15
Bodisham's organisation charts were destined to become historical museum exhibits of the utmost importance. They have been reproduced in the exactest facsimile a score of times. Nearly every History of the World Revolution displays the "central" one as a frontispiece. He worked at them in that small drawing–office, still preserved intact for all the world to visit, in number sixteen. He worked at them with a number of coloured inks and a sublime unconsciousness of the immense possibilities of his scheming. The ink he spilt is still on the faded carpet; the wall is pock–marked by his drawing–pins. Occasionally he smudged his work or used an ink–eraser until he nearly perforated the paper. Chiffan came and made suggestions almost daily. He was more than a little jealous of Bodisham, but he had the generosity to respect his quality and admit his own limitations. His own intelligence worked in brilliant flashes, but Bodisham's went on, a steadfastly burning flame, indefatigable. Rud came to survey the developments, making sometimes a pithy comment, and sometimes merely standing in meditation before the great scheme.
The charts showed plainly the developing conception of the world revolution as it grew in the minds of its makers. Bodisham would sit over his big sheets of paper, compasses in hand, breathing audibly, thinking through long pauses, then flinging himself upon some freshly apprehended linkage, scribbling, blotting, tearing the chart from its drawing–pins, shouting for his assistant to carry it away and recopy it—for the fortieth or fiftieth time. The whole diagram was enclosed in a huge circle, and in this clustered minor circles, which touched, overlapped, were joined by coloured bands and lines, signalled to each other with arrows, displayed significant tinting. These things meant association of leaders and direction, partial merger of activities, mutual information and so forth.
The all–comprising outer circle represented what Rud called the Idea of Common–sense, the idea that a general agreement about life among normal men, based on mutual respect, is possible, and that this common agreement could be made the one supreme criterion of law and collective activity. Sweep away authoritarian ideas, delusions of superiority and inferiority and a general complex of subconscious dishonesties, and that was what you exposed. That was the true Social Contract.
The Party in its more generalised form was little more than a loosely organised propaganda for the intensive reiteration of this one common–sense idea, the idea that the world as a whole belongs to every human being. The only justification for interference with the free dominion of the individual was the common good. No claim of authority or of debt was valid beyond that controlling consideration. This was a fundamental concept of the movement, and it meant a continuous attack on everything that set up preferential distinctions and divisions among mankind, that is to say racial, national, religious, sexual claims and assertions, and every sort of artificial advantage and privilege, all hereditary appropriations, inherited wealth or other priorities. It boldly and flatly denied the existence of any broad and essential differences in humanity sufficient to justify privilege, enslavement or control. "No pre–natal subjugation," was its leading phrase. "No pre–natal debt. Otherwise men cannot be free."
Elaborately Bodisham was working out the implications of this proposition and applying them still more elaborately to the drift of world events.
With this fundamental conception, the new movement faced the world. This "fundamental conception" was the outer ring of Bodisham's diagrams. But so far it hardly went beyond what primitive Christianity, Islam, Anarchism, Rousseauism and all the primary Leftisms, had said before it. Directly one came inside that ample circle, however, the organisers of the new world found themselves against certain practical realities, that so far had frustrated every attempt to reduce human affairs to equalitarian common–sense, and they faced them with an unprecedented frankness.
"They just haven't been worked out," said Bodisham. "They just haven't been worked out."
The chief of these practical difficulties on the way to human unity was the fact that normal human beings are not by nature interested in public affairs. That has always been the little rift in the lute of sentimental democracy. Because man is not instinctively political, as the ant seems to be, all his collective operations have to be directed. Most human beings do not want to be bothered looking after their common interests. They put the real stuff of their individual lives before the common weal as a matter of course. They may be educated or cowed into a practical respect for the common weal, but that is against the natural disposition of their hearts.
It was necessary, therefore, Bodisham argued, to find and select and appoint people of a certain type—Rud called them generally "masterful people"—who would take a special interest in the direction and co–ordination of this or that collective activity, whether it was crop–production or road–making and maintaining, or improving and distributing the statement of fact, or teaching or research or what not. The whole history of mankind had been and was still and could not be anything else but the struggle of the various types of these masterful men to get collective processes established, either for their own advantage or the collective advantage, against the general contrariety, the resistances, the confused, shortsighted self–seeking and self–protection of common individuals. Masterful men come to the top under any conditions. But the peculiar sorts of masterful men who come to the top depended on the conditions.
"The Common Man can only become conscious of himself and learn his lesson through the exposition of certain peculiar sorts of masterful men," argued Bodisham. "There are people who must 'say it' for the inarticulate and generally inattentive common man. Call them teachers, demagogues, prophets, what you will. Rud is quintessentially that sort. That sort you must have. But also there have to be experts and, furthermore, there have to be men to check back, criticise and justify the expert and protect the Common Man from either tyranny or quackery. All that complexity you must have in human affairs. The essential problem is to use those necessary masterful men and yet restrain them. How to balance them? How to prevent their abusing their masterfulness? They must have authority in their special fields, but you have to put simple Power out of reach of everyone.
"That is why the eighteenth century, that most enlightened century, that liberty–seeking century, was so preoccupied by constitution–mongering, and why my great circle here is all cut up by these minor circles and these schemes of mutual checks and co–operations. All through the ages mankind in its communities has relieved its political laziness and cowardice in an irrational abandonment to leaders and rulers. God will provide, the King will settle it, the priesthood will see to it, the aristocracy for the sake of the land, the property–owners out of enlightened self–interest, the lawyers, the oligarchy, 'They', the Party, the Party leaders, the dictators…"
"The history of mankind," said Dreed, "has been a history of betrayals, the perennial betrayal of the common man by the men he has trusted."
"By the men the lazy, haphazard, childish oaf was too wilfully stupid to mistrust," said Bodisham. "The history of mankind from the very beginning has been a history of over–trusted trustees, corrupted by their unchecked opportunities. And here in these organisation diagrams I am simply trying to assemble in their proper relations, the latest ideas for balancing the interests, restraining the egotisms, and extracting the maximum of good out of the masterfulness and the masterful phases of masterful men. It's the eternal problem of politics—once again."
"The problem isn't eternal; it changes"; interrupted Rud. "The conditions have changed. The fundamental conditions have changed. What you don't realise fully enough, Bodisham, you with your out–of–date historical precedents, is that all over the world there is Awareness, such as there never was before. The light penetrates everywhere. Knowledge, I tell you, wins its way. See how ideas spread! See how they run. It's only now that natural science begins to tell what it knows to the common mind. And common people drink it up. For the first time the whole world reads, reads to know. There is a new spirit in the world…"
It was always Bodisham who theorised and planned. Each main function of the new world was presented in his diagram by systems of circles and intersecting circles within. Here was the propaganda system, and overlapping it and destined to replace it was organised education. Here were the intimations of a plan for the correlation of research and record and the distribution of knowledge. Here was the organisation of force balanced against legal power. Here was a quadrilateral of old military organisations, fading out before police, controlled production and the air. Curious green lines intimated the subtle but understandable relationship of "parallel independent co–operation." Here, like an elucidatory veil across this map of the future, was a mighty, new network of universities, of record, discussion and information organisations, of poetry and imaginative creation, that was to furnish the controlling atmosphere of criticism and understanding throughout the world.
To anyone who saw these diagrams in the days before their realisation, they would have seemed like the reveries of a very intelligent but quite impracticable dreamer. Yet they were certainly no more fantastic and far more constructive than was Communism in the days when Marx at Highgate, bothered by tradesmen's bills and earning a precarious living by discreet political journalism, smoked and dreamed.
Plan or reverie, so it was that things shaped themselves in the minds of the central group. The Group grew steadily as it elaborated its conceptions of activity. Never was any revolutionary scheme so little insurrectionary, so boldly and definitely constructive, or so loosely centralised. Naturally the idea of insurrection was fundamental to it, but conceptions of new organisations completely overshadowed it. That idea of parallel independent co–operation proved of the utmost practicability. Rud in those days was not so much the head as the central link of the group's scheme. Nothing so deliberate and detailed and adaptable as Bodisham's net of diagrams had ever before been produced by the revolutionary impulse in man. It resembled previous revolutionary organisations as the working drawings for the first modern aeroplane resembled the series of suicidal contrivances from the wings of Daedalus onwards that had anticipated flying. After each disaster people said "Man can never fly". But a few dreamers persisted. After each revolutionary failure men said "Human society can never escape from its traditional limitations. It must live or perish in its self–made cage."
The Group was not of that opinion. It believed in the ultimate victory of design and it was justified.