ration to millions of common laborers, for the enormous bulk of the
surplus will compel an equally enormous expenditure, and the oligarchs
will build for a thousand years--ay, for ten thousand years. They will
build as the Egyptians and the Babylonians never dreamed of building;
and when the oligarchs have passed away, their great roads and their
wonder cities will remain for the brotherhood of labor to tread upon and
dwell within.*

* And since that day of prophecy, have passed away the three
centuries of the Iron Heel and the four centuries of the
Brotherhood of Man, and to-day we tread the roads and dwell
in the cities that the oligarchs built. It is true, we are
even now building still more wonderful wonder cities, but
the wonder cities of the oligarchs endure, and I write these
lines in Ardis, one of the most wonderful of them all.

"These things the oligarchs will do because they cannot help doing them.
These great works will be the form their expenditure of the surplus will
take, and in the same way that the ruling classes of Egypt of long ago
expended the surplus they robbed from the people by the building of
temples and pyramids. Under the oligarchs will flourish, not a priest
class, but an artist class. And in place of the merchant class of
bourgeoisie will be the labor castes. And beneath will be the abyss,
wherein will fester and starve and rot, and ever renew itself, the
common people, the great bulk of the population. And in the end, who
knows in what day, the common people will rise up out of the abyss; the
labor castes and the Oligarchy will crumble away; and then, at last,
after the travail of the centuries, will it be the day of the common
man. I had thought to see that day; but now I know that I shall never
see it."