Freemasonry is the Champion of Liberty
Lord Acton, who was one of the most learned men of all times, one of the greatest scholars of the last century, and who left behind him as his monument the great Cambridge Modern History, had as his life work the task of writing a History of Liberty. On this he toiled for years, with two large houses full of books, with all manner of original materials in several languages, until he had accumulated great heaps of data. But alas! he never arrived at the point where he felt that he knew enough about liberty to write its history! and he died with all his knowledge in him, his magnum opus unwritten! Such an experience reminds us what a subject we have before us in the present paper; how difficult it is to deal with; how little has as yet been really thought out about it; how scanty are men’s experiences of it; and consequently how modest must be our own attempts in the present connection.
On the surface it might appear to some that Masonry in itself has not much liberty to give its own children. The initiate finds himself forced to rehearse a ritual no single syllable of which he can change; he is in the hands of a group of men who govern him and his fellow members; the subordinate lodge, as its very name implies, must adjust itself to the will of Grand Lodge: and the whole field covered by the Fraternity is hedged about by a series of Landmarks which, like the laws of the Medes and the Persians, change not. Where the individual finds himself so circumscribed, and compelled to move in so narrow a channel, how, say many, can he be said to have liberty?
Those who ask such a question betray the misunderstanding under which so many labour as regards what is and what is not liberty. They have a vague notion as to what it is, and they dimly feel that in some way there isn’t much liberty to be had anywhere, either in institutions or in government, or in the way the world is made.
Liberty is not merely freedom from restraint. How many there are who think it to be so! A friend who has spent many years in working among immigrants told me that hordes of aliens come in from southeastern Europe, and used to come in from Russia, who have been told over and over that in America there are no laws, no governments, no penitentiaries and fines, and that here every man may do as he pleases with no other man to hinder. Finding themselves so completely disillusioned when they discover the real truth about this nation, they grow sullen and rebellious, consider themselves cheated, and fall an easy victim to the fallacies of anarchy. Such ideas of liberty are born of fancy, for there is no part of the human race anywhere that does have, or ever has had, any experience of such a state. On the contrary every one of us knows from his own experiences that liberty and restraint go together and are in no sense necessarily opposed one to the other. In a family there is all manner of restraint needed, not only for the children but for the parents as well, who are unable to do a hundred things because there are children to care for at home; but even so, father, mother, and the children may all enjoy to the utmost the fullest family liberty. And we know that it is the same with a man’s work. If he is running a farm he is compelled to remain at his post to care for his stock often when he would prefer to be elsewhere; that he must be up with the sun, and do a certain amount of ploughing, harrowing, planting, harvesting, and what not, even though his fancies would lead him to do something very different. He has restraints enough, nevertheless he enjoys on his farm absolute liberty of toil, for the two things go together. And so it is in every kind of labour, and in every other sphere in which men live; always there are the fences about one, and the sign set up, “Thus far shalt thou go but no farther,” but that does not destroy liberty, which is a very different thing than freedom from restraint.
Nor is liberty the same as a go-as-you-please individualism. A large and powerful group of men in the last century taught that all things that check the individual are wrong, and that the full enjoyment of life comes only when the individual can consider himself a separate entity cut off from other individuals whom he is not to hinder and who are not to hinder him. The state is to have no right to interfere with the lives of men in any way, shape or form. Herbert Spencer, who may be considered typical of this school of thought, resented it when the state interposed to regulate education; when it undertook to levy income taxes and to direct business developments; he was bitter even against the governmental building of highroads which he believed should be left to the citizens in each given community. It may be true that such a conception of individualism would accord well with liberty, and it might be desirable, but unfortunately the experience of the nations has shown it utterly impossible of operation; it is not in harmony with the way men are made. Human nature is against it. For each individual man is by his very nature a social being who can no more be cut off from the social organisation than a leaf can be safely cut from the branch of the parent tree. There are some things that we can do separately as private souls; there are other equally important things that we can do only as citizens of a community, as members of a social order. What would have become of us, to cite one example, if it had been left to individual enterprise to manage the late war? In many, many cases the individual, for his own joy and welfare, must be held to his place in the social organism and made to perform his functions there.
Closely akin to the philosophical doctrine of individualism preached by Spencer are the theories of the “laissez faire” school of economics which played so large a part in the history of the nineteenth century. The members of this school believed that the business relations of men are governed by certain “economic laws” which operate in the same way as, and are as unchangeable as, the so-called laws of nature. Men must be left alone, was their cry, and not tampered with; hands off, and business will run itself; the world will be fed, clothed, and housed as automatically as the sun rises and sets. The chief of these “economic laws” was believed to be unfettered competition: indeed, competition was set up as such an important god that when, during the Irish famine in 1825 it was proposed to organise relief in England and ship corn to the starving millions many “economists” fought the project on the ground that the situation would be cared for by the normal functionings of the law of supply and demand and that nobody had any right to divert ships from the normal channels of trade. The theories of the “laissez faire” school seem quaint and far off to one at this date, for their whole scheme of thought has gone by the board, and that for a hundred reasons, one of which is that there are in economic life no such “laws” as those that operate in nature, and that such laws as do operate in economics are of the same kind as those that we find in all forms of human association; they are full of the action of men’s wills, and desires, and deliberate planning. “To let things alone,” to let things drift, does not mean that things will be cared for by automatic natural laws, but that the most predatory individuals in the community will use such a state as an opportunity to rob their fellows right and left. In our own government we have learned that business, in all its forms, is something that must be regulated like all other human activities, and that any ideal of liberty which assumes itself to consist of an absence of regulation is a false ideal.
All these various false notions of liberty have in common one thought, that it is a desirable thing to leave each individual to himself, uncontrolled by others; to let him be an entity in a void. Such a thought is false and impossible. Man is by his very structure a social being, and therefore one that must live, for the sake of his own happiness as much as for the sake of the happiness of others, ringed about by all manner of governing forces and influence.
What then is Liberty?
In my own conception of it liberty means that each man of us is to enjoy unhindered the full exercise of the normal functions and powers of his nature. This is an entirely different conception than that implied in the no-restraint theory, because man’s nature cannot function normally in a void, or in a condition of pure individualism: the functions and powers of a man’s nature, when rightly understood, imply and demand a social life, a community of lives in which each individual finds his true happiness in his right relations to other human beings. It will be best to permit this conception to define itself through a series of examples and illustrations.
One of the most important powers of a man’s nature is his mind. If the man is to be happy, if his nature is to be healthy and un-mutilated, he must be permitted to live in a social order where he has absolute right to use that mind unhindered by anything or anybody. The mind is so made that any interference with its normal functioning brings distress to the individual and disorder to human society. Every attempt to dictate to men how they shall use their minds has proved to be disastrous, as history so abundantly proves. One may recall Prince Metternich and the Peace of Vienna in 1815 when the masters of Europe ordained what men should think, speak, and read. That regime did not bring the uniformity of thought and peace of life which the masters expected; it brought quite the contrary, a fermentation of embittered men and women which led finally to the outbursts of 1848. It is a peculiar agony to have one’s very brain in chains: men must rebel or at last surrender, to sink in the apathy and listlessness of the peasant and the serf.
In what does liberty of mind consist? In the right to use it normally, for the health and the good of all. It does not mean that an individual is free to make use of his mind without restraint or hindrance of any kind. The man who uses his intellect to perpetrate a fraud should be held in leash; if he exercises it in the manufacture and dissemination of lies it is time that he feel that he is not the only man who lives in the world. When a man is given the liberty of thought it is not in order that he may indulge in intellectual license or anarchy, for that is the absence of thought; he is set free in order that he may think according to those laws of thought that are inherent in the mind itself. Therefore freedom of thought does not lead to anarchy and confusion but to harmony, for all facts exist in the system of nature,and all truth is in harmony with itself. When we Masons contend for the right of the free intellect we are contending for the right and healthful use of the intellect, the normal use of it; not for mere caprice.
So also with the right to choose one’s own work, which is also essential to a state of liberty. During the last centuries of the Roman Empire the collegiate system (the collegia were a kind of craft union) had hardened to such rigidity that what a man’s father had done that also must he do; he was not even free to leave his own village without permission; he existed in a kind of industrial slavery.
The same thing recurred, or almost the same thing, at the end of the guild system in England: men had at last to break the system because, it was destroying the right of free work. In India, or in certain parts of it, the caste system `functions in the same manner to deprive the individual of the right to choose his own form of labour.
This right also exists in the very structure of man’s nature. Each of us has his own “bent,” and prefers his own “line.” One man loves manual toil; another would be a musician; a third finds himself made to be a scholar. So goes it with all. This urge within one’s nature toward a certain form of labour is as essential to manhood as the freedom of thought, and it is always as disastrous to human happiness when the freedom to work is denied as it is when men are deprived of freedom of mind. In any social order rightly conceived the liberty of every man to work as he chooses is essential.
But this does not mean that a man can exercise his desire unrestrained. It does not mean that an individual can do what he pleases as if he were alone in a void. It means that the right to work, like all other rights, is shaped by the structure of human nature, and by the necessities of society. If a given form of business proves destructive of social order, such for example as the business of war, or opium smuggling, or piracy, etc., then the man’s right ceases. What we all should strive to uphold is the normal exercise of such rights.
As much may be said of the right of free worship, or liberty of religion. Religion is, it seems, an integral part of nature, therefore it must have healthy development else it leads to ills and to unhappiness. Interference with religious liberty, the long and dark attempts to dictate to men what and how they shall worship, has always bred misery and degradation. A normal religiousness makes for the welfare of a man’s life, and he therefore has a right to the free and normal exercise of it.
The same may be said of all the other functions and powers of our nature. We have an inherent right to choose our friends; to marry whom we would; to have a voice in our own government; to live where and when we desire; etc., etc. In all the possible forms which liberty may take we find this same truth, that this liberty is for the sake of the healthful exercise of human nature, so that a man can be happy while he lives, and that any interference with the normal functionings of the same leads to unhappiness, to the mutilation of nature, and is therefore a thing to be opposed and destroyed. And all this does not lead to individualism, to atomism, to any form of license, or to anarchy as many conservative minds fear, because if the functions of man’s nature are rightly exercised, exercised according to human nature itself, freedom will not lead to conflict among men, but rather to unity and harmony. The very way in which a man is made causes him to be a part of nature, a part of society, and in constant relationship with God. Any liberty which divorces him from nature, or makes him an anti-social being, or causes him to violate the deep laws of his own spirit, is not real liberty at all, but its counterfeit.
Liberty, it follows from all that has been heretofore said, is therefore not a mere gift which the powers that be may confer on a man at their pleasure: it is called for by the very structure of man. It is something necessary, something demanded by the nature of things. Therefore it is, as our Declaration of Independence defined it, a natural right. It is a right that existed before governments came into being; nay, governments exist in order to make it possible, and to preserve it inviolate. For law, rightly understood, exists in order that liberty may be unharmed.
When We have reached this conception we can no longer believe that such a thing can be a mere matter of simple instinct to any individual which he will straightway begin rightly to exercise the moment he is set loose to do as he pleases. Liberty, just because it is so deep and many-sided a thing, and sends so many roots down into human nature and so many ramifications out into human society, is a thing that must be learned. The baby chick has an instinct which teaches it how to eat the moment it steps out of the shell; some have held the theory that man has a similar instinct for liberty which he will exercise if only priests, kings, and aristocrats will let him be. Such a notion is a fallacy. We each one have the right to be free; but to be indeed free, that means a right education for the purpose. Freedom as a right exists in every man: freedom as a fact exists only in those natures which have prepared themselves for it.
From one point of view the whole of Masonry exists in order to teach men how to make right use of their prerogatives of freedom. The candidate is made to feel that he is not a separate living atom living and dying unto himself, but that he is by nature a part of a great brotherhood of men and women; he is taught that until he can exercise the powers of maturity he must, like all good apprentices, be content to have others lead him; he made to understand that mature life is not his at a grasp but that he lives in darkness concerning it until he has gone the whole road of preparation; he is shown that the hoodwink cannot be removed until he is duly obligated to his fellows and taught his duties; he is made to understand that unless he is able to walk alone and exercise his rights normally a cable-tow of external authority is needed to hold him in place, and that such a cable-tow must remain about him until he is able to stand on his own feet; he is made to understand the ever present need of light, and that unless he is always seeking it, darkness will settle upon him, and darkness means unhappiness; and not until he is instructed how to be the absolute master of himself is he raised from the dead level of his slavery to the living perpendicular of a free man.
In its mysteries of initiation Freemasonry reveals itself to its adepts, under one of its aspects at least, as the preparation for the liberty of the mind, of the body, of the soul, of manhood and womanhood. Its part out in the great world among other powers and institutions also reveals it as the champion of liberty in all its forms and under all its veils. And it has ever contended for liberty because it has struggled to win for men life, more life, and life more abundantly. That is its mission. And because man needs liberty in order richly to live, it has striven to win liberty in all its forms. During the last hundred years Masonry has not been absent from one single struggle for civil, or political, or religious liberty.
When men have sought to throw off the yoke of unlawful or cruel rulers it has lent them its aid. When they have prayed and bled to be relieved of the yoke of spiritual and religious bondage it has given them of its strength and made their war its own. Until man has won for himself all those freedoms wherein his life consists it will ever be so, because Masonry exists in order that we all may live more happily, more completely, more abundantly.