Most of the members now are middle-aged people, and the society is prosperous. Thirty-five years ago, however, it had double the number it now counts. Occasionally members leave; and in the society's early days it had much trouble and suffered some losses from suits for wages brought against it by dissatisfied persons. Hence the stringent terms of the covenant.
They use neither Baptism nor the Lord's Supper.
In summer the women labor in the fields, to get in hay, potatoes, and in harvesting the grain.
They address each other only by the first name, use no title of any kind, and say thou (du) to all. Also they keep their hats on in a public room. The church has two doors, one for the women, the other for the men, and the sexes sit on different sides of the house.
The hotel contains a queer, old-fashioned bar, at which the general public may drink beer, cider, or California wine. In the evening the sitting-room is filled with the hired laborers of the society, and with the smoke of their pipes.
Such is Zoar. Its people would not attract attention any where; they dress and look like common laborers; their leading trustee, Jacob Ackermann, who has carried on the affairs of the society for thirty years and more, might easily be taken for a German farm-hand. It is the more wonderful to compare the people with what they have achieved. Their leader and founder taught them self-sacrifice, a desire for heavenly things, temperance, or moderation in all things, preference of others to themselves, contentment—and these virtues, together with a prudence in the management of their affairs which has kept them out of debt since they paid for their land, and uprightness in their agents which has protected them against defalcations, have wrought, with very humble intelligence, and very narrow means at the beginning, the result one now sees at Zoar.
THE SHAKERS.
I.
The Shakers have the oldest existing communistic societies on this continent. They are also the most thoroughly organized, and in some respects the most successful and flourishing.
Mount Lebanon, the parent society, and still the thriftiest, was established in 1792, eighty-two years ago.