New York Dispatch

REGULATIONS.
While it is generally admitted that a little learning is a dangerous thing, we do not imagine that the same can well be said of the law, and if it could, there could scarcely be much danger in that direction while our Grand Lodges preserve the same tendency that has characterized them for the past twenty years, seeing that of law and law-making there is apparently no end. Our statute books fairly groan beneath the accumulated enactments made to cure the evils brought on the craft by previous ones, or to air the wisdom of would-be Solons to whom letting well enough alone is an offense past all bearing. On the subject of dues alone, the various Grand Lodges have delivered themselves of sufficient legislation to set up a moderate nation in the matter of statutes, and yet after all there is far from being any satisfactory or uniform adjustment of the subject. Substantially, all the law-making is based on the idea that money being the root of all evil there must be some latent crime connected with the subject, to be guarded against if possible, and punished with greater or less severity according to the prevailing ideas in the respective jurisdictions; the penalties ranging from local exclusion to the highest known to the Masonic code, and yet we entertain grave doubts whether the Grand Lodges have any defensible right to legislate in this direction at all; or at any rate beyond such general regulations as may protect the individual brethren from wrong at the hands of a thoughtless majority. In essence, the payment of dues is simply a contract between a lodge and its members, both parties giving a consideration and receiving a benefit in return, and we fail to think of any more purely family arrangement than this, or any that might and with greater propriety ought to be left to the parties in interest for settlement.
The system is purely modern, and is an outgrowth of modern methods of doing business and maintaining lodges, and has no foundation whatever in the ethics of Masonry. Still we cannot now go back and begin anew what has become established as a necessity of our existence; but we can and should reduce our regulating machinery to the simplest possible form, leaving details, as we have just said to lodges and their members.
So again with personal jurisdiction over profanes. The law in this country is, that a person having applied to a lodge for initiation and been rejected, can never apply anywhere else without the consent of the rejecting lodge so long as that lodge remains in existence. Like all other questions this has two sides. The first is the fact that in the earlier days, there was no such thing in the books or in practice; a person desirous of being received into the fraternity applied to any lodge at his pleasure, and no lodge thought of such a thing as claiming special jurisdiction over him. In Europe the same rule continues to this day as was exemplified not long since in the case of a gentleman living in one of the Western States. He petitioned the lodge nearest his residence, and was rejected: subsequently he went to Scotland, and while there was made a Master Mason, and came home with the documents in his pocket. The matter soon reached the cognizance of the Grand Lodge on this side, and, a lengthy correspondence ensued, the upshot of which was that, the Grand Lodge of Scotland declared in terms: "We shall respect your jurisdiction over lodges in your State, and will not grant authority to any one to invade it, but we reserve the right to confer the degrees of Masonry, as we always have done, on any proper person who may have been accepted by one of our lodges."
Hence we see that our law is not, by any means a landmark, or in pursuance of any underlying principle of Masonry, but simply, like the payment of dues, an outgrowth of modern times and a need of our lodges for some safeguard against the ever increasing pressure from without; as a means of preventing dissensions between lodges and brethren by the admission of material in one which it would seem, or is claimed, ought to go to the other; and, finally, to prevent unworthy persons who cannot gain admission at home, where they are known, from going into another jurisdiction where they are comparative strangers, and imposing themselves on the craft.
It is clearly to our advantage on this continent in view of the great facilities for travel and the restless character of our people that we should preserve this law and enforce its observance among ourselves, but we need not be deceived with the idea that what is proper for us to do in view of the habits of our people, and the institutions of our country must therefore be of like application in every other country, and under other forms of government and habits of thought. More than this we should endeavor to learn, as many seem unwilling to do, that regulations are not necessarily landmarks nor even exemplifications of them; that each Grand Lodge may of right make such local laws as best suit the requirements of its own jurisdiction, and that only those need become of general acceptance, which are needful to the conservation of the general harmony, and that respect for the rights and conveniences of others we desire to have accorded to our own.
A proper understanding of this principle will do much to simplify our system of laws, much to make that system understood by the craftsmen, and very much toward reducing the volume of legislation with which the fraternity is favored by the various Grand Lodges.