THE BUILDER JANUARY 1925

Shall Grand Lodge Become a Nursing Mother?

BY BRO. DONALD HUGHES, California

BRO. HUGHES is a genial philosopher who has the knack of expressing
his opinions with such good humor as to please even those who most
violently disagree with him. We are hoping that he will let us
publish three or four other essays about which he has been
gossiping in a number of recent letters.

LET'S philosophize a little! It is a harmless pastime with
occasional utility, and seldomly does anybody serious harm, more
especially if the so-called philosopher is as absent-minded and
grandfatherly as myself. There is sometimes a little excitement to
be had out of it, too; hardly anybody can ever tell what a
philosopher is aiming at until he gets there, and then sometimes,
as the Irisher said, it isn't the place at all but another. You
remember Professor Huxley's gentle jibe at good Bishop Berkeley? He
said the sainted metaphysician began his discourse with tar water
and ended with the Trinity. Huxley added, it may be recalled
irrelevantly for the sake of the fun, that the pages on tar water
were much the better !

My friend The Editor has asked me to contribute to THE BUILDER a
few of my lucubrations. I have warned him of my awful habit of
digressing, of pausing by the way to gossip about this and that, of
all my literary lapses, my ingrained garrulousness, and other
faults, but he has insisted natheless; perhaps after I have once
wandered all over the inside of the magazine he will recant.
(Others have done as much.) Public taste in letters is all for
speed and jazz. People want their literature served up in rapid
little packages, like bullets. They have gazed so much on the face
of the flapper that they have lost taste for gazing on the face of
truth. The shop girl going to work attired in satin slippers, and
a few other things, is setting the fashion for books. "Make it
snappy!" is our motto. The bread of life has become gingerbread;
the wine of life has become coca-cola.

I am not comfortable in this atmosphere. To me it is a heresy to
suppose that the history of the world can be crowded into an
Outline, or that the poetry of existence can be expressed in five
lines of vers libre, or that the drama of life can be presented in
one act. I like the rigor of the game but, like Charles Lamb's Mrs.
Battle, I prefer to play it with my friends in front of the open
fire. The old-fashioned essay is my favorite literary form; its
leisureliness pleases me, its winding in and about through its
subject; the sense it conveys of plenty of time, as if the author
knew well enough that we human beings may as well begin to practice
the eternal life right now. You can make a machine as rapidly as
you please, but you cannot make a human being that way; life grows,
and growth takes time, under the patient sun and the unhurried
rains, with time for doing nothing and for dreams. All that is as
true in our lodge life as anywhere else. It grinds me to see the
Third Degree rushed through, with candidates "initiated" in gangs,
and everybody screwed up to the pitch of haste; we shall never
teach our novices the lesson of immortality unless we take time for
it.

Let that pass ! What I started to philosophize about is history,
among other things. Not history in general, in the sense of
everything that has ever happened, but history as understood by
Trevelyan, Wells, Robinson, Breasted, Macaulay, Greene, Hume,
Hallam, Gibbon, Freeman, Bishop Stubbs, and all those disciples of
Clio who write big books and organize themselves into learned
societies.

Do their labored disquisitions have any value above the literary
pleasure they furnish bookworms like you and me ? Can one make any
practical use of their chronicles ? Can history be applied ? Is
there any method for plotting out the future on the strength of
what we have learned about the past? Are Guglielmo Ferrero, Lathrop
Stoddard and President Herbert Spencer Hadley warranted in telling
us what America is coming to on the strength of what happened two
thousand years ago in Rome ? What these queries amount to, I
believe, may be jammed into one short question of four words--is
history a science?

HISTORY IS AN ART

For myself I agree with Mr. Trevelyan in his Clio, a Muse, where he
argues that history is an art rather than a science because it is
of the essence of any real science to permit its devotee to
foretell the future, whereas the historian can do nothing of the
kind, as anyone knows from the sorry failure that has attended
every well meant effort of an historian to don the mantle of the
prophet. The astronomer can tell you to the second when Halley's
Comet will next put in its appearance because he knows when it has
been here before, but no historian on top of Mother Earth can make
any similar prediction. A thing can occur ten thousand times in the
historian's realm and then never occur again.

There are obvious reasons for this, of course. Man is by nature an
unpredictable being. The mere fact that he possesses such a thing
as a history means that his world is always making new beginnings,
new departures, new experiments; unforeseen factors irrupt into it;
if it were everlastingly repeating itself there would be no news to
tell about it, and hence no history, which is news about the past.
Who foresaw the railway ? the automobile ? the aeroplane ? wireless
? What biologist can tell when human heredity will take a Mendelian
leap into an utterly unexpected variety, with a new kind of blood,
a new cast of human brain? Because the unexpected happens, nobody
can tell what to expect, therefore there can be no prediction and
consequently no science.

The historian is an artist. Like every other practitioner of that
gild he picks and chooses among his possible materials for those
which suit him, leaving out of account what some other artist may
consider of first value, for the purpose of shaping its plastic
substance into impressive forms that please him and may possibly
please his readers.

In saying that the historian is an artist, I have in mind the large
true sense of that word and not merely a painter of pictures. Now
the one chief and all engrossing subject of all art is human
nature. The artist's proper study is mankind. Even the art of
architecture has man for its theme; a building takes its shape' and
structure not in order to reveal the geological nature of the
stones but to exhibit the purpose and aspirations of the men who
will live or work inside it. Every artist, in any possible medium,
is out to show man something about himself, to reveal him to
himself, to put him into completer possession of himself, so that
he can the better shape and govern and enjoy his own life. This is
as true of those forms of art which seem farthest removed from us
as of the more immediate and intimate forms, such as lyric poetry.
Art is a history of human life presented through the forms of the
imagination; it may ignore facts but it cannot ignore truths. Our
Ritual, which as I believe is one of the masterpieces of the
world's art, is a history of the human heart in some of its deeper
moods and more tragical moments.

I should like to say here that we shall never understand the art of
fiction writing properly until we come to think of it as an attempt
to give us this same kind of history. The notion that it is a
novelist's business to construct frothy tales out of his fancy to
furnish pastime to idle souls seems to me a libel on all the wise
and true practitioners of that great art. Imagine a Conrad, a Willa
Cather, a W. H. Hudson, a Balzac, a Henry James wasting his time at
such petty stuff ! It is ridiculous! Those and all others like them
have in view the serious purpose of telling the truth about human
life; when they deceive us by telling lies about it they cease to
be great novelists. And that is the trouble in chief with so many
of the poor novels that often become so popular (no need to mention
any names); they mis-represent man's nature, and therefore practice
deception on the unwary minds that steep in their pages.

CONRAD IS GIVEN AS AN EXAMPLE

Consider as in point here Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. This admirable
and heroic novelist cherished in his boyhood among the Polish
plains far removed from salt water the dream of becoming a sailor
on an English ship, and then lived out his dream against all the
odds of race and language. That done he turned novelist and left
behind him--he has recently passed into the Unseen--the most
valuable body of fiction given us by any writer of this present
day. The professional critic may value his books for the skillful
managements of his themes, or for his sophisticated style, but
others of us love them for their truth. Perhaps there was never a
real Jim; never a young sailor who caved in when he believed his
ship to be going down; never such a hidden and barbarous land as
that in which he tried so nobly to bury his shame; but what does it
matter ? The story of this young "Tuan" is a transcript of human
nature, true and revealing, and every reader is the wiser for
having read it; wiser, that is, not alone because he understands
others better, and the world better, but for knowing his own nature
better. And what a mystery is this nature of ours! It is our own,
but at the same time not our own, much of it lying outside our own
self-grasp as distantly and strangely as the Malay Archipelago or
the Indian Ocean, so that to have it laid bare to ourselves, and
interpreted, is a great gift to our wisdom, and enables us to know
and therefore to manage our lives the better. To write a novel,
such as this, is as much a feat as to write a great history; in
either event the purpose is a truthful unveiling of human nature.
The historian makes his interpretation by means of known facts
about the past; the novelist by means of truths won through the
imagination. One is as valuable, for "serious," or any other
purposes, as the other.

I have long believed that we make a great mistake in supposing that
a historian is necessarily concerned with the so-called "dead
past." For one thing, it is not a fact, as a rapid reading of the
biographies of historians will prove. Some of them have been
learned pundits completely divorced from the present, and more
excited about the size of a stone in King Tut's tomb than about the
living world; but for the most part (one recalls Macaulay, Gibbon,
Mommsen and a score beside) they have been moi e interested in
present affairs than the majority of men are, and for that very
reason have become historians. For another thing, the past is not
"dead," not much of it anyhow, but very much alive, most of it
quite busily at work in our present day. For time, as Bergson made
us see with his persuasive eloquence, is a continuum, like the flow
of a river, carrying with it into the future what it has gathered
up in the past. Consider your own life ! The experiences of your
boyhood have not been left behind you, like stones lying inertly on
a road; they continue functioning inside you, influencing you as
much now, perhaps, or even more than at the time they occurred. To
condemn history, which is literature dealing with old events, in
the name of the urgent needs of the present is to be peculiarly
short-sided about that same present. Almost everything that lives
and moves in our own immediate world derives its momentum and its
vigor from past generations.

With this understanding of the matter we can easily see in what
sense history, the record of times past, can be put to the service
of the present and of the future. By knowing what men have been in
the past, how they have behaved in certain conditions, what motives
have moved them, what inspirations have drawn them along, what
hopes have animated them, we are the better enabled to understand
what is going on about us, and what we may reasonably expect will
grow from present conditions in the future. This is the truth of
Goethe's profound saying, already quoted, I recall, several times
in THE BUILDER, that "men change but man remains the same." There
can be no predictions of matter of fact but there can be
anticipations; anticipations of the future based on knowledge of
men in the past. For these reasons and in this sense I believe that
Ferrero, Stoddard, Hadley and the others are safely within their
province in warning us -- about the trends in the present world
from their knowledge of how we humans have behaved under similar
conditions in past generations.

THE CITY IS A KEY TO OUR PROBLEM

A rapid survey of a number of such books as are represented by
those of these authors--I have a stack of them on the table before
me as I write--shows that the thing which bulks largest in their
troubled view of our modern world is the preponderant place of the
large city in our life, and of the industrial and economic system
that has brought these huge towns into existence. There is no need
here to go into a detailed analysis of the problem of the city as
envisaged by them, for space is limited; it will be sufficient to
quote an utterance, already become familiar, of James Bryce, who
was as keen a critic of his own times as he was a keen historian,
and who succeeded better than most in bringing the lessons of the
past to bear on the difficulties of the present. He said these
words to a group of Americans about to leave London for home, and
they were directed at American cities, but their application is
general:

"Go back to the splendid world across the sea; but don't you make
a failure of it. You cannot go on twenty-five years more in your
great cities as you have been doing. Don't you do it. If you do,
you will set us liberals back in Europe five hundred years." (For
this quotation, and for a striking work on the whole subject, see
The Challenge of the City, by Josiah Strong; his statistics are now
out of date, but his general treatment is as valid as ever.)

This problem of the city is the key to a number of the most
perplexing problems of government. For consider. In a stable rural
community an individual is buttressed and supported by the whole
neighborhood; he is linked to his neighbors by a lifetime of
associations, and to many of them by ties of blood. If he is out of
work he doesn't need to appeal to some stranger in an employment
bureau; if he loses all his money he isn't thrown upon "organized
charity, scrimped and iced, in the name of a cautious statistical
Christ"; if he becomes ill the neighbors come in to help nurse him;
and if he dies penniless he isn't buried in a Potter's Field. He
has moral resources outside himself; his character has roots in the
neighborhood.

Put the same man in a great city to live among indifferent
strangers and nobody will care much whether he lives or dies. He no
longer wages the battle of life upheld and assisted by a
neighborhood but goes it alone, and as a result may very well
become economically morally and physically bankrupt. The time comes
when he is overwhelmed by his own sense of isolated helplessness.

And meanwhile the same industrial process that has thus herded him
and his family into a roaring community of strangers has been
reacting on those left in rural communities. A farmer no longer
raises produce for a local market well understood by himself but
for a distant city market over which he has no individual control;
the mysterious juggling of prices by distant influences may cause
it to turn out that a bumper crop will bankrupt him; and in the
course of time he will very likely find himself mortgaged to money
lenders sent out from the towns.

What will men do under such circumstances? The historians tell us
they will most probably do what they have nearly always done when
similarly situated: they will begin to call loudly upon the
government to help them out; they will ask it to guarantee wages
for them, and prices; they will want all manner of subsidies and
grants from the public purse. The national government will become
more and more complicated, adding bureau to bureau, until finally
it becomes a despotism; and meanwhile the dependent and helpless
groups and blocs will have become pauperized, because it is as
plain as the nose on your face that a man who accepts money from
his government is indirectly accepting it as a gift from those
classes that have money wherewith to pay taxes. Once this process
gets under way it automatically perpetuates itself; the very
subsidies create new reasons for further subsidies, and so on ad
infinitum. It is an old, old story !

For purposes of offering tangible proof of these rather sweeping
generalizations let me refer you to the last report of the Census
Bureau, capitulated and summarized by Bradstreet's. In 1915 the
average state in the Union increased its per capita tax on us from
$4.66 in 1915 to $10.71 less than ten years later. In the same
period the per capita net indebtedness for the average state
increased from $4.31 to $8.12. The cost of government increased
158.7 per cent in the same years. There is only one possible
interpretation of these stark figures: they mean that power, wealth
and activity is rapidly pyramiding in government. It seems to me
that this process is getting a strangle hold on our own government,
and I am afraid that the deadly process has only just begun. So far
as such things are concerned we face a melancholy future. We shall
have not the "Great State" or the "Servile State" that so many
publicists are writing about, but what is much worse, a Maternal
State, a state that has become a mere nursing mother to its weak
citizens.

WHY BREED WEAKLINGS?

It was this thing that poured so much rage into the sensitive soul
of Nietzsche, who, whatever may have been his faults otherwise, saw
into the core of this whole situation with clairvoyant clearness.
"Why do we go on with a system," he demanded, "that automatically
breeds classes of weaklings ? Do we not know that when these
weaklings have become numerically powerful they will pull
everything else down to their own level ? Strength will be
submerged in weakness, and the foolish will govern the wise!"
It perturbs me to see so many Masons swept into this habit of
calling on their own central government, the Grand Lodge, in this
selfsame manner. One might suppose, to judge from a dozen
indications, that the individual Mason and the individual lodge had
lost all power or ability, the way they ask Grand Lodge to become
a nursing mother for them. They want Grand Lodge to manage their
charities, to superintend their new building enterprises, to look
after them as if they were helpless infants; they even become
afraid to ask a man into lodge to give a speech without first
creating a Grand Lodge bureau to do it for them. What has become of
the old sturdy independence of character by which our early
brethren went out into the wilds beyond the frontier where there
were no Grand Lodges? Has it all leaked out of our natures? It is
idle to justify this steady centralization of activity on the score
that we need discipline and order; you can't have discipline among
sheep!

When I was a young man I was so much oppressed by the various and
sundry social evils about me that I almost became a professional
reformer. It seemed to me that one could find no better way of
investing his life than in an effort to help tidy up and clean up
and better organize our communal life; and I believed that much of
that work could be accomplished without impossible difficulty if
only "the people" could be brought to recognize the evils and to
accept the methods. Like other members of the group in which I
worked I devoured barrels of books. They were good books, and they
are still to be recommended: books by Henry Demarest Loyd, Josiah
Strong, Professor Rauschenbusch, Elisha Mulford, and scores more
like them. I distinctly recall what an excitement it caused when H.
G. Wells first arrived on the scene; it seemed to some of us that
we could never tire of his brilliant cataracts of words, his
tireless preaching of a new "World Order."

Well, I remained as much interested in seeing our social life made
more sound and beautiful as ever I was but somehow I lost interest
in most of the reforms specifically advocated. In analyzing them in
after years, I have come to believe that I lost interest in them
because at the core of the majority of them I found an unconfessed,
or half confessed, scheme to throw all the problems upon the
shoulders of the State or National Government. The same thing is
true, as I understand them, of most of the schemes being proposed
today. (I am not discussing politics.) Your typical radical wants
things bettered but he usually wants them bettered by the State. He
wants to shift the responsibility from the individual on Main
street to some other individual in Washington. He loses sight of
the patent fact that the individual in Washington has no more
ability or wisdom or idealism than the individual on Main street;
and that if the individual in Washington manages life for the
individual on Main street, poor Main street will be worse off at
the end than before.

I am not trying to break any lances against national or united
effort in Masonry, least of all in the field of Masonic education,
or for the sake of such concerted relief work as the project of a
National Masonic Tuberculosis Sanitarium; but I do believe that we
need to be on our guard lest we become a Fraternity governed
paternalistically, which is the last way any real man wishes to be
governed.

To my own way of thinking there is a very deep distinction to be
made among all the programs of centralized Masonry. If such a
program asks Grand Lodge to serve as a committee of the whole, and
as an agency through which individual Masons and lodges can better
perform their work, we can have general unity of action without
pyramiding authority; unless I have misunderstood its methods the
George Washington National Masonic Memorial project could be so
described, for in most cases its money was raised locally and
voluntarily, Grand Lodge being only a machinery of collection. But
if in carrying out some such program Grand Lodge takes the place of
the individual and of the local lodge; if it acts in lieu of men;
if it takes money from its own treasury that should come from the
member or his lodge; if, in short, it acts because individuals have
failed to act, then it has become a paternalism.

THE TRUE RADICAL IS DESCRIBED

If I find myself in a quarrel with many of my Masonic brethren on
our own Main streets, it is because they are falling into this
habit. They may call themselves "radicals" but at bottom they are
not radicals at all. A radical should be fearless and daring,
willing to fight alone with his back to a wall. All the efforts to
have Grand Lodge become a nursing mother are not of that character;
it is the timid, nerveless, half-scared individual who wants to be
nursed and chaperoned through life. I believe that we need a new
radicalism in Masonry, a radicalism that will boldly place
responsibility exactly where it belongs, asking for no charity,
with each individual Mason willing to stand the gaff in his own
right, and not begging for help from outside. For that reason I was
rejoiced to come upon a paragraph or two in Bro. Ashley A. Smith's
Report on Foreign Correspondence in the Grand Lodge Proceedings of
Maine for 1924. His words cap off my argument better than my own:

"The writer of this report would desire no higher praise than to be
termed a Masonic conservator of the school of Josiah H. Drummond or
a traditionalist of the type of Albro E. Chase, because in the
truest meaning of the word these men of Maine were radicals of a
vital type even though they are invariably termed conservatives.
How far have we traveled from the original meaning of the word -
radical, - may be seen when we consult the lexicon and find it to
mean--one who goes to the roots of truth. Surely no one thinks of
a radical today in that way. The usual meaning of the word is quite
different in the minds of the majority of men, and the type which
comes before our vision when we say--radical--is that of the
superficial doctrinaire, the irresponsible social agitator, the
long-haired type of fanatical reformer with an easy panacea for all
social ills and international maladies and disorders. Masonry seems
to have few of that type of radicals, and in this sense it is a
kind of misnomer to use the term 'radical Freemasonry.' This is not
to say, however, that there are many who seem to us to have
overstepped the bounds of a wholesale and radical conservatism The
whole point and purpose of this brief essay is to make clear that
there is precisely this reality at the heart of Freemasonry, as we
have this year and last year observed it throughout the world--a
wholesome and radical conservatism. Several Grand Jurisdictions,
which have our fraternal respect veneration and cordial good-will,
incline in the matter of legislation, attitude and interpretation,
rather too much toward the untried and even positively dangerous,
while others no less devoted to the ideal and progress of the
Fraternity veer the other way, toward the old and tested and tried
principles and ancient landmarks of the Order. Maine would
unquestionably belong to the latter class. It would be both
invidious and fraternally ungracious to point out examples of the
former. It may well be that those who are inclined toward the
untried and dangerous will keep the conservative from crystallizing
and becoming moribund and pull them ahead, while on the other hand,
the old fogyism of the Masonic mossbacks (the alleged
conservatives) may exert their influence in a no less wholesome way
in holding the aggressively dangerous (the alleged radicals) from
going too far away from the well-tried landmarks. In short, they
may accomplish in this union, jarring as it often is what neither
alone would do so well."


Sacred Asylum

BY BRO. JOSEPH ROBBINS, Illinois

Sacred Asylum! here we meet
And tell our vows at Friendship's shrine
Father! guide Thou our wandering feet,
And make the hearts before Thee Thine.

Beneath the bannered Cross we stand
From worldly noise and strife apart,
And, trusting, grasp the offered hand,
That holds within its palm the heart.

From off our pilgrim sandals brush
The dust of busy, toiling day
And here, in evening's quiet hush,
Bending before the Master, pray--

That in our hearts, without alloy
May dwell the love that Christ hath shown,
Responsive to a Brother's joy,
And making all his griefs our own.

With firm reliance on Thy name,
May we the path of duty tread
O'er frozen ways, or through the flame,
Whence Molay's martyr-spirit fled.

And when, at last, this mortal dust
Shall put on Immortality;
O, grant us then serenest trust
In Thine unending verity.

