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.