Brethren :-Your Committee on Foreign Correspondence beg leave to offer the following report:

We have reviewed transactions of forty-nine Grand Lodges in the United States. Three Grand Lodges have not reported. We have also reviewed the transactions of nine lodges in British North America; seven in Australia and New Zealand; one in Mexico; one in Cuba; one in Costa Rica and one in the Phillipine Islands. Five in Germany; Swiss Grand Lodge, Alpina; Grand Orients of Hungary and Netherlands. Proceedings of the Diet of the Union of Grand Lodges of Germany (February 6th, 1916) and annual report of the "Victoria Charity" (Victoria-Stiftung).

Referring to formal request of the Gran Logia Cuscattan of San Salvador for recognition, we beg to submit that its book of Constitution and By-Laws has come to hand, we have examined same, and find form and ceremonials harmonize with our own principles and standards and recommend that its application be granted and an exchange of Representatives be arranged.

Referring to the request of Panama for recognition dated December 16th and March 15th, which we have under consideration, we beg to suggest this be laid over for further investigation.

In presenting this report the Committee has not given its opinion on the decisions of Grand Masters or Grand Lodges. It has been the practice of this Committee for many years to report the facts only and not to constitute itself a court of final resort to pass upon the legality of the acts of independent Grand Lodges.

At this time your Committee feels that it would not be out of place to call attention to the high stand taken by the Brethren two hundred years ago. It is just two hundred years since, on St. John Baptist's Day, June 24th, 1717, an assembly was held at the Goose and Gridiron Alehouse in London and "with the oldest Master Mason (now the Master of a lodge) in the chair" elected and installed Anthony Sayer, Grand Master, and formed the Grand Lodge of England.

Masons and Masonic Lodges united under a sustaining, controlling and directing authority, and moral and social forces, once inchoate and individual, were crystallized into an organized beneficence.

Ancient Charges and ceremonies, culled from many sources, were compared, digested and adapted to modern conditions and a Constitution and Charges were formulated which enunciated the highest ethical platform of that time. For the age was decadent. The Grand Lodge was formed at a time when individual and social morality was known only to be scoffed at. Religion seemed dead and worship a farce. The bigotry and intolerance of a cold and formal Church-in which a few devout worshippers only served to mark the drunken ignorance of many of its ministers and the lewd degeneracy of the mass of its adherents-were matched on the other hand by a fierce dogmatism and a narrow and cold religion which spent itself in cruel hatred of