[Footnote 15: The biographies of Quakers and ex-Quakers amount to about 3 per cent. of the whole of the entries in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ (1885-1904), reckoning from 1675.] There must have been in the sober Quaker homes, where affection ruled without softness, where love was heroic rather than sentimental, many who followed, not as imitators, but with all the strength of an original impulse the pathway chosen by those who have been willing to pay the price of an enhanced spiritual life; the withdrawal, in varying measure, from the values and standards accepted by the world at large. They kept watch. They worked amongst their fellows in a dusk between memory and anticipation. They felt to the uttermost and fought to the uttermost the weakness of the self. They were faithful, and in due time the society as a whole felt the breath of revival. [Footnote 16: Ackworth was founded in 1779, Sidcot remodelled on Quaker lines in 1808, the present Saffron Walden School opened in Islington in 1811, and several others since both in England and Ireland, all now open to the general public.] CHAPTER V QUAKERISM IN AMERICA The American colonies seemed to the early leaders of the Quaker movement to offer at once a field for the free development of their faith and a base whence they might spread to the ends of the earth. The possibility of buying land from the Indians was being discussed in the society as early as 1660. But though, it is true, Quaker influence was decisive in establishing religious toleration in America, though the relationship between the native tribes and the colonists was transformed through their substitution of unarmed treaty parties for the existing methods of intimidation and of strictly fair dealing for dishonesty and contract-breaking, though they initiated and took the lion's share in the abolition of slavery,[17] and established the precedent of a State founded on brotherly love, although they did more than any other group of refugees or body of colonists to settle the foundations of the religious and civil life of the country; yet the texture of the religious life of the American people is to-day largely Puritan Protestantism, and of the Quaker influence in government there remains not a trace.