Note 271 — Chapter III

The series of “Initiation Parts,” or forms to be observed on admission of new members, which are preserved in the archives of the Stonemasons’ Society, reveal the steady tendency to simplification of ritual. We have first the old MS. doggerel already described, dating probably from 1832. The first print of 1834, whilst retaining a good deal of the ceremonial, turns the liturgy into prose and the oath into an almost identical “declaration,” invoking the “dire displeasure” of the Society in case of treachery. The second print, which bears no date, is much shorter; and the declaration becomes a mere affirmation of adhesion. The Society’s circulars of 1838 record the abolition, by vote of the members, of all initiation ceremonies, in view of the Parliamentary Inquiry about to be held into Trade Unionism. But even the simplified form of 1838 retains, in its reference to the workmen as “the real producers of all wealth,” an unmistakable trace of the Owenite spirit of the Builders’ Union of 1832.