W.
The twenty-third letter of the English alphabet, which originated in the Middle Ages, is a double V, and is peculiar to the English, German, and Dutch alphabets.
W.-.
An abbreviation of Worshipful, of Wrest, of Warden, and of Wisdom .
WAECHTER, EBERHARD, BARON VON.
Lord of the Chamber to the King of Denmark, and Danish Ambassador at Ratisbon; was born in 1747. He was at one time a very active member of the Rite of Strict Observance, where he bore the characteristic Knighthood name of Eques a ceraso, and had been appointed as Chancellor of the German Priories of the 7th Province.
When the spiritual schism of the Order made its vast pretensions to a secret authority derived from unknown superiors, whose names they refused to divulge, Von Waechter was sent to Italy by the old Scottish Lodge of which Duke Ferdinand was Grand Master, that he might obtain some information from the Pretender, and from other sources, as to the true character of the Rite. Von Waechter was unsuccessful, and the intelligence which he brought back to Germany was unfavorable to Von Hund, and increased the embarrassments of the Strict Observance Lodges. But he himself lost reputation.
A host of enemies attacked him. Some declared that while in Italy he had made a traffic of Freemasonry to enrich himself; others that he had learned and was practicing magic; and others again that he had secretly attached himself to the Jesuits. Von Waechter stoutly denied these charges; but it is certain that, from being in very moderate cireumstances, he had, after his return from Italy, become suddenly and unaceountably rich. yet Mossdorf says that he discharged his mission with great delicacy and judgment.
Thory, quoting the Beytrag zur neuesten Geschicte, or the Bearer of New History (page 150) says that in 1782 he proposed to give a new organization to the old Templar system of Freemasonry, on the ruins, perhaps, of both branches of the strict Observance, and declared that he possessed the true secrets of the Order. His proposition for a reform was not accepted by the German Freemasons because they suspected that he was an agent of the Jesuits (ActaLatomorum i, page 152).
Kloss (Bibliographie, No. 622b) gives the title of a work published by him in 1822 as Worte der Wahrheit an die Menschen, meine Brüder, Word of Truth on Humanity, my Brethren. He died May 25, 1825, one, perhaps, of the last actors in the great Masonic drama of the Strict Observance.
WAGES.
The whole period of the Middle Ages in England was in one aspect of it a struggle of barbarism against civilization, but on the question of wages it would be paying them a tribute to describe them as barbaric; wages were savage, savagely low and savagely cruel, and next only after war were the ruling class's most brutal weapon of subjugation, and that remains true after everv possible allowance is made between the purchasing power of a shilling then and a shilling now. A bookkeeper in the reign of Edward I records "that one Master Mason was paid 6d per day, and five Masons were paid 4d per day."
Bro. Edward Conder, from whose Hole Craft these figures are being taken, notes that in ] 336 a Mason received one shilling a day. In 1342-1400 typical wages for Freemasons working on Westminster Abbey ran 4d; 10/6 for two Masons for 21 days; two Masons at 2 shillings per week; two for two weeks 6 shillings; for "Master Yevele Chief Mason, " one of the greatest of architects, "100 shillings per annum"; etc.
In 1402 Henry IV forbade Masons to work by the week, or to receive pay on feast days, and ordained that on a day before a holiday when they stopped at 3 P.M. they were to receive only one-half day's pay—"in ye name of Godde." One Royal Act forbade Freemasons to be paid more than 5' shillings per day. In 1495 a statute fixed visages for Freemasons at 4d with meals furnished, 6d without meals during the long-day half of the year, 3d and 5d respectively during the other half; the fad a day began at 5 A.M. In Henry VIII's time a Master received 12d a day; a Warden 5d a week; setters 3' 8d per week; clerk of the works, 8d per day; under-clerks, 6d per day. At page 93 of his Gleanings Frown Westminster (Oxford London; 1861) George Gilbert Scott prints a number of specimens of the Westminster Fabric Rolls, the oldest being for 1253 A.D. In that year the average wage for Masons was 1' 10d per week. In 1271 an expert Master Mason received 2' 6d per week.
WAGES OF A MARK MASTER.
See Mark Master's Wages.
WAGES OF A MASTER MASON, SYMBOLIC.
See Foreign Country.
WAGES OF OPERATIVE MASONS.
In all the Old Constitutions praise is given to Saint Alban because he raised the wages of the Freemasons. Thus the Edinburgh-Kilwinning Manuscript says: "Saint Albans loved Masons well and cherished them much, and made their pay right good, standing by as the realme, did, for he gave them iis. a week, and 3d. to their cheer; for before that time, through all the land, a Mason had but a penny a day and his meat, until Saint Alban amended it."
We may compare this rate of wages in the third century with that of the fifteenth, and we will be surprised at the little advance that was made.
In Grosse and Astle's Antiquarian Repertory (iii, page 58), will be found an extract from the Rolls of Parliament, which contains a Petition, in the year 1443, to Parliament to regulate the price of labor. In it are the following items:
And yt from the Fest of Ester unto Mighelmasse ye wages of eny free Mason or maister carpenter exceed not by the day iiiid. with mete and drynk, and withoute mete and drink v(]., ob
A Maister Tyler or Sclatter, rough mason and meen carpenter, and other artificers concernyng beldyng, by the day iiid., with mete and drynk, and withoute mete and drynke, iiid., ob.
And from the Fest of Mighelmasse unto Sister, a free Mason and a maister carpenter by the day iiid with mete and drynk, without mete and drink, iiid., ob.
Tyler, meen carpenter, rough mason, and other artificers aforesaid, by the day iid., ob, with mete and drynk, withoute mete and drynk iiid.., and every other werkeman and laborer by the day id., ob, with mete and drynk and withoute mete and drink iiid., and who that lasse deserveth, to take lasse.
WAGES OF THE WORKMEN AT THE TEMPLE.
Neither the Seriptures, nor Josephus, give us any definite statement of the amount of wages paid, nor the manner in which they were paid, to the workrnen who were engaged in the erection of King Solomon's Temple. The cost of its construction, however, must have been immense, since it has been estimated that the edifice alone consumed more gold and silver than at present exists upon the whole earth; so that Josephus very justly says that "Solomon made all these things for the honor of God, with great variety and magnificence, sparing no cost, but using all possible liberality in adorning the Temple."
We learn, as one instance of this liberality, from the Second Book of Chronicles, that Solomon paid annually to the Tyrian Freemasons, the servants of Hiram, "twenty thousand measures of beaten wheat, and twenty thousand measures of barley, and twenty thousand baths of wine, and twenty thousand baths of oil." The bath was a measure equal to seven and a half gallons wine measure; and the cor or chomer, which we translate by the indefinite word measures contained ten baths; so that the corn, wine, and oil furnished by King Solomon, as wages to the servants of Hiram of Tyre, amounted to one hundred and ninety thousand bushels of the first and one hundred and fifty thousand gallons each of the second and third. The sacred records do not inform us what further wages they received, but we elsen here learn that King Solomon gave them as a free gift a sum equal to more than thirty-two millions of dollars. The whole amount of wages paid to the Craft is stated to have been about six hundred and seventy-two millions of dollars; but we have no means of knowing how that amount was distributed; though it is natural to suppose that those of the most skill and experience received the highest wages.
The Harodim, or chiefs of the workmen, must have been better paid than the Ish Cabal, or mere laborers.
The legend-makers of Freemasonry have not been idle in their invention of facts and circumstances in relation to this Subject, the whole of which have little more for a foundation than the imaginations of the inventors. They form, however, a part of the legendary history of Freemasonry, and are interesting for their ingenuity, and sometimes even for their absurdity (see Penny).
WAHABITES.
A Mohammedan sect, established about 1740, dominant through the greater part of Arabia. Their doctrine was reformatory, to bring back the observances of Islam to the literal precepts of the Koran. Mecca and Medina were conquered by them. The founder oƒ Ibn-abd-ul-Wahab, son of an Arab Sheila, born in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and died 1787. Their teachings were reecived by the Mussulrnan population of India, and much uneasiness has been feared therefrom.
WAITE, ARTHUR EDWARD.
Arthur Edward Waite: A Check list of his Writings, by Harold V. B. Voorhis, privately printed; Red Bank, New Jersey; 1932, is an exhaustive but not wholly complete list of works possessed by Voorhis of which Waite was "either the author, the compiler, the translator, the editor, or the writer of the preface or foreword. " Bro.Waite himself assisted Bro. Voorhis to make the collection as complete as possible; after Bro. Waite's death Bro. Voorhis installed his collection in the Iowa Masonic Library, Cedar Rapids, Ia., where it is housed in a special case and named the Waite Collection; the magnanimity of that act is genuinely ape preciated by Bro. Voorhis' many American friends and colleagues.
In the Check List the titles are:
Alchemical Writings of Edward Kelly. Azoth, or the Star in the East. Belle and the Dragon. Book of Black Magic and of Pacts. Book of the Holy Grail. Braid on IIypnotism—Neurhynology. Brotherhood of the Rosv Cross. Cloud Upon the Sanctuary. Collectanea Chemica. Collected Poerns Compendium of Alchemical Processes. Deeper Aspects of Masonic Symbolism. Devil Worship in France Doctrine and Literature of the Rat balah. Elfin Music: An Antholog-v of English Fairy Poetry. Emblematic Freemasonry General Bool; of the Tarot. Gift of the Spirit. Gift of Understandings Golden and Biessed Casket of Nature's Marvels. Golden Stairs. Harmonical Philosophy. Hermetic and Alchemical M ritP ings of Paracelsus. Hermetic Museum.
Hidden Church of the Holy Graal. History of Magic. Holy Kabbalah. Horlich's Magazine. Israfel, Letters Visions and Poems. Key to the Tarot. Lamps of Western Mvstieism. Lexicon of Alchemy. Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. Lives of Alchemvstical Philosophers. Lucasta, Parables and Poems. Lumen de Lumine. Lyric of the Fairyland. Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan. Mysteries of hIagie. New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry. View Pearl of Great Price. Obermann. Occult Sciences. Ode to Astronomy and Other Poems. Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Prentice Mulford's Story. Prince Starbeam. Psyche.
Quest of the Golden Stairs. Raymond Lully. Real History of the Rosicrucians. Saint-Martin. Secret Doctrine in Israel. Secret Tradition in Alchemy. Secret Tradition in Freemasonrv. Some Characteristics of the Inner Church. Songs and Poems of the Inner Church. Songs and Poems of Fairyland. Soul's Comedy. Steps to the Crown. Strange IIouses of Sleep. Studies in Mysticism. Tarot of the Bohemians. Transcendental Magic. Triumphal Chariot of Antimony.
Turba Philosophorum. Unknown World. Way of Divine Union. Works of Thomas Vaughan. World's Great Religious Poetry. Zodiac of Life. Magazine articles in Horliek's Magazine; Psyche; The Master Mason; The Builder (five); Light; Occult Review; Transactions of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.
Waite was not interested in Masonic History properly so called, and as represented by Mackey, Gould and Hughan; in fact, as his private correspondenec and his published works prove, he was wholly mis taken about the point and purpose of it, as when he insisted that Gould had tried to prove that a few illiterate stone-masons had fathered Speculative Freemasonry. Moreover when his specifically Masonic writing is sifted out of the mass of his writings it is of surprisingly slender volume even his New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry is less about Masonry than about! occultism; and the amount of history in his Emblematic Masonry is scarcely more than a trifle. His theory was that a few occultists like Ashmole and Fludd were bearers of the "Secret Tradition," brought it into Masonry, and by means of doing so were the instruments by which the Operative Craft was made over into the Speculative Fraternity. He gives very little data and no proof for this theory, which has not been accepted; and it has made so little impression that in Ars Quauor Coronatorum and the Transactions of other Lodges of Research his name is seldom referred to, and his theory is not discussed.
It is in the fields of occultism and of mysticism and in the borders between the two that his massive and permanent fame will always rest; his works on the RosY Cross and on the Grail are his own masterpieces, and at the same time are masterpieces of the whole literature which they dominate. (American Masons Will find a surprise in this paragraph from Bro. Voorhis's brochure, page 1: "Born in Brooklyn, New York~ U. S. A., in the year 1857, of Connecticut paternal ancestry, his English mother took him to England at the age of two, following the death of his father, and he has never returned to America. ")
WALES.
The earliest Lodges in Wales were two at Chester and one at Congelton, all three established in 1724, and Doctor Anderson records that Grand Master Inchiquin granted a Deputation, May 10, 1727, to Hugh Warburton, to be Provincial Grand Master of North Wales, and another, Julle 24th in the same year, to Sir Edward Mansel, to be Provincial Grand Master of South Wales (Constitutions, 1738, page 191). Wales forms a part of the Masonic obedience of the Grand Lodge of England, and the Fraternity there has been directly governed by four Provincial Grand Lodges, namely, North Wales, South Wales, Eastern Division, and Western Division.
WALES, PRINCES OF
From 1737 no less than nineteen princes of Great Britain and Ireland have been admitted as Freemasons, four being Princes of Wales:
Frederick Lewis, 20th Prince of Wales, was initiated at the Palace of Kew, November 5, 1737 by Doctor Desaguliers, and the Book of Constitutions of 1737 was dedicated to him.
February 6, 1787, George Augustus Frederick, 22nd Prince of Wales, was made a Freemason in London by the Most Worshipful Grand Masters the Duke of Cumberland. The Prince of Wales was elected Grand Master in 1790. There is in the museum at Washington, District of Columbia, of the Supreme Council, Ancient and Accepted ,Scottish Rite, a copper medal or token bearing the date November 24, 1790, and the inscription "Prince of Wales was elected G. M." with the motto "Amor, Honor et Justicia" (Love, Honor and .Justice) commemorating the election of the Prince of Wales as Grand Master. He was installed in 1792; but on assuming the Regeney, 1812, the office was vacated, and he became Patron. As Georgc IV, he accepted the title of Grand Patron from 1820; and whilst Prince of Wales, 1787-1820, was Worshipful Master of the Prince of Wales Lodge, London, Sir Samuel Hulse being the Deputy Master for that period.
Albert Edward, 23rd Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was initiated at Stockholm by the King of Sweden, in 1868. The rank of Past Grand Master of England was conferred upon him in 1870, but on the resignation of the Marquis of Ripon, he accepted the chair, and was installed as Most Worshipful Grand Master at the Albert Hall, London, by the Earl of Carnalaron, April 28, 1875 idle served as Worshipful Master in the Apollo University Lodge, Oxford, the Royal Alpha Lodge, London, and from 1874 was Worshipful Master of the famous Prince of Wales Lodge, No. 259. In the Grand Lodges of Scotland and Ireland he was a Patron and all honorary member of the Lodge of Edinburgh, No. 1, and also a member and Patron of the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree for England, as well as Grand Master of the Convent Central of Knights Templar.
On Clay 2, 1919, H. R . Edwald A. C. G. 24th Prince of Wales, was initiated at an Emergeney Meeting of the Household Brigade Lodge No, 2614, London, and raised a Master Mason on June 24, 1919, installed as Senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England, October 25, 1922, and as Provincial Grand Master of Surrey, July, 1924.
WALLACE, GENERAL LEWIS.
American writer and soldier in the Mexican and Civil Wars. Corn April 10, 1827; died February 15, 1905. Member of Montgomery Lodge No. 50, Crawfordsville, Indiana (see New Age Magazine, February,1924) . Author of the famous novel, Ben Hur, a Tale of the Christ. Governor of New Mexico, 1880; Minister to Turkey, 1881-5.
WALLACE KEATON MANUSCRIPT.
Brother Wallace Keaton of London in 1926 discovered this manuscript, of the period from 1695 to 1715, which bears his name and is now possessed by the Grand Lodge of England. A description of it by brother H. Poole was published in the Masonic Record, beginning July, 1927 (page 192). There are six strips of parchment sewn into a roll about fourteen feet long and some seven inches wide. The text is in the main of normal style but Brother Poole notes a most interesting feature in that this version contains the peculiar variations of the Dowland Manuscript
WALLACHIA, GRAND SCOTTISH DEGREE OF.
Found in Fustier's lists.
WALLERS AS MASONS.
Operative Freemasonry had in the large a uniform system of organization, grades, customs, but this is a generalization against which must be charged a long list of exceptions or provisoes, and it is never safe to generalize about the whole of Masonry from any one record, set of rules, or lodge. This proviso holds of the subject of wailers. According to a set of still-existing records wallers were Mssons who hewed and laid stone in walls; in contrast to them, the Masons who could work in finer stone, or free-stone, could shape and carve it, were called free-stone Masons—one of the origins, probably, of the name Freemason. A set of rules were set up for Masons in London in 1356; they were compiled by a commission of six free-stone Masons and a commission of six wailers in a joint conference. This indicates a recognized distinction between the two types of Masons, and suggests that they may have had separate organizations. Such a distinction would be in consonance with the records of the incorporated City Companies; in them Masons often were put into the same Company with trades having no connection with building, although each trade would usually maintain its own organization as a fraternity, association, or society apart from the Company.
WANAMAKER, JOHN.
Famous American merchant, giving employment in two stores to more than 12,000 people. Born July 11, 1838; died December 12, 1922. U. S. Postmaster-General, 1889-93. He was made a Freemason "at sight" on March 30, 1898, by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, and later received the Thirty-third Degree (see New Age, March 1925).
WANDERING SCHOLARS, MINSTRELS, ETC.
Even as early as the Twelfth Century there were a few universities in Europe, and by the Thirteenth these had grown to such a number, including Oxford and Cambridge in England, and also in size (one or two might have as many as 35,000 students enrolled), that their faculties ranked in power and inHuenee in the general intellectual life second only to the Church. With few roads and fewer ships to travel by, students had to walk for weeks or months through the country to reach a desired school; and since many students, young men or grown men, would go to one school to sit under one or two famous masters and then to another, and usually distant, school to sit under others, any given student might pass one-third or one-half his time on the roads, begging or working his way along, or earning a week's lodging in some manor or castle by tales, recitations, and songs.
These wandering scholars, as they came to be called, developed in time an esprit de corps, had their unwritten rules, and by the end of the Middle Ages had become almost an organized fraternity. Like the Fellowship of Freemasons they had their legend, the core of which was a set of tales about a certain Golias, or Goliath, who was a sort of Paul Bunyan of scholarship, and very possibly was the germ out of which Rabelais's abounding fancy developed the first idea for his tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel. For this reason the wandering scholars called themselves "Disciples of Golias," or Goliards, or Gollerds, or Gollyers (the name is spelled in many forms); and they were often called vaganXes, though, as paragraphs below will show, that cognomen properly belonged to another fraternity
The Goliardi reached their apogee about 112S1130 A few scholars among them became famous not only as scholars in their own right but as heroes among the Disciples of Golias; Hugh, whom they called their Primate (they tended to be derisive of the Church hierarchy), was a canon of Orleans about l 14U; their "Archpoet't was in the court of Frederiek Barbarossa (that Medici before the Medicis), was a knight, and was author of a literary masterpiece entitled Confession of Goluls (circa 1161-65). The great name of Walter Map, an Arehdeacon at Oxford under Henry II, occurs in many Goliardi MSS.
Men who have pictured the Middle Ages as a block of orthodox belief, solid with saints and a somewhat self-abasing piety, and without any Lucian or Voltaire anywhere in sight, will take a second thought after reading a history of the Goliardi, they and their writings together. They were free minds, witty, ironic, scornful of saints' miracles, disgusted by relic worship, and arrogant to priests, monks, and other illiterates. They carried Latin over Europe and Britain; eomposed masterpieces in verse and prose: kindled a love for the other fine arts; were among the first to spread the good news of the new style of Gothic art and architecture at Paris; lit in remote places a lamp of learning; and helped to knit together the disrupted communities of Europe.
Helen Waddell, one of the most brilliant of modern women scholars, wrote a nowfamous book about them entitled Wandering Scholars in which her translations of Goliardi poems and songs are gem-like. For a shorter history and a fuller bibliography see chapter VI, in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, by Charles Homer Haskins, one of the ripest works of American scholarship.
Also, it is rewarding to trace down references to the wandering scholars in the many works on the Middle Ages by the present doyen on that subject, Professor G. G. Coulton, whose autobiography, being published as these lines are written, it is a pious duty of every student of Medievalism to read: certainly, every Masonic student, because no Mason can ever quite fülly understand the shape and color of the Fraternity when it first emerged in the early Middle Ages without a knowledge of such forces and influences as were at work in and around it as the Goliardi.
There was also in the Middle Ages another and different kind of society of wanderers. The old Latin vagus, wandering, appears in English speech as a root from which a constellation of words have had their rise, vagabond, vagary, vagrant, and Vw7mc among them; and other languages, also of Sanskrit-Latin origins, have the same words in their corresponding forms, and have had them for thousands of years, suggesting that always there is here and there a man who chooses to live on the road, not as a highway but as home and as a means of livelihood. The road was more of a temptation in the Middle Ages than now. Villages were isolated, towns were walled in; to the men in one community, men in another center only five miles
away were "foreigners," and were viewed with suspicion, sometimes with alarm, we with our papers, telephone, radio, and automobiles do not suffer from village claustrophobia, and therefore cannot picture to ourselves how often a Medieval man was seized by a craving, almost a craze, to get away, to take to the road, to see the world. In consequence there arose that strangely romantic Society of Beggars, or Vagantes, who move and appear and reappear in Medieval romances and legends for a thousand years.
It became in time an organized secret society, with officers, assemblies, and (usually three) degrees, along with modes of recognition and a language, or patois, of its own.
This last was called " cant"; sometimes, "thieves' Latin." It had female side orders (what large and permanent society ever has not!), and like the Goliardi belongs to that mileu in which early Freemasonry took its shape. The Vagantes were the heroes, and points of reference, for Gay's great "Beggars' Opera." Cervantes wrote his novel Rinconete y Costidilla about them (Spain was a homeland of the Vagantes as it was of the Gypsies because they went along with the Spanish Church's worship of poverty and theological virtue of almsgiving). A modern Spaniard, Ibanez, wrote La Barraca about them.
They have a large role in Victor-Hugo's Notre Dame. A clear and concise account of them is available, for short reference, in Famous Secret Societies, by John Herron Lepper; Sampson, Low, Marston & Co.; London. Almost every one of the many, and often many-volumed, histories of the social life of the Middle Ages has at least one chapter about them.
A lawyer student will find them much in evidence among Medieval statutes, so many of which were so wrathfully butso ineffectually aimed at the liquidation of "sturdy beggars." (Adolf Hitler was a "house vagante" in Vienna for some three years.)
Men, women, and children of the Middle Ages were so fond of music, dancing, games, and feasts that they took (depending on the district) as many as from 50 to 150 holidays every year for merry-making, for processions, for which they had a passion, and for social occasions which called for musicians. Out of this developed the craft, or mystery, or profession of trained musicians. But since in any one small town or village there was not enough work to support a troupe of them they also, like the Goliardi, were gentlemen and ladies of the road, who went here and there upon invitation.
They must have become organized as early as the Twelfth Century, and had gilds, officers, and rites, traditions, rules and an apprenticeship of their own; they even had oaths, constitutions, and non-operative members, the lastnamed being gentlemen who did not practice the calling for a livelihood but sought to be accepted because of the honor, or because they were patrons or students of the art. The oldest existing written charter is dated 1469.
For a detailed and charming history see The Worshipful Company of Musicians (2nd Edition); private circulation, London; 1905. (Worshipful was in almost as common and as familiar use throughout Medieval times as our own Mr. or Sir; it meant "respectable; accepted; recognized; entitled to respect," and in its early use by Freemasons had no significance peculiar to the Fraternity.)
Readers who belong to the senior brackets of age will
recall the learned, brilliant, and much-loved J. J. Jusserand, France's Ambassador to Washington during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, and his work on pilgrims and wanderers of the Middle Ages; it is no longer as fresh as it was, nor is it as sparkling as the books by Waddell and Haskins and Coulton, but for all that is the best all-round story of the people of the Medieval highway. (See also The Medieval Mind, by Henry Osborn Taylor; II Idol Macmillan; 1927. Medieval Europe, by Lynn Thorn dike; George G. Harrap & Co.; London; 1920. Medieval Italy, by H. B. Cotterill; also published by Harrap; 1915.)
WANDS.
Doctor Oliver, under this title in his Dictionary, refers to the three scepters which, in the Royal Arch system of England, are placed in a triangular form beneath the canopy in the East, and which, being surmounted respectively by a crown, an All-seeing eye, and a miter, refer to the regal, the prophetical, and the sacerdotal offices.. In his Landmarks he calls them scepters. But rod or wand is the better word, because, while the scepter is restricted to the insignia of Kings, the rod or wand was and still is used as an indiscriminate mark of authority for all offices.
WAR AND FREEMASONRY.
In the Middlo Ages a " war " was a personal or family quarrel, u ith small forces offieered by a few knights and eomposed of retainers and peasants. In the period of the Renaissanee, armies were a form of private business, like a factory, which would sign a contract to fight for the highest bidder, and according to agreed rules; collusion among private armies, as among modern managers of prize fighters, was common, and oftentimes the decision was agreed on beforehand— Machiavelli's appeal to Florence to stop this farce, in which not one man would be killed in "battle," and substitute for it an army of citizens, stirred Europe far more than his mephistophelian theory of government.
When the countries became nationalized, so did armies; they were composed of local levies of men, or cadres, or of impressed or conscripted troops, and a man could buy his way into or out of an officership —the Ironmongers Company in London was twice levied for money by each side in the English Civil War. As in China, common soldiers were looked down on as belonging to the lowest order, and sailors were treated with even more contempt. Back of the system was the idea that an army was a nation's champion; while the English champion was fighting the French champion, the English and French peoples went about their affairs as usual, willing to abide by the verdict of a remote contest. Our own Civil War was the first "modern war"; in it the army no longer was a champion but was the people itself, and the home front was as much a part of the struggle as the military front; carried to its inevitable outcome this became the present-day total war in which two or more whole peoples are conscripted into a single armed effort with themselves, their property, and their country at stake.
In articles on other pages of this supplement on RELIGION AND FREEMASONRY and on POLITICS AND FREEMASONRY it is shown that Freemasonry is among those arts and sciences which are inalterable by theological and political doctrines, and therefore it stands apart and unaffected by alterations in them. This is equally true as regards war; just as the old arts of farming, or the old sciences of physics and astronomy, or the old disciplines of mathematics, or philosophy, or history, or the plastic arts, cannot eommit themselves to war, or be altered or revolutionized by war, so a Masonie Lodge has nothing in its Landmarks or its purposes which can take part in armiesAs men, its members may tremble with apprehension or flame with patriotism or may seize arms; as llfasons they are, like Christianity or medicine or educate tion, non-belligerent; even if in any given war, as in the war between the Government of Spain and the Id Phalangist rebels, the future existence of the Fraterw city lies in the balance, still it has in itself no means to arm itself; and as it is not so organized as to take any place in an army neither is it organized to take any part in the diplomatic activities which precede a war, or write a peace, or act to prevent wars.
A Mason's one interest (as a Mason) is at the point where the history of Masonry intersects the history Of Near. In Medieval Freemasonry one large and inportant branch of Craftsmen specialized in military architectures in building castles, fortresses, and fortified city walls—castle building was so specialized that it almost comprised a separate species of Masonry. During the hundreds of wars in Britain and on the Continent during the long period of Operative MasonrY, there is no evidence that the Masonic fraternitiesS gilds, or lodges ever took part in them as such; in the midst of war the gilds went on with their work as best they could, as farmers, sailors, teachers, churches did. In 1732 the Grand Lodge of Ireland hit upon the expedient of granting Warrants for military Lodges (or regimental, or naval, or sea and field) under ambulatory or traveling Charters.
As one Grand Lodge after another adopted the custom these military bodies multiplied into the hundreds, and helped to carry Freemasonry about the world; but this was not a war measure, made to support one side as against another, but was for the sole purpose of according the privileges of the Craft to men away from home; the same Grand Lodge Chartered Lodges in two or three armies, as in America where there were military Lodges in both conflicting armies and under the same Grand Lodge! During that war, as they were to do so again in 1812 and in 1861-5, Masons from both sides oftentimes attended the same Lodge, and did so not out of "the emotions of the battle field" but because they knew that Lodges stand outside the militant struggle.
NOTE. In his article on page 1089 Bro. Robert I. Clegg discusses the action taken by Scottish Lodges in 1777, in offering bounties to men who would enlist for the war in Ameriea. The action taken by the Grand Lodge of Seotland the following year to condemn this un-Masonic practice bears out what was said in the above paragraphs. _ The majority of those Seottish Lodges at the time had patrons in tact is not in name; it is probable that they ware urged on by the patrons. The same thing had been attempted years besore when patrons made urse of a few Lodges as recruiting centers for immigrants willing to move to the Colonies. One act was as un-Masonic as the other.
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