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. CHAPTER IV. THE COMMON MIND.