These people lived in perfect equality; and their community proved that a community of men and women (unburthened with children) could by an amount of labour by no means excessive, or even arduous, provide themselves with an ample sufficiency of all things needful for their material well-being and comfort. It is true that they paid no rent, but I am disposed to think, from what I heard, that they might have paid a moderate rent for the land they cultivated, and still continued to do well. But it was impossible to avoid the reflection that this well-being was merely that of well-kept animals. There was an air of unmistakable stupidity over the whole establishment. Nobody laughed. Nobody seemed to converse. There was excellent lodging, clothing, and food in plenty till they died! And that was all. Perhaps it may be fairly assumed that no one, save people of very mediocre powers and intelligence, had ever felt tempted to become a Shaking Quaker. But it can hardly be said that their experiment exhibited a very tempting sample of a world to be modelled after their fashion! It has been said by some observers that this materially flourishing establishment has so many points of similarity with the conventual institutions of Roman Catholicism that it may be considered as supplying the same natural want to which those institutions are supposed to correspond, an asylum, that is to say, for those of either sex, who, from various circumstances of fortune, or of temperament, are unfitted for the struggles of the world, and find themselves left stranded on the banks of the great social stream. The impressions I received from my visit to Mount Lebanon do not dispose me to accept any such explanation of the Shaking Quaker _raison d’être_. I saw no signs whatever, among either the men or the women, of individuals who had been tempest-tossed in any of the world’s _maelstroms_, or of temperaments for which the contemplative life might be supposed to have had greater attractions than the active life of the world. The characteristics which were most notably observable were of a diametrically opposed kind. One would say that they were men and women thoroughly and unanimously minded to make for themselves in the most judiciously contrived manner a comfortable and clean sty, with abundant and perennial supply of everything needed for their bodily wants. Whether love or hatred, as they are found to exist in monastic communities, existed among them, of course I had not sufficient opportunity for even guessing. But assuredly it may be said with some confidence of not being mistaken, that neither those nor any other passions had left any of their usual marks on those sleek bodies and placid meaningless faces. One would have said that the main and engrossing object of existence at Mount Lebanon was digesting. I have recently learned that the community continues to exist under the same conditions as those under which I saw it.