Warren H. Wilson

“ His followers therefore went so far as to find in plainness a new sanctity. They adapted at once the "plain garb" of the period of William Penn and Robert Barclay, and the generations of men who followed felt themselves morally bettered by a drab coat and breeches, a white neck-cloth, and a broad-brimmed brown hat; the women by dresses of simple lines, low tones of color, bonnets of peculiar shape, shielding the eyes on either side.
Of course in time this exceptional garb by its uniqueness defeated the very desire George Fox had for "plainness." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Hill does not exhibit the highest type of social response in the recognition of impersonal evil, in the quest of knowledge, or in free discussion. Almost two centuries of dogma-worship, with its contemplation of selected facts, has made it now impossible to secure from one thoroughly socialized in the spirit of the place the exact truth upon any matter. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The minds of the residents of the Hill are very suggestible; but the persons who have the power to implant the suggestion are no longer inspired as of old, with a sublime and unearthly ideal. They are only animated with an economic one. But the result is the same. It is social, rather than religious. It was one thing for the early Friends to cement together a community through the feeling that in every man was the Spirit of God. A wonderful appetite was that for the assimilation of new members coming into the community. ”

“ Every man was in some degree a farmer, in that each household cultivated the soil. On every farm all wants had to be supplied from local resources, so that mixed farming was the rule. The land which its modern owners think unsuited to anything but grass, because it is such "heavy, clay soil," was made in the 18th century to bear, in addition to the grass for cattle and sheep, wheat, rye, oats and corn, flax, potatoes, apples. Of whatever the farmer was to use he must produce the raw material from the soil, and the manufacture of it must be within the community. ”

“ But when with wealth came leisure, there were born sons of the Quakers who rebelled against the discipline of life that repressed variation, who demanded self-expression in dress, in language, in tastes, and in pleasures. Gradually but surely, as the outside world was brought nearer, these persons were influenced in their restiveness by books and examples, by imitation and other stimuli from new sources, until they cast off in their minds the Quaker ideal of plainness. To be ordinary no longer seemed to them a way of goodness. ”

“ The newcomer is often fresh, ingenuous, and sometimes intrusive. Little by little he becomes socialized. Ways of action are fixed for him, and a range of performance comes to be his. In harmony with this range, suggestion is very fertile; but one learns after a time that there is a limit to its force beyond which individuals will not go. Suggestion, to be effective upon the many, must come from the sources which embody the community's religious and economic ideal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The dramatic expression of an ideal has had great social power. Upon the casual observer or visitor it has wrought with the effect of a charm to impress upon them in a subtle way the ideal of Quakerism. ”

“ Equality of suffrage and universal suffrage are jealously believed in, owing to the Quaker teaching as to woman's parity with man. Yet in the school-meeting, in which women have the same right to vote that men have, there are seldom any women present. Indeed, except for a packed meeting once in a decade, to decide some agitated question, few women attend school-meetings. ”

“ The Orthodox saw the values of prosperity only in plainness of life, recognized no divinity in humanized manners, and sternly but ineffectually called the community back to idealized commonplaceness, and to hear the utterances of rude ploughmen and cobblers in the name of Deity. ”

“ But in the practical arts and in business a woman is a woman and a man is a man. Here the women are restricted by convention to housekeeping, which on large farms is quite enough for them; and the men have the outdoor life, the "trading," and the gainful occupations—except the boarding of city people. There is no especial respect for the "managing woman" who "runs a farm"; the community expects such a woman to fail. ”

“ This old Oblong Meeting House is a mute record and symbol of the century-old contest of the Puritan spirit among the old Quakers, striving for an inflexibly right relation between the sexes. They attained their ends through the creation of a community, but not until the community dissolved. [85]
The position of woman among Friends is another eloquent tribute to the two-fold "dealing" of Quakerism with women. She is man's equal, but she is man's greatest source of danger. She must be on a par with him, but she must be apart from him. ”

“ Work is a necessity as imperious as war ever was. Looked at frankly and truthfully, work is a disagreeable necessity and not a good in itself. Yet by persuading ourselves that work is a blessing, that it is dignified and honorable, our willingness to work is materially increased, and therefore the process of adaptation is facilitated—in other words, progress is accelerated. ”

“ To-day I am sure no class of men in real need could appeal to the community, or to any constituent group of it, in vain. The growth has been along lines which, beginning in a group-compassion that has from earliest days recompensed any poor member of the Meeting in his sudden losses of property, have widened first to Quakers of other places, then to other Christians, then to other men, and last of all to Quakers of the other Quaker sect; and from Protestant to Catholic and Catholic to Protestant. ”

“ The Quaker Community, which ran its course in the one hundred years following the settlement of the Hill, presents the social history of a homogeneous population, assembled in response to common stimuli, obedient to one ideal, sharing an environment limited by nature, cultivating an isolation favored by the conditions of the time, intermarrying, and interlacing their relations of mutual dependence through a diversified industry ”

“ The young people of the Quaker families, and sometimes their elders, yielded to the fascinations of these gatherings. The unwonted excitement of meeting, the sound of music, playing upon the capacity for motor reactions in a people living and laboring outdoors, inflamed beyond control by rum and hard cider, soon led to lively, impulsive activities and physical exertions, both in immoderate excess and in disregard of all the inhibitions of tradition and of conscience. That there was a close relation of these "frollicks" with the sexual immorality of the period is probable. ”

“ In the Revolution, the Meeting exercised unflinching discipline, for the purpose of keeping members out of the patriot armies, and punished with equal vigor those who paid for the privilege of exemption from military duty and those who enlisted in the ranks. In every act of the discipline of the Quaker Community appears the purpose of the Meeting, namely, to keep its members to itself and away from all other moral and spiritual control. ”

“ The community is markedly divided into rich and poor, and into orthodox and not-orthodox. These have no inclination one to another. Each group has its symbols and pass-words, and while neighborly, and answering to certain appeals to which the community has always responded, each resident of the Hill lives and dwells in his own group and has no expectation of moving out of it. So long as a man stays in his group he is, by a balancing of antipathy and sympathy, respected and valued. ”

“ The effect of the above conditions is seen in the fact that in the twelve years under study nine owners of large farms have "given up the milk business," have sold their cows, or keeping them have made butter and fatted calves for market. The profits to be made in dairy-farming are so small, unless the farmer conduct his dairy in an exceptional manner, or on a very large scale, that the average man on the Hill cannot continue it. Indeed, the average farmer on the Hill is unable through lack of vitality or incapacity for application, to conduct any business, successfully, against competition. ”

“ It has never been possible, so far as records go, to maintain a society of men on the Hill. In the early part of the period under study a literary and debating society was organized, with social attractions; but it was feeble and short-lived. There are not enough leaders among the men to make such group-life possible. They are related by ties of labor, rather than of class-fraternity; and they have never acquired any interest common to their sex to assemble them in groups and companies; the discipline of the religion known to the Hill has discouraged and outlawed it. ”

“ Thus the Quaker ideal has given authority to the Friends, especially to the older and more conservative of them; has furnished a subtle machinery for assimilating new members into the community and thus has been an organizing power. ”

“ For twenty-five years the Mizzen-Top Hotel, accommodating two hundred and fifty guests, has represented notably this response to opportunity. The beautiful scenery, which the Quaker himself does not appreciate, because he has educated himself out of the appreciation of color and form, has offered him an opportunity of profit which he has been prompt and diligent to seize. All through the summer every one of the six largest Quaker homesteads is filled with guests. ”

“ Nor is it a lack of sense of propriety in meetings of worship. But it is in matters ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility constitute the trust; in these, the men and women trained in Quakerism are lacking throughout whole areas of the mind, and lacking, too, in ethical standards, which can only appeal to those whose experience has fed on a rich diversity of sources and distinctions. ”

“ For this silence is a vivid experience, "a silence that may be felt." The presence and influence of men are upon one, even if that of God be not. The motionless figures about one subtly penetrate one's consciousness, though not through the senses. ”

“ It need not be said that the poorer members bear the rich in mind. Every person resident on the Hill has come to partake in this sense of the community, this practice of new Quakerism. No one is out of sight and yet there is no dream of equality behind this communal sense. It is as far from a communistic, as from a charitable state of mind. It is the result of years of belief in common men and common things.
This "make believe" that commonplace things are the spiritual things was a corollary of George Fox's life as much as of his doctrine. ”

“ The history of Quaker Hill in the eighteenth century is the story of these two schools of idealists, who ignored each other, but were moved by the same passion, obeyed the same spirit. It is said that a locality never loses the impression made upon it by its earliest residents. Certain it is that the roots of modern things are to be traced in that earliest period, and through a continuous self-contained life until the present day. ”

“ I think the end for which the Quaker Hill population have lived could be called Individual-Social. They are consciously individual, and unconsciously, inevitably social. These people have sought generation after generation for personal salvation and personal gain. "And that," says a resident, "that is why the place is dying." Yet the common interest was a logical corollary of the Quaker doctrine of God in every man, and therefore a community was formed, a community indeed which was no one's conscious care. ”

“ If he venture to be other than what he was born to be, he suffers all the social penalties of a highly organized community.
Authority, working along the lines of belief and dogma, has almost irresistible force for the Quaker Hill social mind. A visitor to the Hill said "These are an obedient people." Any barrenness of the Hill is to be attributed rather to the lack of leaders who could speak to the beliefs and in harmony with [115] the dogmas, than to lack of willingness to obey authority. From the past the families on the Hill inherit their willingness respectively to command and to obey. ”

“ If the "ability to persuade oneself that what is necessary is noble or dignified or honorable or pleasant," is exhibited on Quaker Hill as a "most important psychic factor," so is also the idealization of the commonplace the "making believe" that peace and plainness, that simple, old-fashioned dress, and seventeenth century forms of speech are spiritual and are serviceable to the believing mind. The power of idealization is nowhere exhibited as a social force more clearly than in a Quaker community. ”

“ And though the ideal of plainness has subtly ruled them even in their rebellion and freedom, it has done so by its negative power, in that the community has never furnished exceptional education. The positive dominion of the meeting broken, the negative "plainness" of the community rules all the children of the Hill to this day. So few are the sources of individual variation furnished, in the form of books, music, education, art, that no son or daughter of Quaker Hill has attained a place of note even in New York State. The ideal of "plainness" has been an effectual restraint. ”

“ A woman of leisure and culture, accustomed to the possession of wealth, and enjoying it in books and travel, she surrounded herself for several of her last years with an atmosphere, and secured for herself enjoyment, of the highest aspirations of the Quaker Hill economic ideal. ”

“ Quaker Hill has always been a community with great [112] powers of assimilation. The losses suffered by emigration have been repaired by the genius of the community for socializing. Whoever comes becomes a loyal learner of the Quaker Hill ways. I think this is a matter of imitation. Personality has here made a solemn effort to perfect itself for a century and a half; and the characters of Richard Osborn, James J. Vanderburgh, Anne Hayes, David Irish and his daughter, Phoebe Irish Wanzer, ripened into possession of at least amazing power of example. ”

“ They instinctively love money, though not for any other purpose than saving. They cherish no illusions of an unworldly sort about it. This is true of Quaker and Catholic, laborer and summer resident. It is true of the small class of cultivated intellectual-aesthetes, who might be expected to be less mercenary. They all value money; but not for display, not for luxury, scarcely for travel; not for books or the education of children. Quaker Hill men and women would accumulate money, invest and manage it wisely and live in respectable "plainness." ”

“ The consciousness of kind on Quaker Hill is stronger in the group than in the community. Yet the general sense of "unity" is very strong and it often comes into play.
The chief social bonds which unite the whole community are, first of all, imitation, in which process it seems to me the Quakers are a peculiarly subtle people. Second, a good-will which pervades the Hill like a genial atmosphere. Third, kindness, which on certain occasions draws the whole community together in unusual acts of helpfulness to some member in need. ”

“ Catholic as well as Protestant, Quaker no more and no less than "the world's people," welcome religious approaches, respect confessions, and believe experiences. Nothing can assemble them all which does not originate in religion and clothe itself in religious sanction. History is religious history. Business prosperity is approved when the prosperity has followed religious profession.
I do not mean to say that there are not other symbols than those of religion. Prosperity has spoken its shibboleths as well as orthodoxy. "Business is business" on Quaker Hill. ”

“ If one may state in condensed form what this study discovers in Quaker Hill that is uncommon and exceptional, one would say that the social peculiarity of the Hill is: first, the consistent working out of an idea in a social population, with the resultant social organization, and communal integrity; and second, the power of this community to assimilate individuals and make them part of itself. ”

“ Interest which attaches to Quaker Hill is of a three-fold sort: historical, scenic and climatic. The locality has a history of peculiarly dramatic interest. It is beautiful with a rare and satisfying dignity and loveliness of scene; and it is [11] the choice central spot of a region bathed in a salubrious atmosphere which has had much to do with its social character in the past, and is to-day very effective in making the place a summer settlement of New York people. The population is increased one hundred per cent. ”