Wayfarers Masonic Education

Calling all Masons to join us at our Education Round Table on Tuesday, November 5th at 6:00 PM as our Brother Francis R. Fritz presents: “Rethinking Masonry” Part 2.

1. Have we lost the meaning of what Masons and Freemasonry are meant to be?

2. Has Freemasonry changed society or has society changed what Masonry was meant to be?

Bring your notebooks! Bring your answers and participate in the lecture!

There will be pizza and various snacks available. RSVP to info@wayfarers50.org

Brother Francis R. Fritz is the author of his latest published works: “Are you Duly and Truly Prepared?” which will be available.

Fraternally,
Christopher J. Britt
Worshipful Master

Wayfarers Lodge No. 50
340 E Carol Avenue Phoenix, Arizona 85020 USA

Refer to the Lodge calendar for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Lodge Calendar

Refer to the Lodge Events and Reminders for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Events & Reminders

Wayfarers Masonic Education

Calling all Masons to join us at our Education Round Table on Tuesday, October 1st at 6:00 PM as our Brother Francis R. Fritz presents: “Rethinking Masonry” Part 1.

1. Have we lost the meaning of what Masons and Freemasonry are meant to be?

2. Has Freemasonry changed society or has society changed what Masonry was meant to be?

Bring your notebooks! Bring your answers and participate in the lecture!

There will be pizza and various snacks available. RSVP to info@wayfarers50.org

Brother Francis R. Fritz is the author of his latest published works: “Are you Duly and Truly Prepared?” which will be available.

Fraternally,
Christopher J. Britt
Worshipful Master

Wayfarers Lodge No. 50
340 E Carol Avenue Phoenix, Arizona 85020 USA

Refer to the Lodge calendar for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Lodge Calendar

Refer to the Lodge Events and Reminders for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Events & Reminders

Wayfarers Masonic Education

Calling all Masons to join us at our Education Round Table on Tuesday, June 4th at 6:00 PM as our Brother Francis R. Fritz presents: “What do your Masonic Obligations really mean in your daily life”? Bring your notebooks!

There will be pizza and various snacks available. RSVP to info@wayfarers50.org

Brother Francis R. Fritz is the author of his latest published works: “Are you Duly and Truly Prepared?” which will be available.

Fraternally,
Christopher J. Britt
Worshipful Master

Wayfarers Lodge No. 50
340 E Carol Avenue Phoenix, Arizona 85020 USA

Refer to the Lodge calendar for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Lodge Calendar

Refer to the Lodge Events and Reminders for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Events & Reminders

Wayfarers Masonic Education

Join us as our Education Round Table as our Brother Francis R. Fritz presents: “What is Freemasonry’s mission?”

Its Philosophy?

Can and are we able to achieve our stated role in society?

“Thinking beyond the quant statements about our Fraternity” and putting them to use in our personal lives.

Open to all Masons, guests, friends interested in Freemasonry!

There will be pizza and various snacks available. RSVP to info@wayfarers50.org

Brother Francis R. Fritz is the author of his latest published works: “Are you Duly and Truly Prepared?” which will be available.

Fraternally,
Christopher J. Britt
Worshipful Master

Wayfarers Lodge No. 50
340 E Carol Avenue Phoenix, Arizona 85020 USA

Refer to the Lodge calendar for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Lodge Calendar

Refer to the Lodge Events and Reminders for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Events & Reminders

Wayfarers Masonic Education

Brethren,

Join us as our Brother Francis R. Fritz discusses the important dates within Masonic history and the effects on the fraternity.

The date is: Tuesday, March 5th, 2024, doors open at⋅6:00 PM, Brother Fritz will start promptly at 6:30 PM. Please bring notebooks, pens, etc.

“Historical Changes Within Freemasonry” will include the consequences of these changes, including some of the following:

The Morgan Affair
The formation of UGLE
The Baltimore Convention of 1843
Anderson’s Constitutions
Certain “exposures” within Freemasonry

Just to name a few.

How might they have caused changes in our ritual? And many more questions!

Open to all Masons and guests!

There will be pizza and various snacks available. RSVP to info@wayfarers50.org

Brother Francis R. Fritz is the author of his latest published works: “Are you Duly and Truly Prepared?” which will be available.

Fraternally,
Christopher J. Britt
Worshipful Master

Wayfarers Lodge No. 50
340 E Carol Avenue Phoenix, Arizona 85020 USA

Refer to the Lodge calendar for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Lodge Calendar

Refer to the Lodge Events and Reminders for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Events & Reminders

Wayfarers Masonic Education

Brethren,

The First Wayfarers Masonic Education Night on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.

The first Tuesday of each month is dedicated to Wayfarers Masonic Education. THis is an open forum and discussion on the three levels of initiation by Brother Francis Fritz!

There will be pizza and various snacks available.

Brother Fritz will start promptly at 6:30 PM. bring notebooks, pens, etc.

Fraternally,
Christopher J. Britt
Worshipful Master

Wayfarers Lodge No. 50
340 E Carol Avenue Phoenix, Arizona 85020 USA

Refer to the Lodge calendar for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Lodge Calendar

Refer to the Lodge Events and Reminders for all upcoming events: Wayfarers Events & Reminders

Masonry and the Problems of Industry

Our modern industrial system dates back to 1789 in which year James ‘Watt successfully demonstrated the feasibility of using the power machine for industrial purposes. Prior to that time almost all work, as the name “manufacture” (which means “make by hand”) itself indicates, was carried on by hand. Tools were simple and inexpensive, and there was little necessity for great factory buildings and no possibility of manufacturing cities such as are now so familiar to us. The worker was closer to his work, and felt more interest in it, and had more at stake in it, and often he himself purchased the raw materials in which he worked, and owned the tools whereby he transformed raw products into articles of commerce.

The introduction of the steam engine, and other power machines, changed all that. The machine was too expensive for the workman to own; it had to be housed in special buildings (factories) designed for it; using such large quantities of stuff and turning out such immense quantities of finished products, it was necessary to devise the railroad in order to tend it. The dependence of one kind of manufacturing upon another led manufacturers to herd together at convenient centres and thus the industrial city came into existence. Things could be made that were never made before, and a hitherto undreamed of quantity of new wealth came into existence. Under this regime workmen could no longer own their own tools but became employes, selling their labour in the market as a commodity. The machinery of production passed into the hands of wealthy men, and as a consequence we have the present divisions of society so familiar to us all: the group owning and controlling the raw materials of production and the machinery of manufacture and distribution; the group made up of industrial labourers; and the large class of small merchants and professional men who cater to the needs of these two groups.

It would be easy for any economist (the writer makes no claim to any such dignity) to quarrel with this picture, but the picture may stand for all that as a not inaccurate description of the way things are, and of how they came so to be. At any rate, it will serve to introduce us to the points worthy of discussion in the present chapter.

Inasmuch as this great industrial system produces such an immense quantity of wealth we very naturally find a great deal of rather earnest rivalry among the various industrial groups who, each one, strive to capture as large a share of it as possible. Accordingly, we find capitalists, proprietors, merchants, etc., forming corporations, associations, and so forth, as a means of securing their stake in the system; and at the same time labouring men form unions, farmers have their granges, and professional and mercantile groups build up all manner of systems, and all this in nearly every case in order to secure or to protect a certain interest in the values being produced daily by the industrial system.

This conflict of groups due to their often conflicting group interests has come to be familiarly known to us in these days as “the class struggle.” Oftentimes men talk of the class struggle as if it were a new invention, something only recently come into existence, but as a matter of fact, as Professor Franklin H. Giddings has been pointing out in a recent series of lectures, the class struggle is as old as war, and has played in all history quite as conspicuous a part as it does now though it was never before quite so much to the front in discussion.

The various ways of describing and explaining and interpreting this class struggle and the forces that have brought it about, and of the manner in which its problems may be solved, enable us to classify men in a large variety of different groups of thought or theory. The Anarchist believes that the industrial system is all wrong as it now exists because it has so powerfully strengthened the hands of government, and therefore multiplied the opportunities of political tyranny, a thing he dreads more than he dreads the plague. The Communist, such as is now found so frequently in Russia, would like to see the ownership of the raw materials, the machinery of production, and of the systems of distributions vested in the hands of the masses of the common people, without distinction of intellectual ability, wealth, or any such thing.

The Socialist would like to see the industrial system owned and managed by the people at large in such wise that workers would produce only for use and not for profit, and each worker would receive just what he produces, no more and no less. The Guild Socialist would welcome a return of the old guilds whereby a given industry would be managed jointly by all the members engaged in it, with more emphasis on the social and artistic side of labour, and less emphasis on the money side of it. The Syndicalist, of whom our own I. W. W.’s may be taken as a type, would like to see all the members of each of the great industries own that industry in such wise that all the industries could be associated together in a general system, which general industrial system would fulfil all the functions now fulfilled by our political governments. The Capitalist, or the man who takes the position which may be thus described, believes that the present system is the only fair and possible method of making the goods needed by the world. The Christian Socialist believes that if the teachings of Christianity were consistently applied to the industrial system it would result in a Socialist state, but that the ordinary Socialistic methods of arriving at such an end are quite wrong; in other words; he trusts in moral suasion rather than in industrial war or the class struggle.

From another point of view all these groups fall into only two groups, which may be described as Revolutionary or Reformist. In the latter case a man believes that the industrial system as it now exists is sane and sound but that there are details and conditions in it here and there that badly need changing, and he is in favour of making these reforms but refuses to touch the system as a whole. On the other hand the revolutionary is not concerned in mere local abuses or failures in the system: he is convinced that the system as a whole is wrong, and he works to uproot the system entirely in order utterly to destroy it so as to replace it by something entirely different. Revolutionaries again could be divided into classes, were there any need in the present instance, because some of them desire one kind of a system and some another, and some believe that the change could be made in one manner while others believe that it can only be made in other ways.

To illustrate. If a man believes that coal miners do not receive adequate wages he may work to increase their pay and would accordingly be classed as a reformer. If he believed that it is utterly wrong for coal mines to be owned and managed by individuals and for coal miners to be wage workers selling their labour as a commodity, and if he strives to bring about a regime wherein coal mines will be owned in some social way, he is a revolutionary. If he resorts to guns in order to bring this change about he is in favour of violence: if he thinks he can bring it about by peaceable means he will not believe in violence but will be a revolutionary nevertheless. In that instance the Communist would say, Let us all, without distinction, own and run the coal mines together. The Syndicalist would say, Let the coal miners own and run the mines for their own sakes. The Political Socialist would say, Let the people own the mines, and let them through some kind of popularly controlled government own and manage these mines, and let coal be produced as we need it, and nobody make a profit out of it.

One might name a score of other groups, such as the Single Taxers, the Land Nationalists, the Co-operationists, etc., but there is no need to multiply instances, especially since this is not an essay in economics but in Masonry. Masonry as such does not take sides with any of these groups. Its members may be doubtless found among them all, for in Europe there are many Masons who may belong to some one of the various Socialist or other radical groups, and in this country there are trade unionists, capitalists, etc., etc., everywhere in our lodges. But that makes no difference to these men as Masons, because as Masons they thrust these differences aside: also, as it is laid down in Masonic law, politics and kindred subjects are not discussed in lodge. Therefore it is perfectly plain that Masonry has nothing to do with these conflicting industrial and political groups as such. But—and here is the whole point of the present study—the Fraternity nevertheless has very much at stake in the present industrial conflicts, for industry occupies so large a place in the foreground of individual and social life, and exercises so potent an influence over everything we are or do, that the fortunes of a great national Fraternity like ours are very much bound up with the fortunes and issues of the industrial system.

Freemasonry strives to make all men brethren, living amicably and happily together; if an industrial system is such as to divide men into quarrelling factions, sometimes making actual war on each other, it is manifest that the aims of the Fraternity are defeated by the evils in the industrial system. Freemasonry looks toward universal peace and international co-operation: if industrial methods and interests, as exemplified in tariffs and large foreign investments, drive nations apart and into some form of war, then Freemasonry is thwarted. Freemasonry strives for equality, but if an industrial regime is of such a nature as to divide society into castes and cliques, the members of which look with jealousy and suspicion upon each other, then it is clear that Freemasonry must suffer defeat. Whatever makes impossible the realisation of the ideals of the Craft is in reality the enemy of Masonry, and will be opposed by genuine and living Masonry just insofar: whatever makes it possible for Masonic ideals to be realised, will be supported and strengthened by Masonry.. The shortest path perhaps to a very clear comprehension of this whole position may be to express in one simple sentence the gist of the whole matter:: In any discussion of the philosophy of industry Freemasonry, if it remain true to its own philosophy, must take the position that industry exists for the sake of man, and must be so managed as to make for the welfare of man. What man is, and what man needs, and what will make it possible for man to live a normal and happy life, that is the criterion by which an industrial system is to be judged.

If we men and women are to remain alive, and if we are to live lives of reasonable happiness, then certain things are necessary to us, such as food, clothing, fuel, houses, education, amusement, and all that. Industry is the method which we have devised whereby these wants and needs may be satisfied. If at any point, or in any moment, the industrial system is failing to satisfy these needs then that industrial system is a failure and must be reorganised. I have to work in order to live, but if no work is to be had, something is radically and dangerously wrong. I need clothing, but if, whatever be my efforts, I cannot get clothing, I am forced to rebel against the way things are. I have to find food in order to remain alive, but if there is no food to be had, it is manifest that there is a breakdown somewhere. To say that an industrial system is a thing that has come about through some mechanical process of nature, like the fall of rain, and that therefore we must passively endure its evils as well as enjoy its goods, is a very foolish way of thinking, because an industrial system is a very human thing, a thing we have brought into existence, a thing over which we always have, if we will but exercise it, a great deal of control. This, however, is not to imply that the present system is wrong; far from it; the point I make is that the one possible criterion whereby to test a system is the question, How successfully does it minister to human needs? The question as to the success or shortcomings of the system now at work is quite irrelevant in the present connection, and must be left to the economists and the industrial experts.

In connection with the above it must also be noted that one should not make impossible demands of an industrial system, as is too often the fashion of zealous but inexperienced reformers. There are many things in nature that cannot be changed, and we must adjust our industrial systems to those things., I may not like to mine coal in the damp galleries underground, but that is where coal is to be found, so I must make the best of it. I may not enjoy living in the far north where the. winters are so long and cold, but if I am to have pine lumber, that is where I must go to get it. The sea is too often a damp and cheerless place on which to live, but if I need fish I must go to sea to get them. Many of the conditions under which we have to work may be uncomfortable and even dangerous, but such conditions must not be charged up against the industrial system if these things cannot be changed. Also, it should be remembered that there is no magic in industry: if a given quantity of goods is to be produced, then a certain amount of work is required to produce it, and that means that men will be compelled to work so many hours, so that it may sometimes happen that a work day will have to be long. And there is a limit to the possibilities of tools, instruments, and inventions, so that often it will necessarily be a hard and dangerous thing to do certain kinds of work, no matter how much improvement there may be by way of inventive genius. This is only another way of saying that while we insist that a given industrial system must satisfy the needs of human beings in a satisfactory manner we must take care not to frame that requirement in such wise as to make it impossible of realisation: the fixed conditions of nature must be taken into consideration, the limitations of devices and tools, and the limitations in human power and human wisdom.

Freemasonry is wedded to high ideals, and insistent on lofty demands, but even so it is unwise on the part of Masons to suppose that therefore it has any right to expect any sudden millennium. It does have a right, however, to ask that this world be made and kept a human world, in which men can live together as brothers and it should insist that the manner in which we make and distribute the goods of life should be of such a character as will make possible the realisation of those fine and human goals toward which it makes its way. For Masonry is itself a living organism and cannot live in a hostile environment.

In American Freemasonry we cannot discuss such things in our lodges, and it is probable that Masons will very seldom as Masons care to discuss such matters outside of lodges. Be that as it may, if we are going to take our task seriously, and if we are sincerely in earnest to make right relations and brotherhood prevail we should all as individuals think out our industrial problems from the point of view of the Craft’s own purposes and ideals. Nothing presses more closely upon us in these days, nothing is more fraught with the potentialities of great change, and nothing will do more to reshape the world in which Freemasonry, like every other institution, must abide, than our industrial system and the burning problems which now beat about it. The Craft must find its own way through all this, and adjust itself to it, and do its own right part in it: how that can be, and when, and where, and to what results, all that is the problem of the Masonic philosophy of industry, a thing not yet born, but which must be born sooner or later.

Freemasonry and the Idea of Democracy

When in the course of human events the mass of people living in a nation learn how to live together as a people, and devise means whereby to secure for themselves their rights as a people, and contrive political machinery and social institutions of such character as exist by and for the whole mass of individuals, that land may be said to be a democracy; for democracy may be described as a state of society in which the people as a whole control in their own collective interest the institutions and forces of the nation. No nation becomes democratic by first thinking out a theory of what democracy is and then, as an architect follows a blueprint, deliberately setting out to put the theory into practice; but they arrive at democracy very gradually and naturally, though not always without strife, by securing control of one thing and of another until they have control of everything, and then manage everything so as to satisfy the needs and desires of the people as a whole.

Some nations long for democracy, others are on the way to democracy, and others still may be said to possess it, albeit in no nation has it as yet become perfect. The most conspicuous among these last is, perhaps, our own country. It was the first great nation to adopt democracy whole-heartedly, and it has from the first never swerved from the path that leads to a more and more complete control of everything by the people themselves and in their own interests. Whether one should describe as democratic a nation that merely longs for it, or whether the name should be exclusively applied only to those nations which may be truly said already to possess it, must be left to the individual’s opinion to decide. The use of words is one thing, facts are another. The organisation of public life by and for the public—that is what we Americans believe in with all our hearts, unless we are renegades, and that is what we American Masons, with an equal whole-heartedness, believe the Masonic Fraternity to stand for.

Now it is self-evident that there may be many means whereby the public as a public may come into control of its own social forces and institutions. How democracy is to be won, and preserved is a question of political and social machinery, and that is a matter that cannot concern us here because it belongs to politics. Suffice it to say that it is possible for the people directly to manage their own institutions, as in some cities the price of a street car ride is determined by popular ballot, which is usually described as “direct democracy,” and that it is also possible for the people to control their own institutions through elected representatives, as is usually done among us, which method is called the “republican” or “representative” system. In our own nation we mix up the two methods very much, and the United States might be properly described as a democracy in the form of a republic.

The reader may have been wondering why it should be necessary to include among these chapters a paper on democracy when the book includes two other papers on equality and liberty respectively. Well, it may be said in reply that while democracy includes equality and liberty, equality and liberty may exist without democracy, and that in our nation, and also I believe in our Fraternity, we strive for all three together. Liberty means that a man is free to develop and use the functions of his own nature without undue interference from others. Equality means that one man has the same fundamental nature as another man, and should have the same privileges to live; but it has often happened that a social structure has existed in which only a minority of the people have been permitted to enjoy either liberty or equality. In Athens, for example, a fraction of the populace was composed of citizens enjoying liberty while the great bulk of them were slaves, and in many parts of India, to cite an example of the other kind, all the individuals enjoy liberty but, owing to a very hard-and-fast caste system, they do not have equality. The democrat (this must not be confused with a member of the political party which employs that name) believes that liberty is a good thing for each individual and that therefore a state should guarantee it to all, and he also thinks that the state should provide genuine equality for all. A state in which all the social forces and values are controlled by and for all the people, and which is so organised at the same time as to guarantee for all liberty and equality, may be thought of as the ideal toward which all true democrats are working. If it be true, as I think it is true, that Freemasonry is one of the mightiest forces working in that direction, we may all feel that no institution could be of more value to our nation than Freemasonry.

We must be careful not to conceive of democracy as being merely political. I should advance this as a criticism of James Bryce’s definition in his recent treatise, already seen to be a great work, called “Modern Democracies.” He says that “democracy really means nothing more nor less than the rule of the whole people expressing their sovereign will by their votes.” That is clearly a merely political definition. Democracy is often something besides a “rule”: it may be an expression of the popular life} as in what we call democratic art, like the “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman; and when it is a rule it may be exercised in quite other ways than political, as when social changes are brought about or prevented by the power of public opinion; and also it often happens that the mere unconscious growth and changing of a people may transform important conditions in a nation’s life, Then, too, I think one should quarrel with Viscount Bryce’s definition in that it ignores such things as social democracy, industrial democracy, and intellectual democracy. By social democracy we mean that social customs and conditions should be controlled and shaped by all the people in the interests of all the people. By industrial democracy we mean that industry shall be controlled by and in the interests of everybody; and by intellectual democracy we mean that there shall be no mere caste of thinkers as there was in Ancient Egypt but that everybody will use his brains and that science and scholarship exist for all and by all. The organising of science and scholarship in public schools which function under the control of the state is an example of how the intellectual life may become genuinely democratic. How all these things may be accomplished or perfected is a question of ways and means and belongs to those discussions in which we strive to discover what are the most perfect social mechanisms, and therefore do not come within our present province.

It is wise for us to learn to look at the facts themselves, and do our own thinking by means of them, rather than to let ourselves be deceived by words. For oftentimes it happens that a nation may call itself a democracy or a republic and yet have not even a tithe of the reality for which these names stand. Mexico under Diaz may have had a very stable government but it was not a democracy, though Diaz and his grandees were careful to observe the formalities, and carried on “elections” every once in a while. Diaz called himself a “President” but in reality was a dictator. In England, on the other hand, there is a king and a royal house but everybody knows that the English people are quite as democratic as we are, because their great governing body is immediately responsible to the people, and is elected directly by the people.

It may be safely said that Freemasonry is about the most democratic institution in existence. On its lodge floor men of all grades of rank, wealth and influence meet together in absolute equality, so that Presidents of the United States have sat on the side lines while some humble workman governed in the East. Its members are elected by secret ballot; its officers are chosen by ballot also; and it is governed by laws administered through representatives who must, once a year, give an account of their trust to the body of the membership. It is so organised that its responsibilities and privileges are distributed among the whole membership so that all share equally.

The democratic nature of the Craft is shown by its actual conduct in history during the past two hundred years. It arose in England (I refer here to modern Speculative Masonry as we now know it) when society in general hated and loathed the idea of democracy, and when men were broken up into social classes of such rigidity as really to constitute genuine castes; but in its lodges Masonry gave to every man absolute freedom of thought and expression and it put into practice those methods of popular rule which we have now in our government. Since its reorganisation in 1717 it has always thrown its weight, or at least with very few exceptions, if any, on the side of popular rule. I had occasion recently to read every reference to Freemasonry in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and I was struck by the fact again and again that the Fraternity received mention almost every time as being one of the forces on the side of a revolt against tyranny in some country, as, for example, in Spain and in Belgium. We know how that a great many of the founders of our nation were active members of the Craft; how that the Declaration of Independence has been freely described, even by the profane, as a Masonic document; and how it can be accurately said that the Constitution of the United States is Masonry put into political practice; and we also know that Masons were very active in fomenting and carrying through the American Revolution.

The teachings and principles of Freemasonry can never be realised in any state of society save a democratic one. How could there be equality for all in a nation ruled by a class, or a caste, or a clique of bureaucrats, or a set of multi-millionaires? How could liberty be guaranteed to every last man in a nation that did not govern itself through laws that apply equally to all, and are interpreted and executed by men chosen by the people and responsible to the people? In any other kind of government liberty and equality may be granted for a time as a privilege, but there is never any way of knowing, as history itself so abundantly attests, when that privilege may be withdrawn.

One is reminded of Masonry’s great book, Albert Pike’s “Morals and Dogma.” Those who have carefully read that wonderful work (“those” should include every Mason, whether he be a member of the Scottish Rite Bodies or not) will recall how that liberty and equality sound through its pages over and over like a mighty bell, and how that the author interprets the whole of history as a vast conflict between the forces that make for tyranny and the forces that make for freedom. It is often asked why Scottish Rite Masonry makes such headway in Latin countries where Ancient Craft Masonry (the “Blue Lodge”) stagnates: I believe the reply to be this, that Albert Pike and his co-founders of the Scottish Rite System organised a Masonry that may be readily translated into a people’s yearning for political freedom. They read in its mighty palimpsest their own prayers for liberation; they find in it a power for emancipation; it is an irresistible force for the overthrow of thrones and dominions.

But it must not be supposed that Freemasonry works for democracy only when it is engaged in some actual struggle, as it was during our Revolutionary period. Its silent and perpetual influences, quiet as the coming of the night, unostentatiously prepare in every Mason’s mind those thoughts and feelings which make toward democracy. It has become a commonplace with political thinkers that democracy cannot come to any people until they have prepared themselves for it. Democracy is not a magic that acts independently of the citizenship; it is a thing that people themselves do if it be done, and it cannot be unless they learn how to do it, and until they desire it with a ceaseless desire. Our great Order of more than two and one-half million members in this nation exercises an immeasurable influence toward a full and complete democracy by constantly instilling into its members those ideas and longings which inwardly prepare them for the fullest measures of equality and liberty. As the sun works so potently in the spring in developing the young seeds until a luxuriant vegetation breaks forth, so does the mighty Fraternity that is dedicated to Light throw its fructifying warmth about the mind and heart of every one of its children. And it does this ceaselessly. It knows no seasons: it has no winter.

Democracy, I said, is not a kind of magic that works whether or no. It is not an infallibility. When the people govern themselves they do not escape mistakes nor are they miraculously freed from weaknesses and evils. The theory of democracy is that the people can learn to govern themselves only by governing themselves, just as an individual learns by experience and experiments. Therefore though the people, or let us say “we,” may fail, time and again, that is no reason for despairing of democracy.

Freemasonry is the Champion of Liberty

Lord Acton, who was one of the most learned men of all times, one of the greatest scholars of the last century, and who left behind him as his monument the great Cambridge Modern History, had as his life work the task of writing a History of Liberty. On this he toiled for years, with two large houses full of books, with all manner of original materials in several languages, until he had accumulated great heaps of data. But alas! he never arrived at the point where he felt that he knew enough about liberty to write its history! and he died with all his knowledge in him, his magnum opus unwritten! Such an experience reminds us what a subject we have before us in the present paper; how difficult it is to deal with; how little has as yet been really thought out about it; how scanty are men’s experiences of it; and consequently how modest must be our own attempts in the present connection.

On the surface it might appear to some that Masonry in itself has not much liberty to give its own children. The initiate finds himself forced to rehearse a ritual no single syllable of which he can change; he is in the hands of a group of men who govern him and his fellow members; the subordinate lodge, as its very name implies, must adjust itself to the will of Grand Lodge: and the whole field covered by the Fraternity is hedged about by a series of Landmarks which, like the laws of the Medes and the Persians, change not. Where the individual finds himself so circumscribed, and compelled to move in so narrow a channel, how, say many, can he be said to have liberty?

Those who ask such a question betray the misunderstanding under which so many labour as regards what is and what is not liberty. They have a vague notion as to what it is, and they dimly feel that in some way there isn’t much liberty to be had anywhere, either in institutions or in government, or in the way the world is made.

Liberty is not merely freedom from restraint. How many there are who think it to be so! A friend who has spent many years in working among immigrants told me that hordes of aliens come in from southeastern Europe, and used to come in from Russia, who have been told over and over that in America there are no laws, no governments, no penitentiaries and fines, and that here every man may do as he pleases with no other man to hinder. Finding themselves so completely disillusioned when they discover the real truth about this nation, they grow sullen and rebellious, consider themselves cheated, and fall an easy victim to the fallacies of anarchy. Such ideas of liberty are born of fancy, for there is no part of the human race anywhere that does have, or ever has had, any experience of such a state. On the contrary every one of us knows from his own experiences that liberty and restraint go together and are in no sense necessarily opposed one to the other. In a family there is all manner of restraint needed, not only for the children but for the parents as well, who are unable to do a hundred things because there are children to care for at home; but even so, father, mother, and the children may all enjoy to the utmost the fullest family liberty. And we know that it is the same with a man’s work. If he is running a farm he is compelled to remain at his post to care for his stock often when he would prefer to be elsewhere; that he must be up with the sun, and do a certain amount of ploughing, harrowing, planting, harvesting, and what not, even though his fancies would lead him to do something very different. He has restraints enough, nevertheless he enjoys on his farm absolute liberty of toil, for the two things go together. And so it is in every kind of labour, and in every other sphere in which men live; always there are the fences about one, and the sign set up, “Thus far shalt thou go but no farther,” but that does not destroy liberty, which is a very different thing than freedom from restraint.

Nor is liberty the same as a go-as-you-please individualism. A large and powerful group of men in the last century taught that all things that check the individual are wrong, and that the full enjoyment of life comes only when the individual can consider himself a separate entity cut off from other individuals whom he is not to hinder and who are not to hinder him. The state is to have no right to interfere with the lives of men in any way, shape or form. Herbert Spencer, who may be considered typical of this school of thought, resented it when the state interposed to regulate education; when it undertook to levy income taxes and to direct business developments; he was bitter even against the governmental building of highroads which he believed should be left to the citizens in each given community. It may be true that such a conception of individualism would accord well with liberty, and it might be desirable, but unfortunately the experience of the nations has shown it utterly impossible of operation; it is not in harmony with the way men are made. Human nature is against it. For each individual man is by his very nature a social being who can no more be cut off from the social organisation than a leaf can be safely cut from the branch of the parent tree. There are some things that we can do separately as private souls; there are other equally important things that we can do only as citizens of a community, as members of a social order. What would have become of us, to cite one example, if it had been left to individual enterprise to manage the late war? In many, many cases the individual, for his own joy and welfare, must be held to his place in the social organism and made to perform his functions there.

Closely akin to the philosophical doctrine of individualism preached by Spencer are the theories of the “laissez faire” school of economics which played so large a part in the history of the nineteenth century. The members of this school believed that the business relations of men are governed by certain “economic laws” which operate in the same way as, and are as unchangeable as, the so-called laws of nature. Men must be left alone, was their cry, and not tampered with; hands off, and business will run itself; the world will be fed, clothed, and housed as automatically as the sun rises and sets. The chief of these “economic laws” was believed to be unfettered competition: indeed, competition was set up as such an important god that when, during the Irish famine in 1825 it was proposed to organise relief in England and ship corn to the starving millions many “economists” fought the project on the ground that the situation would be cared for by the normal functionings of the law of supply and demand and that nobody had any right to divert ships from the normal channels of trade. The theories of the “laissez faire” school seem quaint and far off to one at this date, for their whole scheme of thought has gone by the board, and that for a hundred reasons, one of which is that there are in economic life no such “laws” as those that operate in nature, and that such laws as do operate in economics are of the same kind as those that we find in all forms of human association; they are full of the action of men’s wills, and desires, and deliberate planning. “To let things alone,” to let things drift, does not mean that things will be cared for by automatic natural laws, but that the most predatory individuals in the community will use such a state as an opportunity to rob their fellows right and left. In our own government we have learned that business, in all its forms, is something that must be regulated like all other human activities, and that any ideal of liberty which assumes itself to consist of an absence of regulation is a false ideal.

All these various false notions of liberty have in common one thought, that it is a desirable thing to leave each individual to himself, uncontrolled by others; to let him be an entity in a void. Such a thought is false and impossible. Man is by his very structure a social being, and therefore one that must live, for the sake of his own happiness as much as for the sake of the happiness of others, ringed about by all manner of governing forces and influence.

What then is Liberty?

In my own conception of it liberty means that each man of us is to enjoy unhindered the full exercise of the normal functions and powers of his nature. This is an entirely different conception than that implied in the no-restraint theory, because man’s nature cannot function normally in a void, or in a condition of pure individualism: the functions and powers of a man’s nature, when rightly understood, imply and demand a social life, a community of lives in which each individual finds his true happiness in his right relations to other human beings. It will be best to permit this conception to define itself through a series of examples and illustrations.

One of the most important powers of a man’s nature is his mind. If the man is to be happy, if his nature is to be healthy and un-mutilated, he must be permitted to live in a social order where he has absolute right to use that mind unhindered by anything or anybody. The mind is so made that any interference with its normal functioning brings distress to the individual and disorder to human society. Every attempt to dictate to men how they shall use their minds has proved to be disastrous, as history so abundantly proves. One may recall Prince Metternich and the Peace of Vienna in 1815 when the masters of Europe ordained what men should think, speak, and read. That regime did not bring the uniformity of thought and peace of life which the masters expected; it brought quite the contrary, a fermentation of embittered men and women which led finally to the outbursts of 1848. It is a peculiar agony to have one’s very brain in chains: men must rebel or at last surrender, to sink in the apathy and listlessness of the peasant and the serf.

In what does liberty of mind consist? In the right to use it normally, for the health and the good of all. It does not mean that an individual is free to make use of his mind without restraint or hindrance of any kind. The man who uses his intellect to perpetrate a fraud should be held in leash; if he exercises it in the manufacture and dissemination of lies it is time that he feel that he is not the only man who lives in the world. When a man is given the liberty of thought it is not in order that he may indulge in intellectual license or anarchy, for that is the absence of thought; he is set free in order that he may think according to those laws of thought that are inherent in the mind itself. Therefore freedom of thought does not lead to anarchy and confusion but to harmony, for all facts exist in the system of nature,and all truth is in harmony with itself. When we Masons contend for the right of the free intellect we are contending for the right and healthful use of the intellect, the normal use of it; not for mere caprice.

So also with the right to choose one’s own work, which is also essential to a state of liberty. During the last centuries of the Roman Empire the collegiate system (the collegia were a kind of craft union) had hardened to such rigidity that what a man’s father had done that also must he do; he was not even free to leave his own village without permission; he existed in a kind of industrial slavery.

The same thing recurred, or almost the same thing, at the end of the guild system in England: men had at last to break the system because, it was destroying the right of free work. In India, or in certain parts of it, the caste system `functions in the same manner to deprive the individual of the right to choose his own form of labour.

This right also exists in the very structure of man’s nature. Each of us has his own “bent,” and prefers his own “line.” One man loves manual toil; another would be a musician; a third finds himself made to be a scholar. So goes it with all. This urge within one’s nature toward a certain form of labour is as essential to manhood as the freedom of thought, and it is always as disastrous to human happiness when the freedom to work is denied as it is when men are deprived of freedom of mind. In any social order rightly conceived the liberty of every man to work as he chooses is essential.

But this does not mean that a man can exercise his desire unrestrained. It does not mean that an individual can do what he pleases as if he were alone in a void. It means that the right to work, like all other rights, is shaped by the structure of human nature, and by the necessities of society. If a given form of business proves destructive of social order, such for example as the business of war, or opium smuggling, or piracy, etc., then the man’s right ceases. What we all should strive to uphold is the normal exercise of such rights.

As much may be said of the right of free worship, or liberty of religion. Religion is, it seems, an integral part of nature, therefore it must have healthy development else it leads to ills and to unhappiness. Interference with religious liberty, the long and dark attempts to dictate to men what and how they shall worship, has always bred misery and degradation. A normal religiousness makes for the welfare of a man’s life, and he therefore has a right to the free and normal exercise of it.

The same may be said of all the other functions and powers of our nature. We have an inherent right to choose our friends; to marry whom we would; to have a voice in our own government; to live where and when we desire; etc., etc. In all the possible forms which liberty may take we find this same truth, that this liberty is for the sake of the healthful exercise of human nature, so that a man can be happy while he lives, and that any interference with the normal functionings of the same leads to unhappiness, to the mutilation of nature, and is therefore a thing to be opposed and destroyed. And all this does not lead to individualism, to atomism, to any form of license, or to anarchy as many conservative minds fear, because if the functions of man’s nature are rightly exercised, exercised according to human nature itself, freedom will not lead to conflict among men, but rather to unity and harmony. The very way in which a man is made causes him to be a part of nature, a part of society, and in constant relationship with God. Any liberty which divorces him from nature, or makes him an anti-social being, or causes him to violate the deep laws of his own spirit, is not real liberty at all, but its counterfeit.

Liberty, it follows from all that has been heretofore said, is therefore not a mere gift which the powers that be may confer on a man at their pleasure: it is called for by the very structure of man. It is something necessary, something demanded by the nature of things. Therefore it is, as our Declaration of Independence defined it, a natural right. It is a right that existed before governments came into being; nay, governments exist in order to make it possible, and to preserve it inviolate. For law, rightly understood, exists in order that liberty may be unharmed.

When We have reached this conception we can no longer believe that such a thing can be a mere matter of simple instinct to any individual which he will straightway begin rightly to exercise the moment he is set loose to do as he pleases. Liberty, just because it is so deep and many-sided a thing, and sends so many roots down into human nature and so many ramifications out into human society, is a thing that must be learned. The baby chick has an instinct which teaches it how to eat the moment it steps out of the shell; some have held the theory that man has a similar instinct for liberty which he will exercise if only priests, kings, and aristocrats will let him be. Such a notion is a fallacy. We each one have the right to be free; but to be indeed free, that means a right education for the purpose. Freedom as a right exists in every man: freedom as a fact exists only in those natures which have prepared themselves for it.

From one point of view the whole of Masonry exists in order to teach men how to make right use of their prerogatives of freedom. The candidate is made to feel that he is not a separate living atom living and dying unto himself, but that he is by nature a part of a great brotherhood of men and women; he is taught that until he can exercise the powers of maturity he must, like all good apprentices, be content to have others lead him; he made to understand that mature life is not his at a grasp but that he lives in darkness concerning it until he has gone the whole road of preparation; he is shown that the hoodwink cannot be removed until he is duly obligated to his fellows and taught his duties; he is made to understand that unless he is able to walk alone and exercise his rights normally a cable-tow of external authority is needed to hold him in place, and that such a cable-tow must remain about him until he is able to stand on his own feet; he is made to understand the ever present need of light, and that unless he is always seeking it, darkness will settle upon him, and darkness means unhappiness; and not until he is instructed how to be the absolute master of himself is he raised from the dead level of his slavery to the living perpendicular of a free man.

In its mysteries of initiation Freemasonry reveals itself to its adepts, under one of its aspects at least, as the preparation for the liberty of the mind, of the body, of the soul, of manhood and womanhood. Its part out in the great world among other powers and institutions also reveals it as the champion of liberty in all its forms and under all its veils. And it has ever contended for liberty because it has struggled to win for men life, more life, and life more abundantly. That is its mission. And because man needs liberty in order richly to live, it has striven to win liberty in all its forms. During the last hundred years Masonry has not been absent from one single struggle for civil, or political, or religious liberty.

When men have sought to throw off the yoke of unlawful or cruel rulers it has lent them its aid. When they have prayed and bled to be relieved of the yoke of spiritual and religious bondage it has given them of its strength and made their war its own. Until man has won for himself all those freedoms wherein his life consists it will ever be so, because Masonry exists in order that we all may live more happily, more completely, more abundantly.

WE MEET UPON THE LEVEL

It is not often that one of the subjects of speculative thought becomes the burning issue of the hour, but that is what happened in our own national history between 185o and 1861 with the doctrine of equality. The whole matter, needless to say, was brought to the front by the slavery issue. Anti-slavery orators never wearied of reminding their southern friends that the fathers of the nation, in their Declaration of Independence, had openly proclaimed “that all men are created equal”: if that is true, they argued, then negroes deserve the rights of citizenship, for negroes are men. The pro-slavery advocates retorted by saying that the fathers of the country, many of them, had themselves been slave holders, and that they had really meant to say that “all men are created equal except negroes.” He who reads through the more important debates on that subject—such a one will be richly rewarded—will learn how exceedingly difficult it is to frame any definition of human equality that will at once do justice to things as they are and to things as they ought to be. Equality is an aspiration (in Masonry as elsewhere), a hope, a dream, an ideal, hard to capture in a net of words, difficult to envisage by the mind, so that one must remain content after all his thinking about the matter if he has not yet been able to think it through.

It is as difficult to arrive at a clear conception of equality from the history of Masonry as it is from the history of this nation. The old Craft Mason did not have any equality except in a very special sense. His guild was a helpless part of an aristocratic social order.

He himself had a place in his own guild determined by the most rigorous regulations laid down from above. The guilds themselves were graded in importance, and the members inside each guild were held fast in a similar hierarchy. There is no evidence to show that at any time prior to 1717 any form of Masonry explicitly taught and enforced the doctrine of equality. Subsequent to 1717 the doctrine has come to the fore, and in some countries has almost occupied the first place among Masonic teachings. But even so there have been many exceptions. In the Masonry of Latin countries equality has not, for obvious reasons, been very much emphasised. Even in England, the home of democracy, it has never had .a very rigorous application. When the Earl of Carnarvon inducted King Edward VII into his seat as Grand Master he was careful to remind that potentate that English Masonry had never been subversive of the monarchical system in England as it had been in other countries.
4.It is in France and in America that we find the Masonic doctrine of equality most in evidence, and most influential. The part played by Masonry in the French Revolution is, and perhaps will ever remain, pretty much of a mystery. But there is sound evidence to prove that Masonry had much to do with convincing the French masses that they had rights of their own. To this day liberty and democracy are widely understood in France in the equalitarian sense. “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality” is a slogan that has not yet lost its power of appeal.

But it is in our own land that equality has played its major part in Masonic history. It may be that it was Masonry itself (though this point is hotly disputed) that wrote into the; Declaration the words “All men are created equal.” It is certain that Masonry had much to do with the strain of equalitarianism that runs through the Constitution. It is certain that the Craft was in the forefront in demanding for the negro the full rights of that principle. And it is certain that at the present moment equality and Masonry are almost synonymous in many minds.

It is Russia, strange to say, that now finds equality a living issue. Sovietism, unless we have been all deceived as to its nature and purposes, goes in for equality as the chief good. To level all classes, to do away with distinctions, even such distinctions as those that exist between the learned and the unlearned, seems to be a part of the Soviet regime. It would be a curious experiment to send a questionnaire around to our Masonic leaders and spokesmen to ask them what they think of the Soviet programme, and if they would be willing to see Equality really tried out. The answers might not throw much light on the Russian experiment, but they would surely help us all to learn just what equality means to Masons.

I have my own theory as to what Equality means to Masons, and I shall give it: but I give it as nothing other than my own private opinion, and not as an expression of a generally held formulation of the doctrine. I wish that such a general interpretation could be made, because Masonic thinking demands it. Until we can work out such an interpretation the whole matter will ever remain as foggy as it seems to be now (if one may judge from Masonic books, speeches, and journalism), and not many Masons will understand what is meant when it is said that all Masons “meet upon the level.”

It is easiest to approach the subject by a process of elimination. By equality we cannot mean that all men are equal in the original endowment of their nature.

There are big men and little men, and we all know that in many cases a big man “was born that way,” and that a little man cannot become big by ever so much effort. Why this is so is a mystery, and appears to be (though it doubtless is not) a fundamental injustice in the very structure of the universe. I had this brought to mind recently while reading the third volume of “The History of the United States” by James Ford Rhodes, wherein he carries through several pages a comparison of Lincoln and McClellan. McClellan was spiteful, vainglorious, and ill-mannered; he was a good organiser, but he did not have the courage which naturally belongs to a general. He treated the President with rudeness, and wrote to his (McClellan’s) wife in such strains of pride as made her believe the fate of the Union depended on him alone. Lincoln was a great incarnation of human power, and could be magnanimous, meek, and patient for that very reason. In contrasting the two men one cannot help but believe that the sundering difference was a matter of original nature, and that at birth Lincoln was more of a human being than McClellan. An inequality like that, one that goes. down to the roots of being, is one that is hard to reconcile with our sense of the evenhanded justice of Nature. But the fact is there, and it is everywhere, for no two men have the same aboriginal endowments, let abstract theorists say what they may.

We cannot say that men are equal in nature: neither can we say that they are equal, or can be equal, in opportunity. That may possibly happen in small circles all the members of which live under the same conditions, as in the case of a family, or a neighbourhood, but it is untrue of the race when viewed in the large. The Australian Bushmen, to take an extreme example, never can have the opportunities for education, for wealth, for pleasure, fame, what not, as are enjoyed by the average American youth. Men should have equal opportunities, but they do not have them. They never can have them because the earth itself varies too much over its surface ever to make it possible for all men everywhere to be born into equal opportunities for the goods of life.

Men are not born equal in abilities. On this it is not needful to say much because that kind of inequality confronts us everywhere. It used to be the fashion among theorists to teach that if only all men could receive the same education and have the same chances at wealth, and live under equal laws, and be freed from unnatural restrictions, all would come up to the same average. Horace Mann firmly believed that if all the boys and girls of this nation could get into college all of them would turn out scholars, proficient in Greek, Latin, and the arts. But those who have had any experience with boys and girls in college know that nothing is more certain and unvarying than differences of ability. One student, no matter how hard he tries, cannot master the subjects; another seems to understand them by nature.

In the last place—there is no need further to multiply instances—there can be no such thing as social equality, if by that term one means social uniformity. Social classes there are, and always will be, because social needs and instincts are so various. If a social class (I use the word in its largest sense) is based on caste, or aristocratic privilege, or any other kind of special privilege, then it is an evil. But there are many social classes that are based not on the principle of the superiority of one group of persons to another but upon the fact of difference among men. I shall use a very homely example. In a small town a group of fifty persons organise themselves into a literary club, and in the activities of such a club meet each other socially, get acquainted with each other, and all share in the common enjoyment of literary art. Let us suppose, for clearness of illustration, that admittance to this club rests purely on the desire to share in the study of literature. It is plain that there will be a great number of persons in the community who will never desire membership, because in every community there are so many who, out of a lack of nature, care nothing for literature. This example, as I said above, is of trivial character in itself, but it may serve to remind us of how many social gradations, classes, cliques, clubs, etc., there are everywhere which rest not on any fact of superiority but upon the fact of the difference of interests, tastes, and aims among people. As long as such differences exist (which will probably be as long as there is a human race) there will never come a time when such social groupings will vanish away, and there will consequently never come a time when all men will enjoy the same social advantages. To work for the advent of such a social state, as the Communists have ever done (Owen, Fourier, St. Simon, etc.) is to strive for the impossible. Such social communism is not equality in any possible sense.

What, then, is Equality? Instead of attempting any exhaustive definition, I shall make a generalisation concerning it, and then trust to a series of examples to do the defining for me. The statement is as follows: Every man is entitled to the right, equal to the right enjoyed by other men, to the unhindered and normal functionings of his own nature.

Sir Isaac Newton had a great intellect, one of the very greatest, all historians agree, that has ever appeared on the earth. My intellect cannot in any sense be spoken of as equal to his. Nevertheless I claim the same right to use my intellect, such as it is, that he enjoyed; and he, if he were living, would have no right whatsoever, merely because of his own superiority, to deny me the prerogatives of thought. For him to do so, and for me to submit to such abasement would be a crime against nature. The right to use the mind is for all men everywhere and always the same right, whatever may be the inequalities of mental ability. Whenever this right is interfered with, or controlled in the interests of some clique or class, as has often happened, society suffers, individuals suffer, and a wrong is done that merits condign punishment.

The same thing holds good of practical ability. William Morris had an extraordinarily versatile genius. He could weave tapestry, carve wood, paint pictures, write poetry, make speeches, model in clay, print books, and a score of things beside, and do all with rare skill. There are few of us who could claim any such ability, but even so, we have the same right to use our powers, such as they are, that Morris had to use his. In that fundamental and all-important regard, William Morris was no better than the awkwardest apprentice in his workshops.

Every one of us is social by nature, and nearly every one of us appreciates the rare privilege of friendship. But some men seem to have a genius for friendship. Theodore Watts-Dunton, comparatively unknown himself, was the centre of a circle of friends almost every one of whom became famous in some line. Our own Charles Eliot Norton, than whom no rarer spirit has ever dwelt in this land, numbered among his close friends such men as Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, Lowell, George William Curtis, Charles Darwin, Leslie Stephen, and nobody knows how many more such outstanding personalities. You and I may number our friends on the fingers of one hand, and they may be the humblest imaginable so far as attainments go, but for all that each of us has the right to friends, the same right as that enjoyed by Watts-Dunton and Eliot Norton. Such a statement may seem banal enough, but there are places in the world now, and have been many places in the past, where social life has been so rigidly classified and graded that custom and aristocratic dictation have made impossible to all but a few the unhindered exercise of so fundamental a thing in human nature as the cultivation of friendship.

The right of human equality has been oftenest violated, it seems, in religion, the one field in which men should enjoy the largest measure of it. What a tale of unrightful usurpation, tyranny, and aristocracy has been the history of the world’s religions! One no sooner thinks of the matter than examples flock to the mind in unmanageable numbers. During one great period of their history the Egyptian people were entirely abased beneath the feet of a priestly hierarchy that crushed out in the masses the very instincts of worship, or made use of that instinct for the advantage of their own class. After Buddha had unveiled to the eyes of his people the sacredness of each individual soul before the ineffable and eternal realities of the universe, the Brahmans came back with their castes and their engines of oppression and the people lost once again all uses of their own religious faculties. Jesus came forth to make each man know himself as a son of God, bound together in the great circle of brethren, but after time went on, and the priestly leaven had its opportunities to work, it required a Lutheran revolution to restore to Christians the “liberty of a Christian man.” The old lady across the street, who reads her Bible morning and evening, who arises and retires with prayer, and who lives in her humble and unlearned way such a religious life as she is capable of conceiving of, may be worlds removed in religious faculty from a Buddha, a Jesus, a Luther: but she is as much entitled as they to think her poor religious thoughts and to lead her life of little pieties.

From this it will be seen that equality is not a utopian theory which men have dreamed as being desirable in this harsh world. Far from it! Equality is a necessity of our nature, without which we live mutilated unhappy lives. It is a necessity, when properly understood, like food, clothing, and shelter. He who robs men of that equality which Nature ordains is committing a crime against human beings. He does something that must necessarily be followed by tragic consequences, as is true of the violation of any other condition made necessary by Nature herself. It is because of this that the doctrine is not a mere plaything for erudites but a pressing problem for every man, however busy he may be.

“But,” some reader may here rightfully interject, “that is all very good, and nobody will deny that equality is a right, but what about equality as a fact? One needs only look about him to see that even the simple and basic equality which you have described is not being enjoyed by the masses of people to any degree at all !”

“True enough,” I should reply, “but you have merely stated the complementary fact (complementary, that is, to what I have hitherto said) that equality is a task as well as a right, and it is precisely because equality is a right that it is for us all a task.” By that I mean, that if we are clear in our mind that every man is justly entitled to a reasonable measure of equality then it is for us all, insofar as we are good Masons and citizens, to see that every man gets it. To see that every man gets it is precisely one of the great missions in which Masonry is engaged.

Let us consider a moment equality before the law. There was a time in England when only the rich had access to the protection of the “law” at all, and when the priesthood had its own courts where priest administered the law to priest. Poor men were arrested without warrant; sentenced without being tried; and often executed without evidence. It all depended upon the whim of the earl, or the baron, or bishop, or king, or what-not. But very gradually there was developed in England a genuine equality before the law, as may be traced through the following important watermarks of the evolution of the freedom of English people: 1. Magna Charta; 2. The petition of Rights, 1628; 3. Habeas Corpus, 1679. In our Colonial days these gains made by the people of England naturally were enjoyed by the early settlers, and they at last, after writing a Declaration of Independence, incorporated basic equality before the law in the Constitution, and in the first seven or eight amendments thereto.

But, as may be expected, equality before the law is not yet a realised fact for all. The lawyer for a great corporation told me that his employers were so powerful through their wealth that he would guarantee to keep any case indefinitely in the courts, and thus wear out any adversary, however just might be that man’s claims. “The law’s delays,” is often a sad calamity for a poor man. In my own old home community I knew of two men whose opposite experiences illustrate this unfortunate fact. One was the president of a great corporation who in a federal court was found guilty on ten serious counts, but being a corporation president, and very wealthy, and very prominent, he paid not a cent of fine and did not spend a day in jail. When he returned to his home city he was met at the depot by a band and a long procession. The other man about whom I knew stole a coil of copper wire from a car-barn in the same city and served two years in the penitentiary for so doing! The reader knows of such cases, I have no doubt, and so does everybody. But this is only to say that any right which humanity gains is always imperfectly held and must ever be more and more completely won, and that every right must evermore be carefully guarded, for the whole tendency of human society, if men relax their vigilance, is to slide backwards. Equality before the law as we now enjoy it in this country is found nowhere else in the world save in England, France, and a few other nations. In the great portion of the world it is a thing unknown. If that equality is not yet a perfect thing, the challenge is to us; it is in no sense a proof that the doctrine of equality is an impossible thing.

What holds true of equality before the law holds true of equality in every right and just sense. And we Masons are under a peculiar obligation to devote ourselves to the task of making equality everywhere a fact. For equality is one of our central tenets. The Fraternity never permits us to forget that; the ritual impresses it upon the candidate in every way; the lodge is so organised that every one “meets upon the level.” The candidate is made to feel that without the assistance of his fellows he is a poor, naked, blind, destitute thing without hope: the member is made to know that every Mason has Masonic rights equal to every other Mason, and pays the same dues, enters on the same conditions, holds office on the same terms, and shares equally with all others the burdens and obligations of the Order.