The Iron Heel Page #5

"The Iron Heel" by Jack London, published in 1908, is a dystopian political novel that explores themes of authoritarianism, class struggle, and revolution. It is considered one of the earliest examples of dystopian fiction, influencing later works like 1984 and Brave New World.

• Novel

								


“I can only reaffirm my position,” Dr. Hammerfield retorted tartly. “It
is too long a story to enter into now.”

“No story is too long for the scientist,” Ernest said sweetly. “That is
why the scientist gets to places. That is why he got to America.”

I shall not describe the whole evening, though it is a joy to me to
recall every moment, every detail, of those first hours of my coming to
know Ernest Everhard.

Battle royal raged, and the ministers grew red-faced and excited,
especially at the moments when Ernest called them romantic
philosophers, shadow-projectors, and similar things. And always he
checked them back to facts. “The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!” he
would proclaim triumphantly, when he had brought one of them a cropper.
He bristled with facts. He tripped them up with facts, ambuscaded them
with facts, bombarded them with broadsides of facts.

“You seem to worship at the shrine of fact,” Dr. Hammerfield taunted
him.

“There is no God but Fact, and Mr. Everhard is its prophet,” Dr.
Ballingford paraphrased.

Ernest smilingly acquiesced.

“I’m like the man from Texas,” he said. And, on being solicited, he
explained. “You see, the man from Missouri always says, ‘You’ve got to
show me.’ But the man from Texas says, ‘You’ve got to put it in my
hand.’ From which it is apparent that he is no metaphysician.”

Another time, when Ernest had just said that the metaphysical
philosophers could never stand the test of truth, Dr. Hammerfield
suddenly demanded:

“What is the test of truth, young man? Will you kindly explain what has
so long puzzled wiser heads than yours?”

“Certainly,” Ernest answered. His cocksureness irritated them. “The
wise heads have puzzled so sorely over truth because they went up into
the air after it. Had they remained on the solid earth, they would have
found it easily enough—ay, they would have found that they themselves
were precisely testing truth with every practical act and thought of
their lives.”

“The test, the test,” Dr. Hammerfield repeated impatiently. “Never mind
the preamble. Give us that which we have sought so long—the test of
truth. Give it us, and we will be as gods.”

There was an impolite and sneering scepticism in his words and manner
that secretly pleased most of them at the table, though it seemed to
bother Bishop Morehouse.

“Dr. Jordan[9] has stated it very clearly,” Ernest said. “His test of
truth is: ‘Will it work? Will you trust your life to it?’”

 [9] A noted educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
 centuries of the Christian Era. He was president of the Stanford
 University, a private benefaction of the times.

“Pish!” Dr. Hammerfield sneered. “You have not taken Bishop
Berkeley[10] into account. He has never been answered.”

 [10] An idealistic monist who long puzzled the philosophers of that
 time with his denial of the existence of matter, but whose clever
 argument was finally demolished when the new empiric facts of science
 were philosophically generalized.

“The noblest metaphysician of them all,” Ernest laughed. “But your
example is unfortunate. As Berkeley himself attested, his metaphysics
didn’t work.”

Dr. Hammerfield was angry, righteously angry. It was as though he had
caught Ernest in a theft or a lie.

“Young man,” he trumpeted, “that statement is on a par with all you
have uttered to-night. It is a base and unwarranted assumption.”

“I am quite crushed,” Ernest murmured meekly. “Only I don’t know what
hit me. You’ll have to put it in my hand, Doctor.”

“I will, I will,” Dr. Hammerfield spluttered. “How do you know? You do
not know that Bishop Berkeley attested that his metaphysics did not
work. You have no proof. Young man, they have always worked.”

“I take it as proof that Berkeley’s metaphysics did not work, because—”
Ernest paused calmly for a moment. “Because Berkeley made an invariable
practice of going through doors instead of walls. Because he trusted
his life to solid bread and butter and roast beef. Because he shaved
himself with a razor that worked when it removed the hair from his
face.”

“But those are actual things!” Dr. Hammerfield cried. “Metaphysics is
of the mind.”

“And they work—in the mind?” Ernest queried softly.

The other nodded.

“And even a multitude of angels can dance on the point of a needle—in
the mind,” Ernest went on reflectively. “And a blubber-eating, fur-clad
god can exist and work—in the mind; and there are no proofs to the
contrary—in the mind. I suppose, Doctor, you live in the mind?”

“My mind to me a kingdom is,” was the answer.

“That’s another way of saying that you live up in the air. But you come
back to earth at meal-time, I am sure, or when an earthquake happens
along. Or, tell me, Doctor, do you have no apprehension in an
earthquake that that incorporeal body of yours will be hit by an
immaterial brick?”

Instantly, and quite unconsciously, Dr. Hammerfield’s hand shot up to
his head, where a scar disappeared under the hair. It happened that
Ernest had blundered on an apposite illustration. Dr. Hammerfield had
been nearly killed in the Great Earthquake[11] by a falling chimney.
Everybody broke out into roars of laughter.

 [11] The Great Earthquake of 1906 A.D. that destroyed San Francisco.

“Well?” Ernest asked, when the merriment had subsided. “Proofs to the
contrary?”

And in the silence he asked again, “Well?” Then he added, “Still well,
but not so well, that argument of yours.”

But Dr. Hammerfield was temporarily crushed, and the battle raged on in
new directions. On point after point, Ernest challenged the ministers.
When they affirmed that they knew the working class, he told them
fundamental truths about the working class that they did not know, and
challenged them for disproofs. He gave them facts, always facts,
checked their excursions into the air, and brought them back to the
solid earth and its facts.

How the scene comes back to me! I can hear him now, with that war-note
in his voice, flaying them with his facts, each fact a lash that stung
and stung again. And he was merciless. He took no quarter,[12] and gave
none. I can never forget the flaying he gave them at the end:

 [12] This figure arises from the customs of the times. When, among men
 fighting to the death in their wild-animal way, a beaten man threw
 down his weapons, it was at the option of the victor to slay him or
 spare him.

“You have repeatedly confessed to-night, by direct avowal or ignorant
statement, that you do not know the working class. But you are not to
be blamed for this. How can you know anything about the working class?
You do not live in the same locality with the working class. You herd
with the capitalist class in another locality. And why not? It is the
capitalist class that pays you, that feeds you, that puts the very
clothes on your backs that you are wearing to-night. And in return you

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