The new life that the Open Conspiracy struggles to achieve through
us for our race is first a life of liberations. The oppression of
incessant toil can surely be lifted from everyone, and the miseries
due to a great multitude of infections and disorders of nutrition and
growth cease to be a part of human experience. Few people are perfectly
healthy nowadays except for brief periods of happiness, but the elation
of physical well-being will some day be the common lot of mankind.
And not only from natural evils will man be largely free. He will not
be left with his soul tangled, haunted by monstrous and irrational
fears and a prey to malicious impulse. From his birth he will breathe
sweetness and generosity and use his mind and hands cleanly and
exactly. He will feel better, will better, think better, see, taste and
hear better than men do now. All these things are plainly possible for
him. They pass out of his tormented desire now, they elude and mock
him, because chance, confusion and squalor rule his life. All the gifts
of destiny are overlaid and lost to him. He must still suspect and fear.
Within the peace and freedom our Open Conspiracy will win, all these
good things that escape us now may be ensured. A graver humanity,
stronger, more lovely, longer lived, will learn and develop the
ever-enlarging possibilities of its destiny. For the first time, the
full beauty of this world will be revealed to its unhurried eyes.
Its thoughts will be to our thoughts as the thoughts of a man to the
troubled mental experimenting of a child. And all the best of us will
be living on in that ampler life, as the child and the things it tried
and learnt still live in the man. When we were children, we could not
think or feel as we think and feel to-day, but to-day we can peer back
and still recall something of the ignorances and guesses and wild hopes
of these nigh forgotten years. And so mankind, ourselves still living,
dispersed and reconstructed in the future, will recall with affection
and understanding the desperate wishes and troubled efforts of our
present state.
How can we anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and
adventures, the mighty employments, the ever-increasing knowledge and
power of the days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling
paper and its box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings
of its adult years. Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations,
stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last,
less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from
a nightmare in the dawn. From any dream, however dismal and horrible,
one can escape by realising that it is a dream; by saying, “I will
awake.” The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare
of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light
of day thrusts between our eyelids and the multitudinous sounds of
morning clamour in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with
history before them or with some old newspaper before them, and ask
incredulously, “Was there ever such a world?”