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. The Shakers have eighteen societies, scattered over seven states; but each of these societies contains several families; and as each "family" is practically, and for all pecuniary and property ends, a distinct commune, there are in fact fifty-eight Shaker communities, which I have found to be in a more or less prosperous condition. These fifty-eight families contain an aggregate population of 2415 souls, and own real estate amounting to about one hundred thousand acres, of which nearly fifty thousand are in their own home farms. Moreover, the Shakers have, as will be seen further on, a pretty thoroughly developed and elaborate system of theology; and a considerable literature of their own, to which they attach great importance.