Let us consider first the general advancement of science, the protection and support of scientific research and the diffusion of scientific knowledge. These things fall within the normal scheme of duty for the members of the Open Conspiracy. The world of science and experiment is the region of origin of nearly all the great initiatives that characterise our times; the Open Conspiracy owes its inspiration, its existence, its form and direction entirely to the changes of condition these initiatives have brought about, and yet a large number of scientific workers live outside the sphere of sympathy in which we may expect the Open Conspiracy to materialise, and collectively their political and social influence upon the community is extraordinarily small. Having regard to the immensity of its contributions and the incalculable value of its promise to the modern community, science--research, that is, and the diffusion of scientific knowledge--is extraordinarily neglected, starved and threatened by hostile interference. This is largely because it has no strong unifying organisation and cannot in itself develop such an organisation. Science is a hard mistress and the first condition of successful scientific work is that the scientific man should stick to his research. The world of science is therefore in itself, at its core, a miscellany of specialists, often very ungracious specialists, and, rather than offer him help and co-operation, it calls for understanding, tolerance and service from the man of more general intelligence and wider purpose. The company of scientific men is less like a host of guiding angels than like a swarm of marvellous bees--endowed with stings--which must be hived and cherished and multiplied by the Open Conspiracy. But so soon as we have the Open Conspiracy at work, putting its case plainly and offering its developing organisation to those most preciously preoccupied men, then reasonably, when it involves no special trouble for them, when it is the line of least resistance for them, they may be expected to fall in with its convenient and helpful ideas, and find in it what they have hitherto lacked, a common system of political and social concepts to hold them together. When that stage is reached, we shall be saved such spectacles of intellectual prostitution as the last Great War offered, when men of science were herded blinking from their laboratories to curse one another upon nationalist lines, and when after the war stupid and wicked barriers were set up to the free communication of knowledge by the exclusion of scientific men of this or that nationality from international scientific gatherings. The Open Conspiracy must help the man of science to realise, what at present he fails most astonishingly to realise, that he belongs to a greater comity than any king or president represents to-day, and so prepare him for better behaviour in the next season of trial.