Древниот и прифатен Шкотски ритуал на Масонеријата
3’ - МАСТЕР
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Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of
falsehood and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and
deceitful through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they
are so as a means of attaining popularity and office, and because of the greed
for a wealth. Experience will probably prove that these odious an detestable
vices will grow most rankly and spread most rapidly in a Republic. When office
and wealth become the gods of people, and the most unworthy most aspire to the
former, and fraud becomes the highway to the latter, the land will reek with
falsehood and sweat lies and chicane. When the offices are open to all, merit
and stern integrity and the dignity of unsullied honor will attain them only
rarely and by accident. To be able to serve the country well, will cease to be
a reason why the great and wise and learned should be selected to render
service. Other qualifications, less honorable, will be more available. To adapt
one`s opinion to the popular humor; to defend, apologize for, and justify the
popular follies; to advocate the expedient and the plausible; to caress,
cajole, and flatter the elector; to beg like a spaniel for his vote, even if he
be a negro…; to profess friendship for a competitor and stab him by innuendo;
to set on a foot that which at third hand shall become a lie, … the result
being a State ruled and ruined by ignorant and shallow mediocrity, pert
self-conceit, the greenness of unripe intellect, vain of school-boy`s
smattering of knowledge.
The faithless and the false in public and in political life
will be faithless and false in private. The jockey in politics, like a jockey
on the race-course, is rotten from skin to core. Everywhere he will see first
to his own interests, and whoso leans on him will be pierced with a broken
reed. His ambition is ignoble, like himself;…
At length, office and honor are divorced. The place that the
small an shallow, the knave or the trickster, is deemed competent and fit to
fill, ceases to be worthy the ambition of the great and capable; or if not,
these shrink from a contest, the weapons to be used wherein are unfit for a
gentleman to handle. Then the habits of unprincipled advocates in law courts
are naturalized in Senates, and pettifoggers wrangle there, when the fate of
the nation and the lives of a million are at stake. States are even begotten
with villainy and brought forth by fraud, and rascalities are justified by
legislators claiming to be honorable. Then contested elections are decided by
perjured votes or party considerations; and all the practices of the worst time
of corruption are revived and exaggerated in Republics.
It is strange that reverence for truth, that manliness and
genuine loyalty, and scorn of littleness and unfair advantage, and genuine
faith end godliness and large-heartedness should diminish, among statesmen and
people, as civilization advances, and freedom becomes more general, and
universal suffrage implies universal worth and fitness! In the age of
Elisabeth, without universal suffrage, or Societies for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge, or popular lecturers, or Lycaea, the statesman, the merchant, the
burgher, the sailor, were all alike heroic, fearing God only, and man not at
all. Let but a hundred or two years elapse, in a Monarchy or Republic of the
same race, nothing is less heroic than the merchant, the shrewd speculator, the
office-seeker, fearing man only, and God not at all. Reverence for greatness
dies out, and is succeeded by base envy of greatness. Every man is in the way
of many, either on the path of popularity or wealth. There is general feeling
of satisfaction when a great statesman is displaced, or a general, who has been
for his brief hour the popular idol, is unfortunate and sinks from high estate.
It becomes a misfortune, if not a crime, to be above the popular level.
We should naturally suppose that the nation in distress
would take counsel with the wisest of its sons. But, on the contrary, great men
seem never so scarce as when they are most needed, and small men never so bold
to insist on infesting place, as when mediocrity and incapable pretence and
sophomoric greenness, and showy and sprightly incompetency are most dangerous.
When France
was in the extremity of revolutionary agony, she was governed by an assembly of
provincial pettifoggers, and Robespierre, Marat, … ruled in place of Mirabeau… England was
governed by the Rump Parliament, after she had beheaded her king.. Cromwell
extinguished one body, Napoleon the other.
Fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deceit in national affairs
are the signs of decadence in States, and precede convulsions and paralysis. To
bully the weak and crouch to the strong, is the policy of the nations governed
by a small mediocrity. The tricks of the canvass for office are re-enacted in
the Senates. The Executive becomes the dispenser of patronage, chiefly to the
most unworthy; and men are bribed, with offices instead of money, to the greater
ruin of the Commonwealth. The divine in human nature disappears, and interest,
greed, and selfishness take place. That is a sad and true allegory which
represents the companions of Ulysses changed by the enchantments of Circe into
swine.
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