Chapter III: Part 3

In many ways this government is a novelty of extraordinary interest. In the fact that it is a propagandist association becoming a commonweal, it is manifestly the inspiration and precursor of the Open Conspiracy. It labours against enormous difficulties within itself and without. Flung amazingly into a position of tremendous power, its intellectual flexibility is greatly restricted by the urgent militant necessity for mental unanimity and a consequent repression of criticism. It finds itself separated, intellectually and morally, by an enormous gap, from the illiterate millions over which it rules. More open perhaps to scientific and creative conceptions than any other government, and certainly more willing to experiment and innovate, its enterprise is starved by the economic depletion of the country in the Great War and by the technical and industrial backwardness of the population upon which it must draw for its personnel. Moreover, it struggles within itself between concepts of a modern scientific social organisation and a vague anarchistic dream in which the “State” is to disappear and an emancipated proletariat, breeding and expectorating freely, fills the vistas of time for evermore. The tradition of heavy years of hopeless opposition have tainted the world policy of the Marxist cult with a mischievous and irritating quality that focuses upon it the animosity of every other government in the dominant Atlantic system. Nevertheless it has maintained itself for more than ten years and it seems far more likely to evolve than to perish. It is quite possible that it will evolve towards the conceptions of the Open Conspiracy, and in that case Russia may witness once again a conflict between new ideas and Old Believers. So far the Communist Party in Moscow has maintained a considerable propaganda of ideas in the rest of the world and especially across its western frontier. Many of these ideas are trite and stale. The time may be not far distant when the tide of propaganda will flow in the reverse direction. It has pleased the vanity of the Communist Party to imagine itself conducting a propaganda of world revolution. Its fate may be to develop upon lines that will make its more intelligent elements easily assimilable to the Open Conspiracy for a world revolution. The Open Conspiracy as it spreads and grows may find a less encumbered field for trying out the economic developments implicit in its conceptions in Russia and Siberia, than anywhere else in the world.

However severely the guiding themes and practical methods of the present Soviet Government in Russia may be criticised, the fact remains that it has cleared out of its way many of the main obstructive elements that we find still vigorous in the more highly organised communities in the west. It has liberated vast areas from the kindred superstitions of monarchy and the need for a private proprietary control of great economic interests. And it has presented the Oriental China and India with the exciting spectacle of a social and political system capable of throwing off many of the most characteristic features of triumphant Westernism, and yet holding its own. In the days when Japan faced up to modern necessities, there were no models for imitation that were not communities of the Atlantic type pervaded by the methods of private capitalism, and in consequence the Japanese reconstituted their affairs on a distinctly European plan, adopting a Parliament and bringing their monarchy, social hierarchy and business and financial methods into a general conformity with that model. It is extremely doubtful whether any other Asiatic community will now set itself to a parallel imitation, and it will be thanks largely to the Russian revolution that this breakaway from Europeanisation has occurred.

But it does not follow that such a breakaway will necessarily lead more directly to the Open Conspiracy. If we have to face a less highly organised system of interests and prejudices in Russia and China, we have to deal with a vastly wider ignorance and a vastly more formidable animalism. Russia is a land of tens of millions of peasants ruled over by a little band of the intelligentsia who can be counted only by tens of thousands. It is only these few score thousands who are accessible to ideas of world construction, and the only hope of bringing the Russian system into active participation in the world conspiracy is through that small minority and through its educational repercussion on the myriads below. As we go eastward from European Russia the proportion of soundly prepared intelligence to which we can appeal for understanding and participation diminishes to an even more dismaying fraction. Eliminate that fraction and one is left face to face with inchoate barbarism incapable of social and political organisation above the level of the war boss and the brigand leader. Russia itself is still by no means secure against a degenerative process in that direction, and the hope of China struggling out of it without some forcible directive interventions is a hope to which constructive liberalism clings with very little assurance.

We turn back therefore from Russia, China and the communities of Central Asia to the Atlantic world. It is in that world alone that sufficient range and amplitude of thought and discussion is possible for the adequate development of the Open Conspiracy. In these communities it must begin and for a long time its main activities will need to be sustained from these necessary centres of diffusion. It will develop amidst incessant mental strife and through that strife it will remain alive. It is no small part of the practical weakness of present day communism that it attempts to centre its intellectual life and its directive activities in Moscow and so cuts itself off from the free and open discussions of the Western world. Marxism lost the world when it went to Moscow and took over the traditions of Tzarism, as Christianity lost the world when it went to Rome and took over the traditions of Cæsar. Entrenched in Moscow from searching criticism, the Marxist ideology may become more and more dogmatic and unprogressive, repeating its sacred _credo_ and issuing its disregarded orders to the proletariat of the world, and so stay ineffectively crystallised until the rising tide of the Open Conspiracy submerges, dissolves it afresh and incorporates whatever it finds assimilable.

India like Japan is cut off from the main body of Asiatic affairs. But while Japan has become a formally Westernised nationality in the comity of such nations, India remains a world in itself. In that one peninsula nearly every type of community is to be found, from the tribe of jungle savages through a great diversity of barbaric and mediæval principalities to the child and women sweating factories and the vigorous modern commercialism of Bombay. Over it all the British imperialism prevails, a constraining and restraining influence, keeping the peace, checking epidemics, increasing the food supply by irrigation and the like (so that population increases horribly), and making little or no effort to evoke responses to modern ideas. Britain in India is no propagandist of modern ferments: all those are left the other side of Suez. In India the Briton is a ruler as firm and self-assured and uncreative as the Roman. The old religious and social traditions, the complex customs, castes, tabus and exclusions of a strangely mixed but unamalgamated community, though a little discredited by this foreign predominance, still hold men’s minds. They have been, so to speak, pickled in the preservative of the British raj.

The Open Conspiracy has to invade the Indian complex in conflict with the prejudices of both ruler and governed. It has to hope for individual breaches in the dull Romanism of the administration; here a genuine educationist, here a creative civil servant, here an official touched by the distant stir of the living homeland--and it has to try to bring these types into a corporated relationship with a fine native scholar here or an active-minded prince or land-owner or industrialist there. As the old methods of passenger transport are superseded by flying, it will be more and more difficult to keep the stir of the living homeland out of either the consciousness of the official hierarchy or the knowledge of the recalcitrant “native.”

Very similar to Indian conditions is the state of affairs in the foreign possessions of France, the same administrative obstacles to the Open Conspiracy above, and below the same resentful subordination, cut off from the mental invigoration of responsibility. Within these areas of restraint, India and its lesser, simpler parallels in North Africa, Syria and the Far East, there goes on a rapid increase of low-grade population, undersized physically and mentally, and retarding the mechanical development of civilisation by its standing offer of cheap labour to the unscrupulous entrepreneur, and possible feeble insurrectionary material to the unscrupulous political adventurer. It is impossible to estimate how slowly or how rapidly the knowledge and ideas that have checked the rate of increase of all the Atlantic populations may be diffused through these less alert communities.

We must complete our survey of the resistances against which the Open Conspiracy has to work by a few words about the negro world and the regions of forest and jungle in which barbaric and even savage human life still escapes the infection of civilisation. It seems inevitable that the development of modern means of communication and the conquest of tropical diseases should end in giving access everywhere to modern administration and to economic methods, and everywhere the incorporation of the former wilderness in the modern economic process means the destruction of the material basis, the free hunting, the free access to the soil, of such barbaric and savage communities as still precariously survive. The dusky peoples, who were formerly the lords of these still imperfectly assimilated areas, are becoming exploited workers, slaves, serfs, hut-tax payers or labourers to a caste of white immigrants. The spirit of the plantation broods over all these lands. The negro in America differs only from his subjugated brother in South Africa or Kenya Colony in the fact that he also, like his white master, is an immigrant. The situation in Africa and America adjusts itself therefore towards parallel conditions, the chief variation being in the relative proportions of the two races and the details of the methods by which black labour is made to serve white ends.

In these black and white communities which are establishing themselves in all those parts of the earth where once the black was native, or in which a sub-tropical climate is favourable to his existence at a low level of social development, there is--and there is bound to be for many years to come--much racial tension. The steady advance of birth control may mitigate the biological factors of this tension later on, and a general amelioration of manners and conduct may efface that disposition to persecute dissimilar types, which man shares with many other gregarious animals. But meanwhile this tension increases and a vast multitude of lives is strained to tragic issues.

To exaggerate the dangers and evils of miscegenation is a weakness of our time. Man interbreeds with all his varieties and yet deludes himself that there are races of outstanding purity, the “Nordic,” the “Semitic” and so forth. These are phantoms of the imagination. The reality is more intricate, less dramatic and grips less easily upon the mind; the phantoms grip only too well and incite to terrible suppressions. Changes in the number of half-breeds and in the proportion of white and coloured are changes of a temporary nature that many become controllable and rectifiable in a few generations. But until this level of civilisation is reached, until the colour of a man’s skin or the kinks in a woman’s hair cease to have the value of Shibboleths that involve educational, professional and social extinction or survival, a black and white community is bound to be continually preoccupied by a standing feud too intimate and pervasive to permit of any long views of the world’s destiny.

We come to the conclusion therefore that it is from the more vigorous, varied and less severely obsessed centres of the Atlantic civilisations in the temperate zone, with their abundant facilities for publication and discussion, their traditions of mental liberty and their immense variety of interacting free modern types, that the main beginnings of the Open Conspiracy must develop. For the rest of the world, its propaganda, finding but poor nourishment in the local conditions, may retain a missionary quality for many years.

_Chapter XI_

RESISTANCES AND ANTAGONISTIC FORCES IN OURSELVES

We have dealt in the preceding two chapters with great classes and assemblages of human beings as, in the mass, likely to be more or less antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy, and it has been difficult in those chapters to avoid the implication that “we,” some sort of circle round the writer, were aloof from these obstructive and hostile multitudes, and ourselves entirely identified with the Open Conspiracy. But neither are these multitudes so definitely against, nor those who are with us so entirely for, the Open Conspiracy to establish a world community as the writer in his desire for clearness and contrast and with an all too human disposition perhaps towards plain ego-centred combative issues, has been led to represent. There is no “we” and there can be no “we” in possession of the Open Conspiracy.

The Open Conspiracy is in partial possession of us and we attempt to serve it. But the Open Conspiracy is a natural and necessary development of contemporary thought arising here and there and everywhere. There are doubts and sympathies that weigh on the side of the Open Conspiracy in nearly everyone, and not one of us but retains many impulses, habits and ideas in conflict with our general devotion, checking and limiting our service.

Let us therefore in this chapter cease to discuss classes and types and consider general mental tendencies and reactions which move through all humanity.

In our opening chapters we pointed out that religion is not universally distributed throughout human society. And of no one does it seem to have complete possession. It seizes upon some of us and exalts us for one hour now and then, for a day now and then; it may leave its afterglow upon our conduct for some time; it may establish restraints and habitual dispositions; sometimes it dominates us with but brief intermissions through long spells and then we can be saints and martyrs. In all our religious phases there appears a desire to hold the phase, to subdue the rest of our life to the standards and exigencies of that phase. Our quickened intelligence sets itself to a general analysis of our conduct and to the problem of establishing controls over our unilluminated intervals.

And when the religious elements in the mind set themselves to such self-analysis and attempts to order and unify the whole being upon this basis of the service and advancement of the race, they discover first a great series of indifferent moods, wherein the resistance to thought and work for the Open Conspiracy is merely passive and in the nature of inertia. There is a whole class of states of mind which may be brought together under the head of “everydayism.” The dinner-bell and the playing-fields, the cinema and the newspaper, the week-end visit and the factory siren, a host of such expectant universal things, call to a vast majority of people in our modern world to stop thinking and get busy with the interest in hand, and so on to the next, without a thought for the general frame and drama in which these momentary and personal incidents are set. We are driven along these marked and established routes and turned this way or that by the accidents of upbringing, of rivalries and loves, of chance encounters and vivid experiences, and it is rare for many of us, and never for some, that the phases of broad reflection and self-questioning arise. For many people the religious life now, as in the past, has been a quite desperate effort to withdraw sufficient attention and energy from the flood of events to get some sort of grasp, and keep whatever grip is won, upon the relations of the self to the whole. Far more recoil in terror from such a possibility and would struggle strenuously against solitude in the desert, solitude under the stars, solitude in a silent room or indeed any occasion for comprehensive thought.

But the instinct and purpose of the religious type is to keep hold upon the comprehensive drama, and at the heart of all the great religions of the world we find a parallel disposition to escape in some manner from the aimless drive and compulsion of accident and everyday. Escape is attempted either by withdrawal from the presence of crowding circumstance into a mystical contemplation and austere retirement, or--what is more difficult and desperate and reasonable--by imposing the mighty standards of enduring issues upon the whole mass of transitory problems which constitute the actual business of life. We have already noted how the modern mind turns from retreat as a recognisable method of religion, and faces squarely up to the second alternative. The tumult of life has to be met and conquered. Aim must prevail over the aimless. Remaining in normal life we must yet keep our wills and thoughts aloof from normal life and fixed upon creative processes. However busied we may be, however challenged, we must yet save something of our best mental activity for self-examination and keep ourselves alert against the endless treacheries within that would trip us back into everydayism and disconnected responses to the stimuli of life.

Religions in the past, though they have been apt to give a preference to the renunciation of things mundane, have sought by a considerable variety of expedients to preserve the faith of those whom chance or duty still kept in normal contact with the world. Modern religion, which has no alternative to constant normal contact with the world, cannot lightly forgo the experiments of the old religions in such expedients. Meetings for mutual reassurance, confession and prayer, self-dedication, sacraments and seasons of fast and meditation need to be modernised or replaced by modern equivalents if the religious vitality of the Open Conspiracy is to be sustained. At present, except in the case of a few friends and lovers, the modern religious individual leads a life of extreme, wasteful and dangerous spiritual isolation. He may forget and he has nothing to remind him; he may relapse and he will hear no reproach to warn him of his relapse.

“Everyday” has many ways of justifying the return of the believer to its sceptical casualness. It is easy to persuade oneself that one is taking life or oneself “too seriously.” The mind is very self-protective; it has a disposition to abandon too great or too far-reaching an effort and return to things indisputably within its scope. We have an instinctive preference for thinking things are “all right”; we economise anxiety; we defend the delusions that we can work with, even though we half realise they are no more than delusions. We resent the warning voice, the critical question that robs our activities of assurance. Our everyday moods are not only the antagonists of our religious moods, but they resent all outward appeals to our religious moods and they welcome every help against religious appeals. We pass very readily from the merely defensive to the defensive-aggressive, and from refusing to hear the word that might stir our consciences to a vigorous effort to suppress its utterance.

Churches, religious organisations, try to keep the revivifying phase and usage, where it may strike upon the waning or slumbering faith of the convert, but modern religion as yet has no such organised reminders. They cannot be improvised. Crude attempts to supply the needed corrective of conduct may do less good than harm. Each one of us for himself must do what he can to keep his high resolve in mind and protect himself from the snare of his own moods of fatigue or inadvertency.

But these passive and active defences of current things which operate in and through ourselves, and find such ready sympathy and assistance in the world about us, these massive resistance systems, are only the beginning of our tale of the forces antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy that lurk in our complexities.

Men are creatures with other faults quite beyond and outside our common disposition to be stupid, indolent, habitual and defensive. Not only have we active creative impulses but also acute destructive ones. Man is a jealous animal. In our youth and adolescence our egotism is extravagant. A great number of us at that stage would rather not see a beautiful or wonderful thing come into existence than have it come into existence disregarding us. Something of that jealous malice, self-assertive ruthlessness, there is in all of us. At his worst man can be an exceedingly combative, malignant, mischievous and cruel animal. And few of us--none of us--are altogether above the possibility of such phases. When we consider the oppositions to the Open Conspiracy that operate in the normal personality, we appreciate the soundness of the catechism which instructs us to renounce not only the trivial world and the heavy flesh, but the active and militant devil.

To make is a long and wearisome business, with many arrests and disappointments, but to break gives an instant thrill. We all know something of the delight of the bang. It is well for the Open Conspirator to ask himself at times how far he is in love with the dream of a world in order, and how far he is driven by hatred of institutions that bore or humiliate him. He may be no more than a revengeful incendiary in the mask of a constructive worker. How safe is he then from the reaction to some fresh humiliation? The Open Conspiracy which is now his refuge and vindication may presently fail to give him the compensation he has sought, may offer him no better than a minor rôle, may display irritating and incomprehensible preferences. And for a great number of things in overt antagonism to the great aim of the Open Conspiracy, he will still find within himself not simply acquiescence but sympathy and a genuine if inconsistent admiration. There they are, waiting for his phase of disappointment. Back he may go to the old loves with a new animus against the greater scheme.

Man has pranced a soldier in reality and fancy for so many generations that few of us can altogether release ourselves from the brilliant pretensions of flags, empire, patriotism and aggression. Business men, especially in America, seem to feel a sort of glory in calling even the underselling and overadvertising of rival enterprises “fighting.” Pill vendors and public departments can have their “wars,” their heroisms, their desperate mischiefs, and so get the Napoleonic feeling. The world and our imaginations are full of the sentimentalities, the false glories and loyalties of such refurbishing of the old combative traditions, trailing after them, as they do, so much worth and virtue in a dulled and stupefied condition. It is difficult to resist the fine gravity, the high self-respect, examples of honour and good style in small things, of the military and naval services, for all that they are now no more than noxious parasites upon the nascent world commonweal. In France not a word may be said against the army; in England, against the navy. There will be many Open Conspirators at first who will scarcely dare to say that word even to themselves.

But all these obsolete values and attitudes with which our minds are cumbered must be cleared out if the new faith is to have free play. We have to clear them out not only from our own minds but from the minds of others who may be or become our associates. The finer and more picturesque false loyalties, false standards of honour, false religious associations, may seem to us, the more thoroughly must we seek to release our minds and the minds of those about us from them and cut off all thoughts of a return.

We cannot compromise with these vestiges of the ancient order. Whatever we retain of them will come back to life and grow again. It is no good to operate for cancer unless the whole growth is removed. Leave a crown about and presently you will find it being worn by someone resolved to be a king. Keep the name and image of a god without a distinct museum label and sooner or later you will discover a worshipper on his knees to it and be lucky not to find a human sacrifice upon the altar. Wave a flag and it will wrap about you. Of yourself even more than of the community is this true; there can be no half measures. You have not yet completed your escape to the Open Conspiracy from the cities of the plain while it is still possible for you to take a single backward glance.

And at last when we conceive that we have given ourselves altogether to the Open Conspiracy frustration may overtake us. Then it is, when we are assured that we are possessed by the Open Conspiracy, that we shall be most disposed to think and act as though we possessed the Open Conspiracy. And if we have made sacrifices, if we are conscious of substantial success, then still more shall we be in danger. One of the most disagreeable features of Christian hagiology is the value set by the blessed saints upon their special privileges. The poor souls loved to think they had caught the peculiar attention of God by their sores and mortifications. This “weakness of the eminent claim” pervades all religions. Most of those who will serve the Open Conspiracy will be tempted to think they have deserved well and to compare their merits and their share of influence and recognition in the movement with those of others.

The Open Conspiracy will be no more free from rivalries, heartburnings, distrust, touchy suspicions, mutual interference and disingenuous negligences, than any other great human co-operation. The disciplines, the trainings and methods of organisation that must be evolved as the movement grows may be effective in restricting the mischief of such humanities; they will certainly not suppress them altogether. Many a good and serviceable man may die embittered by the preoccupation of his fellow workers in this huge campaign. But the Open Conspiracy will grow as science grows, greater at last than all its outer antagonisms, than ancient tradition or instinctive resistance, greater than the conscious or unconscious disloyalties of its adherents, greater than all the present vices of mankind.

* * * * *

Beware of malice in this movement. Remember that man is a malicious animal and you are human. Do not fall foul of your allies and associates because some of them affect your richer nature as prigs or pedants; do not be too scrupulous about the motives of others; your own also may be misconceived; do not interpret enthusiastic service either as conceited self-assertion or calculated self-advancement, nor give way to excessive chagrin when some honourable task you had promised yourself is seized upon by someone else. Avoid the belittlement of useful work upon our side because it is not perfect. Do not let differences of accent and idiom annoy you. Many great movements have been crippled, many great opportunities lost, by the minor spites of the elect. Vindictive self-assertion is an invariable characteristic of the hopelessly damned. Watch yourself for the minutest first specks of this leprosy.

The Open Conspiracy may learn a useful lesson if it bears in mind the early phases of Christianity and Islam and guards itself against such sordid dissensions as sprung and enfeebled those mighty initiatives before even the first generation of disciples had passed away.

_Chapter XII_

THE OPEN CONSPIRACY MUST BEGIN AS A MOVEMENT OF EXPLANATION AND PROPAGANDA

And now, having taken the measure of the array of current things against which the Open Conspiracy must pit itself, we may go on to consider the germination and development of the Open Conspiracy.

It is fairly obvious that the primary and earliest task is to express, develop and propagate the idea of the Open Conspiracy, to make its external form clear, convincing, attractive and commanding to as many people as possible. The primary organisation must be a propagandist organisation.

The idea of the Open Conspiracy rests upon and arises out of a system of historical, biological and sociological realisations. In the case of people with sound knowledge in these fields we may look for these realisations already; such people are prepared for adhesion without any great explanatory work; there is nothing to set out to them but the project. They do already constitute the Open Conspiracy in an unorganised solution and will not so much adhere as admit to themselves and others their state of mind. Directly we pass beyond that comparatively restricted world, however, we shall find that we have to deal with partial knowledge, distorted views or blank ignorance, and that a revision and extension of historical and biological ideas and a considerable elucidation of economic misconceptions has to be undertaken.

For the past twelve years, the present writer has given much thought and work to the question of presenting these foundation ideas for a modern moral and political activity in a practicable form, and it will be the easiest method of statement for him to describe the outcome of his experiments and reflections. He reports therefore upon what he has done and is doing not because that is in any way final or universally applicable, but because it gives something sufficiently full and lucid to serve as a concrete illustration of his idea. He has schemed out a group of writings to embody the necessary ideas of the new time in a form adapted to the current reading public and he considers what he is doing as a sort of provisional “Bible,” so to speak, for some factors at least in the Open Conspiracy. As the current reading public changes, his work will become obsolescent so far as its present form and method go. But not so far as its substantial method goes. That he believes will remain.

These writings, this modern Bible scheme, has taken a threefold form and he believes the mental basis of the Open Conspiracy must necessarily retain this threefold form if only on account of its lucidity of presentation. He has already written and published the opening third of his scheme, first in a full and then in a compacter book, as the _Outline of History_ and as _A Short History of the World_. This furnishes a framework of fact within which the general political ideas of the reader can be put in order. It presents the history of life as a progress from fragmentation towards world unity, mental and material. A second third of this statement of fundamental modern ideas he is now preparing in collaboration with two more specially qualified writers. This will be a companion and parallel to the _Outline of History_ and it will be called _The Science of Life_. It will be a summary of what is known of the nature and possibilities of life. It will give the data for personal conduct within a biologically conceived world society, just as the _Outline of History_ gives a frame for the individual political life in a unifying world state. The remaining third of this encyclopædia, the third dealing mainly with inorganic and economic science, is still a mere sketch and skeleton. It will treat of economic and social organisation considered as the problem of man’s exploitation of extraneous energy for the service of the species. Its prospective title, _The Conquest of Power_, will perhaps convey the spirit of its design. The general idea of these writings is to present altogether, first a complete modern world outlook, politically speaking, then the moral data of the new time, and then the forecast of a collective economic policy, in a form accessible to a person of ordinary education. It is the presentation of the threefold basis for a modern ideology, historical, biological and economic. It is a pioneer attempt to get this written down connectedly.

For a considerable section of the moderately educated public, with historical ideas fragmentary and restricted to mere periods and countries, the compilation of the _Outline of History_ has served already, and still serves, as a stimulant and a release--and no doubt, when its work is supplemented by its two companions and when all that can be done now with life and matter is realised the three will help in a great number of cases to pull people’s minds together into a shape that will dispose them to full participation in the new movement. But at the most exaggerated estimate possible, these works constitute a merely provisional “Bible,” and the measure of their success will be marked by the promptitude of their replacement by worthier successors.

Such compilations cannot but have many of the characteristic defects of pioneer and elementary work; they have often to achieve their ends by going rather roughly over secondary difficulties that would otherwise delay their production indefinitely. Yet at the outset they will be of use in marking out the shape and scope of the general concepts of the Open Conspiracy. At the outset, the Open Conspiracy, as it reaches beyond the range of exceptionally well-informed and mentally active people, must be very largely an educational propaganda of such material. Only later can it hope to relinquish this part of its task to renascent educational organisations which can be trusted to ensure a firm foundation for the modern conception of life.

The form in which the Open Conspiracy will first appear will certainly not be that of a centralised organisation. Its most natural and convenient method of coming into being will be the formation of small groups of friends, family groups, groups of students and employees or other sorts of people meeting and conversing frequently in the course of their normal occupations, who will exchange views and find themselves in agreement upon the general idea. Fundamentally important issues upon which unanimity must be achieved from the outset are, firstly, the entirely provisional nature of all existing governments, and the entirely provisional nature, therefore, of all loyalties associated therewith; secondly, the supreme importance of population control in human biology and the possibility it affords us of a release from the pressure of the struggle for existence on ourselves; and thirdly, the urgent necessity of protective resistance against the present traditional drift towards war. People who do not grasp the vital significance of these test issues do not really begin to understand the Open Conspiracy. Groups coming into agreement upon these matters, and upon their general interpretation of history, will be in a position to seek adherents, enlarge themselves and attempt to establish communication with kindred groups for common ends. They can take up a variety of activities to develop a sense and habit of combined action and feel their way to greater enterprises.

We have shown already that the Open Conspiracy must be heterogeneous in origin. Young men and young women may be collected into groups arranged upon lines not unlike those of the Bohemian Sokols or the Italian Fasci. Such groups may easily have an athletic and recreational side. These initial groups will be of no uniform pattern. They will be of very different size, average age, social experience and influence. Their particular activities will be determined by these things. It is highly improbable that the name of the Open Conspiracy will be applied to any of them. That is just a provisional name in these Blue Prints. Their diverse qualities and influences will express themselves by diverse titles. A group of students may find itself capable of little more than self-education and personal propaganda; a group of middle-class people in a small town may find its small resources fully engaged at first in such things as, for example, seeing that desirable literature is available for sale or in the local public library, protecting books and news-vendors from suppression, or influencing local teachers. Most parents of school-children can press for the teaching of universal history and sound biology and protest against the inculcation of aggressive patriotism. On the other hand, a group of ampler experience and resources may undertake the printing, publication and distribution of literature, and exercise considerable influence upon public opinion in turning education in the right direction. The League of Nations movement, the Birth Control movement and most radical and socialist societies are fields into which groups may go to find adherents more than half prepared for them. The Open Conspiracy is a fuller and ampler movement into which these incomplete activities must necessarily merge as its idea takes possession of men’s imaginations.

From the outset, the Open Conspiracy will set its face against militarism. There is a plain present need for the organisation now, before war comes again, of an open and explicit refusal to serve in any war--or at most to serve in war, directly or indirectly, only after the issue has been fully and fairly submitted to arbitration. The time for a conscientious objection to war service is manifestly before and not after the onset of war. People who have acquiesced in a belligerent foreign policy by silence right up to the onset of war, have little to complain of if they are then compelled to serve. And a refusal to participate with one’s country in warfare is a preposterously incomplete gesture unless it is rounded off by the deliberate advocacy of a world _pax_, a world economic control and a restrained population, such as the idea of the Open Conspiracy embodies.

The putting upon record of its members’ reservation of themselves from any or all of the military obligations that may be thrust upon the country by military and diplomatic effort, will be, I think, the first considerable overt act of the Open Conspiracy groups. It will supply the practical incentive to bring many of them together in the first place. It will follow closely upon the beginning of the propaganda and it will probably necessitate the creation of regional or national _ad hoc_ committees for the establishment of a collective legal and political defensive for this dissent from current militant nationalism. It will bring the Open Conspiracy very early out of the province of discussion into the field of practical conflict. It will from the outset invest it with a very necessary quality of present applicability.

The anticipatory repudiation of military service, so far as this last may be imposed by existing governments in their factitious international rivalries, need not necessarily involve a denial of the need of military action on behalf of the world commonweal, for the suppression of nationalist brigandage, nor need it prevent the military training of members of the Open Conspiracy. It is simply the practical form of assertion that the normal militant diplomacy and warfare of the present time are offences against civilisation, processes in the nature of brigandage, sedition and civil war, and that serious men cannot be expected to play anything but a rôle of disapproval, non-participation or active prevention towards them. Our loyalty to our current government, we would intimate, is subject to its sane and adult behaviour.

These educational and propagandist groups drawing together into an organised resistance to militarism and to the excessive control of individuals by the makeshift governments of to-day, are the possible and probable form in which the Open Conspiracy will appear in the world. But they constitute only the earliest and more elementary grade of its activities, and we will presently go on to consider the more specialised and constructive forms its effort must evoke. Before doing so, however, we may say a little more about the structure and method of these initiatory groups.

Since they are bound to be different and miscellaneous in form, size, quality and ability, any early attempts to organise them into common general action or even into regular common gatherings are to be deprecated. There should be many types of groups. Collective action had better for a time--perhaps for a long time--be undertaken not through the merging of groups but through the formation of _ad hoc_ associations for definitely specialised ends. The groups will come into these associations to make a contribution very much as people come into limited liability companies, that is to say with a subscription and not with their whole capital. A comprehensive organization attempting from the first to cover all activities would necessarily rest upon and promote one prevalent pattern of group and hamper or estrange the more original and interesting forms.

There is a detestable sort of energetic human being which preys upon human societies, delighting in procedure, by-laws, votings, stereotyping and embarrassing “resolutions,” the “capture” of committees and organisations, the delegation of powers and suchlike politicians’ mischief. It is a blighting and accursed type, living and multiplying in rules and precedents as bugs in old wallpaper. The less the Open Conspiracy devotes itself to such elaborations in its gatherings, the better for its spirit. Always it will be well to keep its comprehensive organisation easy and simple.

Each group should come together and develop its ideas, frankly and freely, at something like a common level of understanding and in a friendly atmosphere. It would be advisable that most groups should assemble with some regularity, and since in a large part of the world Sunday is recognised as the day set apart from the concerns of the individual for the consideration of wider issues, that day may well be the usual day for group gatherings. A weekly meeting at which everyone attempts to be present seems to be indicated as the normal habit of a group. A member who finds weekly attendance at his group meeting irksome, probably belongs to the wrong group and should seek another.

A normal group in the early stage of its existence will find most of its energy engaged in confirming and cleaning up its conception of the Open Conspiracy and in dealing with people invited to join in, trying out its ideas upon interested visitors and so forth. It will also experiment in outside activities determined by its special circumstances. The ordinary group must bear in mind that these practical activities must at first be preparatory and mainly self-educational. It must not subordinate its general mental task in them.

The clear conception of the Open Conspiracy is a considerable but necessary intellectual effort. A group of historical, biological and economic ideas and interpretations has to be assimilated and they are not by any means simple and obvious ideas. And in addition--and what is perhaps the more difficult part--many prevalent habits of mind and current assumptions have to be got rid of. The conception of the Open Conspiracy involves, for example, a sceptical and destructive criticism of personal-immortality religions and also of the sacred formulæ of communism. It can work, and may go far in certain ways, with Christians or Communists, but it cannot incorporate them so long as they are Christians or Communists. Vague goodwill for mankind, or for progress, and adhesions based on some partial approval of its spirit, its methods or its objective, are of no real value to an enterprise so huge in its ultimate intentions.

For the furtherance of its aims, the Open Conspiracy may work in alliance with all sorts of movements and people, but to take them into its own essential substance is an altogether different matter. Propaganda and education are seed-sowing and only in revivalist religion is an immediate, a simultaneous reaping attempted with the sowing of the seed. The general run of people are more eager to do than to understand, and from the beginning of its first overt activities the Open Conspiracy will have to deal with the friendly advances of those who will want to share in its effort without any proper assimilation of the ideas that promote it. This will be another reason for projecting its practical activities into the form of _ad hoc_ associations, into which outsiders with different or undeveloped religious, political, social and philosophical views may come without penetrating as permanent members into the actual groups, and it will also justify the helpful participation of the Open Conspiracy groups in definitely restricted movements which attend only to a portion of its programme. But many of those who first come into touch with the Open Conspiracy simply as helpers and allies will no doubt go on to a careful study of its general concepts and so to complete participation.

The groups of the Open Conspiracy, it may be reiterated, will vary much in leisure, knowledge, ability and scope. In the student world, in the associated world of special social, political and philosophical studies and in the world where speculative thought is combined with writing and discussion, groups will appear which turn naturally to the development and expression of the Open Conspiracy as their distinctive contribution. The concepts of the Open Conspiracy will appear increasingly in books and periodicals until some of these latter become recognised definitely as means of communication within the movement. It will acquire or provoke its own periodic literature. Such circles of “intelligentsia” will also supply lecturers and leaders of discussions who will be drawn upon by other groups and group combinations for visits of stimulus and elucidation.

From that, the spreading, growing and ripening groups will go on to combine with one another for local and regional meetings. People who have met first in _ad hoc_ activities will find themselves developing naturally and progressively into social association and a loose general organisation with the Open Conspiracy. Such an organisation should leave the fullest scope for group or even individual autonomy in particular cases. The only binding restraint upon independent initiatives in the Open Conspiracy should be its broad essential requirements, namely:

(1) The complete assertion, practical as well as theoretical, of the provisional nature of existing governments and of our acquiescence in them;

(2) The resolve to minimise by all available means the conflicts of these governments, their militant use of individuals and property and their interferences with the establishment of a world economic system;

(3) The determination to replace private local or national ownership of at least credit, transport and staple production by a responsible world directorate serving the common ends of the race;

(4) The practical recognition of the necessity for world biological controls, for example, of population and disease;

(5) The support of a minimum standard of individual freedom and welfare in the world; and

(6) The supreme duty of subordinating the personal life to the creation of a world directorate capable of these tasks and to the general advancement of human knowledge, capacity and power.

The admission therewith that our immortality is conditional and lies in the race and not in our individual selves.

_Chapter XIII_

EARLY CONSTRUCTIVE WORK OF THE OPEN CONSPIRACY

In such terms we may sketch the practicable and possible opening phase of the Open Conspiracy.

We do not present it as a movement initiated by any individual or radiating from any particular centre. It arises naturally and necessarily from the present increase of knowledge and the broadening outlook of many minds throughout the world. It is reasonable therefore to anticipate its appearance all over the world in sporadic mutually independent groups and to recognise not only that they will be extremely various but that many of them will trail with them racial and regional habits and characteristics which will only be shaken off as its cosmopolitan character becomes imperatively evident. The passage from the partial anticipations of the Open Conspiracy that already abound everywhere to its complete and completely self-conscious statement may be made by almost imperceptible degrees. To-day it may seem no more than a visionary idea; to-morrow it may be realised as a world-wide force of opinion and will. People will pass with no great inconsistency from saying that the Open Conspiracy is impossible to saying that it has always been plain and clear to them, that to this fashion they have shaped their lives as long as they can remember.

In its opening phase, in the day of small things, quite minor accidents may help or delay the clear definition and popularisation of its main ideas. The changing pattern of public events may disperse or concentrate attention upon it, or it may win the early adherence of men of exceptional resources, energy or ability. It is impossible to foretell the speed of its advance. Its development may be slower or faster, direct or devious, but the logic of accumulating realisations thrusts it forward, will persist in thrusting it on, and sooner or later it will be discovered, conscious and potent, the working religion of most sane and energetic people.

Meanwhile our supreme virtues must be faith and persistence.

So far we have considered only two of the main activities of the Open Conspiracy, the one being its propaganda of confidence in the possible world commonweal and the other its immediate practical attempt to systematise resistance to militant and competitive imperialism and nationalism. But such things are merely its groundwork undertakings; they do no more than clear the site and make the atmosphere possible for its organised constructive efforts.

Directly we turn to that we turn to questions of special knowledge, special effort and special organisation.

Let us consider first the general advancement of science, the protection and support of scientific research and the diffusion of scientific knowledge. These things fall within the normal scheme of duty for the members of the Open Conspiracy. The world of science and experiment is the region of origin of nearly all the great initiatives that characterise our times; the Open Conspiracy owes its inspiration, its existence, its form and direction entirely to the changes of condition these initiatives have brought about, and yet a large number of scientific workers live outside the sphere of sympathy in which we may expect the Open Conspiracy to materialise, and collectively their political and social influence upon the community is extraordinarily small. Having regard to the immensity of its contributions and the incalculable value of its promise to the modern community, science--research, that is, and the diffusion of scientific knowledge--is extraordinarily neglected, starved and threatened by hostile interference. This is largely because it has no strong unifying organisation and cannot in itself develop such an organisation.

Science is a hard mistress and the first condition of successful scientific work is that the scientific man should stick to his research. The world of science is therefore in itself, at its core, a miscellany of specialists, often very ungracious specialists, and, rather than offer him help and co-operation, it calls for understanding, tolerance and service from the man of more general intelligence and wider purpose. The company of scientific men is less like a host of guiding angels than like a swarm of marvellous bees--endowed with stings--which must be hived and cherished and multiplied by the Open Conspiracy.

But so soon as we have the Open Conspiracy at work, putting its case plainly and offering its developing organisation to those most preciously preoccupied men, then reasonably, when it involves no special trouble for them, when it is the line of least resistance for them, they may be expected to fall in with its convenient and helpful ideas, and find in it what they have hitherto lacked, a common system of political and social concepts to hold them together. When that stage is reached, we shall be saved such spectacles of intellectual prostitution as the last Great War offered, when men of science were herded blinking from their laboratories to curse one another upon nationalist lines, and when after the war stupid and wicked barriers were set up to the free communication of knowledge by the exclusion of scientific men of this or that nationality from international scientific gatherings. The Open Conspiracy must help the man of science to realise, what at present he fails most astonishingly to realise, that he belongs to a greater comity than any king or president represents to-day, and so prepare him for better behaviour in the next season of trial.

The formation of groups in, and not only in, but about and in relation to, the scientific world, which will add to those first main activities of the Open Conspiracy, propaganda and pacificism, a special attention to the needs of scientific work, may be enlarged upon with advantage here, because it will illustrate quite typically the idea of a special work carried on in relation to a general activity, which is the subject of this section.