Chapter Twelve

. This resistance must be attacked by special societies, by the establishment of competing schools, by help and promotion for enlightened teachers, and, wherever the attack is incompletely successful, it must be supplemented by the energetic diffusion of educational literature for adults, upon modern lines. The forces of the entire movement may be mobilised in a variety of ways to bring pressure upon reactionary schools and institutions.

A set of activities correlated with most of the directly creative ones will lie through existing political and administrative bodies. The political work of the Open Conspiracy must be conducted upon two levels and by entirely different methods. Its main political idea, its political strategy, is to weaken, efface, incorporate or supersede existing governments. But there is also a tactical diversion of administrative powers and resources to economic and educational arrangements of a modern type. Because a country or a district is inconvenient as a division and destined to ultimate absorption in some more comprehensive and economical system of government, that is no reason why its administration should not be brought meanwhile into working co-operation with the development of the Open Conspiracy. Free Trade nationalism in power is better than high tariff nationalism, and pacificist party liberalism better than aggressive party patriotism.

This evokes the anticipation of another series of groups, a group in every possible political division, whose task it will be to organise the whole strength of the Open Conspiracy in that division as an effective voting or agitating force. In many divisions this might soon become a sufficiently considerable block to affect the attitudes and pledges of the national politicians. The organisation of these political groups into provincial or national conferences and systems would follow hard upon their appearance. In their programmes they would be guided by meetings and discussions with the specifically economic, educational, biological, scientific and central groups, but they would also form their own special research bodies to work out the incessant problems of transition between the old type of locally centred administrations and a developing world system of political controls.

In the preceding chapter we sketched the first practicable first phase of the Open Conspiracy as the propaganda of a group of interlocking ideas, a propaganda associated with pacificist action. In the present chapter we have given a scheme of branching and amplifying development. In this scheme, this scheme of the second phase, we conceive of the Open Conspiracy as consisting of a great multitude and variety of overlapping groups, but now all organised for collective political, social and educational as well as propagandist action. They will recognise each other much more clearly than they did at first and they will have acquired a common name.

The groups, however, almost all of them, will still have specific work also. Some will be organising a sounder setting for scientific progress, some exploring new social and educational possibilities, many concentrated upon this or that phase in the reorganisation of the world’s economic life and so forth. The individual Open Conspirator may belong to one or more groups and in addition to the ad hoc societies and organisations which the movement will sustain, often in co-operation with partially sympathetic people still outside its ranks.

The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It will have become a great world movement as widespread and evident as socialism or communism. It will largely have taken the place of these movements. It will be more, it will be a world religion. This large loose assimilatory mass of groups and societies will be definitely and obviously attempting to swallow up the entire population of the world and become the new human community.

_Chapter XIV_

EXISTING AND DEVELOPING MOVEMENTS WITH WHICH THE OPEN CONSPIRACY MAY HOPE TO COALESCE

A suggestion has already been made in an earlier chapter of this essay which may perhaps be expanded here a little more. It is that there already exist in the world a considerable number of movements in industry, in political life, in social matters, in education, which point in the same direction as the Open Conspiracy. It will be interesting to discuss how far some of these movements may not become confluent with others and by a mere process of logical completion identify themselves with the Open Conspiracy.

Consider, for example, the movement for a scientific study and control of population pressure, known popularly as the Birth Control Movement. By itself, assuming existing political and economic conditions, this movement lays itself open to the charge of being no better than a scheme of “race suicide.” If a population in some area of high civilisation attempts to restrict increase, organise its economic life upon methods of maximum individual productivity and impose order and beauty upon its entire territory, that region will become irresistibly attractive to any adjacent festering mass of low-grade highly reproductive population. The cheap humanity of the one community will make a constant attack upon the other, affording facile servility, prostitutes, toilers, hand labour. Tariffs against sweated products, restriction of immigration, tensions leading at last to a war of defensive massacre are inevitable. The conquest of an illiterate, hungry and incontinent multitude may be almost as disastrous as defeat for the selector race. Indeed one finds that in discussion the propagandists of Birth Control admit that their project must be universal or dysgenic. But yet quite a number of them do not follow up these admissions to their logical consequences, produce the lines and continue the curves until the complete form of the Open Conspiracy appears. It will be the business of the early Open Conspiracy propagandists to make them do so, and to install groups and representatives at every possible point of vantage in this movement.

And similarly the now very numerous associations for world peace halt in alarm on the edge of their own implications. World Peace remains a vast aspiration until there is some substitute for the present competition of states for markets and raw material, and some restraint upon population pressure. League of Nations Societies and all forms of pacificist organisation are either futile or insincere until they come into line with the complementary propositions of the Open Conspiracy.

The various socialist movements again are partial projects professing at present to be self-sufficient schemes. Most of them involve a pretence that national and political forces are intangible phantoms and that the primary issue of population pressure can be ignored. They produce one woolly scheme after another for transferring the property in this, that or the other economic plant and interest from bodies of shareholders and company promoters to gangs of politicians or to syndicates of workers--to be steered to efficiency, it would seem, by pillars of cloud by day and pillars of fire by night. The communist party has trained a whole generation of disciples to believe that the overthrow of a vaguely apprehended “Capitalism” is the simple solution of all human difficulties. No movement ever succeeded so completely in substituting phrases for thought. In Moscow communism has trampled “Capitalism” underfoot for ten eventful years, and still finds all the problems of social and political construction before it.

But as soon as the Socialist or Communist can be got to realise that his repudiation of private monopolisation is not a complete programme but just a preliminary principle, he is ripe for the ampler concepts of the modern outlook. The Open Conspiracy is the natural inheritor of socialist and communist enthusiasms; it may be in control of Moscow before it is in control of New York.

The Open Conspiracy may achieve the more or less complete amalgamation of all the radical impulses in the Atlantic community of to-day. But its scope is not confined to the variety of sympathetic movements which are brought to mind by that loose word _radical_. In the past fifty years or so while Socialists and Communists have been denouncing the current processes of economic life in the same invariable phrases and with the same undiscriminating animosity, these processes have been undergoing the profoundest and most interesting changes. While socialist thought has recited its phrases, with witty rather than substantial variations, a thousand times as many clever people have been busy upon industrial, mercantile and financial processes. The Socialist still reiterates that this greater body of intelligence has been merely seeking private gain, which has just as much truth in it as is necessary to make it an intoxicating lie. Everywhere competitive businesses have been giving way to amalgamated enterprises, marching towards monopoly, and personally owned businesses to organisations so large as to acquire more and more the character of publicly responsible bodies. In theory in Great Britain, banks are privately owned and railway transport is privately owned, and they are run entirely for profit--in practice their profit making is austerely restrained and their proceedings are all the more sensitive to public welfare because they are outside the direct control of party politicians.

Now this transformation of business, trading and finance has been so multitudinous and so rapid as to be still largely unconscious of itself. Intelligent men have gone from combination to combination and extended their range, year by year, without realising how their activities were enlarging them to conspicuousness and responsibility. Economic organisation is even now only discovering itself for what it is. It has accepted incompatible existing institutions to its own great injury. It has been patriotic and broken its shins against the tariff walls its patriotism has raised to hamper its own movements; it has been imperial and found itself taxed to the limits of its endurance, “controlled” by antiquated military and naval experts and crippled altogether. The younger, more vigorous intelligences in the great business directorates of to-day are beginning to realise the uncompleted implications of their enterprise. A day will come when the gentlemen who are trying to control the oil supplies of the world without reference to anything else except as a subsidiary factor in their game, will be considered to be quaint characters. The ends of Big Business must carry Big Business into the Open Conspiracy, just as surely as every other creative and broadly organising movement is carried.

Now I know that to all this urging towards a unification of constructive effort, a great number of people will be disposed to a reply which will, I hope, be less popular in the future than it is at the present time. They will assume first an expression of great sagacity, an elderly air. Then, smiling gently, they will ask whether there is not something preposterously ambitious in looking at the problem of life as one whole. Is it not wiser to concentrate our forces on more practicable things, to attempt one thing at a time, not to antagonise the whole order of established things against our poor desires, to begin tentatively to refrain from putting too great a strain upon people, to trust to the growing common sense of the world to adjust this or that line of progress to the general scheme of things. Far better accomplish something definite here and there than challenge a general failure. That is, they declare, how reformers and creative things have gone on in the past; that is how they are going on now; muddling forward in a mild and confused and partially successful way. Why not trust them to go on like that? Let each man do his bit with a complete disregard of the logical interlocking of progressive effort to which I have been drawing attention.

Now I must confess that, popular as this style of argument is, it gives me so tedious a feeling that rather than argue against it in general terms I will resort to a parable. I will relate the story of the pig on Provinder Island.

There was, you must understand, only one pig on Provinder Island, and Heaven knows how it got there, whether it escaped and swam ashore or was put ashore from some vessel suddenly converted to vegetarianism, I cannot imagine. At first it was the only mammal there. But later on three sailors and a very small but observant cabin-boy were wrecked there, and after subsisting for a time on shell-fish and roots they became aware of this pig. And simultaneously they became aware of a nearly intolerable craving for bacon. The eldest of the three sailors began to think of a ham he had met in his boyhood, a beautiful ham for which his father had had the carving knife specially sharpened; the second of the three sailors dreamed repeatedly of a roast loin of pork he had eaten at his sister’s wedding, and the third’s mind ran on chitterlings--I know not why. They sat about their meagre fire and conferred and expatiated upon these things until their mouths watered and the shell-fish turned to water within them. What dreams came to the cabin-boy are unknown, for it was their custom to discourage his confidences. But he sat apart brooding and was at last moved to speech. “Let us hunt that old pig,” he said, “and kill it.”

Now it may have been because it was the habit of these sailors to discourage the cabin-boy and keep him in his place, but anyhow, for whatever reason it was, all three sailors set themselves with one accord to oppose that proposal.

“Who spoke of killing the pig?” said the eldest sailor loudly, looking round to see if by any chance the pig was within hearing. “Who spoke of _killing_ the pig? You’re the sort of silly young devil who jumps at ideas and hasn’t no sense of difficulties. What I said was _AM_. All I want is just a Am to go with my roots and sea salt. One Am. The Left Am. I don’t want the right one and I don’t propose to get it. I’ve got a sense of proportion and a proper share of humour and I know my limitations. I’m a sound clear-headed practical man. Am is what I’m after, and if I can get that, I’m prepared to say Quits and let the rest of the pig alone. Who’s for joining me in a Left Am Unt--a simple reasonable Left Am Unt--just to get One Left Am?”

Nobody answered him directly, but when his voice died away, the next sailor in order of seniority took up the tale. “That Boy,” he said, “will die of Swelled Ed, and I pity im. My idea is to follow up the pig and get hold of a loin chop. Just simply a loin chop. A loin chop is good enough for me. It’s--feasible. Much more feasible than a great Am. Here we are, we’ve got no gun, we’ve got no wood of a sort to make bows and arrows, we’ve not nothing but our clasp knives, and that pig can run like Ell. It’s ridiculous to think of killing that pig. But if one didn’t trouble him, if one kind of got into his confidence and crept near him and just quietly and insidiously went for his loin--just sort of as if one was tickling him--one might get a loin chop almost before he knew of it.”

The third sailor sat crumpled up and downcast with his lean fingers tangled in his shock of hair. “Chitterlings,” he murmured, “chitterlings. I don’t even want to _think_ of the pig.”

And the cabin-boy pursued his own ideas in silence, for he deemed it unwise to provoke his elders further.

On these lines it was the three sailors set about the gratifying of their taste for pork, each in his own way, separately and sanely and modestly. And each had his reward. The first sailor after weeks of patience got within arm’s length of the pig and smacked that coveted left ham loud and good, and felt success was near. The other two heard the smack and the grunt of dismay half a mile away. But the pig in a state of astonishment carried the ham off out of reach, there and then, and that was as close as the first sailor ever got to his objective. The roast loin hunter did no better. He came upon the pig asleep under a rock one day, and jumped upon the very loin he desired, but the pig bit him deeply and septically, and displayed so much resentment that the question of a chop was dropped forthwith and never again broached between them. And thereafter the arm of the second sailor was bandaged and swelled up and went from bad to worse. And as for the third sailor, it is doubtful whether he even got wind of a chitterling from the start to the finish of this parable. The cabin-boy pursuing notions of his own made a pitfall for the whole pig, but as the others did not help him, and as he was an excessively small--though shrewd--cabin-boy, it was a feeble and insufficient pitfall and all it caught was the hunter of chitterlings who was wandering distraught. After which the hunter of chitterlings became a hunter of cabin-boys, and the cabin-boy’s life, for all his shrewdness, was precarious and unpleasant. He slept only in snatches and learned the full bitterness of insight misunderstood.

When at last a ship came to Provinder Island and took off the three men and the cabin-boy, the pig was still bacon intact and quite gay and cheerful, and all four castaways were in a very emaciated condition because at that season of the year shell-fish were rare and edible roots were hard to find and the pig was very much cleverer than they were in finding them and digging them up--let alone digesting them.

From which parable it may be gathered that a partial enterprise is not always wiser or more hopeful than a comprehensive one.

And in the same manner, with myself in the rôle of that minute but observant cabin-boy, I would sustain the proposition that none of these movements of partial reconstruction has the sound common-sense quality its supporters suppose. All these movements are worth while if they can be taken into a world-wide movement; all in isolation are futile. They will be overlaid and lost in the general drift. The policy of the whole hog is the best one, the sanest one, the easiest and the most hopeful. If sufficient men and women of intelligence can realise that simple truth and give up their lives to it, mankind may yet achieve a civilisation and power and fullness of life beyond our present dreams. If they do not, frustration will triumph, and war, violence and a drivelling waste of time and strength and desire, more disgusting even than war, will be the lot of our race down through the ages to its emaciated and miserable end.

For this little planet of ours is quite off the course of any rescue ships, if the will in our species fails.

_Chapter XV_

THE CREATIVE HOME, SOCIAL GROUP AND SCHOOL: THE PRESENT WASTE OF YOUTHFUL SERIOUSNESS

Human society began with the family. The natural history of gregariousness is a history of the establishment of mutual toleration among human animals, so that a litter or a herd keeps together instead of breaking up. It is in the family group that the restraints, disciplines and self-sacrifices which make human society possible were worked out and our fundamental prejudices established, and it is in the family group that our social life must be relearnt generation after generation.

Now in each generation the Open Conspiracy must remain a minority movement of intelligent converts until it can develop its own reproductive methods. A unified progressive world community demands its own type of home and training. It needs to have its fundamental concepts firmly established in as many minds as possible and to guard its children from the infection of the old racial and national hatreds and jealousies, old superstitions and bad mental habits, and base interpretations of life. From its outset the Open Conspiracy will be setting itself to influence the existing educational machinery, but for a long time it will find itself confronted in school and college by powerful religious and political authorities determined to set back the children at the point or even behind the point from which their parents made their escape. At best, the liberalism of the state-controlled schools will be a compromise. During the early phases of its struggle, therefore, the Open Conspiracy will be obliged to adopt a certain sectarianism of domestic and social life in the interests of its children, and it may even in many cases have to consider the grouping of its families and the establishment of its own schools. In many modern communities, the English-speaking states, for example, there is still liberty to establish educational companies, running schools of a special type. In every country where that right does not exist it has to be fought for.

There lies a great work for various groups of the Open Conspiracy. Successful schools would become laboratories of educational methods and patterns for the state schools. Necessarily for a time, the Open Conspiracy children would become a social élite, they would begin from their first conscious moments to think and talk among clear-headed people speaking distinctly and behaving frankly, and it would be a waste and loss to put them back for the scholastic stage among their mentally indistinct and morally muddled contemporaries. A phase when there will be a special educational system for the Open Conspiracy is, therefore, clearly indicated. Its children will learn to speak, draw, think, compute lucidly and subtly, and into their vigorous minds they will take the broad concepts of history, biology and mechanical progress, the basis of the new world, naturally and easily. Meanwhile, those who grow up outside the advancing educational frontier of the Open Conspiracy will never come under the full influence of its ideas, or they will get hold of them only after a severe struggle against a mass of misrepresentations and elaborately instilled prejudices.

The Open Conspiracy will not be in health until it has segregated its home life and much of its social life from the general confusions of to-day, until its adherents marry and associate preferentially within the movement and keep themselves essentially aloof from the prevalent methods of wasting time and interest. They must evolve a new social atmosphere. It will be a minor aspect of the world revolution to live down the contemporary theatre, contemporary “amusements,” the sentimental booms and imitative chatter, the ovine congregating to gape at this or that, the dull pursuit of sports and “games” and quasi-innocent vices, the fashions and industrious futilities of current life so soon as it escapes from poverty. The whole drift of the contemporary world is to tempt and ensnare and waste our children. It has a diabolical disposition to make life altogether trivial and ineffective. Over all these matters women seem to have much more aptitude and power than men. It may not be true that “woman’s sphere is the home,” but certainly the home and its immediate social atmosphere is her empire. She can be the moral quite as much as the physical mother of the days to come.

* * * * *

Always, as long as I can remember, there has been a dispute and invidious comparisons between the old and the young. The young find the old prey upon and restrain them and the old find the young, shallow, disappointing and aimless in vivid contrast to their own revised memories of their own early days. The present time is one in which these perennial accusations flower with exceptional vigour. But there does seem to be some truth in the statement that the facilities to live frivolously are greater now than they have ever been for old and young alike. In the great communities that emerge from Christendom, there is a widespread disposition to regard Sunday as merely a holiday. But that was certainly not the original intention of Sunday. As we have noted already in an earlier chapter, it was a day dedicated to the greater issues of life. Now great multitudes of people do not even pretend to set aside any time at all to the greater issues of life. The churches are neglected and nothing of a unifying or exalting sort takes their place.

Now what the contemporary senior tells his junior to-day is perfectly correct. In his youth, no serious impulse of his went to waste. He was not distracted by a thousand gay but petty temptations, and the local religious powers, whatever they happened to be, seemed to believe in themselves more and made a more comprehensive attack upon his conscience and imagination. Now the old faiths are damaged and discredited and the new and greater one, which is the Open Conspiracy, takes shape only slowly. A decade or so ago, socialism preached its confident hopes, and patriotism and imperial pride shared its attraction for the ever grave and passionate will of emergent youth. Now socialism and democracy are “under revision” and the flags that once waved so bravely reek of poison gas, are stiff with blood and mud and shameful with exposed dishonesties. Youth is what youth has always been, eager for fine interpretations of life, capable of splendid resolves. But it comes up out of its childhood to-day into a world of ruthless exposures and cynical pretensions. The past ten years has seen the shy and powerful idealism of youth at a loss and dismayed as perhaps it has never been before. It is in the world still, but masked, hiding even from itself in a whirl of small excitements and futile defiant depravities.

The old flags and faiths have lost their magic for the intelligence of the young; they can command it no more; it is in the mighty revolution to which the Open Conspiracy directs itself that the youth of mankind must once more find its soul if ever it is to find its soul again.

_Chapter XVI_

PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ACTIVITIES OF THE OPEN CONSPIRACY INTO A WORLD CONTROL AND COMMONWEAL: THE HAZARDS OF THE CONFLICT

We have now sketched out in these Blue Prints, the methods by which the confused radicalism and constructive forces of the present time may and can and probably will be drawn together about a core of modernised religious feeling into one great and multifarious creative effort. A way has been shown by which this effort may be developed from a mere propagandist campaign and a merely resistant protest against contemporary militarism into an organised foreshadowing in research, publicity and experiment in educational, economic and political reconstructions, of that _Pax Mundi_, which has become already the tantalised desire of great multitudes throughout the world. These foreshadowings and reconstructions will ignore and transcend the political boundaries of to-day. They will continually become more substantial as project passes into attempt and performance. In phase after phase and at point after point, therefore, the Open Conspiracy will come to grips with the powers that sustain these boundaries.

And it will not be merely topographical boundaries that will be passed. The Open Conspiracy will also be dissolving and repudiating many existing restrictions upon conduct and many social prejudices. The Open Conspiracy proposes to end and shows how an end may be put to that huge substratum of under-developed, under-educated, subjugated, exploited and frustrated lives upon which such civilisation as the world has known hitherto has rested, and upon which most of our social systems still rest.

Whenever possible, the Open Conspiracy will advance by illumination and persuasion. But it has to advance and even from the outset where it is not allowed to illuminate and persuade it must fight. Its first fights will probably be for the right to spread its system of ideas plainly and clearly throughout the world.

There is, I suppose, a flavour of treason about the assumption that any established government is provisional, and a quality of immorality in any criticism of accepted moral standards. Still more is the proposal, made even in times of peace, to resist war levies and conscription, an offence against absolute conceptions of loyalty. But the ampler wisdom of the modern Atlantic communities, already touched by premonitions of change and futurity, has continually enlarged the common liberties of thought for some generations, and it is doubtful if there will be any serious resistance to the dissemination of these views and the early organisation of the Open Conspiracy in any of the English-speaking communities or throughout the British Empire, in the Scandinavian countries, or in such liberal-minded countries as Holland, Switzerland, republican Germany or France. France, in the hasty years after the war, submitted to some repressive legislation against the discussion of birth control or hostile criticism of the militarist attitude; but such a check upon mental freedom is altogether contrary to the clear and open quality of the French mind; in practice it has already been effectively repudiated by such writers as Victor Margueritte, and it is unlikely that there will be any effective suppression of the opening phases of the Open Conspiracy in France.

This gives us a large portion of the existing civilised world in which men’s minds may be readjusted to the idea that their existing governments are in the position of trustees for the greater government of the coming age. Throughout these communities it is conceivable that the structural lines of the world community may be materialised and established with only minor struggles, local boycotts, vigorous public controversies, normal legislative obstruction, social pressure and overt political activities. Police, jail, expulsions and so forth, let alone outlawry and warfare, may scarcely be brought into this struggle upon the high civilised level of the Atlantic communities. But where they are brought in, the Open Conspiracy to the best of its ability and the full extent of its resources, must become a fighting force and organise itself upon resistant lines.

Non-resistance, the restriction of activities to moral suasion, is no part of the programme of the Open Conspiracy. In the face of unscrupulous opposition creative ideas must become aggressive, must define their enemies and attack them. By its own organisations or through the police and military strength of governments amenable to its ideas, the movement is bound to find itself fighting for open roads, open frontiers, freedom of speech and the realities of peace in regions of oppression. The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory. It lies within the power of the Atlantic communities to impose peace upon the world and secure unimpeded movement and free speech from end to end of the earth. This is a fact on which the Open Conspiracy must insist. The English-speaking states, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries and Russia, given only a not very extravagant frankness of understanding between them, and a common disposition towards the ideas of the Open Conspiracy, could cease to arm against each other and still exert enough strength to impose disarmament and a respect for human freedom in every corner of the planet. It is fantastic pedantry to wait for all the world to accede before all the world is pacified and policed.

The most inconsistent factor in the liberal and radical thought of to-day is its prejudice against the interference of highly developed modern states in the affairs of less stable and less advanced regions. This is denounced as “imperialism,” and regarded as criminal. It may have assumed grotesque and dangerous forms under the now dying traditions of national competition, but as the merger of the Atlantic states proceeds, the possibility and necessity of bringing areas of misgovernment and disorder under world control increase. A great war like the war of 1914-1918 may never happen again. The common-sense of mankind may suffice to avert that. But there is still much actual warfare before mankind, on the frontiers everywhere, against brigands, against ancient loyalties and traditions which will become at last no better than excuses for brigandage and obstructive exaction. All the weight of the Open Conspiracy will be on the side of the world order and against that sort of local independence which holds back its subject people from the citizenship of the world.

But in this broad prospect of far-reaching political amalgamations under the impulses of the Open Conspiracy lurk a thousand antagonisms and adverse chances, like the unsuspected gulleys and ravines and thickets in a wide and distant landscape. We know not what unexpected chasms may presently be discovered. The Open Conspirator may realise that he is one of an advancing and victorious force and still find himself outnumbered and outfought in his own particular corner of the battlefield. No one can yet estimate the possible strength of reaction against world unification; no one can foresee the extent of the divisions and confusions that may arise among ourselves. The ideas in this book may be spread about without any serious resistance in most civilised countries, but there are still governments under which the persistent expression of such thoughts will be dealt with as crimes and bring men and women to prison, torment and death. Nevertheless they must be expressed.

While the Open Conspiracy is no more than a discussion it may spread unopposed because it is disregarded. As a mainly passive resistance to militarism it may still be tolerable. But as its knowledge and experience accumulate and its organisation becomes more effective and aggressive, as it begins to lay hands upon education, upon social habits, upon business developments, as it proceeds to take over the organisation of the community, it will marshal not only its own forces but its enemies. A complex of interests will find themselves restrained and threatened by it and it may easily evoke that most dangerous of human mass feelings, fear. In ways quite unpredictable it may raise a storm against itself beyond all our present imaginings. Our conception of an almost bloodless domination of the Atlantic communities may be merely the confident dream of a thinker whose thoughts have yet to be squarely challenged.

We are not even sure of the common peace. Across the path of mankind the storm of another Great War may break, bringing with it for a time more brutal repressions and vaster injuries even than its predecessor. The scaffoldings and work-sheds of the Open Conspiracy may fare violently in that tornado. The restoration of progress may seem an almost hopeless struggle.

It is no part of the modern religion to incur needless hardship or go out of the way to seek martyrdom. If we can do our work easily and happily, so it should be done. But the work is not to be shirked because it cannot be done easily and happily. The vision of a world at peace and liberated for an unending growth of knowledge and power is worth every danger of the way. And since in this age of confusion we must live imperfectly and anyhow die, we may as well suffer if need be, and die for a great end as for none. Never has the translation of vision into realities been easy since the beginning of human effort. The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price--and who can tell what that price may be?--in toil, suffering and blood.

_Chapter XVII_

THE WORLD COMMUNITY

The new life that the Open Conspiracy struggles to achieve through us for our race is first a life of liberations. The oppression of incessant toil can surely be lifted from everyone, and the miseries due to a great multitude of infections and disorders of nutrition and growth cease to be a part of human experience. Few people are perfectly healthy nowadays except for brief periods of happiness, but the elation of physical well-being will some day be the common lot of mankind. And not only from natural evils will man be largely free. He will not be left with his soul tangled, haunted by monstrous and irrational fears and a prey to malicious impulse. From his birth he will breathe sweetness and generosity and use his mind and hands cleanly and exactly. He will feel better, will better, think better, see, taste and hear better than men do now. All these things are plainly possible for him. They pass out of his tormented desire now, they elude and mock him, because chance, confusion and squalor rule his life. All the gifts of destiny are overlaid and lost to him. He must still suspect and fear.

Within the peace and freedom our Open Conspiracy will win, all these good things that escape us now may be ensured. A graver humanity, stronger, more lovely, longer lived, will learn and develop the ever-enlarging possibilities of its destiny. For the first time, the full beauty of this world will be revealed to its unhurried eyes. Its thoughts will be to our thoughts as the thoughts of a man to the troubled mental experimenting of a child. And all the best of us will be living on in that ampler life, as the child and the things it tried and learnt still live in the man. When we were children, we could not think or feel as we think and feel to-day, but to-day we can peer back and still recall something of the ignorances and guesses and wild hopes of these nigh forgotten years. And so mankind, ourselves still living, dispersed and reconstructed in the future, will recall with affection and understanding the desperate wishes and troubled efforts of our present state.

How can we anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and adventures, the mighty employments, the ever-increasing knowledge and power of the days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling paper and its box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings of its adult years. Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn. From any dream, however dismal and horrible, one can escape by realising that it is a dream; by saying, “I will awake.” The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light of day thrusts between our eyelids and the multitudinous sounds of morning clamour in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them, and ask incredulously, “Was there ever such a world?”

NOTE ON THE MARGIN OF THESE BLUE PRINTS

Such is the truth of human possibility and our necessities as I perceive it, and that is the way man must live if our species is to survive and pass on to greater destinies. I set down the truth as it is given me to see it; for me there can be no other truth. On every hand about us all is the darkness of the unknown, but the light we have, when we have used our eyes to their utmost, must be our guide. Because of obtuseness and prepossessions, I may but run beside the realities I imagine I express. Necessarily reality which goes on all over the universe and for every instant of time, is infinitely more intricate and wonderful than any statement, teeming with possibilities still unsuspected. All the more do we need compass and map and plans to keep our direction through the jungle of its manifest marvels and dangers. That this presentation of the current phase of human life as the occasion for an Open Conspiracy to establish a world commonweal will seem to many an extreme simplification of our circumstances, should not condemn it. The value of a map lies in the fact that it is not a model nor a picture of reality but a reduced abstraction, sufficiently clear and sufficiently true to essentials and sufficiently free from irrelevancies to guide.

This scheme to thrust forward and establish a human control over the destinies of life and liberate it from its present dangers, uncertainties and miseries, is offered here as an altogether practicable one, subject only to one qualification, that sufficient men and women will be willing to serve it. That there is no foretelling. It is clear that the whole growth is dependent upon the appearance of those primary groups, sustaining and spreading its fundamental ideas. Those ideas have to become the mental substratum of constructive effort. If those ideas can find sufficient vigorous, able and devoted people for their establishment, the rest will follow. There is need of much leadership, not indeed the leadership of a single leader, for the days of spiritual monarchies are over, nor for the leadership of exaggerated figureheads, but for the energetic initiatives of many co-operating personalities. I will not speculate where these leaders are now, in universities, in laboratories, in studies, in factories, in mines, in technical schools, but I have a firm belief that they will come to the call of our mighty opportunities.

For my generation, the rôle of John the Baptist must be our extreme ambition. We can proclaim and make evident the advent of a new phase of human faith and effort. We can point out the path it has been our lifework to discover. We have struggled through the thought and bitter experiences of our time. We have hammered out our instinctive individualism on the anvil of socialism; we have witnessed the apocalypse of the Great War; we have been misled, we have stumbled through depths of despair, we have learnt. “Here,” we say, “is what we have made of it all. Here is the basis for a new world.” In the few years remaining to us we can hope to do no more than that. It is for you to say whether you will set your feet in this direction and go along with us and go further. Upon you--individually and multitudinously--the future rests. Here and there chance may correct and supplement the efforts of our race and save us from the full penalties of our mistakes and negligences, but saving the impact of some unimagined disaster from outer space, the ultimate decision of the fate of life upon this planet lies now in the will of man.

THE END

Transcriber’s Note:

Spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been retained as appears in the original publication except as follows:

Page viii of the miscroscope _changed to_ of the microscope

Page 79 in power and auhority warlike classes _changed to_ in power and authority warlike classes

Page 98 no discrimination at last between _changed to_ no discrimination at least between

Page 107 or how rapidy the knowledge _changed to_ or how rapidly the knowledge

Page 165 as defeat for the selecter _changed to_ as defeat for the selector

Page 200 mistakes and negligencies _changed to_ mistakes and negligences