There are men here and there who look down their noses on those who must work to earn money. There are others who consider the subject of money to lie below them, and deem it too vulgar to mention at the dinner table. There are others of a supposedly spiritual sort, mystical, or metaphysical, or other-worldly, who condemn money because they look upon it as something crassly materialistic. Such men should never petition for the Degrees, because if they do they will be shocked by the Fraternity's frank and open acceptance of money, the need for it, its high place in men's lives, the honorableness of it; and not money in any Pickwickian, or evasive, or make-believe, or occult sense but actual money, dollars, half-dollars, quarters, dimes, and pennies. They will find that the subject of wages is chock-ablock at the center of the Ritual, one of its great themes, and becomes as big as a mountain; and they will discover that the very sanctum sanctorum is nothing other than the place where a young Craftsman has ceased to be an Apprentice, working for nothing, and has become a Fellow of the Craft who can now earn wages. Freemasonry is neither backward nor abashed by the subject of money, but accepts it wholeheartedly with full frankness and an above-board enthusiasm.
If a man must have belongings, such as his
hat, his clothes, his shoes, his handkerchief, and what he carries
in his pocket, it is because he would perish without them - especially
in winter. If he needs many possessions, furniture, utensils,
tools, an automobile, etc., it is because he could not have a
home or make a living without them. He is so made that without
food, sleep, rest, remedies, and what not he will be unmade, but
if he is to sleep he
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must have a bed, if he is to rest he must have a chair, if he
is to eat he must have groceries and a cook stove, if he is to
recover from his illness he must have medicine, if he is not to
be rendered helpless by ignorance he must have schools, and if
he is to retain his possessions and be able to continue to work
he must have government. If such things are material, or physical,
or external he cannot hate them or hold them in contempt or despise
them without hating or despising himself, because they are as
much a part of him as his own hands and feet.
There are hundreds of such things of many kinds and sorts; to make or produce almost any one of them is impossible without materials, equipment, special knowledge, or special skill-consider that a man must spend four years in college, four years in medical school, and two years as an interne before the law will permit him to feel your pulse or prescribe an aspirin tablet for your cold! Any given man is incapable of making or growing more than three or four of the things which he must have to live; it is for that reason that a man needs money. He must have it to trade with. Since he can make only a few of the things he must have, then he must be able to trade what lie himself makes or grows for the many things which he cannot make or grow. He must include money itself among the many things which he owns or he can own nothing; he uses his shoes to wear on his feet, and his hat to wear on his bead; lie must use money for a similarly necessary purpose, because without it he cannot trade for the necessaries which he cannot produce.
Through a long process of trial and error men have found that to date the best material for use as money is gold and silver, and more especially gold. These metals are convenient, durable, and everywhere in demand; they cannot easily be counterfeited (as other metals can), and they may be used in high units of value without bulk-sooner or later all usable money must be pocket money. The Latin terns from which we derived our word "money" meant "to mint," and it is this minting which distinguishes gold money from gold. To mint money a government fixes a standard quantity of a standard fineness of metal; stamps it into a fixed shape, which in modern times is always a disc; mills the edges to
Masonic Monies-Masonic Lodge Funds 91
prevent clipping; and stamps on both sides the denomination, its
seal, the name of the government, etc.; and then declares it to
be official and compels every citizen to accept it as valid money.
It is a prevalent theory that every man who works desires to have what he produces, and is entitled to it in justice; in actual practice the world over a man seldom wants what he produces. If you have potatoes in the ground which are worth $40.00 where they lie, but you are not able to dig them, you can make an agreement with me to dig them for you; if after I have dug and sacked them the potatoes are worth $50.00 it is obvious that I now own one-fifth of those potatoes, or, say, ten bags. I could take these ten bags of potatoes home with me because they belong to me; but I already have more potatoes than I need, therefore you trade me ten dollars for them; or if you do not need them I can trade them to a third man for the ten dollars, and I can then in turn trade the dollars for things I do need. If you pay me the money instead of leaving me in possession of my potatoes that money is called wages, which is money paid for work. There are two very curious and illuminating facts about the wages you pay me - they must be curious, because it has always been so difficult for men to see them, they must be illuminating because as soon as they are seen they clear up a thousand questions about wages. One of the facts is that you do not give me the ten dollars, still less do the ten dollars belong to you; the ten dollars are my property and when you "pay" them you are giving me something which already belongs to me-you are not out the ten dollars because the ten dollars did not belong to you; if you give me the ten dollars it is not because I have forced you to, or have taken from you something which was yours; they are mine, and you have lost nothing by turning over, to me, what is mine. The other fact is that there can be no competition between you and me because my work was done by agreement between us both. We both profit; you have your own potatoes dug, and you are that much ahead; I have my potatoes or my money and I am ahead; we both are ahead but neither is ahead at the expense of the other. It is possible for me to cheat you by not doing as much work as I agreed to, or for you to cheat me by not turning over in the form of
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wages what belongs to me, but cheating has nothing to do with
the system of wages. Wages are an everlasting method necessary
in the nature of things because by no other possible method can
a man who works through the year producing or making one or two
or three kinds of things trade them for the hundreds of other
things which he must have; and by the same token it can never
be true that a man who has money he did not earn is superior socially
or intellectually to a man who must earn every dollar he has.
Next to religion and politics money has always been the most prolific source of public follies. The mid-Twentieth Century American who has become dazzled by the merry-go-round of economic theories, and to whom socialism, communism, and fascism have cone with an air of exciting surprise, cannot have read history; if he had, he would have known that those schemes have no newness except a new mask in this guise, and that in reality they are as old as the hills, and far less exciting than most of our American hills; history is a record of endless experiment with such economic theories. But nowhere in history have theories multiplied so rapidly, or taken so lunatic a form, or gone to such extremes of folly, as during that long period in Britain in the Middle Ages when Operative Freemasonry arose, and in which it took the form which out - Speculative Fraternity inherited. This Medieval ignorance was most dense on the subject of money. Governments, such as they were, did not understand even the A B C's of it; they could see no difference between money and barter; thee fixed costs, prices, and wages by arbitrary and rigid law; if a king waged war he clipped his own coinage to steal the gold or silver out of it; they struck it out in awkward shapes and sizes; they farmed out the coining of it to private firms; and the honesty of governments was so rudimentary (honesty is what money means to character) that it took a microscope to find iteven Joan of Arc connived with her French king to clip his coin in order to pay her army.
No government understood wages, either, as is proved by the stupidity of the laws enacted to regulate then, for they took it that a workman's wages were largess, or a form of charity, paid
Masonic Monies-Masonic Lodge Funds 93
by the employer out of his own pocket. The
Church was even more unenlightened. Wycliff was only one of the
great divines who thundered at workmen for being greedy enough
to accept the wages they had earned; and he and all the other
divines for a thousand years firmly believed that work is a curse,
that money is a low-down thing because it is "material,"
and that wageearners were low-down men, belonging to the lowest
castes of society. Employers were superior to employees even in
God's eyes, and a rich man was more certain to go into heaven
than a poor one because his riches were a proof in this world
of God's favor, and therefore a warrant of God's approval in the
world to come. The worst and most disastrous of the church's stupidities
was its identifying interest with usury; you could let a man have
the use of a $5,000 house for $30.00 rent a month, but to charge
him rent on the use of $5,000 in money was a sin as well as a
crime
this was the tap-root out of which grew the hatred of the Jews,
because Judaism permitted the charging of interest; and if Roman
Catholics practiced their doctrine of the infallibility of the
Pope not one of them would ever lend money at interest because
for centuries one Pope after another issued thundering condemnations
of it in a long succession of Papal Bulls. As for Operative Freemasonry
itself it taught no economic doctrines, either orthodox or heretical,
and came unscathed and unmarked through centuries of Utopian schemes
about money, and "revolutionary" transformations; the
whole history of Freemasonry's own economic theory may be told
in the three words, "It has none."
Freemasons no longer work for wages. The member of a Lodge may work in it one, or two, or four nights a month but is never paid for his time. That system of wages which Operative Freemasons laid down as one of the cornerstones of their craft, and from which they always refused to budge, come Church anathemas or Royal thunders, is no longer practiced by Freemasons; they use it symbolically only. But their using it symbolically does not mean that they have turned money itself into make-believe, or have dissolved it into mystical or into occult dreams: on the contrary wages in the Ritual continue to be real wages, literal wages, wages earned by work and therefore belonging to the worker; the
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dollar is an actual dollar; the only difference between the use
of money and wages by Speculative Masons and their Operative Masonic
forbears is that Speculative Masons aver that what the Operative
Masons knew, and taught, and understood about money and wages
is true of money and wages everywhere. Instead of having a money
theory peculiarly its own the Fraternity affirms that its money
theory belongs to everybody.
Money has been described as that subject about which no two of its own experts ever agree; it is because, of the four factors of which money is constituted, three can be predicted but the fourth cannot be; it is a variable, an X. But this is not a complete explanation of that sense of mystery which almost every man has, at least once in a while, about the function and nature of a dollar; for there is yet a fifth factor, which is not in money but about it, and it is the factor of its function. For like Aladdin with his lamp a man can turn a dollar into any one of countless things. There is a magic in it. He can at will turn it into two pounds of meat; or a bouquet of flowers; or (if he have enough of them) into a pair of shoes; or into medicine; or into a subscription to his church; or into a book; or into schooling; or into science. And as a man usually does not value the product of his own work merely for its own sake but for what he can get for it, so he does not value a coin for its own sake but because he can trade it for innumerable things or services which in themselves are wholly unlike gold or silver.
This complete freedom a man has of turning a dollar into whatever he may need, or want, or desire, or fancy is in a Masonic Lodge brought under a restriction; this restriction is that Masonic funds can be expended only for Masonic Purposes; these latter are broad, they ramify in many directions, they have in them a large number of potentialities, nevertheless they are defined by law, and the fact is a key to the Fraternity's use of money. Unless a Lodge owns property from which it collects rents, or receives gifts, or has an endowment on which it is paid interest, a Lodge, strangely enough, has no income, and even more strangely, it charges no admittance fee to the Lodge Room, charges no price for conferring the Degrees, and charges no price for membership.
Masonic Monies-Masonic Lodge Funds 95
Yet if it is a true and living Lodge, and is at work in a community
where it is needed, it is never without funds. The secret of it
is that a Lodge pays out what monies are needed to carry out the
purpose of a Lodge, adds up the expenditures, and has each man
pay in his equal or his proportionate share. If he is a Candidate
he pays his apportioned share, which means the sum apportioned
to him as his share in meeting the expenses incurred while conferring
the Degrees, and this is called his Initiation Fee - it is not
a price of admission, and it is not a price at which the Degrees
are sold, because no Lodge ever sells its Degrees, but is, to
repeat, a share in Lodge expenses. During the year a Lodge must
pay rent, must pay taxes, pays for light, heat, and janitor service,
postage, equipment, entertainments, relief, and incidentals; the
total is divided among the members each of whom pays an equal
share, called Annual Dues; and since each member accepts responsibility
for his share in a Lodge's fixed expenses in the act of becoming
a member, and since appropriation for expenditures made through
the year are made by vote, and he has a vote. Dues are not a tax
levied upon him from without, but a charge assessed upon him by
himself.MASONIC JURISDICTION
If anything is to come into existence or is to be born or is to begin it can do so only if it is some particular plant or animal or material thing. A philosopher would describe this in the shorthand of his own profession as the principle of individualism. There is nowhere in the world any mere flux, or chaos, or void. Each thing is always "a this particular thing." Aristotle stated the fact in his own shorthand in his treatise on logic by saying that a thing is either A or it is B; it cannot be A and yet not be A, neither can it be A and B at the same time. Any thinking of any sort must take it for granted that this is true; no man can think about nothing in particular, he can think only when he has some given, identifiable, knowable thing to think about; you can say that a horse has four legs but you cannot say that X has four legs because you do not know what X is.
This principle of individualism is as true of the largest things there are as it is of the smallest; the universe itself is a "this particular thing" as surely as a leaf is; so is the earth! so is the sun; so is space; so is time. There is no such thing as climate in the large, in the abstract, but only a number of particular climates in the earth which can be counted, placed, and described; even weather, which is climate as it is in some one area, is never weather in the abstract but always is a definite kind of weather and is determined by the particular climate to which it belongs. The surface of the earth has an anatomy; an ocean is confined to its own basin and does not go wandering about at random; a river runs in its own bed, and does not wander loose everywhere; a valley has its own margins, a plain extends only so far, even a wilderness though its name is a synonym for indefiniteness has its own frontiers; before ever a people occupy a country the country already has its boundaries laid down by geology, and if a people's political boundaries do not coincide with its natural boundaries the people will always have trouble with them.
The principle of individualism is as true
of any other kind of facts and things as it is of material things.
You cannot say that something in general is true, you can only
say that what this particular man says in a particular statement
is true. If anything is beautiful it must be a something, there
can be no beauty where there is nothing to be beautiful. We have
the three institutions of the home, school, and government; work
has in itself some
fifty-odd separate and distinct "forms of work"; we
have separate, individual crafts, trades, arts, professions, callings,
and each one has its own particular subject-matter, that subject-matter
lies inside its own limits or boundaries, consists of its own
entities, and a man who masters any one of them must do it by
the process of mastering each entity, step, degree, one after
the other. To know invariably means to know "this particular
thing"; nobody can know nothing in particular, or everything
at once.
Every government is a government, not government in general. It is an institution which a people establishes because they will suffer unless they do, and its purpose is to put the great world of law to their use and to set it in practice. In a government the principle of individualism takes a form of dividing the work of governing into areas which are called jurisdictions. Any government has jurisdiction only over that territory which lies within a people's political boundaries, and only over such people as live inside them. Its own subject matter is the law, and it has no authority outside that subject matter. The government used by the people in the United States has stupendous power at its disposal, but even it cannot tell a man how many spoons of sugar to put in his coffee, nor could it arrest a kitten north of the Canadian boundary nor trap a mouse south of the Rio Grande because such matters lie outside its jurisdiction. Any government which makes use of the force at its command beyond that jurisdiction is at war with other peoples. A government does not find and declare and enact law in general but always particular laws; each law has jurisdiction over certain actions only-the law of contracts has no jurisdiction over a case of manslaughter. Each court has its own jurisdiction; a sheriff has his county; a policeman has his beat. A people should be implacably firm in seeing to it that the government makes full use of its awesome weight of force against crime; it should also implacably forbid its government to take one step outside of its own jurisdiction to do what is never a government's business to do.
"Jurisdiction" has been one of the most beautiful and majestic words in the languages of Western Man for more than three thousand years. It is composed of jus, which means the law, added to dico, which means to speak forth, to say and, to give voice to; jurisdiction is therefore "the voice of the law." It is the law which the voice carries; the boundaries of a nation are the area over which. the voice carries.
The jurisdictions provided for in the rules of Freemasonry arc in principle and purpose, either the same as jurisdictions in civil government or are similar to them. Freemasonry, like the United States itself, is not something "in the air," vague, or abstract, or a flux, or "in men's minds," but is the name for an actual and visible fraternity with flesh-and-blood members who work in visible Lodges which are housed in material rooms or buildings; but like the government of the United States, and for organizational purposes, its rules are specific and determinant, and it divides itself and its activities into jurisdictions, wherever it is present at all it establishes itself in a village or city in the form of a Masonic Community which centers in a Lodge; this Lodge has authority over Masons and their Masonic activities within fixed boundaries, called a local jurisdiction, and the Lodges of any given state are combined under a Grand Lodge which has those combined local jurisdictions as its Grand Jurisdiction.
This principle of jurisdiction is as old as the Fraternity itself; and, by a kind of paradox, it may be said to be even older, because the Fraternity grew up out of the early Medieval gild system, and jurisdiction was one of the cornerstones of that system. Each craft, art, or profession was organized and had its own rules and regulations but it had authority over only its own work and workers. Any particular gild was in turn divided into local gilds each of which had authority over its own local work and workers inside a fixed boundary, and no neighboring local gild of the same craft was permitted to trespass across those boundaries. This was true also of any Lodge of Operative Freemasons.
When the first Grand Lodge of Speculative Freemasonry was erected in London in 1717 A.D., it began by extending its jurisdiction as far as Westminster, which meant an area with a radius of about ten miles from the center of the cite. Outside of that area it was "open country" therefore when a Grand Lodge was Constituted at York in about 1725 A.D., and another was set up in London in 1751 A.D., neither one violated the jurisdiction of the first Grand Lodge; it was not until 1813 A.D. that England became the exclusive Grand jurisdiction of the present United Grand Lodge of England. Before 1717 A.D. none of the Speculative Lodges had claimed territorial jurisdiction but each one had had full jurisdiction over its own members; it was only after the Grand Lodge System had become permanently established that local Lodges were given local territorial jurisdiction.
In the United States a local Lodge has exclusive authority over its own members and their Masonic activities, within an area of which the boundaries are fixed by Grand Lodge enactment; if no other Lodge is working within those boundaries the Lodge is said to have Exclusive Local Territorial Jurisdiction. If two or more Lodges are at work within the same boundaries, as in a city, the Lodges arc said to have Concurrent Local Territorial Jurisdiction. A Grand Lodge has jurisdiction over its state, and over the regular Lodges and Masons in the state; this is said to be Exclusive Territorial Grand Jurisdiction. If an American Grand Lodge has Lodges in foreign countries (as in China, Panama, the Near East, etc.) those Lodges belong to its jurisdiction but they are necessarily in "open country" (not inside the Exclusive Territorial Jurisdiction of any other Grand Lodge) and hence are not in its own Exclusive Territorial Jurisdiction. A Lodge or Grand Lodge has jurisdiction over only Ancient Craft Lodges and their members; Bodies and Grand Bodies of the other Rites have their own jurisdiction.
In addition to these local and Grand jurisdictions and the jurisdiction of each Rite over its own members and territories there is also a form of jurisdiction which cannot be so definitely described; it may be for convenience called partial jurisdiction, or joint jurisdiction, and comes into play when a Mason, or his acts, are necessarily under more than one jurisdiction at one time. If the Mason resides in one Lodge jurisdiction but holds his membership in another, he is under the partial jurisdiction of his own home Lodge and Grand Lodge and at the same time is under the partial jurisdiction of the nearest Lodge and its Grand Lodge otherwise a Mason could put himself beyond the reach of Freemasonry's "voice of the law" by moving or visiting outside his home jurisdiction, and for him to be so would be a violation of the Landmarks. Any Mason who is away from his home jurisdiction, who introduces himself as a Mason to other Masons, or who asks for Masonic favors or privileges or relief, or seeks to visit a Lodge, is while doing so answerable to the nearest Lodge or to the Lodge he visits. If when doing so a question arises which is not easily answered by the rules the case is then discussed and decided by Masonic Correspondence between the nearest Lodge and his home Lodge, or between the nearest Lodge and his Grand Master. Wherever a Mason goes, even though it be in the countries farthest away, or in a country without Lodges of its own, he is never beyond the reach of some Masonic body of competent authority; nor does it follow that this is true only in questions of Masonic discipline because jurisdiction is not solely for legal purposes but may equally well operate for purposes of Masonic fellowship and relief. It is always a mistake to take jurisdiction to be a legal principle only; for it is the whole of Freemasonry which operates within each jurisdiction, and it is for the sake of the whole of it that it operates.
This fact that jurisdiction includes boundaries in space and yet includes many other things because it is the whole of Freemasonry that is jurisdictionalized ought to be the point of departure for the national debate over the question as to how large (or how small) a Lodge ought to be. Which is better, a large Lodge, or a small one? In the lean year of 1939 A.D. the Lodges in the District of Columbia averaged 434 members, Rhode Island averaged 342 members, and Massachusetts averaged 316 members; at the opposite end of the scale Alabama and South Carolina averaged 61 members per Lodge, and Arkansas averaged 55; Wyoming and Minnesota coincided with the national average, which was 163.
Each of these Lodges had its own jurisdiction, but because a jurisdiction is a unit containing everything which belongs to Freemasonry, the word "size" manifestly cannot be reduced to the terms of size in space or membership. A Lodge of fifty members may easily be "bigger" Masonically than one of 500; it confers as many Degrees, it omits nothing from any Degree, it has as much room for each member as a large Lodge, it carries out the same Masonic purposes; and-this is said as a plain statement of fact, not as a sentimental exaggeration if the Lodge of 50 members has more fellowship, more sociability, more friendship, more help, aid and assistance, more brotherly love then the Lodge of 50 is Masonically larger than the Lodge of 500; it is the amount of Masonry, not the number of members, which ultimately decides the "size" of a Lodge jurisdiction. Freemasonry is a life to be lived, not a set of observances, nor a mere system of duties, nor a code of doctrines; the motto of a Lodge now is "Let there be light" but a Lodge could as rightly take for its motto "I have come that you shall have life, and that you shall have it more abundantly"; the Masonic Community cannot be measured in the terms of miles, or number of members, or number of dollars, but must be measured by the amount of the Masonic life in it; and though its geographical area remains fixed whether it is a dead Lodge or a living Lodge the true size of its jurisdiction is the richness and the abundance of the Masonic life in it.
What, then, is it which in the long run
and over the terms of generations decides how much geographic
space a Lodge needs, and where its boundaries are to be fixed?
The amount of life, and vigor, and activity which it has in it.
It should have as much space as it needs. Therefore the boundaries
of a jurisdiction are not only laid down for Masonry, but are
also laid down within it, and by it. It is Freemasonry alone,
out of itself, and for its own purposes, which decides them. And
it is because this is true that the jurisdictional boundaries
of a Lodge often do not coincide with the political boundaries
of the city, or the state, or the nation. What do they have to
do with Freemasonry? What difference does it make to Masons where
political boundaries are drawn? If you live in Indiana and I live
in Illinois what is that to us as Masons? If you live on one side
of the U.S. - Canadian boundary and I live on the other, does
the boundary divide us? As Masons we ignore its existence. Lodge
and Grand Lodge jurisdictional boundaries are organizational conveniences
which separate us into many families in order that we may throughout
the world be one family, and are not Grand Canyons or Chinese
Walls which pen us up apart from each other in small parochial
separateness, each one with a Freemasonry of its own; for Freemasonry
is a seamless robe; it stretches without let, or division, or
hindrance around the earth, simple and whole, in an embracing
unity, and jurisdictions are not obstructions to that unity but
are the means to maintain it.
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