III. A Lodge lias the right to transact all business

lhai can be legally transacted by regularly congregated Masons. This also is one of the objects for which the warrant was granted, but like the preceding right already considered, it is to be exercised under the regulation of certain restrictions.
It seems now to be almost universally conceded that all mere business (by which word I wish to make a distinction from what is technically called " Masonic work,") must be transacted in the third degree. This is a very natural consequence of the change which has taken place in the organization of the craft. Originally, as I have already repeat- edly ob-served, the Fellow Crafts constituted the great body of the fraternity — the Master's degree being confined to that select few who presided over the Lodges. At that time the business of the Order was transacted in the second degree, because the possessors of that degree composed the body of the craft. Afterwards, in the beginning, and up almost to the middle of the last century, this main body was made up of Entered Apprentices, and then the business' of Lodges was necessarily transacted in the first degree. Now, and ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, for more than one hundred years, the body of the craft has consisted only of Master Masons. Does it not then follow, by a parity of reasoning, that all business should be now transacted in the third degree ? The ancient Charges and Constitutions give us no explicit law on the subject, but the whole spirit and tenor of
320 POWERS OF LODGES WORKING
Masonic usage has been that the business of Lodges should be conducted in that degree, the members of which constitute the main body of the craft at the time. Whence it seems but a just deduction that at the present time, and in the present condition of the fraternity, all business, except the mere ritual work of the inferior degrees, should be conducted in the third degree. Another exception must be made as to the examination of witnesses in the trial of an Entered Apprentice or a Fellow Craft, which, for purposes of justice, should be conducted in the de- gree to which the defendant has attained ; but even here the final decision should always be made in the third degree.
In conducting the business of a Lodge, certain rules are to be observed, as in all other deliberative bodies ; but these will be more appropriately con- sidered in a chapter devoted to the discussion of " rules of order," in a subsequent part of this work.