secret meetings. "And when they take me out of Congress," Ernest replied coldly, "and put me against a wall, and blow my brains out-what then?" "Then we'll rise in our might," a dozen voices answered at once. "Then you'll welter in your gore," was his retort. "I've heard that song sung by the middle class, and where is it now in its might?" CHAPTER XI THE GREAT ADVENTURE Mr. Wickson did not send for father. They met by chance on the ferry-boat to San Francisco, so that the warning he gave father was not premeditated. Had they not met accidentally, there would not have been any warning. Not that the outcome would have been different, however. Father came of stout old Mayflower stock, and the blood was imperative in him. One of the first ships that carried colonies to America, after the discovery of the New World. Descendants of these original colonists were for a while inordinately proud of their genealogy; but in time the blood became so widely diffused that it ran in the veins practically of all Americans. "Ernest was right," he told me, as soon as he had returned home. "Ernest is a very remarkable young man, and I'd rather see you his wife than the wife of Rockefeller himself or the King of England." "What's the matter?" I asked in alarm. "The Oligarchy is about to tread upon our faces-yours and mine. Wickson as much as told me so. He was very kind-for an oligarch. He offered to reinstate me in the university. What do you think of that? He, Wickson, a...