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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: to have attributed them to the morals of the French noblesse in the
days of Louis Quinze. What could a corrupt tree bring forth, but
corrupt fruit? If some of the early lodges, like those of "La
Felicite" and "L'Ancre," to which women were admitted, resembled not
a little the Bacchic mysteries of old Rome, and like them called for
the interference of the police, still no great reform was to be
expected, when those Sovereign Masonic Princes, the "Emperors of the
East and West," quarrelled--knights of the East against knights of
the West--till they were absorbed or crushed by the Lodge "Grand
Orient," with Philippe Egalite, Duc de Chartres, as their grand
master, and as his representative, the hero of the diamond necklace,
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