NEW IDEALS OF QUAKERISM: ASSIMILATION OF STRANGERS.
Quaker Hill has always been a community with great 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. I must be sparing of illustration here, where too rich a store is at hand. I will offer only this striking fact, observed by all who know the Hill: the Irish emigrant and his American-born children, of whom there are now as many as remain of the original Quakers, have come to be as good Quakers in character—though still loyal Catholics in dogma—as if they said "thee and thou," and wore drab. They are peaceable, gentle folk, sober and inoffensive; and the transforming influence of Quaker character is seen in certain of them in a marked degree.
The same statement may be made of the pervasive example of the Quaker character upon other areas of population; servants who come from the city, summer guests, artistic people who love the Hill for its beauty and suggestiveness, ministers and other public teachers who come hither.
The area to the southeast, called "Coburn," settled to a degree by those who have worked on the Hill in times past as employees, is touched with the same manner. Its meeting house, erected over sixty years ago, even retains the Quaker way of seating the men and women apart.
The Quaker Hill Conference, now in its ninth year, is another illustration of the charm and reach of the gentle influence of the Quaker Hill ideal upon personal character.
Suggestion also explains much. In such a social whole, manners and customs are fixed. 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.
Ideas, once broached, are usually, if they contemplate action, opposed, at least by inertness; but after a time they reappear as if native to the minds which would have none of them by reasonable approaches. This process is accelerated if the suggestion begins to travel from mind to mind. Some individuals are less slow than others; and the leaders of Quaker Hill thinking have always been able to work by the plan of academic proposal—to avoid rejection—followed by incitement of popular action in particular quarters. Quaker Hill cannot bear to be divided; and that which comes to be successful in one quarter soon comes to be universal. Things can be done by social suggestion which could never be accomplished by appeal or rational discussion.
The word that has formed the social mind of Quaker Hill has been, not "the Spirit," not "the inner light," but "orthodoxy" or "plainness." For this community, it must be remembered, had no great thinkers. It discouraged study, stiffened reason in formulas and dissolved thinking in vision. To its formulas the Hill has been exceedingly devoted. He who upheld them was accepted, and he who rejected them, as well as he who ignored them, was to the early Quaker Hill as if he did not exist.
This shibboleth has indeed always been religious. Even to-day the way of direct access to the common heart is a religious one. 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. Not "to save money" is an unforgiven sin—and a rare one!
Much has been done in forming the common mind of Quaker Hill by antipathies and sympathies, chiefly again of a religious order modified by the economic. 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. 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 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. This is true socially of certain families and religiously of others. That to-day some are not led is due solely to the decadence of initiative in the households which, by reason of wealth or dogmatic rectitude, inherit and claim the first place.
It was said above that Quaker Hill has shown great power of assimilating foreign material, and of causing newcomers to be possessed of the communal spirit. The agency which from the first accomplished this was religious idealization, embodied in the meeting, the dress, language and manners of Friends. Generally the Meeting was recruited from births, and members were such by birthright. In former times the community and the Meeting were one. This assimilating of foreign material by social imitation to the Quaker type, and into organic subjection to the Quaker Hill community, was wrought by six agencies. They were language, manners, costume, amusements, worship, and morals. In each of these the Quakers were peculiar. In the use of the "plain language" the Quakers had a machinery of amazing and subtle fascination for holding the attention, purifying the speech, and disciplining the whole deportment of the young and the newcomer. No one has ever been addressed with the use of his first name by grave, sweet ladies and elderly saints, without its beginning an influence and exerting a charm he could not resist; the more so that the Quaker in so doing is guarding his own soul, rather than seeking to save his hearer.
The grave manners of the Quakers, both in meeting and without, are framed upon their belief that all days are holy, and all places sacred. Their long and triumphant fight against amusements is a tribute to the gravity of life. The contest to which I have elsewhere referred for pure morals, in matters of sex, of property and of speech, was a victorious battle.
In all these matters Quaker Hill was a population socialized by religion. Central to it all was the worship of the Meeting on First Day, and on other occasions; and the great solemnity of the annual Quarterly Meeting. Fascinated by that "silence that can be felt," men came from far. They would come as readily to-day. They went away under the domination of that idea of pure and spiritual faith, which kept a whole houseful of men silent for an hour in communion.
As I have looked into this matter it has seemed to me that the induction to be drawn from the history of Quaker Hill is this: Religion was a true organizing power for this social population. Whatever the meeting determinedly strove to do it accomplished. If it had tried to do more it would have succeeded.
This was a gain, moreover, without corresponding losses; a total net gain in all the moralities. The whole area on which this meeting exerted its influence was by it elevated to a higher moral and social tone, and organized into a communal whole, characterized by a loftier and cleaner standard than that of surrounding populations.
Why, then, did it die out? First, because of the bareness of its worship, the lack of music, color and form; through which it lost in the nineteenth century some of its best families. Then through dogmatic differences, of no interest to human beings, it lost its primacy in the community and so its authority.
In the chapter on "Ideals of the Quakers," I have dwelt upon their dramatization of life. They "made believe" that "plainness" was sanctity. They fixed their minds upon the commonplace as the ideal. It is probable that the early population were men and women of no such talents as to disturb this conviction; and the variations from plainness in the direction of gayety were sternly denounced as immoral. Also the struggle with the wilderness occupied and exhausted the powers of the exceptional as well as of the average man. 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. They were oppressed and stifled by the ban of the meeting upon variation. 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.