Quaker Hill: A Sociological StudyWilson, Warren H. (Warren Hugh)
Religion
Quaker Hill: A Sociological Study
Wilson, Warren H. (Warren Hugh)
Quaker Hill (N.Y.)
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 accumulate 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 classes in a significant degree. There are no idiots, no
defective, no criminal, no pauper classes among the Quaker Hill
population.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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