All this time the daily wage continued to fall, from $1 and $1.50 in 1814 to 50c., 65c. and 75c. in 1833. It is said that men bitterly commented, in those days of the rapid development of the country, that a farmer who paid a laborer fifty cents for a day's labor in the hay-field from daybreak to dark, would pay the same amount, fifty cents, for his supper on the Hudson River boat, when he made his annual visit to the great city of New York.
We have, then, in John Toffey's daybook a reflection of conditions which had to do with the break-up of the community, as truly as did the theological difference between Elias Hicks and the Orthodox. Comfortable living, diversified and intensified industry, importation of expensive and stimulating comforts, leisure with its sources in wealth, and its tendencies toward reflection, and especially a differentiation of the homogeneous community into diverse classes, owing to lowered wages and multiplied embellishments of life, made up altogether the raw materials of discontent, criticism and division.
These factors go with a state of growing discontent and disintegration. The men and women possessed of leisure cultivated a humanist state of mind, with which arose a critical spirit, a nicer taste and a cultured discrimination. They were offended by literalism, bored by crudeness however much in earnest, and disgusted with the illogical assertions of pietists. The imperative mandate of the meeting awakened in them only opposition. They found many to sympathize with their state of mind.
On the other side there were those who seriously feared the incoming of luxurious ways. They distrusted books, remembering the values of one Book to the laborer who reads it alone; they believed in plainness, and their minds associated freedom of dress with freedom of thought. They resented also the new privileges conferred on some by wealth, because to most had come only harder work with discontent.
The schism which rent the community was an economic heresy, the belief in the use of money for embellishment of life. All the Quakers regarded with favor the making of money. The Liberals, however, saw ends beyond money, and processes of ultimate value beyond administration and business. They looked for household comforts, books, travel, and the leisure with great souls who have written and have expressed the greatest truths. They believed in a divinity such as could have made, and regarded with favor, the whole teeming world.
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.
One ventures to believe, too, that there was a falling away from all religious exercises at this time, and that the pious of both schools were troubled about it, and accused one another. The poor were too hard worked and too poorly paid to feel anything but discontent; and the leaders of the community differed as to the solution of the religious problem. Hence came division.
The Quakers are conscious of religious "unity," but their mode of life is a true economic unity. The Quaker Community was re-arranging itself economically, but the members felt a religious change. 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 real power has, since a period antedating the division, been in the hands of those who have owned farms centrally located; who in addition to owning land centrally located have been possessed of large means: the "rich men" and "wealthy women" have possessed a monopoly of actual leadership. If also, they have been religiously inclined, their leadership has been absolute.