THE OPEN CONSPIRACY MR. WELLS HAS ALSO WRITTEN THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ON SOCIAL, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL QUESTIONS Anticipations (1900) A Modern Utopia The Future in America New Worlds for Old First and Last Things God the Invisible King The Outline of History Russia in the Shadows The Salvaging of Civilisation Washington and the Hope of Peace A Short History of the World The Story of a Great Schoolmaster A Year of Prophesying Democracy Under Revision History Mr. Belloc Objects to the Outline of History The Way the World Is Going H. G. WELLS THE OPEN CONSPIRACY BLUE PRINTS FOR A WORLD REVOLUTION [Illustration: Colophon Doubleday, Doran] GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, DORAN AND COMPANY, INC. 1928 COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC. ALL EIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. To DANIEL GERBAULT who asked me to write this book PREFACE This book states as plainly and clearly as possible the essential ideas of my life, the perspective of my world. Everything else that I have been or done seems to me to have been contributory to or illustrative of these ideas and suggestions. My other writings, with hardly an exception, explore, try over, illuminate, comment upon or flower out of the essential matter that I here attempt at last to strip bare to its foundations and state unmistakably. This is my religion. Here are my directive aims and the criteria of all I do. Since the subject of this book is the whole destiny of man, and the whole duty of man, it will certainly be called a pretentious book. That will be a charge too obvious to miss and we can consider it made. But it is no more pretentious to work upon the whole of life than upon parts and aspects of life; it is a question of scale and method; the intellectual effort needed, the quality of the work required for making the map of a continent may be less than and inferior to that demanded by the chemical examination of a muscle fibre or the investigation of atomic structure. A man is not pretentious because he works with the theodolite instead of the microscope. Some men work upon the bulkier common issues; some upon finer and subtler questions. To every man his task. There is no hierarchy in human thought.