The Bear Confronts the Masters — The Iron Heel

Ernest is at the house so often that Avis stops pretending the dinners are the only draw. His gaze and his handshake grow firmer, and the question in his eyes does not go away. She has already moved through dislike, attraction, and repulsion. When he is asked to speak at the Philomath Club, the monthly room of men who own the city, he begins with the childhood that starved flesh and spirit alike. Upstairs, he had believed, lived unselfishness of the spirit and clean thinking. He had learned that paradise from cheap novels in which, villains aside, the rich thought beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds.

He tells them what he found when he finally entered that paradise: not clean thinking, but money-talk under religious speech, and faces that change when lordship is named. Avis hears what he hears, a growl the pack does not know it is making. Harshness forms in their faces. Fight-light flashes in their eyes. She understands, before he finishes the charge, that they will not let the world be wrested from them easily. He accounts for a million and a half revolutionists by mismanagement. Productive power has increased a thousand-fold, and children still work in factories while millions stay poor. He asks them to answer the charge. They grow louder instead of answering.

Colonel Van Gilbert, the corporate lawyer, tries to swat him with youth and fallacy. Ernest puts the lawyer back in his trade. On the law of thieving corporations, Ernest says, he is in the dirt at Van Gilbert's feet. On sociology, Van Gilbert is in the dirt at his. Law is the stuff of a day; rash generalisations about history are not worth the breath spent on them. The room likes the hit until it understands the hit is on them. Mr Wickson, the coolest head present, finally drops the debate. He does not try to win on history or economics. He says the class in that room will not be argued out of lordship. They will keep the world by force if argument fails them, and they will do it without the embarrassment of a moral defence.

Ernest answers with the word the labour hosts have been learning until their minds tingle with it: power. He has already told Van Gilbert to stay in his trade. Now he tells the whole club the same thing in one syllable. It does not matter whether the dragging-down takes a year, ten, or a thousand. Both sides have now said out loud that votes will not decide who rules. And so the night ends on that kingly word, with the Philomath Club still seated and the coming fight already named.