Warren H. Wilson

“ The result has been that mediocre people have both lived on the Hill, and gone away from it, in voluntary exile from its beautiful scenes, but not in exile from its spirit of plainness. No person of brilliant mind or of uncommon talents has ever come of the Quaker Hill population. There is not among the sons or daughters of this place one whose name is of lasting interest to any beyond the limits of Pawling. No artist or poet has ever ventured to express the intense feeling of the aesthetic which pervades the place, but has always been hushed from singing, restrained from picturing. ”

“ The emotional nature of this population has been by long-continued application of an accepted discipline, economic and religious, restrained and schooled. More beautiful personalities than some of the Quaker and Irish women of the Hill, schooled in a discipline which produces the most charming manners, the gentlest kindness, one may never see. There is no cloud in the sky of these women's justice, truthfulness, goodness. ”

“ The problem is now a problem of economy. Instead of the standards of a time of plenty we are confronted with problems of bare subsistence.
In times of plenty, when resources are not yet exhausted, men's lives diverge and the individual is the unit of thought and feeling. The natural result of a time of plenty is the development and the endowment of personality. But in times when a bare subsistence is the condition with which many are confronted, men are drawn together and the community becomes the unit of thought and feeling. Industry as it matures brings men together. ”

“ EVOLUTION OF THE COMMUNITY
I THE PIONEER
The earliest settlers of the American wilderness had a struggle very different from our own, who live in the twentieth century. Their economic experience determined their character. They appear to us at this distance to have common characteristics, habits and reactions upon life; in which they differ from all who in easier times follow them. They have more in common with one another than they have in common with us. They differ less from one another than they differ from the modern countryman. The pioneer life produced the pioneer type. ”

“ Occasionally one sees the outcropping of a really artistic spirit—peculiarly refreshing because so rare—which has only in a woman's mature years ventured to indulge in a bit of happy color; but the venture if successful is always reserved and simple; and the most of such ventures are of unhappy result.
The housekeeping arts have reached a high degree of perfection on the Hill. Cooking is there done with a precision, economy and tastefulness in sharp contrast to the non-aesthetic manner in which the Quakers conduct most occupations. ”

“ The farmer's moral standards are opposed to combination. He believes in personal righteousness and family morals. He does not believe in the moral control of the individual or the household by the economic group. It has been impossible, therefore, to combine the farmers in the East in any general way so as to control their markets by maintaining a high standard of product. The only control that is dreamed of by the leaders of the farmers is the control of the quantity of their products. ”

“ It is not surprising that in a riper age of the world, after lifetimes of this idealization of peasant states of mind, their children find themselves morally and mentally unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship, of high ethical trust and of the varied ways of a moral world, whose existence their fathers made believe to ignore and deny.
Women have always occupied in Quakerism a place theoretically equal to that of the men, in business and religious affairs. George Fox and his successors declared men and women equal, inasmuch as the Divine Spirit is in every human soul. ”

“ The duty of the church in the process of exploitation is to build the community and to make itself the center of the growing scientific industry on which the country community in the future will be founded.
The religion of the exploiter moves in the giving of money. Consecration of his wealth is consecration of his world and of himself. The church that would save him must teach him to give. His sins are those of greed, his virtues are those of benevolence. His own type, not the least worthy among men, should be honored in his religion. ”

“ The dependence of the scientific farmer or husbandman upon the world market and upon the scientists who are studying agriculture enlarges the circle of his life from the rural household to the rural community. In the rural community agriculture can be taught; in the household it cannot. The only teaching of the household is tradition; the teaching of the community is in terms of science. The country school and the country church take a greater place as community institutions just so soon as the farmer passes out of the period of exploitation into that of scientific husbandry. ”

“ But in our later time, between 1895 and 1905, this power of "making believe" had suffered the strain of a division of the meeting. It was harder to believe that the Spirit of God was in all men, when half the community was set off as "unorthodox." It had suffered the strain of seeing the wide social difference caused by money. Yet it bravely played the game. Children are not more adapt at "making believe" than were these old Friends. They deceived even themselves; and their "pretending" assimilated into the communal life every newcomer. ”

“ Many churches in the country teach only the standards of right and wrong to which the farmers already conform. For a short time a new minister is popular with them because his new voice and his fresh elocution contain a subtle flattery. He denounces the sins to which they are not inclined and praises the virtues which they have learned to practise from their fathers. But after about six months of such preaching the farmer wearies of a preacher with no new message. Indeed the countryman is puzzled and perplexed by modern situations about which the minister has no knowledge. ”

“ Class division was coming upon them, and they felt it as a sectarian division. It was indeed the end of the old community ruled by religion, and the formation of a new neighborhood life; a new Quakerism, ruled by economic classes: the persons of influence being invariably persons of means, and the dominating leaders rich. Doubtless the Quakers who led in the Division of 1828 hoped, in each party equally, to maintain the old religious domination. The community has never granted that leadership to the divided Meeting, neither to the Orthodox, nor to the Hicksites. ”

“ The great movements which have influenced the farmer in the past twenty years have most of them been pushed to success by men unknown to any but farmers. What orator has come into national prominence out of the enterprises of agricultural life in the past two decades? The farmer does not need great eloquence, but he does need a thorough understanding of the moral and spiritual situations arising out of the exploiter process in which he is immersed. He needs moral teachers for the era of husbandry which is dawning in the country. ”

“ I have spoken elsewhere of the effect of this century-long repression and ignoring of the aesthetic movements of the human spirit, in banking the fires of literary culture in this population. The present generation, all inheriting the examples of ancestors ruled in such unflinching rigor, has in none of its social grouping any true sense of color or of the beauty of color. Neither in the garments of those who have laid off the Quaker garb, nor in the decorations of the houses is there a lively sense of the beauty of color. None of the women of Quaker extraction has a sense of color in dress ”

“ Sermons and funerals and weddings become to country people the windows by which religion flies out of the community. Especially among farmers, religion is a matter of every-day life. What religion the farmer has grows out of his yearly struggle with the soil and with the elements. His belief in God is a belief in Providence. His God is the creator of the sun and the seasons, the wind and the rain. The man who does not with him share these experiences cannot long interpret them for him in terms of scripture or of church. ”

“ They testify to their belief in God when they do not speak better than they could with rhetoric or eloquence. It is the influence of many, not of one; yet of certain leaders who are the organs of this impression, and of the human entity made of many who in communion become one. The self-control of it breathes power, and principle, and courage. One would expect a Quaker meeting to exert an imperious rule upon the community. It is an expression of the majesty of an ideal. I believe that the Quaker Hill meeting has been able to accomplish whatever it has put its hand to do. ”

“ Industry is based on it. Civilization is propelled by it. It is the desire to get a living and the quest of a living.
I believe that this economic motive is religious. It is the quest of what a man has not, but feels to be his. It engages his utmost efforts. It is labor for his wife and children and for all his group fellows, and therefore is involved in his holiest, most self-forgetting feelings. It takes him back to his parents and reminds him constantly of his ancestors. He forms his ideas of justice in his economic experiences. ”

“ For this reason the ministers, teachers, and social workers in the country should be not discouraged, but hopeful, when confronted with rural landlords and capitalists. The business of the community leader is to enlist in the common task those persons whose privileges are superior and inspire them with a progressive spirit. Without their leadership the community cannot progress. Without their privileges, wealth and superior education, no progress is possible in the country. ”

“ Moreover, nobody outside a country community knows how far a family can go in the path to poverty and still live. No one knows how eccentric and peculiar, how reserved and whimsical the life of a household may be, in the country community, unless he has lived as neighbor and friend to such a household. The preacher cannot know this. Not all the experience of the world is written even in the Bible. The spirit shall "teach us things to come." It is the pastor who learns these things by his daily observation of the lives of men. ”

“ No plans have been made in the American rural economy for a tenantry. The lease, therefore, throughout the United States generally is for only one year. This gives to the landlord the greatest freedom, and to the tenant the least responsibility. Neither is willing to enter into a contract by which the land itself can be benefitted. The landlord is looking for the increase of the values of land, and is ever mindful of a possible buyer. Moreover, he is watchful of the market for the crop and of the size of the crop, so that he desires to be free at the end of the year to make other arrangements. ”

“ The writer believes that the path of co-operation is the efficient and slow one of economic and social organization rather than the delusive short-cut of religious union. People cannot be united in religion until they are united in their social economy. The business of the church is to organize co-operative enterprises, economic, social and educational, and to school the people in the joy, to educate them in the advantages, of life together. Co-operation must become a gospel. Union requires to be a religious doctrine. ”

“ The most of men seek and get a living. The best of men, and the most religious, are those whose economic experience brings them a series of satisfactions, beginning with bread, clothing, shelter, education in the essentials, music and a little aesthetic culture, and gradually extending into higher forms of human enjoyment. The simplest religious craving is for economic assurance of supply. "The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want," is on the most thumbed page of the Bible. The play of these economic aspirations among poor people results in all the simpler and most general religious feelings. ”

“ I am convinced that in most farming territories the loyalty of the countryman to his group is the second reason for his refusal to co-operate. Again, this refusal of his is not subject to persuasion. He is obeying an economic condition which shapes his life and controls his action. Striking instances are furnished in many regions of the amazing disloyalty of farmers to one another, and to their own pledged word. These are to be explained by the type to which the farmer in these sections conforms. We must not expect the land farmer to obey the ethical standards of the husbandman. ”

“ Just as necessary as the providing of common schools for all the people, is the provision of public play-grounds for all the people. As many as are the school houses so many, generally speaking, should be the play-grounds accessible to all, under the care of trained and responsible leaders, in which, without too much government, the free movements of the young and the abounding self-expression of the great mass of the employed shall have opportunity to work out their own education through play, into public righteousness. ”