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.
The Open Conspiracy extends its invitation to all sorts and conditions
of men, but the service of scientific progress is for those only who
are specially equipped or who are sufficiently interested to equip
themselves. For scientific work there is first of all a great need
of endowment and the setting up of laboratories, observatories,
experimental stations and the like in all parts of the world. Numbers
of men and women capable of scientific work never achieve it for want
of the stimulus of opportunity afforded by endowment. Few contrive to
create their own opportunities. The essential man of science is very
rarely an able collector or administrator of money and anyhow the
detailed work of organisation is a grave call upon his special mental
energy. But many men capable of a broad and intelligent appreciation
of scientific work, but not capable of the peculiar intensities of
research, have the gift of extracting money from private and public
sources, and it is for them to use that gift modestly and generously in
providing the framework for those more especially endowed.
And there is already a steadily increasing need for the proper storage
and indexing of scientific results, and every fresh worker enhances it.
Quite a considerable amount of scientific work goes fruitless or is
needlessly repeated, because of the growing volume of publication, and
men make discoveries in the field of reality only to lose them again in
the lumber-room of record. Here is a second line of activity to which
the Open Conspiracy with a scientific bias may direct his attention.
A third line is the liaison work between the man of science and the
common intelligent man; the promotion of publications which will
either state the substance, implications and consequences of new work
in the vulgar tongue, or, if that is impossible, train the general
run of people to the new idioms and technicalities which need to be
incorporated with the vulgar tongue if it is still to serve its ends as
a means of intellectual intercourse.
Through special _ad hoc_ organisations, societies for the
promotion of Research, for Research Defence, for World Indexing,
for the translation of Scientific Papers, for the Diffusion of New
Knowledge, the surplus energies of a great number of Open Conspirators
can be directed to entirely creative ends and a new world organisation
of scientific work built up, within which such dear old institutions
as the Royal Society of London, the various European Academies of
Science and the like, now overgrown and inadequate, can maintain
their venerable pride in themselves, their mellowing prestige and
their distinguished exclusiveness, without their present privilege of
inflicting cramping slights and restrictions upon the more abundant
scientific activities of to-day.
So in relation to Science--and here the word is being used in its
narrower accepted meaning for what is often spoken of as _pure_
science, the search for physical and biological realities,
uncomplicated by moral, social and “practical” considerations--we
evoke a conception of the Open Conspiracy as producing groups of
socially associated individuals, who engage primarily in the general
basic activities of the Conspiracy and adhere to and promote the six
broad principles summarised at the end of Chapter Twelve, but who work
also with the larger part of their energies, through international
and cosmopolitan societies and in a multitude of special ways, for
the establishment of an enduring and progressive world organisation
of pure research. They will have come to this special work because
their distinctive gifts, their inclinations, their positions and
opportunities have indicated it as theirs.
Now a very parallel system of Open Conspiracy groups is conceivable,
in relation to business and industrial life. It would necessarily be
a vastly bulkier and more heterogeneous system of groups but otherwise
the analogy is complete. Here we imagine those people whose gifts,
inclinations, positions and opportunities as directors, workers or
associates give them an exceptional insight into and influence in the
processes of producing and distributing commodities, can also be drawn
together into groups within the Open Conspiracy. But these groups
will be concerned with the huge and more complicated problems of the
processes by which even now the small isolated individual adventures in
production and trading, that constituted the economic life of former
civilisations, are giving place to larger, better instructed, better
planned industrial organisations, whose operations and combinations
become at last world wide.
The amalgamations and combinations, the substitution of large-scale
business for multitudes of small-scale businesses, which are going on
now, go on with all the cruelty and disregards of a natural process. If
man is to profit and survive, these unconscious blunderings--which now
stagger towards but which may never attain world organisation--must be
watched, controlled, mastered and directed. As uncertainty diminishes,
the quality of adventure and the amount of waste diminish also, and
large speculative profits are no longer possible or justifiable.
The transition from speculative adventure to organised foresight in
the common interest, in the whole world of economic life, is the
substantial task of the Open Conspiracy. And it is these specially
interested and equipped groups and not the movement as a whole which
may best begin the attack upon these fundamental readjustments.
The various Socialist movements of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth
centuries had this in common, that they sought to replace the “private
owner” in most or all economic interests by some vaguely apprehended
“public owner.” This, following the democratic disposition of the
times, was commonly conceived of as an elected body, a municipality,
the parliamentary state or what not. There were municipal socialists,
“nationalising” socialists, imperial socialists. In the mystic
teachings of the Marxist, the collective owner was to be “the
dictatorship of the proletariat.” Production for profit was denounced.
The contemporary mind realises the evils of production for profit and
of the indiscriminate scrambling of private ownership, but it has a
completer realisation and a certain accumulation of experience of the
difficulties of organising that larger ownership we desire. Private
ownership may not be altogether evil as a provisional stage even if
it has no more in its favour than the ability to transcend political
boundaries.
Moreover--and here again the democratic prepossessions of the
nineteenth century come in--the Socialist movements sought to make
every single adherent a reformer and a propagandist of economic
methods. In order to do so, it was necessary to simplify economic
processes to the crudity of nursery toys, and the intricate interplay
of will and desire in enterprise, normal employment and direction,
in questions of ownership, wages, credit and money, was reduced to
a childish fable of surplus value wickedly appropriated. The Open
Conspiracy is not so much a socialism as a more comprehensive scheme
that has eaten and assimilated whatever was digestible of its socialist
forebears. It turns to biology for guidance towards the regulation of
quantity and a controlled distribution of the human population of the
world, and it judges all the subsidiary aspects of property and pay by
the criterion of most efficient production and distribution in relation
to the indications thus obtained.
These economic groups, then, of the Open Conspiracy, which may come
indeed to be a large part of the Open Conspiracy, will be working in
that vast task of economic reconstruction--which from the point of
view of the older socialism was the sole task before mankind. They
will be conducting experiments and observing processes according to
their opportunities. Through _ad hoc_ societies and journals
they will be comparing and examining their methods and preparing
reports and clear information for the movement at large. The whole
question of money and monetary methods in our modern communities, so
extraordinarily disregarded in socialist literature, will be examined
under the assumption that money is the token of the community’s
obligation, direct or indirect, to an individual, and credit its
permission to deal freely with material.
The whole psychology of industry and industrial relationship needs
to be revised and restated in terms of the collective efficiency and
welfare of mankind. And just as far as can be contrived, the counsel
and the confidences of those who now direct great industrial and
financial operations will be invoked. The first special task of a
banker, or a bank clerk for that matter, who joins the Open Conspiracy,
will be to answer the questions: “What is a bank?” “What are you going
to do about it?” “What have we to do about it?” The first question
to a manufacturer will be: “What are you making and why?” and “What
are you and we to do about it?” Instead of the crude proposals to
“expropriate” and “take over by the state” of the primitive socialism,
the Open Conspiracy will build up an encyclopædic conception of the
modern economic complex as a labyrinthine pseudo-system progressively
eliminating waste and working its way along multitudinous channels
towards unity, towards clarity of purpose and method, towards abundant
productivity and efficient social service.
Let us come back now for a paragraph or so to the ordinary adherent
to the Open Conspiracy, the adherent considered not in relation to
his special aptitudes and services, but in relation to the movement
as a whole and to those special constructive organisations outside
his own field. It will be his duty to keep his mind in touch with the
progressing concepts of the scientific work so far as he is able and
with the larger issues of the economic reconstruction that is afoot, to
take his cues from the special groups and organisations engaged upon
that work, and to help where he finds his opportunity and when there
is a call upon him. But no adherent of the Open Conspiracy can remain
merely and completely an ordinary adherent. There can be no pawns in
the game of the Open Conspiracy, no “cannon fodder” in its war. A
special activity quite as much as a general understanding is demanded
from everyone who looks creatively towards the future of mankind.
We have instanced first the fine and distinctive world organisation of
pure science and then the huge massive movement towards co-operating
unity of aim in the economic life until at last the production and
distribution of staple necessities is apprehended as one world
business, and we have suggested that this latter movement may gradually
pervade and incorporate a very great bulk of human activities. But
besides this fine current and this great torrent of evolving activities
and relationships there are also a very considerable variety of other
great functions in the community towards which Open Conspiracy groups
must direct their organising enquiries and suggestions in their common
intention of ultimately assimilating all the confused processes of
to-day into a world community.
For example, there must be a series of groups in close touch at
one end with biological science and at the other with the complex
of economic activity, who will be concerned specially with the
practical administration of the biological interests of the race, from
food-plants and industrial products to pestilences and population. And
another series of groups will gather together attention and energy to
focus them upon the educational process. We have already pointed out in
Chapter Nine that there is a strong disposition towards conservatism
in normal educational institutions. They preserve traditions rather
than develop them. They are likely to set up a considerable resistance
to the reconstruction of the world outlook upon the threefold basis
defined in 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_