Transcript

{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

I have been asked a very good question: since the generation after a war, or even two generations after a great conflagration are left stranded outside the wind and the tide of great events, can they only be brought into the ken, into the fold by a common catastrophe, by the next spring tide, in other words? So that would make World War III inevitable. Now the rumbling, grumbling, and the -- underneath this country, the real, deep dissatisfaction that is felt today about the state of education would point to the fact that it is felt that the way out could be brought about by a million of small explosions, instead of by one big explosion. This is always before mankind. Look at the explosion motor. The greatness of its invention is that you do not have to blow up all the oil fields at once, but you can use every one, you see, car to explode a little. And so you can turn the -- nature's catastrophes into human endeavors.

This is -- seems to be the role of man on this globe. If you think of him as a global appointee, obviously it is not just spoils democracy for him, but he is really appointed to divide, to minimize. We are not there to make things bigger, sond- -- to make things smaller than they appear in nature. Now this turn of heart, that you have thought that you must create bigger and better elephants may now result in the cosmic conversion for the American, that he discovers that he has complied too much with nature's own bent. The Grand Canyon is of nature, but your subdivisions of cosmic space into small housing projects, and swimming pools, and -- cars is obviously our mission. We have to subdivide the universe.

And as soon as this is understood, there would be no reason why there should not be, you see, preventive medicine found against war. As soon as this is understood -- all faiths of men -- over the last 7,000 years has been to abolish some natural law. Now the natural law of catastrophe is bigger and better bombs, and bigger and better elephants. And the law of na- -- of man seems to be -- to be -- to -- for example, to create smaller and smaller groups, like the family, that's a heavenly invention. We call "heaven" in all human affairs the small, still voice, the -- noiseless ways of man, the even tenor of one's life. A Quaker house in -- on -- a one-story house obviously is nearer to the kingdom of Heaven than the Empire State Building.

Once you make this decision, you don't have to -- to fear these -- catastrophes, because man then doesn't try to imitate the colossus of nature, because he's warned by the previous catastrophes. And to me "catastrophe" and "bigness" is identical. And "death" and "bigness" is identical. Our corporations, they die all from arteriosclerosis.

I have a friend, when he wants to get a leave of absence--he's a chemist in a corporation--five stamps and five signatures have to be appended before he can go on a leave for -- of a week outside his ordinary time schedule. Now that's ridiculous. But that must happen if you have pentagons.

You know the story of the Pentagon and the colonel, when he suddenly was found in -- front of the restroom sitting on a chair. And he -- they said, "Why do you sit here?"

He said, "Well, this seems to me the only place in the whole building where the people know what they do."

Does this answer your question? It's a very haphazard question, because it depends on you as well as on me whether there should be a Third World War. Anybody who evinces a fighting interest in making things smaller obviously is on the way of peace. And anyone -- I just read a -- a -- a story in the paper two days ago, where a man said he had -- he had dated 156 blondes in one year to find out whether they -- why gentlemen prefer blondes. And -- but he had dated experimentally on the other side 156 brunettes, so that he could be, you see, fair -- {equity}, now.

The result is, of course, that he has reinstated the war of the sexes, which is the bloodiest and most desperate war, much worse than any -- than any world war between men. I mean, you just have to look at the Duncan case to know that the war between the sexes is much more violent than anything else. That's why the Bible felt satisfied after she had described -- they had described the war between Adam and Eve, to say nothing more about the rest of history. That's all included.

Now if you have to have 156 brunettes, and 156 blondes, you go with nature. Nature is not selective. This whole term of "natural selection," gentlemen, is a one great blind. That's just what nature cannot do, select. That's left to us. We breed cattle of the first rate, because we select the right breeds. The animals don't. Na- -- no horses came ever up to size of a modern stallion -- a modern Arabian horse without the interference of man, who selects. Now selection is not doing -- is not going on in this world without caring for the small distinctions, and the small differences. And if you do not know that it makes all the difference whether you marry one girl or the other, you make for war. Because anything that is nonselective reduces man to a number and to a superfluous liability on the cosmos. Then we have just to be fed and we do not contribute our share to the order of the universe, which is selection and nothing but selection. That's all we contribute to nature. Nature is there. We have to breathe. But you can even select when to breathe.

People always ask me about freedom. Well, our freedom is certainly not unlimited. We have to breathe. But there have been people, as the -- men in the fiery furnace, who have preferred even to give up breathing. And they have glorious -- come out gloriously -- out of it. We can always at least change the when: when to do something necessary. Think of Gandhi's hunger strike. You have to eat. And he might have died in the strike. But he didn't eat for 21 days. And the Indian re- -- commonwealth came into being, just because he didn't eat.

This is what man can do. He can select among the necessary actions what to do and when to do it. And that's all we can do. But you must learn that selection is man's part.

Now I return right away to my own problem here today: this is answering this lady's question. What's your name, please?

(Webster.)

Wie?

(Webster. Webster.)

You write it down. I can't hear. You write it down for me.

Because -- the Americans were forced to select a worldwide space as the field of their actions un- -- interdenominational, political cosmos, or chaos, the whole land west of the Alleghenies came under their sway right from the beginning. And it is my whole problem, with which I have asked you to occupy your -- yourself in this paper of yours, that for the Americans in a most dangerous and a most subtle way, space has been the one selective element, as for no other nation, to be cultivated, and to be believed in. And what I have to try to do as an outsider who has come to this country and fallen in love with this -- it -- it, is to draw your attention to the fact that the love of infinite space is still selective, that it is still the selection of one's love, as compared to other possible loves.

When you come to Paris in August, you'll find a sign on the -- on the -- on the cobbler's shop, "A la campagne." And it's just closed, you see. And -- because the village existence or -- at least { } garden existence is for the French the real existence, the right existence, to be hedged in and enclosed so that nobody else can butt in. The -- this individualism is the true, French feature.

Now it doesn't exist in this country. We speak of "rugged individualism." I've never seen a rugged individualist in this country. They are all gregarious. I mean, the rugged individuals all mix. And -- and they melt, and -- and they

shout, and they whistle, and they sing. And whatever they do, they do together. That's just one of these stock phrases, as stupid as "the common denominator." It has no validity in practice. For any political campaign, you cannot use the common denominator, for example, because you have to talk the people up, into some higher aspirations, if you want to get their votes. For example. And so it is the same of course with the gregariousness of the American. He can only conquer space if he has a life line back to Uncle Sam in Washington. All this -- taking up of land, and all this seeing no neighbor physically for a square mile around yourse- -- your own farm, is all very well as long as you have a militia at back of you that will drive out -- the Indians; you didn't do it yourself. And the land -- that you didn't get title of the land yourself. But space has been the common enterprise of the Americans. I have a whole chapter on this common enterprise of the Americans in a book of mine called Out of Revolution. Of course, since it is a good book, it is not in this library.

Now what I'm trying to do today is to show you that as the pyramid on the dollar note has--and this is the clue to which I would want to lead you up at the end of the whole course--to our own situation as of today, and has far outrun all imagination of the 19th century--you will not believe this, but the pyramid is prophetic, for the destiny of man ahead of the Second World War, although it was put on this -- greenbacks in the '80s of the 18th century.

So you must understand that Free Masonry in this country has anticipated the railroads, that just as miraculous as it is that we should use pyramid, and the eye of Horus, and the sun on the dollar note long before we could read hieroglyphs, any Egyptian hieroglyphs, and long before there was any conquest of space in fact, so the Free Masonry has served the purpose of creating a translocal interspacious bond, outrunning the inventors. Things are only invented always after they have been in the spirit of men. The spirit precedes the flesh. That's why flesh -- the flesh alone cannot inherit anything, you see, because the -- the -- first, everything is in the spirit, and later it gets into the body. We incarnate. And the part of the Christian belief that every layman who looks at the history of science, or the history of technology should begin to understand is that the central dogma of Christianity is not a dogma of anybody, but simply true. It can be proven that we all incarnate, that the word comes first, and the enthusiasm comes second, and the embodiment comes third. And it's not the other way around.

Nobody has ever been more stupid than the man from Missouri who has said, you see, "I have to be shown." That's just stupid. And certainly Grant -- General Grant, who came from Missouri when he entered as commander-inchief the -- the Civil War, didn't think so. But it was first -- the victory was in his mind, and spirit, and in his heart, before he won it outside of -- between Rich-

mond and St. Petersburg. And how could you ever go to war if it wasn't first in your spirit, and later -- outside visible in the local victories?

But this is the one thing that people in this country know from their own story, and deny to believe. It's very strange that one can know a thing and not believe it. All the facts of the history of the humanity prove and demonstrate that things are first in the spirit and later come into the flesh. The whole story of the Christian Church, you see, 300 years persecuted, and then victorious, and then suddenly visible. You all know these facts, but you don't believe them. You really believe that when a -- when a speculator -- builds a ghost town -- a boom town, that this is the way of building a town. Well, the result is a ghost town. A tremendous waste of energy. And this country is strewn with ghost towns that have never come into existence in the first place, because they're so wasteful. Cities that last are those like the Pilgrim fathers, who came in the spirit, you see, and then built their houses, because they had to. They had to embody the spirit. And that's why the New England townships are multiplied 77 times in these United States, because they were children of the spirit. But Cobalt, and -- and Uranium--these are also cities, as you know--and Telluricum, which I have seen in Colorado -- just mushroom, foam, nothing.

So the Free Masons are the railroads of America in the first 50 years of its existence--to put it, I mean, bluntly. And provokingly. Because they allowed professional men to understand and to see each other as Americans without any further ado attached to religious connotations.

This fantastically spiritual story went in -- on unbrokenly and unchallenged to the year 1828, when there arose a violent anti-Misonic -- -Masonic movement. Because if the leading classes, the professional groups, had continued their unbr- -- -challenged and unbroken march, and I showed you, that the numbers even today are very considerable--4 million Masons in this country, which makes -- brings it up to 20 million as a -- as family groups--then of course, the churches would have been threatened in their existence, because all the educated group then would have had no need for the churches. They would have become those second-rate institutions which they are today.

That is, they would not be necessary, indispensable for the moral existence of the individual, of its members. And I am s- -- think you will agree that today the churches are--I'm a member myself of one, and I think a good member, a faithful member, and an energetic member--but I must say that it doesn't threaten my existence if I should be cut off from its functioning, because it is a -- such a nice affair. That is, not a perilous affair. And the church of course is nothing real as long as it doesn't -- endanger your existence, you see. It's nothing pleasant to be a member of the church. And because it is so pleasant now to be a

member of the church, I suspect that we haven't much Church.

Now the re- -- the reaction of the church people against the Free Masons brings out the fact that the churches still were very li- -- lively and vital in 1828, but they couldn't have made a real -- taken a real stand if they hadn't been supported by the rabble. That is, by those people who by their being nobodies--neither church nor professional people--probably had felt that they were excluded from some social privilege. So that we get -- I gue- -- I guess -- I think the -- as far as I can make out the data--it's very hard to assure them--the anti-Masonic party was a combination of elements of the ecclesiastical tradition, of elements of another {brand} who felt that the Masons put something over on them by their solidarity, by -- and especially by their secrecy. The ominous character of the lodge, which was present in those times, was that they were after all unknown to the outer world, and that the public could demand there should be no secrets.

And we get here the first step to this very specific American development, between secret and public. As you know, today -- much made out of private thought, and private religion, and privacy in the sense { } {"God"} always meant just an individual. Now I -- I think that's just hocus-pocus. There are not 175 private religions. And I can assure you from what I see of my friends--and my students, specially--and my colleagues, and my neighbors, that there certainly are not 175 different brains. Not even 175, let alone 175 millions. My neighbors are satisfied with two or three standard ideas which they receive every day over the broad- -- radio, or from the telephone by their neighbors' gossip, or whatever it is. Certainly our food, mental food is ex- -- -traordinary, standardized, and there would be no need for privacy. If you take a statistics about the thought that I and you have had at this moment, they could be reduced, I mean, to an infinitely small number of thoughts.

But the fight against the Masons has changed the meaning of the word "public" in a decisive manner. There is a book on our bookshelves, written by a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 30 years ago, which runs, The Public and Its Government. And I -- as far as I can make out, it was the fight against the secrecy of the lodge, which brought about this strange and unique identification of people and public. You fe- -- will feel -- perhaps that the word "public and its government" is all right. I shudder, coming from Europe, that the public can be confused with the people. The public to me are people who pay a ticket to see a show, you see. You see a showman or a stump speaker, or a -- and that's a public. The difference between a public and a people is that the -- the members of a public had nothing to do with each other, whatsoever. Everyone has his -- has his -- has his connection with the spectacle he sees. But he sits on a seat and says, "I've paid for my ticket, and what you left and right do -- think,

you see, applaud. -- That's not your b- -- my -- my business, and it's your business to think anything of me."

A public is an organized quantity. And the people are the human race from beginning to end. It's the same difference as between humanity and the humankind. The humankind means the children of Adam to the last day. Humanity means all the people as -- as of now.

And it's very important for you to see that the -- the new cosmic era of the Free Masonry, with its rainbow, and its sunshine, and its architect of the spacious universe, and its -- anticipation of the vast unity of a United States under the leader- -- in one mi- -- mentality of the Free Mason lodges all over the country, was reacted to by saying, "No secrets." But the reaction was bought at a price, because the reaction is now that the -- most Americans believe that it is enough to form a public, and it is not necessary to form a people. The difference between a public obviously be -- and a people is quite important, you see: the word "public" belonging on the side of humanity, and the word "peoples" belonging on the side of the humankind.

Now most misunderstandings in all our discussions about human rights today, for example, I think come from the fact that most speakers wouldn't dare to distinguish between "public" and "people." And the notion that everything can be told to everybody at once has made the word "public" more popular than the word "people." No secrets, no privacy can be respected in the public eye. And you just have to think of the press and its publicity to show you that the word "public" has -- any number of -- of intonations, and suggestions, and implications, you see, which you take for granted, but which you wouldn't if you would settle for the word "people," you see, because obviously people cannot live without intimacy, without secrets, you see, without slowness. And whereas in pub- -- the public has to be informed as fast -- quickest as possible, with the people, I think it wouldn't be -- necessary for a child to be exposed to television. It wouldn't be necessary to have the child already order its own menu at the ripe age of three.

But if everything is public, then there is no time. I -- I think we talked about this here, that the child prodigy still is the curse of America, and that you -- really think that it is better to know something a little earlier than later, which of course is absolutely idiotic. For people it is necessary to know the right things at the right time. But for the public, which is curious, and which is just a wild animal to be fed raw meat--as in a circus, the lions and the tigers--these people of course want -- are voracious. They want to eat as fast as possible. Well, the curse of man is on the child prodigy. Any one of you who is a parent owes his child this respect, that he does not accelerate its process of growth. And he will -- the

parents will go to hell who do not know that people have their own growing time, and do not live in a hot house. But the public does. The public is there to be stimulated, to be attracted by curiosity. And you get, of course, as a -- last consequence that the public has to be entertained by sensation.

The word "public" means that--and I can show you this, I think, quite clearly--the word "public" means that since every individual has to be attracted on its -- his seat--because the public is a quantity of people--thousand people here, hundred people, sitting every one connecting with me, but not connected, you see, among yourselves in any other way except by my, of course, invincible magnetism -- whenever this is the place, sensation takes the place of common sense. The people have common sense. The public cannot have public sense, because we appeal to the public a- -- qua Number 1, 2, 3, 4. Now, all you and I have is our own sense, duality, you see, our sense of pr- -- being pricked, and prickled, and -- and tickled to death. And that's what we are, by our modern instruments of sensationalism: we are tickled to death. And so we are all dead. The human mind, when it lives by stimulation, is dead -- just dead, sterile. And that's why it is so boring to meet most people, because they have been tickled to death.

I mean this, gentlemen. You must only, unembarrassed, which nobody seems ever to do, look at the word "sensation" as a very serious word, and a very connoisseur word -- it's a -- excellent expression for the situation in which you find yourself in a opera house, or in a concert hall, or in a lecture hall. The lights go out; you look at the speaker; and everyone looks directly, you see, and therefore, all is left is your own private sensation. Whereas if people meet, if whole families gather at a wedding table--or even in church, the members of a congregation in th- -- at least in the old times--there is an appeal made to the body of Christ to the people incarnate, to this group and its highest aspirations, which you never can do in a theater, because we are in a theater, because we have paid five dollars for a ticket, you see. But you are at a wedding because you are the brother of the bride. That's a little different.

So you are forming a people. But in a -- wherever you are 500 people or hundred people, or 10,000, or now with these television sets, I mean, 50 million people, you -- every one of you has paid for this, and everybody wants to get a sensation. So we say, gentlemen, sensation is the form of the spirit which must appeal to the naked body of the individual, to somebody.

Common sense makes an appeal to the membership of a group. And I think I have only completed my -- my didactics about "common" if you take into account that the sensations -- with headlines, television, and circus, whatever you take--are just not -- nothing that we have in common. That's really the

lowest denominator, you see, of the individual's irritability. Just as we irritate in the laboratory a leg of a frog, and galvanize it, you see, and even though the frog is dead, the leg is still struggling, so your sensations, your member- -- limbs and legs are -- are tickled to death by these burlesque shows, stripteasers, and whatnot. And you feel it, and you are ruined, because you are broken into your physical, and your spiritual existence as though they were two.

You fall in love when the time has come. And if there hasn't been this cons- -- blessing of the constellation between your sweetheart and you, if the hour hasn't been the right one of your maturing, the whole sexual appeal is absolutely only damaging. But in a strip-teaser, and in a burlesque show, it is the nakedness of the -- of the offering that betrays you, and pulls you out of you -- the stream of your own biography, the stream of history, the tide and ebb in -- which flows through your veins, and you are left stranded, just with your physical member -- body allured to and ruined. And as long as people do not see that incarnation is the only basis for falling in love and getting married, when you think that marriage is just the summing up of sexual experiences, or what all the nonsense is today, you'll never understand man as being a wavelength in history over 70 -- 80 years, trying to do at every one moment that which is due to the spirit of the moment. And of course, then we take our whole body, and invest it into this moment; and then you get married, or then you get engaged. And woe to you if you marry -- on any other basis. If it isn't the time that it was necessary for you to get married, don't get married. Don't call it a marriage. It's something quite different.

Since this is today completely confused, this judge -- justice of the Supreme Court, who for- -- fortunately no longer judges us anymore -- has been able to -- even to carry into the law of this country, into the judiciary branch this fantastic idea of the public having a government. Now I tell you frankly, the public can have no government. You cannot buy justice, as you can buy a ticket in the theater. If you don't understand this, you see, then I can't help you. But it has -- somebody has to tell you this. And I have looked for all the political sciences of the -- this country, and nobody has rebelled against this book title by Justice Felix Frankfurter, The Public and His Government. It's a scandalous title. It's an end of democracy, because democracy believes in people, and it doesn't believe in public. But the thing has come about as an antithetical experience, because the -- the leading group, the -- the united group, the group that represented most the unitedness of the states of this country, of the 13 colonies, and in the West--the Free Masons--had this secrecy. And so it isn't all -- excusable and understandable that after 1828, the people demanded that there should be no secrecy for their higher structures of society.

And I think they won this battle. In -- 1829, they put up a president; his

name was William Wirt. He had been general -- attorney general of the United States, or he was. And the Anti-Masonic Party--John Quincy Adams the president of the time--hoped, would perhaps be able to hold down Jackson, and the new democracy of the spoils. They didn't succeed. But it is interesting to know that the candidate of the Anti-Masonic Party, forerunners of the -- later Whigs, that these people had a candidate for president who himself was a Mason. Now that's one of the wonderful American stories, which you just have to tell somebody outside this country, and he thinks we are all insane.

Probably we are.

William Wirt was a Mason, and they said -- the -- the -- the party on- -- obviously felt that the Masons were so entrenched that you had to drive a wedge between the Masons who didn't contribute any importance to being Masons, and those who did. That was the middle-of-the-road, you see, solution. Just as Andrew Johnson had to become vice-president because he was from Tennessee, you see, and therefore you had to get one of the border states of the Secessionists, you see, represented on the -- Lincoln's ticket at the second election, {and whereas} the vice-president always is taken. That's why we got dear Nixon.

So Wirt was a Mason, and he was the head of the Anti-Masonic Party. And leave -- with you without further ado, because I think if you let this sink in, you'll see how complicated ever since American politics have remained.

The party came to naught. I told you already that in the '50s that the secrecy of the Mason, that is, the anti-anti-Masonic bias was revived in the Know-Nothing Party. It was a -- one more form of self assertion of the -- of the principle of the Mason- -- Masons, because the Know-Nothings just said, "I know nothing," and thereby said, "We are a special people, and we are not the public." But with the railroads being built, and with therefore the incarnation of the spirit of union taking place in physical achievement, you see, in the visible railroads, that just connected the land, the Masons obviously became more and more superfluous. And they are today of course a joke -- a joke. They are something nice. They are something social. But they are not serious. The remnant is, I mean a man like Mr. Truman I suppose would never have become president unless he had been a Mason. But I -- I think on the whole, although this is the case of Truman, it's a very important case, because obviously nobody would ever have thought of him as vice-president unless he had had this affiliation. I think that you and your generation are not very much burdened by this problem of Masonry or no Masonry.

So -- for the political scene of the last 150 years, we have two periods. One from 1775 to 18- -- let me say, '58, where the problems of secrecy of a leading

group of a nondenominational character enables the people to anticipate the union which is not yet physically realized. The roads are not yet built. The canals are not yet built. The railroads do not exist. No wires, no telephones. Imagine what this meant, you see. So you carried the unity spiritually with you, wherever you went. And not the divisiveness of the denominations {back}.

And then we get, on the other hand--and I put an earlier date for this--we get the decline of Masonry, the decline of any attempt to rule this country by secrecy. We'll see when we come later to the religious problem, to the problem how one can, under a very successful secular history of the 19th century--with railroads, with Masons, with expanse, with a new economy--how one can keep up the churches, the Christian- -- Christian tradition going -- we'll see that the sects, the great movements of religious revival, made an -- a--how do you say?--loaned a feature of Free Masonry, and that the most successful religious movements of the 19th century is indebted to Masonry for one of its central tenets of secrecy.

The Ma- -- the governing body of nondenominational statesmanship and leadership -- you -- that's how you {may call it} -- the necessity of secular government, to find a body, you see, that is not held to- -- cemented together by a religious identity, you see, obviously, is not as -- so easy as you think, because we -- they are related to each other by blood as kinsmen, and we are related -- were related to each other down to 17- -- 1700 to each other by religion. The attempt of the Masons to found a nondenominational solidarity is something you must not think so easy, and so natural. It -- has only -- escapes your in- -- interest today, and it is not written up in the books, because there is a go-between term that misleads you today. It come -- that hails from the Church; and from the family, the racial, the tribal group; and has been carried over to this day in a way -- as a way -- as a -- but it has -- and is now so exhausted that it is high time to mention it. Between the lodge and its secret tie, that is -- was to -- meant to be bound up by oaths, by vows, by a loyalty as strong as the loyalty to the pope, or to the king of England, you see, there was friendship, and there is friendship.

And we have to -- turn now from "common," and "public," and "secret" to the vanishing of friendship, or quest to the road paved by friendship in this country, and to the vanishing of friendship today, because it has lost its religious and -- and tribal connotation. The word "friend" just means kinman -- kinsman. And itself it means "blood relation," affinity. A brother-in-law is your friend. Although not directly related by kin -- by blood, but is the kinsman. And so in itself, the word "friend" is an ambiguous term.

But in the 18th century, the word began to spread all over the world as meaning "spiritual friendship." The Society of Friends is of course the great

model case, where these people were satisfied not with the denomination; they didn't call themselves Quakers, but they call themselves to this day the Society of Friends. This means that they are related to each other not by blood ties, or family ties, but by experiences of a common bond, of a common -- or you may even say not so much a common experience, but a necessity of pooling different {experiences}. That's really what these Friends do.

Now the essence of friends is--and that's I think important--that friends are only friends if they are not identical twins. In "friends" it is understood that people play in society different roles and are friends for this very reason. You can have a roommate, because he does the same as you do in college. That's not a friend. I exclude this. I exclude all ties and loyalties that are based on similarity of situation. You may be a member of the same union. That doesn't make you into a friend of the other members. You may -- vote in the same party. That doesn't make you a friend of the other Republican, you see. A friendship is based on our power to overcome social, racial, credal distinctions. This I only call "friendship" in the new sense in which the Quakers first used it.

Now one of the inherita- -- heirlooms of England was that the Americans inherited the word "friend" in a vast sense. There existed 20,000 friendly societies in England in 17- -- 1820. There existed already at -- minimum of 9,000 such friendly societies in 1792. And although I have no statistics for the 18th century--neither for England nor the Americans--you can see from these fantastic numbers that these friendly societies must have been of tremendous influence. They were the same societies that have anticipated all our social insurance today, our sickness insurance, our old-age insurance. They -- these were friends who took care of each other in need. The Odd Fellows, whom you all know, come from this root. The Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Woodmen of the World, the Royal Arcanum, the Knight of the Maccabees, the Order of the Owls, the Fraternal Aid Union, the American Order, Sons of St. George, Ancient Order of Hibernians, the National Union Assurance Society, Fraternal Aid Union -- they are all based on a biblical tradition which is not Greek and not Roman. Cicero has written a book, De Amicitia. That's a pagan book on friendship. But in Proverbs, the 18th chapter, the 24th word -- verse, there is the decisive line to be found about our tradition of friendship: "And there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother."

It is the -- the victory of the friend over the brother, the kinsman, you see, which makes history, which creates out of the -- you see, of the enlarged family types, third cousin, who might have been called a friend, you see, now something that sticks closer than a brother -- at this moment when your third cousin, you see, becomes more important to you than your blood brother, then something else happens. Then the word "friend" acquires an independent meaning.

Can you see this?

And it is this reversal that you have to take into account to know how the United States have been able, in all the horrors of ruthless, rugged individualism, and robber barons, and industrial violence to survive with the help of friendly societies, in anticipation of all the social legislation which you now take for granted. And we'll come now next time to a completion of this meaning of "friend" when I tell you that the United States have never been governed well unless the president had a group of friends to govern with.