People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 March 1897 — ORDER OF ARCHERS. [ARTICLE]

ORDER OF ARCHERS.

Statement of Premises Upon which It Operates. Why Have all Our Class Organizations and Political Parties Failed in Results?—They Ignore Laws of Nature and the Distributive Factors. Following is taken from a circular issued by Plato’s Archers, an organization that is making rapid headway, irrespective of party, local conditions, or trade i Environments. We shall have more 1 to say of it in the future. Our readers cannot afford to miss anything they see in print regarding it. We can truthfully repeat in three words, that it has the key which solves the PROBLEM.

REFORMATIONS DEMAND ORGANIZATIONS. Reformers in all ages have labored to increase the happiness of man in this life. Plato, the immortal philosopher of Greece, framed an ideal Republic based upon the fact that each individual in society is endowed by nature with some specific virtue. which adapts him to the production of some special form of value, which fits him for some vocation in life wherein he can become the most useful to society. The most perfect state of civilized society must be that state wherein every individual can enjoy perfect liberty without endangering the peace, prosperity, or perpetuity of the commonwealth. Man is instinctively industrious as the ant, the beaver or the bee. The man who finds that place in life for which nature has best fitted him, enjoys more happiness than one who has been driven by necessity into an abnormal field. Man is actuated by motives, influenced by environments. Men do not create motives, they simply obey them. To adjust ourselves to our conditions, to harmonize with our environments is the effort of our lives. No greater work can be accomplished by any reformation than to secure the opportunity to each member of society to find its proper place. Secret societies are organized for the avowed purpose of bettering the condition of the members of which each is formed. Each society is organized for a specific purpose, and inspired by a central idea, around which everything must cluster, and to which everything must be made tributary. “Ye cannot put new wine into old bottles,” is a figurative way of saying everything in nature has a specific individuality which identifies it; which determines its shape, color, and destiny; which marks and distinguishes it from all other creatures or individualities. This law of individuality is infinitely essential to all order; it seperates the atomic particles of matter from each other, and keeps the planets whirling in their own orbits; confines solar systems to their respective regions of space, and prevents the material universe from becoming a chaos of confusion. Nor is this law confined to material organisms. It is equally

applicable to religious, political and social systems. A grain of corn, a grain of wheat, a mustard, and a peach seed planted in the same soil, moistened with the same water, warmed by the same sunlight, grows seed each after its own kind—one a stalk of corn, another a stalk of wheat, another a mustard plant and another a peach tree. No method of treatment can change one into the other, nor can either be grafted onto the other. Each has a distinct individuality which alone deten mines its future, and any effort to unite them will end in their destruction. Thp same is true of religions, A church founded upon the idea of justification by faith alone, can not be expected to adopt the .idea that works are essential to salvation; nor can a church whose essential feature is baptism be expected to take up and pursue any theory that would make the essential feature secondary in importance. In the light of these existing facts, let us carefully analyze the great reform movements which are engaging the minds of mankind to day, and, if possible, deduce a logical conclusion therefrom.

Henry George and his followers think the wrong exists in our method of taxation, and that a single tax on land values would correct the evils of which we complain. The K. of L. was founded upon the idea of uniting the working men in one grand organization whose numbers would en able them to resist the encroachments of the employers upon the rights of the employed. In its essential feature it is organized to render strikes more potential, hence its appeals for support are made especially to the wage worker. They see no enemy beyond the avaricious employer, and hence can not be expected to take up the “single tax idea.”

The Grange is founded on the theory that the “middle man” has brought us to our present condition, and their remedy lies in cutting off this feature and bringing the producer and consumer closer together, and can not be expected to take up the single tax idea, nor to fight the battles of the wage worker and his boss. The F. M B. A. have found that there are too many merchants, and their remedy is to starve out all the unnecessary ones by concentrating their patronage upon the favored few. The Alliance has conceived the idea that somehow the remedy lays in legislation, but are divided upon the question as to what that legislation should be, and how to accomplish it. Their central idea is unity; with no definite object or recognized leader.

The temperance reformers see the enemy of. all social order in the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, and can not be induced to look beyond these for a possible cause, but insist that Intemperance is itself the cause, and have organized their secret societies to eliminate this evil with no agreed plan as to what means are necessary to accomplish its removal. The Financial Reformer sees the wrong in the money system of the world, and to introduce this idea into the minds of the masses has gone into the ranks of the other existing organizations to convince them that their essential feature is secondary and that the money question is , the essential one, hence we find

the Greenbacker among the temperance societies struggling to induce them to lay aside their views and take up the money question. And thus you see every one of these organizations fighting each other over the “essential feature” of the needed reformation, with no more prospect of changing the nature of these organizations than the florist has of changing the mustard plant to a*peach tree. The soul of the Henry Georgists is “single tax.” Destroy this and attempt to substitute another and you kill the .movement. Attempt to substitute the money question for the “strike” and “boycot” of the K. of L. and you disintegrate the order. Try to engraft the “money question” onto either of the existing secret organizations, and the effort is equally fruitless, and alike disastrous. It is true, we have made some progress in educating some of the members of eacfl of the existing secret societies on the necessity of financial reform, but none will claim that we have reached a point in this process of education where we can reasonably calculate that these organizations are ready to lay down their recognized “essential” measure and take up a subject that will necessarily make the object of their special care, secondary. If the problem of civilization is ever solved its solution must be practicable; if practicable, it can be put into practice. We must present this fact to the masses so conclusively that none can gainsay it. We must organize a secret society, whose essential feature is the existing wrong and whose object is the application of the remedy. We must show how utterly impossible any reform measure must be while the production and distribution of wealth is controlled by heartless money kings and soulless syndicates. We must adopt such methods as will at once appeal to the strongest motives that govern human action, and at the same time plant in the minds of all, the seed thought that will grow into a knowledge of the truth. The essential germ that individualizes a secret society must be set out in the ritual. No thought embodied in any declaration of principles, not in harmony with the essential principle of the order, can be made to take root and grow. Relying on these fundamental truths, the ritual of Archery has been carefully prepared, and the truth set forth in a beautiful and impressive ceremony, presenting in a strong light the cause of the present prevailing distress nuder which we are struggling. This ceremony once seen leaves upon the mind an indelible impression, and prepares the mind for the reformation without which all other reformations are impossible. By no means do we deprecate the work of labor organizations. Each has its work to accomplish; each its special mission to fill. Some are organized for mutual aid and self protection; others for education along the line of needed reforms. It is not the aim >of this order to oppose or interfere with any of them, but by presenting the necessity for the reformations that we advocate, to enlarge their field of usefulness by making the reforms they advocate possible and their influence more potential. If you ask us what we have, we answer, “come and see,” and if you think we have the truth and are of use to you, take hold; if not, no harm can come to you or us.