Quaker Hill Part 13

CHAPTER VII.

THE SOCIAL WELFARE.

Quaker Hill is an example of the working of a religious and economic system toward its inevitable results in social welfare. The results consciously sought were mainly personal. They were not seeking culture or security or equity, and not attempting to create a community, those early Quakers; but they sought with all their heart and mind after prosperity, individual and communal; after vitality, morality and that self-expression which is in the form of self-sacrifice or altruism in "the service of others." The conscious mind of the Quaker fathers of this community was other-worldly, except in the matters of business--of which more later. That "spiritual" state of mind was intensely individual. All the interests it regarded were of the self, conceived as an inner, immaterial duplicate of the body, destined for heaven after death, and now enjoying interchanges of experience, especially of emotion and intelligence, with the Deity, during life.

It was a mind consciously framed to serve personal development, with no thought of public or common interests. Yet subconsciously the Quaker was acutely aware of common interests. A Quaker frequently uses the expression "I feel myself in unity with them." Their doctrine of the indwelling of the divine in every man made them quick to feel common emotion. Their group-sympathy was lively and strong. They felt the community, though they never thought upon it. Subconsciously, though not consciously, they were public-spirited. They acted upon a fine social spirit, thought they taught no social gospel.

"The supreme result of efficient organization,"[37] says Professor F.

H. Giddings, "and the supreme test of efficiency is the development of the personality of the social man. If the man himself becomes less social, less rational, less manly; if he falls from the highest type, which seeks self-realization through a critical intelligence and emotional control, to one of those lower types which manifest only the primitive virtues of power; if he becomes unsocial, the social organization, whatever its apparent merits, is failing to achieve its supreme object. If, on the contrary, the man is becoming ever better as a human being, more rational, more sympathetic, with an ever broadening consciousness of kind, then, whatever its apparent defects, the social organization is sound and efficient." Let us consider whether Quaker Hill has met this test. It has been well organized. It has had definite purposes. What has been the type of welfare enjoyed as a result? What kind of man has emerged from almost two centuries of cultivation of a religious and economic ideal?

In economic operations the Quakers dwelt in this world. They sought a living and they sought wealth--not for the services wealth can render in culture and education, but to acc.u.mulate it, possess it, invest and manage it, and to live "in plainness."

Yet they subconsciously did also seek after a prosperity that should be general. Not closely, not in any declarations or definite teachings of their code, but still in a real way, as a by-product of their code of life, they acted so that none in their community should be in want. This they did with profound wisdom--for they taught no communal doctrine--and the details of their action toward weaker members of the neighborhood were uncommonly shrewd and sensible. I will show later the effects of this in the fact that the population under our study shows the absence of defective cla.s.ses in a significant degree. There are no idiots, no defective, no criminal, no pauper cla.s.ses among the Quaker Hill population.

The mind of the community had, indeed, an active interest in liberty and the contribution noted above (see Ch. IV. Part I) in the agitation for the abolition of slavery in this state was an act of public spirit along the lines of a great national experience. The fact that the meeting of Friends in 1767 was held on Quaker Hill, which initiated effective action against slave-holding, is much cherished on the Hill, and is commemorated in a stone and bronze memorial at the Meeting House.

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 size of the holdings of land on the Hill, and the curve of increase and decrease for seventy years, are exhibited in Table II.

TABLE II.

_Land-Holdings on Quaker Hill: Acreages on which Owners are taxed._

Years 1835 1845 1865 1875 1890 1900 1906 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ No. Owners 31 26 39 51 48 53 42 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Highest Acreage 610 540 445 420 540 540 540 Higher Quartile 378 260 225 225 183.5 222.5 265 Average 222 206 150.5 147.8 137.8 154 184.2 Median 187 150 131 120 104 120 155.5 Lower Quartile 80 100 59 52 43.5 57 90 Lowest Acreage 1 42 3 6 5 1 6

The above table gives in a graphic manner the tendency of wealth to increase, on the Hill, so far as wealth is represented in land. It is to be noted that these figures, taken from the Tax-Lists of the town of Pawling, are not precisely accurate, especially in the lower ranges.

There is an evident inaccuracy in the reporting of the smaller places.

Yet from them the following may be inferred: First, that from the beginning of the reports, which was about the end of the period of the Quaker Community, there was a shrinkage in the size of the land-holdings on the Hill; and from the beginning of the period of the Mixed Community a rise in the general averages. The lowest of the curve is about 1890, in the Median, the average and in each of the quartiles. Second, the incoming of the Irish immigrants, who began to be land-holders about 1850, multiplied the number of small holdings of land.

Just what cause has operated in the years 1890-1906 to increase the size of the holdings of land it is hard to say, unless it be the expectation that land would have a value, which is aroused by the presence on the Hill every summer of visitors to a number equal to the numbers of the resident population. It is evident at the present time, when the "milk business" has been reduced to half in the past five years, that the farmers are holding their lands with a hope of selling.

It is worthy of remark that the tax-list of the town furnish no other data of reliable value, or even of suggestion, being obviously inaccurate and uneven in their reports of the values of land, and of the holdings of personal property.

The fact that is not recorded in the above statistics is this: that certain owners, a.s.sociated in close family ties, own all the land of greatest value. Seven family groups possess, in the names of eleven of the above owners, all the land near the Hotel, all the land for which any one has ever thought of charging more than fifty dollars an acre.

These eleven owners of all the land of greatest value possess probably nine-tenths of the personal property.

Holdings of property on Quaker Hill are very unequal. The smallest owner of real estate has an acre, and the largest about six hundred acres.

Contrasts here are sharp and permanent. The same families have possessed certain properties for many decades, often for two centuries; and generally Quaker Hill families do not sell till they all die or move away.

Wealth is increasing on Quaker Hill in the slow course of years, and probably along the lines of present growth, will increase. It is distributed with marked inequality. The tendency, especially in central territory, is toward increasing inequality. There is "a small group at a high degree."

Yet the community is generally prosperous and well-to-do. There are none poor. Indeed, the wealthy women who began to come to Mizzen-Top Hotel in 1880, looking about for some poor to a.s.sist, were obliged to go off the Hill to the south, and lay hold of a lonely female with a curious nervous malady but self-respecting withal, and deliberately pauperize her. To this process, after some initial struggles, she has submitted through these intervening years. She has now for years been pensioned by the church in Akin Hall through the year, visited in summer by people in carriages, has maintained an extensive begging correspondence through the mails all winter, and has been generally despised by her neighbors.

But she has represented to interested clergymen and charity workers on their summer vacations the fascinating and mysterious problem of poverty.[38]

Very few indeed have been the defectives. I know of none in ten years.

The prevailing vitality of the community is high. There were living two years ago five persons past ninety; and one of them died in his hundredth year. Octogenarians drive the roads every day, and manage their estates with ripe discretion and unabated interest in affairs. The religious revival referred to (see Chapter VI) brought into the church an active man of great wealth of ninety-five years of age.

There are no blind persons. One old man, who suffered from cataract, lost an eye in an operation at eighty-five years of age; and refused to submit the other eye-ball to the surgeon. There are no deaf and dumb.

People on Quaker Hill are well-born. I suppose this may be in part due to the high morality of their fathers. I attribute it, in view of the contrast in this respect to the contiguous population in Sherman, Conn., to the highly organic communal life of Quaker Hill. Connecticut people, some of them of the same original Quaker stock, have settled on small holdings of lands, and held them till isolation and poverty have driven them to suicide, insanity or other miseries. Quaker Hill was from the beginning differentiated into a healthier diversity, and it has been the better for her people.

There are few mentally abnormal persons in the community. One may designate three persons as unbalanced, two of them unmarried women; and another such as probably insane, though residing at home. But even the aged do not die first in the head. There are no idiotic persons.

The prevailing morality is high. Very few would be cla.s.sified as immoral, by the public disapproval of their conduct. Individuals have committed theft, or an act of cruelty, or adultery, in the years 1895-1905. They do not const.i.tute cla.s.ses.

The sociality of Quaker Hill seems to the writer relatively high.

Response to a case of real need is prompt, wise and abundant; and common action for others is heartily begun and completed. There are no unsocialized persons; neither paupers, criminals, nor degraded, in the community; at least no cla.s.s or cla.s.ses of such. There is a man who perhaps drinks too much and too often; but even he is too far from the saloon to attain to the dignity of neighborhood drunkard.

Quaker Hill has not been of a mind to contribute inst.i.tutions or resources to the public. Toward war hostile, toward the state always impa.s.sive, sometimes actively disloyal in times of war, Quaker Hill has lived a life apart.

Common school privileges are offered to all in the three school houses at Sites 12, 43 and 101 (school districts No. 1, 3, 4) and the advantages offered are generally studiously appropriated by the young.

In the ten years under study two families alone have been unwilling to take full advantage of the school opportunities.

In the school at Site 43, for which alone an improved, modern building has been erected, there was, beginning in 1893, a determined effort made to provide a school better than the ordinary country school. By the co-operation of certain farmers with children in school, and through contributions of citizens of means who had no children, better teachers were employed, at increased expense, for the s.p.a.ce of twelve years.

During two years the school was graded, employing two teachers. But the effort in this direction seems to have ceased with the close of the year 1905-1906. This school has had, for the years 1904-6, only one Protestant child, in an enrollment of twenty to thirty.

The other school-districts are maintained "in the old back-country way,"

their attendance is small and no effort is made to raise the standard of teaching.

It has been accepted for generations among the authoritative leaders on Quaker Hill that "higher education was not good for the poor." Of this doctrine, Albert Akin, generally progressive, was a firm believer. He insisted, and other representatives of the leading families have done the same, that "to offer them higher education only makes them discontented"; "they won't work if you get them to studying--and somebody must do the work."

It seems in strict harmony with this opinion, which I never heard opposed on the Hill, that Quaker Hill has never until 1904 sent a young man or woman through the college or university. Albert J. Akin, 2d, was a member of cla.s.s of 1904 of Columbia University, but he was not born on the Hill, and never long resided there. Indeed, the town of Pawling has not another college graduate among its sons. There have been, however, a few who have gone to school to the grade of high school and no normal schools. In the past ten years ten young men and women have done so. One youth all but completed a college course in 1906. Two young women are just completing courses as nurses.

Personality is the field in which the conscious purpose cherished on Quaker Hill would have wrought its best efforts. But personality was always on Quaker Hill inhibited, restrained and schooled into mediocrity. Variation was repressed. Spontaneity was forbidden.

Ingenuous spirits were firmly and effectively directed into channels believed to be harmless.

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.

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 G.o.d in every man, and therefore a community was formed, a community indeed which was no one's conscious care. In the chapter upon "The Common Mind," above, I have showed that all the leaders of the community as a whole, save one, have been outsiders, who came to see the integrity of the community with eyes of "the world's people," and these leaders in communal service have been grudgingly followed.

That one, Albert J. Akin, who founded Akin Hall a.s.sociation, lived away from Quaker Hill, in New York City, the most of the months of fifty years, 1830-1880, and fell under the influence of outsiders.[39]

Indeed, a rare beauty characterizes these children of the old Quaker Community; and a fine harmony blends the members of the Mixed Community into one another. The type of country gentleman and lady was perfectly embodied in James J. Vanderburgh, who died about 1889, in his residence at Site 30. He was a good man, hospitable, large-minded, well read, humane; he was sufficiently reverent to be good neighbor to the Orthodox; and he was sufficiently wealthy to express the Quaker economic ideal. He had the Quaker genius of thrift expressing itself in bounty.

Mrs. Zayde Akin Bancroft, resident at Site 32, who died in 1896, was an example of the ideal Quaker Hill lady. 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.

No one quite so much embodied that ideal as Albert J. Akin, who died in his hundredth year, in January, 1903. His fortune, which amounted at his death to more than two million dollars, was the culmination of the wealth of his family, acquired since his great-great-grandfather, David Akin, the pioneer, came to Quaker Hill about 1730. He was a far-seeing and brilliant investor, and through his long business life, which lasted until 1901, he followed the growth of railroads in the United States with steady optimism, and almost unvarying profit. After the year 1880 he came to live on Quaker Hill, in the interest of his health, more constantly than he had in the preceding fifty years. He at once interested himself in local enterprises, and Akin Hall a.s.sociation and Mizzen-Top Hotel were at that time founded by him and others. Until his death, twenty-three years later, he was the leading citizen and the most interesting personality among this social population. Such was his place and so masterful as well as constructive his influence that it was a true expression of the feeling of all which one resident wrote at that time to another: "The king is dead, the man on whom we unconsciously leaned and whom none of us thought of disobeying, though only his personality held us to allegiance, is gone from us. And I for one feel that I have lost a dear friend."