Part 9

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.