The amalgamations and combinations, the substitution of large-scale business for multitudes of small-scale businesses, which are going on now, go on with all the cruelty and disregards of a natural process. If man is to profit and survive, these unconscious blunderings--which now stagger towards but which may never attain world organisation--must be watched, controlled, mastered and directed. As uncertainty diminishes, the quality of adventure and the amount of waste diminish also, and large speculative profits are no longer possible or justifiable. The transition from speculative adventure to organised foresight in the common interest, in the whole world of economic life, is the substantial task of the Open Conspiracy. And it is these specially interested and equipped groups and not the movement as a whole which may best begin the attack upon these fundamental readjustments. The various Socialist movements of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries had this in common, that they sought to replace the “private owner” in most or all economic interests by some vaguely apprehended “public owner.” This, following the democratic disposition of the times, was commonly conceived of as an elected body, a municipality, the parliamentary state or what not. There were municipal socialists, “nationalising” socialists, imperial socialists. In the mystic teachings of the Marxist, the collective owner was to be “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Production for profit was denounced. The contemporary mind realises the evils of production for profit and of the indiscriminate scrambling of private ownership, but it has a completer realisation and a certain accumulation of experience of the difficulties of organising that larger ownership we desire. Private ownership may not be altogether evil as a provisional stage even if it has no more in its favour than the ability to transcend political boundaries. Moreover--and here again the democratic prepossessions of the nineteenth century come in--the Socialist movements sought to make every single adherent a reformer and a propagandist of economic methods. In order to do so, it was necessary to simplify economic processes to the crudity of nursery toys, and the intricate interplay of will and desire in enterprise, normal employment and direction, in questions of ownership, wages, credit and money, was reduced to a childish fable of surplus value wickedly appropriated. The Open Conspiracy is not so much a socialism as a more comprehensive scheme that has eaten and assimilated whatever was digestible of its socialist forebears. It turns to biology for guidance towards the regulation of quantity and a controlled distribution of the human population of the world, and it judges all the subsidiary aspects of property and pay by the criterion of most efficient production and distribution in relation to the indications thus obtained.