Where does history come in? What use does a man make of it in his daily affairs? It comes in everywhere, and he must make use of it continually, and not one man, woman, or child in the world could evade it, or avoid it, or do without it, because history is the name for one of the kinds of things of which the world is made, and it is a kind to which belong uncountable things, men, events, occurrences and activities. To try to escape from it would be like trying to escape out of space or from the law of gravitation. Millions of men start work every morning on something which they began yesterday, or last week, or last month to pick up today where you left off yesterday, that is history. When we begin to make acquaintance with a man our first inquiry always is, "who is he?" which is to say, "Tell me about his past," and we ask for this history of him because without it we could neither know nor understand him as he now is. When a boy studies any subject in school it has a beginning; the end of it may be ten years away, but he must keep hold of that beginning even when he approaches the end, and when he is doing calculus or is writing his thesis for a Ph.D. he still clings to the alphabet and the tables of addition and subtraction and the forming of letters in writing because each and every study in the curriculum has a history in itself. The answer to half the questions we ask contain facts about the past-he did this a year ago; or our town decided on that twenty years ago; or this is because of what they did six months ago, etc. The greater number of things which exist or live do not come into life or existence and then leave it all in a minute, but persist, endure, last, day after day, or year after year; and not many things which occur are over as soon as they begin but need time to occur in. A war may take four years to occur in, or, as was true of two European wars, thirty years or one hundred years. If something going on now has been going on for years or for generations it is impossible to understand it now without knowledge of its past. It is this going on through a period of time, this having to know the past in order to work with the present, this fact that almost all the important things last and remain active over periods of time, that we mean by the word history. If through illness or an accident a man loses possession of his own history he becomes helpless; he is, as we say, suffering from amnesia. If the men who hate history or find it too difficult to understand could have it ignored, as Henry Ford once recommended, we might as a whole people fall ill with amnesia; a woman could starve to death in her own kitchen because she did not remember her way to the refrigerator.
Among the things which thus continue to go on year after year, and which we are unable to deal with unless we know their past, there are a number which belong to us as a people; which affect us as a people, and which we must know and understand and deal with as a people; most of them are very large things, many of them are great things, a few of them are of a life anddeath importance to us. They are so important to us as a people, and they are so necessary to each man in his daily life, that we make written records of them and teach these records to our sons and daughters in school. We do not put them through these hard chills of memory and ordeals of understanding because we are obsessed by a love or romantic passion for the past, or because we believe that the past was better than the present, or for any other reasons equally futile, but for the sake of the present: we know how often they are helpless to take action today unless they understand what occurred a century ago. History has to do) with the here and now; it is contemporaneous; it is not interested in the past for the past's sake, but for the sake of the present, why do we have a Monroe Doctrine? Why do we not have free trade? Why did we choose to enter World War I? Why were we forced into World War II? Why do we maintain and pay for forty-eight governments instead of only one? Why is our religion inherently denominational? Was the Constitution adopted "way back" in 1787 A.D. or is it adopted anew each day? Why have political parties? Why do we have so many strikes? Why so much crime? We and the world together are so made that many of the affairs with which we must cope are very old affairs; we may begin something today but they may still be working at it a century from today. What is history? Suppose a man does not like it? Suppose that he would endeavor to stop it? What good would it do him, and how would he do it? If a man were caught by his neighbor trying to stop the sun from rising would not that man blush? If a man says, "History is bunk" ought he not similarly to blush, and for a like reason? and ought we not blush for him?
A number of the acts, decisions, events, and ways belonging to us as a people and which in themselves are a part of the historical process, arc so large, and complex, and difficult that few of us have either the time or the means to know and understand them for ourselves, nor can we find other men among our associates able to give us that knowledge orally; we have therefore set up and set aside a profession devoted to history, and we have told off and trained (at the taxpayer's expense) a certain number of men (not a large number) to practice that profession. Only a minute fraction of history comes within their profession; and any one of them can know only a much smaller fraction, and when he teaches his students in college or writes his books he can put into either one a fraction even yet smaller; but like the mysterious materials which are put into an atomic bomb, and which also come in fractional amounts, the professional historian's own fraction of history carries a tremendous potential power, and its use is always fateful to a people, and it may under some circumstances be as hugely explosive as salts of Uranium which obliterated a whole city at one stroke. Woe to a people which trifles with history! The Nazis who trifled with German history, and taught the German people such brazen great lies about that history, discovered in 1945 A.D. how deep and how agonizing that woe can be.
Men in the other professions and arts are free with their materials and have much power over them. A musician can make and unmake his compositions to suit himself. A poet has the liberty of a bird, and has the whole of the English language to move about in at will. A sculptor can carve his block into whatever shape he pleases. An architect can make his choice among many styles and select for himself any one of uncountable details of ornamentation. An orator chooses his own subject and writes his own speech. They can be as original, and as individual, and as free as they may desire to be. In comparison with them an historian is a man of vast meekness, and of almost infinite helplessness. "Not even heaven o'er the past has power." He cannot so much as lay a finger on his own materials. It does not even belong to him. He cannot touch a hair on George Washington's head. He cannot make Caesar change his date for crossing the Rubicon. He cannot tell Genghis Khan which gate of the Great Wall to attack. If Rome fell, he can do nothing about it. If an event occurred yesterday he is no more able to alter it than he is to unbuild the Pyramids. And it is the great paradox of his profession that he not only cannot alter any event in the past but he goes to the extreme length of caution to make sure that he does not even appear to have altered it. His facts are sacred to him. And if he drudges, toils, sweats, labors, groans, and reads himself blind it is also because he is determined to know what actually did occur, and to make sure that what occurred will not be misreported. If a man finds a chapter in the history of his own people hard and painful to read he is not to cast the blame on the historian; he (lid not cause those facts to occur, and if they are hard or painful in his report of them it is because he had to report what he found; and he knows that if his fellow historians catch him trying to misrepresent events, or to twist his reports of them to please some party or interest, they hold him in contempt and read him out of the Republic of Letters.
If history is a process or kind of activity which is everlastingly going on and is a part of the world, and if it is among many other processes or activities of other kinds, it follows that there may be more of history in one kind of activity (or subject) than in another. Is it possible to devise a measuring rod by which to measure the amount of history in any given subject? There have been many in use, but possibly the simplest of them (and therefore in this place the most convenient) was the one used by Plato. To mark one end of the scale take any one or more of those things or activities which have no history in them, which means that they are unaffected by time, that no change takes place within them, and that they are not affected by changes around them. Plato himself made up a long list of these historyless realities in the world, among them being such things as time, space, mathematics, and those inviolable regularities which our fathers described as "the laws of nature." The opposite end of the scale can be marked by war, which is so completely historical in its nature that every battle in it and almost every (lay in it is recorded, and remembered, and the reasons for doing so are so urgent that modern armies carry their own historians into battle with them.
We can now ask ourselves the question, "where does Freemasonry stand in this scale?" The answer is that in respect of the amount of history in it it stands closer to history than to abstractions. It is almost pure history; it is as if it were a body of history come to life; so true is this that if the whole content of Freemasonry were to be divided into 200 subjects the number is not exact but neither is it wholly guesswork not one of them could be known and understood, at least not wholly so, except by history. The Fraternity is one of the most remarkable things in the whole world; because it is, almost every fact about it is a remarkable fact; but few of them are more remarkable, and none of them is more important, than this fact that the Fraternity is living history.
To describe or explain Freemasonry, or any particular thing in it, without a full knowledge and understanding of Masonic history would be as impossible as to attempt to explain geometry without lines, angles, circles, triangles, curves; the attempt to explain it without any reference to its history, as if its meaning could be made up by a man in his own head, is folly. It docs not consist of something in any man's head but originated and developed out of external events; it (lid not arrive where it now is from any man's head but from the past; that past occurred in the actual and external world, was never composed of anybody's private thoughts and theories, and no man by shutting his eyes and by fabricating thoughts in his own mind can unmake that past, or alter it; he can only accept it as he finds it. Freemasonry is not theoretical but is historical.
In order to crowd much into little space we can picture the Fraternity as being a ship though such pictures are always misleading. This ship was built by a set of master shipwrights eight or nine centuries ago. It has moved, along a route chosen by itself, and at its own speed, down from one century to another, in a voyage as long as from here to the moon; it has not yet sighted its last landfall, nor is it likely to do so for generations to come, because it has proved itself worthy to sail through any storm and on any sea. Much can happen inside a ship; work, eating, sleeping, births, illnesses, deaths, talk, and many other things; much may happen to it, from the outside, and especially if it calls at many ports.
The whole of Masonic history, whether we think of it as consisting of numberless events of an historical kind, or as written records or descriptions of those events, can therefore be divided into two large fields. One of them is Freemasonry's internal history, the events which have occurred within it, the movements and charges and occurrences inside Lodges and Grand Lodges and behind tiled doors. The other field is Freemasonry's external history, in which are such events and occurrences as have acted upon it from without, have affected it or effected it. The two field, belong to a single indivisible whole, they interact and overlap, but they are nevertheless well defined, and one of them is useless without the other. The story of the Three Degrees, the erection of the Grand Lodge System, the establishment of the High Grades, these belong to its internal history, and are instances of hundreds other particular subjects; the story of architecture in general and of the Gothic Style especially, of the gild system, of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, of public education, these are instances of its external history. A knowledge and understanding of Masonic history must include both.
In spite of its being unchanged with history, and for all of the years it had behind it, the Fraternity was very slow and very late in finding its own professional historians, partly because for a long period Grand Lodges exercised a censorship over Masonic writings, partly because there were so few documents and other written records for historians to use, partly because the Fraternity had no way to pay historians. Until the middle of the Nineteenth Century Masons had nothing to read except the "historical introduction" of the Book of Constitutions of 1723 A.D. which was not historical, William Preston's Illustrations and William Hutchinson's Spirit of Masonry neither of which had any value as history except for the period in which they were written, and the Rev. George Oliver, whose "historical" writings were a cloudland of guesses.
Masonic historical scholarship worthy to
be so called began with J. O. Halliwell's publication of the Regius
MS. in 1838 A.D.; then, in the 1870's and 1880's, almost without
warning, there came suddenly on the scene a race of giants; Gould,
Hughan, Crawley, Lyon, Speth, Sadler, Rylands, Begemann, Thorp,
etc., and along with them came the Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Research,
the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum which is an Encyclopedia Britannica
of historical studies. These were British; in the United States
we have had Mackey, Pike, Macoy, McClenachan, Fort, Stillson,
Clegg, Robertson, Newton, Pound, etc., etc., and if American Grand
Lodges continue to constitute Lodges of Research as they are now
beginning to do our own best historical writing may lie in the
not too distant future.
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