The Open Conspiracy is not necessarily antagonistic to any existing government. The Open Conspiracy is a creative organising movement and not an anarchistic one. It does not want to destroy existing controls and forms of human association, but either to supersede or amalgamate them into a common world directorate. If constitutions, parliaments and kings can be dealt with as provisional institutions, trustees for the coming of age of the world commonweal, and in so far as they are conducted in that spirit, the Open Conspiracy makes no attack upon them. But most governments will not set about their business as in any way provisional, they and their supporters insist upon a reverence and obedience which repudiate any possibility of supersession. What should be an instrument becomes a divinity. In nearly every country of the world there is, in deference to the pretended necessities of a possible war, a vast degrading and dangerous cultivation of loyalty and mechanical subservience to flags, uniforms, presidents and kings. A president or king who does his appointed work well and righteously is entitled to as much subservience as a bricklayer who does his work well and righteously and to no more, but instead there is a sustained endeavour to give him the privilege of an idol above criticism or reproach, and the organised worship of flags has become--with changed conditions of intercourse and warfare--an entirely evil misdirection of the gregarious impulses of our race. Emotion and sentimentality are evoked in the cause of disciplines and co-operations that could quite easily be sustained and that are better sustained by rational conviction. The Open Conspiracy is necessarily opposed to all such implacable loyalties and still more so to the aggressive assertion and propaganda of such loyalties. When these things take the form of suppressing reasonable criticism and forbidding even the suggestion of other forms of government they become plainly antagonists to any comprehensive project for human welfare. They become manifestly, from the wider point of view, seditious, and loyalty to “king and country” passes into plain treason to mankind. Almost everywhere at present, educational activities organise barriers in the path of progress and there are only the feeblest attempts at any counter-education that will break up these barriers. There is little or no effort to restrain the aggressive nationalist when he waves his flag against the welfare of our race or to protect the children of the world from the infection of his enthusiasms. And this last is as true now of the American system as it is of any European State.