When the first permanent Grand Lodge was constituted in 1717 A.D. by the old Lodges only four of them are known to have participated the dining room in the Goose and Gridiron Tavern would have held their combined membership without crowding, because no one of them had over thirty members. If there were as many as ten other old Lodges in London at the time the fourteen together could not have assembled a crowd of 500. Few of the inhabitants of the city so much as knew of the existence of the Fraternity, though London had at the time only a small fraction of its present population. In 1721 A.D., which was four long years after the erection of the Grand Lodge, John the second Duke of Montague was elected and installed as Grand Master, and remained in office for one and one-half years. His election was a quiet and an undramatic event about which there was no gossip or rumor on the streets of the town, but as ensuing events were to show it was to be a turning point in the history of Speculative Free Masonry, because Montague was a member of the nobility. An opportunity to sit in the same rooms with a blood relative of the King, and even possibly to enjoy with him the intimacies of the table, made so powerful an appeal to the socially aspiring that Freemasonry began to multiply. New Lodges sprang into existence almost over night, and the Fraternity began to be the talk of the town; nor did that talk have an opportunity to abate as the Duke was followed in office by other Dukes, and by Earls and Marquises. In a pamphlet published under the title of A Free Vindication, which is one of the most important documents in Speculative history, it is stated that in 1726 A.D., the year of its writing, there were 4,000 Freemasons in London.
The Fraternity became, in the language as then used, "a power," and it became a center of controversy for that reason. There were Whig and Tory political parties even then, at least in outline, but the most menacing controversy was that which blazed between the Hanoverians, the faction which supported the Hanoverian King George, and the Jacobites, the faction which worked to restore the Stuart family to the throne, the rancor being so bitter that in Scotland it had led to war; as soon as Freemasonry became a "power" each of these factions fought to capture it in a struggle which blazed up into an open quarrel on the floor of Grand Lodge when the Duke of Warton was Grand Master in 1723 A.D. a fact which adds a special interest to the publication of the Book of Constitutions in that year.
During the Operative and Transition Periods there was sonic Anti-Masonry Wyclif published a diatribe against it but it was sporadic, though, as shown by an Anti-Masonic leaflet of 1698 A.D., it was sometimes vitriolic; but in the 1720's, and consequent to the growth described above, it became chronic, and began to accumulate a literature of its own. Along with it there grew up a deal of satire directed against the Craft, in the newspapers, on the stage, and in the coffee houses, in the form of lampoons, joke cartoons, and ribaldries, and these in turn led to a number of species of "mock Masonry," or societies designed to make sport of Masonic solemnities, among them being the "Gormogons" and the "Guzzletonians." And amidst this hubub there were published a number of so-called exposes, by which means clandestines cowans tried to work their way into the lodges to ridicule.
The Fraternity met these vexing problems by having Grand Lodge act upon it officially, with edict and law, rather than to leave them work themselves out by discussion or by measures taken by Lodges. The Grand Lodges employed one means, after another, as rapidly as they were called for, and enforce: them with uniformity and severity. Except at one or two point, and as the results were later to testify, the Craft could not have acted more wisely. Public processions were prohibited in order to avoid hooliganism on the streets even the old customs of visiting church and of escorting the Grand Master's carriage from his residence to Grand Lodge were discontinued. Modes of recognition were altered. The Paragraphs on religion and politics in the Book of Constitutions were literally enforced. These various means were gathered up into a single system, and made complete, and carried to their extreme, by the official adoption of Grand Lodge censorship which included meetings, speeches, and publications, it being ordained that no Mason or Lodge could print a pamphlet or book without official approbation by the Grand Master, as is always true in any system of censorship the whole pressure was negative, censors being what they are, and this long period of verboten explains why it was that over a number of decades only Calcott, Hutchinson, and Preston published books of any weight, and the once so powerful voice of Masonic oratory remained so long in silence. It was not until 1783 A.D. that Captain George Smith defied censorship by publishing his Use and Abuse of Freemasonry, and it was not until a decade afterwards that the whole system was openly and officially set aside; since then Freemasons have been free to think and to write, and they will continue ever to be free, because grown men, if they are qualified to be Masons, will not tolerate a despotism so gratuitous, and one which violates every principle of Masonic teachings; because if the principle of censorship were established in the heart of the Craft it would destroy that very responsibility for his own thought, speech, and actions which every Mason has, first as a Candidate and then as a Member; for it is the essence of censorship to forbid a man to act upon his own responsibility.
History it so happened, preordained Freemasonry in Nineteenth Century America to repeat, almost point by point, the same course of alarm, defence, and censorship as that which was described above. The Anti-Masonic Crusade which followed the disappearance of William Morgan in 1826 A.D. was vicious, nationwide, and well organized; it set up a political party of its own, it sent hundreds of stump speakers across the land, it published hundreds 0f magazines, newspapers, and books, and it won the active support of many clergymen; had there been anything in Freemasonry corrupt or evil or false it would in all certainty have completely perished, because that crusade was kept up and pursued with an almost fanatical intensity for a quarter of a century; the microscopes of its foes could find nothing false in it, and it turned again and recovered its old place and went forward. But during the decades of the attack the Fraternity set up within itself not an official censorship but a tacit rule of silence, and until the Civil War American Masonry was not only secret but almost secretive; the reason was obvious, because Masons argued that the less said in public or to the public the fewer would be the targets at which Anti-Masons could aim.
After the Civil War history took another turn, one almost as unheralded as the Anti-Masonic Crusade, and by one of the most unexpected coincidences possible to history, one that also turned out as an argument for preserving silence. The American Craft became very religious; the Master's pedestal was almost turned into a pulpit; delegates went off to Grand Lodge less to transact business than to listen to long Masonic sermons by pulpit orators: and it was accepted almost as a motto that "Freemasonry is a handmaiden to the church"; the tone and temper of the Lodge was solemn and almost funereal, and the offices 0f the Lodge were filled with men white in hair and beard. Along with this went not the conservatism which preserves the old because it has stood every test of analysis and research, but the conservatism which obstructs analysis and research, because it is afraid 0f knowledge. An "old man's silence" lay over the Craft in the 1870's and the 1880's.
This censorship by tacit consent came to an end not by rebellion or revolution or reform but for the same reason that British censorship had come to an end a century before; it was found by decades 0f actual practice and experience that the Fraternity could not carry 0n its own Masonic activities without sonic knowledge, where knowledge is needed censorship must be cast aside because its motto is: "Thou shalt learn nothing. Thou shalt have no new knowledge." The men who moved forward to Craft leadership from about 1885 A.D. to about 1915 A.D., in person or through their writings, were almost without exception scholars, teachers, writers, historians, and encyclopedists, both here and in Britain, for the new leaders here were Fort, Stillson, Greenleaf, Drummond, Mackey, Pike, Macoy, Morris, Parvin; and in Britain were Hughan, Gould, Speth, Crowe, Woodford, Crawley, Rylands, Lyons; and in Europe were Krause, Rebold, Begemann, and others of a like kind. After one and one-half centuries of experiment with and without censorship, with and without silence, with and without books, the World Fraternity decided once and for all, and regardless of what the future may bring, that the freedom of the Masonic mind is a Landmark in Freemasonry.
No man desires to be a free man in order to be free to lie, or steal, or be ignorant, or to be rebellious, or to indulge in any other wicked or mischievous or criminal action; he desires to be free in order to be free to work and to earn wages, free to use his mind when lie has need to, free to say the truth when it is the thing for him to do, free to work with others and to associate with others in peace and harmony. There is no connection between freedom and anarchy, and nothing under the starry decked canopy of heaven could be more false than the sophistry that freedom means disorder, with every man for himself, and that order cannot be had except by the rule of a dictator or a tyrant or a despot; if history shows anything to be true it is that peoples who have the least freedom are most rebellious because they become bitter or resentful, and consequently are most in disorder.
Neither can anything be more false than the sophistry that free thought means that a man can say or think whatever may chance to enter his head, and whether it is true or false, that he has the right to believe in any notion he pleases, or to adopt any "opinion" for which he has the whim. Such vagaries would not mean that a man has a free mind, but that he has no mind. Freedom to think means whatever is necessary to think. It is of the very nature of free thought and of free speech that a man is free to think what he must think, and not what he himself decides to think, for to refuse to grasp the fact or the truth is not a form of thinking, but a form of not thinking. If I ask you what time it is, it is not you but your watch which decides your answer. If I ask you what day of the week it is it is not you but the calendar which determines what you think and what you say. If I ask you what is the area of a triangle with a base of three feet and a side of four feet and you answer that it is six feet it is not you who determines its area but the triangle itself. We do not manufacture facts or create truths but find them, and always they are independent of ourselves. If it be the function of the mind to find out what facts arc, or what is true about facts, then it would be a contradiction in the nature of the mind to suppose that a man would demand freedom of thought in order to ignore facts or evade truths, it is among peoples where men are least free to use their own minds that the greatest amount of falseness and superstition is found because they are not permitted to find out facts or truths.
Criticism is nothing other than a man's
free use of his own mind over any given field or subject matter,
and the concomitant freedom to report what he finds, and not to
be penalized if what lie finds proves (through no fault of his)
to be painful or distressing or distasteful to somebody else.
Masonic criticism is a Mason's freedom to use his own mind on
the subjects, questions, and problems of Freemasonry, and his
freedom to report any facts or truths he finds, and without being
penalized by any Lodge or Grand Lodge law or officer for doing
so; since we have that freedom, since Freemasons are as free to
think and to speak as they are to work or pay dues, and since
that freedom is a Landmark, we have Masonic criticism free, and
full, and unimpaired, and no member can be penalized or persecuted
by anything or anybody if he makes use of it. But it would be
as false in Freemasonry as it is elsewhere to advance the sophistry
that criticism is fault finding, or is a belittlement of things,
or a running down of everybody, or is a mere advertising of failures,
or is nothing but a sort of lust for destructive talk. There is
no conceivable connection between criticism and fault finding
and a man's reasoning is faulty if he believes there is. When
a man lets his own intelligence play freely over any subject he
is not searching for the faults in it but for the facts in it
and the truths about these facts; whether what he finds is good
news or bad news depends on what he finds those facts and truths
to be. Who is he to dictate the facts! Would he not be under the
delusion that he is a god if he tried to make the facts be what
he wishes them to be! He reports what lie finds. If a thing is
bad he says so; if a thing is good he says so.
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