Sunday September 10, 2023, Olive Branch Lodge will visit the grave of General John C. Black as part of its Founders Day Celebration. Our Brother served the Grand Lodge of Illinois as Grand Orator in 1894 and 1895. His Grand Oration delivered at the Grand Lodge of Illinois Annual Communication in Chicago October 3, 1895, is transcribed here.
ORATION.
By R.W. Bro. John C. Black, Grand Orator.
M. W. Grand Master and Brethren of the Grand Lodge:
I wish to extend to you, each and all, officers and members, my sincere thanks for the great honor that you have conferred on me by this repeated selection to address you. I feel that if I have won your favor in the past in what I have had to say to you it has been because I have tried, in what I have said, to speak the truths of Masonry. The truths of Masonry are universal. They are not committed to our charge alone; they are like law, they have their seat in the bosom of God. It has been the eminent fortune of Masons, as organized here, to bear through the ages a conspicuous part in the service and application of those truths. Every period must have its teachers as well as those who listen and learn, and thus the sparkling stream of knowledge of the truth rolls on through the generations as the old figure is of a river fed by perennial fountains, sparkling amidst the waste and desolate places of the world.
In what I shall say to you today there will be something of the historic and much of the speculative, and I feel that if anywhere in the world a man may speak of speculative events without essaying to be a prophet, may endeavor to forecast as it appears to him the future hoped for by seers and the lovers of their kind, if anywhere in the world, it is in the presence of the Grand Lodge of the State of Illinois. A man here may tell what he believes and feels and hopes will be the result of the wide spreading- universal truths of the order, for the Grand Lodge of Illinois in less than seventy-five years has grown from a handful until fifty thousand men are tiled at its doors, and a similar progress in the future before another century is past will bring in to the lines of our order ever}' man that is a freeman and eligible to membership.
Why then may not speculation enter the highest domain of thought and hope in the presence of the chosen representatives of this mighty association? Yet in what I shall have to say I do not want you to consider me Utopian. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress he tells how upon a certain point in a long and perilous journey, the pilgrim, weary, came to where the far-distant heights of Beulah rose on his view, a picture so ravishing and glorious that it burned into his soul. Back of him stretched the tempest-beaten and perilous way that he had trod, and before him were the gins and pit-falls and the shadows of death; but there in the distance and on the heights beamed the eternal light, to which his steps through all his career had been pressing, and when he saw that radiant sight, he tells us he forgot that all about him and behind him were the multitudinous sorrows and snares of his career. I do not expect that that which I shall speak of as possible to come, will come in a day, nor in the presence of this generation of men; multitudes shall be born and shall die before the happy hour comes when speculative Masonry pervades the whole world: but the hour will come, for it is God's truth, and that conquers all.
THE PASSING CENTURY.
And, perhaps, M.W. Grand Master, the hour of triumph may be nearer than the most sanguine anticipate. The century in whose closing years we stand is in my estimation the most remarkable that has left to us its story. Other centuries have been distinguished; some for the magnificence of their physical achievements, some like the Augustan, for golden speech and poetry and literature and the charmed pictures of art; but this century is and has been more than all a century of investigation, of progress, and of the advancement of the people. When it opened its portals to let the old world in, the old world stood arrayed in arms and every distant region rang with the opposing cries of men engaged in hostile combat. Blood was sprinkled upon every doorpost and women wept by every hearthstone; the mighty shock of legions of embattled men was felt throughout the continents. A few leaders, phantoms, as they seem to us now, arose in gloomy magnificence, their vestures rolled in the blood of multitudes, and claimed to be the rulers of the earth. Where are they now that the century has nearly sped its way? Their dark records are in the keeping- of the historian. Their fame is disgrace and humanity is stepping into the places that they occupied!
A CENTURY OF DISCOVERY.
At the beginning of this century the knowledge of the race was confined to a very little portion of the surface of the earth. Dis- coverers and adventurers had skirted the shores of continents, but the centers of these continents were unknown and the vast shores themselves veiled from all but a few adventurers. Today every land has yielded up its secrets and even the chart of mysterious Africa, so long unknown to the world, has been delineated and spread upon the ample lap of knowledge. We know what every climate will produce; we know what every region will do: we know what every race of mankind can accomplish. Universal interchange of commerce has made famines an impossibility and thus removed a motive and incentive to war. Today, except where nature has reared her icy barriers about the poles that shield their frozen regions from the track of the adventurer, we know all the world. Under the influence and by the activity of the press, we know all mankind; there are no intrigues of cabinets, there are no threatened rearrangements of nations on this globe that you might not have read this morning before you convened in this assembly. Upon its white multitudinous far waving wings the press brings to us and lays before us and before all mankind the daily storv of the career of the race.
THE ART OF DESTRUCTION.
At the beginning of this century men had learned the art of destruction only for the benefit of their rulers. To my mind the most tremendous leveler perhaps of all the natural agencies that has been committed to our knowledge and care is the discovery and the development of the use of gunpowder.
Mr. Grand Master, think back a few hundred years, if you will, to the period of time in which our ancestors lived, when a few men in secret and closely tiled lodges whispered in brothers' ears the story, and hope for freedom, before the discovery of gunpowder. Some ruffian, stronger than others of his kind, banded with a few that were like him, clothed himself in armor of steel from plume to spur, he strode his war horse similarly caparisoned, and with lance in rest and sword by his side rode forth to the destruction of the peaceful burghers and to the spoliation of the wares of the tradesman. All the world was his prey, and he was impervious to attack, and on some mountain's height he chose to rear his stone encircled castle, whither he could repair for safety to digest the spoils he had wrung from the hand of the laborer. It was impossible for the plain man to stand against these monstrous robbers, but finally came the discovery of the little fulminite that made the weakest equal to the strong; that put into the hands of helplessness itself an engine by which personally every man could be protected against the sword of the strongest, and from that day, inasmuch as personal strength has ceased to be the controlling factor in politics or war, so it has happened that individual robbery and petty despotism have fallen back and the massed ranks of humanity have advanced. This was an agency which by each man made the equal of every other man in a physical point, tended towards the destruction of the conditions of personal tyranny that existed in the feudal ages.
You and I have learned to know that in the great affairs of this world there are no little things; but when you turn the cartridge lovingly and fondle the gun that is to be used in your pleasure in the hunting field you are holding and contemplating one of the greatest instrumentalities of civilization. I have been recently called upon to look at and carefully examine the improvements in the use and the developments in the manufacture of gunpowder. I believe, gentlemen, that it is to be one of the great instrumentalities that will drive wars from the face of the globe. Long after its discovery and until within a very few years of the time in which we are now speaking, its chief uses were by the governments of the earth, but science and investigation have diffused a knowledge of its mighty power and have quickened invention; the instruments of war which have been fabricated are rendering war itself impossible. Within the generation of those whom I now address war was a glorious picture. "The ranks were rolled in vapor and the winds were laid with sound" when the armies of the earth stood against each other, and the flags were lifted into the heavens: shouting columns of men came face to face and could see into each other's eyes in earnest and dreadful conflict and with an individual interest in the result. But today, so perfect has become the method of destruction, that individual heroism is gone. Do I overstate the condition of affairs? Go to the arsenals of this country and see what preparations are being made. Do they depend upon the men? No, they depend upon the machine. The warrior of the future is to be encased and is to have placed at his disposition a machine that will kill between five and ten miles. Before he can see the face of his opponent, before he can engage in action and be warned by the fires of battle, he is to be not aroused by the heroic exploits of manhood, but is to sit still and turn a crank like a coffee-mill and cause desolation and death to men whom he never saw in the world before and for whom he can entertain no personal hostility! What is going to be the result on armies and on peoples of such complete armaments? Consider the balloon that flies through the air, bearing the little bomb which when dropped into the camp of hostile soldiers will spread desolation and death through wide ranks of men or overthrow the walls of cities. War is becoming reduced to the science of distant, impersonal, cowardly murder, and believe me, no people who are being educated, no people who are learned in the tenets of Masonry, can be brought to fight against their kind or long to continue in that combat under such circumstances. Take the bravest boy in any one of your communities who has drawn his blood from a line of warlike ancestors and whose passions are fired with the old time story or pictures of war and let him understand that long before he can see his adversary he is to be shot at from an ambuscade where it is impossible for him to make response, and even his ambition for war will die, and when the reasons for war perish, wars will perish with them.
UNIVERSAL SPEECH.
At the beginning of this century the tongue which we speak was spoken by perhaps twenty-five millions of men. Today, one-third almost of the whole peoples of the globe are able to converse with us fairly in our native tongue. One hundred years has diffused homogeneity of speech, the instrument by which men communicate with each other, and thus rendered it impossible long to preserve the ancient hostilities and the ancient barriers that arose simply from difficult communication between man and man.
FREEDOM.
At the beginning of this century slavery was the rule. Today there is no spot on the globe where it is recognized as right and just, unless it may be in the undiscovered crall of some African prince.
FREE INTERCOURSE.
At the beginning of this century nations communicated with each other only in the most formal manner. Travel was exceedingly limited. Difficulties of speech and difficulty of inter-communication kept nations of the same standard of humanity antagonistic to each other because of their assumed different interest, and their different lineage and traditions. You and I in this city, where this Grand Lodge is being held, have seen all that changed; and not here alone, but through great masses and sections of the world. Here we have seen the merchants of all lands, the manufacturers of all lands, the tradesmen of all shores, meet in friendly competition; and more and greater than all, here in this city we have seen most potent cause of the wars of the world, —I must speak it with truth, if it is with sorrow, —the differing creeds of humanity suspend their animosities; we have seen the men that reared their altars to Buddha, the men that open their temples to the worship of Confucius, the priests of all temples, the ministers of all altars, the religious representatives of all the different races of humanity, gathered in peaceful and harmonious counsel to proclaim that in spite of the differences of creeds, in spite of the differences of forms, in spite of differing races (that which Masons have proclaimed through all the years of their organization) that there was one God who was the Father of mankind. And when the warriors have become butchers and the priests of all nations have become friends, believe me that the end of war is approaching.
SELF-GOVERNMENT.
At the beginning of this century, two or three little governments enabled their citizens to express their wishes: today, after the revolution of one hundred years, we find that the doctrine of self-government has penetrated every people except the most distant peoples in the world. There are still peoples who are not advanced as high as that but they have become exceptions, and this century is drawing towards its close with the doctrine of self-government of the people rapidly finding lodgment in the breast of all intelligent mankind, and perhaps, more or less modified, in all their forms of government.
Thus, it is that everything in the course of this marvelous century has tended towards the upbuilding of the idea of the brotherhood of man. Invention, discovery, intelligence, and educational interests are all united to re-affirm the Masonic doctrine of the equality of mankind.
THE GREAT SOURCES OF WAR
In other times were ambition and hunger and savagery. While savagery endures in a more or less modified extent, it is only a blot upon the surface of the rising sun of civilization. Hunger, as I said before, becomes an impossibility. You and I have seen how to the very furthermost confines of the world, when famine touched any land, the brethren of the Craft, and the common people extended supplies and means to distant regions and relieved the distress. The century has rendered famine, which was one great incentive of war, an impossibility. The fact is, Mr. Grand Master, the man that will study carefully' the history of mankind, of peoples in the past, will discover that a reason for many of the great wars of the olden time was the physical necessities of those that became the invaders. Famine drove great nations from their homes and took them down into those fields where civilization had prepared plenty. Now, thank God, civilization with its modern appliances takes that plenty and freely gives it to those who starve, thus rendering it unnecessary that there should be encroaching wars; and if there had been an American railway stretching from Rome to the far plains of Asia or the north, the Huns and Visigoths would never with their bloody record have disgraced the pages of history.
Ambition and the ignorance of the world is another cause. How could an ambitious man have led his subjects to slaughter if they had not been ignorant? Why should any free, intelligent, and enlightened man have left his home, his friends, and people, the dear face of wife and child to die for another's fame? Why should man have turned from scenes of comfort to fields of battle under the banner of any ambitious chief? The proportion of such ignorant men grows small, and the wars themselves will disappear with them.
For twenty-five years—and I stated, Most Worshipful Grand Master, in the opening of my address, that the day that I might forecast might be nearer than the most sanguine of us anticipated, —for twenty-five years, with the single exception of a short campaign among the Chinese and Japanese, there has not been a war on the face of the globe. There have been broils; there have been little troubles: the civic arm of government has been able to suppress all of them, and the necessity for them is becoming less. But with the single exception of the Chinese and Japanese war, there has not been in the quarter of the century that which would be dignified as war. Why should not these twenty-five years be prolonged to a hundred years? Who is going to break the peace? Upon what pretext is it going to be done? And while none have disarmed, I have shown that nations are armed in such fashion that wars will become impossible among them. What cause is there that nations may not settle by peaceful means? What is there that will justify a nation in bearing the sword and calling forth armies? The times are growing greater and better and stronger. Other wars may come, but I do not now perceive that they must come.
THE COMING PEACE.
Surely a time advances when all nations shall assemble in a "parliament of men, a federation of the world;"' the time and the place no man knoweth, but I can imagine the scene and its surroundings; perchance on some vast plain, or amongst uplifting mountains, or by the everlasting sea. It will not be in cathedral aisles or minster columns, or in the shadowy depths of any structure reared by this old world from the spoils of oppressed labor; but rather in some new
White City, all of whose structure are trophies of genius, wealth, and labor, devoted to the peaceful arts and useful industries. And into the far reaching avenues will come the representatives of many nations and many flags, and they will be emblazoned with many battle names and wreathed with many laurels. The men to whom I speak know what it is to worship a flag. [Applause.] To your fancy comes the vivid beauty of the flag of the free, which first was raised against the mistress of the ocean world.
“For thee they fought, for thee they fell,
And their oath on thee was laid,
To thee the clarion raised its swell.
And the dying warrior prayed.”
But in this new time even that flag of flags, blazoned with many battle names and wreathed with many laurels, may be folded up forever! The people will come with these flags that are great to this new temple from the feet of many thrones, from the memorial halls of many states. All that valor, bravery, and advancement stand for they will stand for—the victories of ten thousand fields give them that luster that will memorialize centuries of struggles under these flags. All history will be in their folds, and the world cannot forget them; for if they represent its old sorrows, so also they represent its struggles and progress; but in that time the world cannot forget that though these flags have waved over great battlefields, yet they have witnessed violated homes, peoples in tears and cities in ruins, oceans of blood and rivers of tears, and so at last instead of the most glorious emblems associated with the noblest of wars, the coming congress of the world will ask for a new symbol and spread abroad a new flag. I can fancy that when it shall come the vision of the old seer will be fulfilled, and "the Lord shall bend the heaven and come down," and the earth return to labor and peace and pour out the full beneficence of nature; and when that new flag of humanity shall have been lifted up, the vast congress, dissolving, shall return across the seas and throughout all lands, bearing the white and starry symbol to all nations and among all men, and struggle will become brotherly and noble contention.
Brethren, how much of pain will cease by this new civilization! How much of misery will disappear! How learning and liberty and law will prevail, and M.W. Grand Master, in that time among the strong hands that shall uplift the new flag many will be raised by Masons, even if the order itself, having outlived its usefulness and interest, shall have merged into the universal lodge. The tenets and the obligations of our beloved order require of every man a reverence for God and love of justice which will be the symbolism of that new design.
Brethren, am I optimistic? Is this thing possible? Do all men dwell in harmony in the lodges? Why should not all men, knowing each other, loving each other, speaking a common speech, dwell in a mighty lodge whose pillars are set upon the borders of the world?
Is this but a dream! Better to have dreamed it than never to have felt its thrill! Better to have believed in fancies that render such a future possible than to have lived and died in a dull despair that never anticipates the end of strife! Better the fancies of the Masonic brotherhood than the stagnation of a rayless, hopeless future!
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