Part 10

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

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

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

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

_Chapter XVII_

THE WORLD COMMUNITY

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

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

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

NOTE ON THE MARGIN OF THESE BLUE PRINTS

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

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

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

THE END

Transcriber’s Note:

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

Page viii of the miscroscope _changed to_ of the microscope

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

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

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

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

Page 200 mistakes and negligencies _changed to_ mistakes and negligences