WHY FREEMASONRY SURVIVES

Institutions do not survive through the ages by accident; they live only through the possession and operation of everlasting principles. When an organization runs back beyond historic records, and relies upon tradition for the story of its origin, its career during a known period either justifies or falsifies the tradition. An ancestry of virtue and good works is a liberal education. The power of the accumulated wisdom of the past is a resistless impelling force upon the present. The architects, the decorators, the draftsmen, the woodcarvers, the workers in precious metals and the Masons who were building the famous Temple of King Solomon came from every nation in the then-known world. Their union of mutual help, protection, society and improvement was the marvel of an age when all navies were pirates and all nations enemies.

Masonry, marching under the leadership of God and the banner that bears the motto, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," with the peasant and the prince, the mechanic and the merchant, the learned and the unlearned following in equal rank and common step, knows neither race nor nationality, neither caste nor condition, as it proudly and beneficially moves down the centuries.

Chauncey M. Depew (1834-1928)

Financier, U. S. Senator