Quaker Types in Pennsylvania
The arrival of colonists in Pennsylvania in greater numbers than
in Delaware and the Jerseys was the more notable because, within a
few years after Pennsylvania was founded, persecution of the Quakers
ceased in England and one prolific cause of their migration was no
more. Thirteen hundred Quakers were released from prison in 1686 by
James II; and in 1689, when William of Orange took the throne,
toleration was extended to the Quakers and other Protestant
dissenters.
The success of the first Quakers who came to America brought others
even after persecution ceased in England. The most numerous class of
immigrants for the first fifteen or twenty years were Welsh, most of
whom were Quakers with a few Baptists and Church of England people.
They may have come not so much from a desire to flee from
persecution as to build up a little Welsh community and to revive
Welsh nationalism. In their new surroundings they spoke their own
Welsh language and very few of them had learned English. They had
been encouraged in their national aspirations by an agreement with
Penn that they were to have a tract of 40,000 acres where they could
live by themselves. The land assigned to them lay west of
Philadelphia in that high ridge along the present main line of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, now so noted for its wealthy suburban homes.
All the important names of townships and places in that region, such
as Wynnewood, St. Davids, Berwyn, Bryn Mawr, Merion, Haverford,
Radnor, are Welsh in origin. Some of the Welsh spread round to the
north of Philadelphia, where names like Gwynedd and Penllyn remain
as their memorials. The Chester Valley bordering the high ridge of
their first settlement they called Duffrin Mawr or Great Valley.
These Welsh, like so many of the Quakers, were of a well-to-do
class. They rapidly developed their fertile land and, for pioneers,
lived quite luxuriously. They had none of the usual county and
township officers but ruled their Welsh Barony, as it was called,
through the authority of their Quaker meetings. But this system
eventually disappeared. The Welsh were absorbed into the English
population, and in a couple of generations their language
disappeared. Prominent people are descended from them. David
Rittenhouse, the astronomer, was Welsh on his mother's side. David
Lloyd, for a long time the leader of the popular party and at one
time Chief Justice, was a Welshman. Since the Revolution the Welsh
names of Cadwalader and Meredith have been conspicuous.
The Church of England people formed a curious and decidedly hostile
element in the early population of Pennsylvania. They established
themselves in Philadelphia in the beginning and rapidly grew into a
political party which, while it cannot be called very strong in
numbers, was important in ability and influence. After Penn's death,
his sons joined the Church of England, and the Churchmen in the
province became still stronger. They formed the basis of the
proprietary party, filled executive offices in the Government, and
waged relentless war against the Quaker majority which controlled
the Legislature. During Penn's lifetime the Churchmen were naturally
opposed to the whole government, both executive and legislative.
They were constantly sending home to England all sorts of reports
and information calculated to show that the Quakers were unfit to
rule a province, that Penn should be deprived of his charter, and
that Pennsylvania should be put under the direct rule of the King.
They had delightful schemes for making it a strong Church of England
colony like Virginia. One of them suggested that, as the title to
the Three Lower Counties, as Delaware was called, was in dispute, it
should be taken by the Crown and given to the Church as a manor to
support a bishop. Such an ecclesiastic certainly could have lived in
princely state from the rents of its fertile farms, with a palace,
retinue, chamberlains, chancellors, feudal courts, and all the
appendages of earthly glory. For the sake of the picturesqueness of
colonial history it is perhaps a pity that this pious plan was never
carried out.
As it was, however, the Churchmen established themselves with not a
little glamour and romance round two institutions, Christ Church for
the first fifty years, and after that round the old College of
Philadelphia. The Reverend William Smith, a pugnacious and eloquent
Scotchman, led them in many a gallant onset against the "haughty
tribe" of Quakers, and he even suffered imprisonment in the cause.
He had a country seat on the Schuylkill and was in his way a fine
character, devoted to the establishment of ecclesiasticism and
higher learning as a bulwark against the menace of Quaker
fanaticism; and but for the coming on of the Revolution he might
have become the first colonial bishop with all the palaces, pomp,
and glory appertaining thereunto.
In spite of this opposition, however, the Quakers continued their
control of the colony, serenely tolerating the anathemas of the
learned Churchmen and the fierce curses and brandished weapons of
the Presbyterians and Scotch-Irish. Curses and anathemas were no
check to the fertile soil. Grist continued to come to the mill; and
the agricultural products poured into Philadelphia to be carried
away in the ships. The contemplative Quaker took his profits as they
passed; enacted his liberalizing laws, his prison reform, his
charities, his peace with the savage Indians; allowed science,
research, and all the kindly arts of life to flourish; and seemed
perfectly contented with the damnation in the other world to which
those who flourished under his rule consigned him.
In discussing the remarkable success of the province, the colonists
always disputed whether the credit should be given to the fertile
soil or to the liberal laws and constitution. It was no doubt due to
both. But the obvious advantages of Penn's charter over the mixed
and troublesome governmental conditions in the Jerseys, Penn's
personal fame and the repute of the Quakers for liberalism then at
its zenith, and the wide advertising given to their ideas and
Penn's, on the continent of Europe as well as in England, seem to
have been the reasons why more people, and many besides Quakers,
came to take advantage of that fertile soil.
The first great increase of alien population came from Germany,
which was still in a state of religious turmoil, disunion, and
depression from the results of the Reformation and the Thirty Years'
War. The reaction from dogma in Germany had produced a multitude of
sects, all yearning for greater liberty and prosperity than they had
at home. Penn and other Quakers had made missionary tours in Germany
and had preached to the people. The Germans do not appear to have
been asked to come to the Jerseys. But they were urged to come to
Pennsylvania as soon as the charter was obtained; and many of them
made an immediate response. The German mind was then at the height
of its emotional unrestraint. It was as unaccustomed to liberty of
thought as to political liberty and it produced a new sect or
religious distinction almost every day. Many of these sects came to
Pennsylvania, where new small religious bodies sprang up among them
after their arrival. Schwenkfelders, Tunkers, Labadists, New Born,
New Mooners, Separatists, Zion's Brueder, Ronsdorfer, Inspired,
Quietists, Gichtelians, Depellians, Mountain Men, River Brethren,
Brinser Brethren, and the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness,
are names which occur in the annals of the province. But these are
only a few. In Lancaster County alone the number has at different
times been estimated at from twenty to thirty. It would probably be
impossible to make a complete list; some of them, indeed, existed
for only a few years. Their own writers describe them as countless
and bewildering. Many of them were characterized by the strangest
sort of German mysticism, and some of them were inclined to monastic
and hermit life and their devotees often lived in caves or solitary
huts in the woods.
It would hardly be accurate to call all the German sects Quakers,
since a great deal of their mysticism would have been anything but
congenial to the followers of Fox and Penn. Resemblances to Quaker
doctrine can, however, be found among many of them; and there was
one large sect, the Mennonites, who were often spoken of as German
Quakers. The two divisions fraternized and preached in each other's
meetings. The Mennonites were well educated as a class and
Pastorius, their leader, was a ponderously learned German. Most of
the German sects left the Quakers in undisturbed possession of
Philadelphia, and spread out into the surrounding region, which was
then a wilderness. They and all the other Germans who afterwards
followed them settled in a half circle beginning at Easton on the
Delaware, passing up the Lehigh Valley into Lancaster County, thence
across the Susquehanna and down the Cumberland Valley to the
Maryland border, which many of them crossed, and in time scattered
far to the south in Virginia and even North Carolina, where their
descendants are still found.
These German sects which came over under the influence of Penn and
the Quakers, between the years 1682 and 1702, formed a class by
themselves. Though they may be regarded as peculiar in their ideas
and often in their manner of life, it cannot be denied that as a
class they were a well-educated, thrifty, and excellent people and
far superior to the rough German peasants who followed them in later
years. This latter class was often spoken of in Pennsylvania as "the
church people," to distinguish them from "the sects," as those of
the earlier migration were called.
The church people, or peasantry of the later migration, belonged
usually to one of the two dominant churches of Germany, the Lutheran
or the Reformed. Those of the Reformed Church were often spoken of
as Calvinists. This migration of the church people was not due to
the example of the Quakers but was the result of a new policy which
was adopted by the British Government when Queen Anne ascended the
throne in 1702, and which aimed at keeping the English people at
home and at filling the English colonies in America with foreign
Protestants hostile to France and Spain.
Large numbers of these immigrants were "redemptioners," as they were
called; that is to say, they were persons who had been obliged to
sell themselves to the shipping agents to pay for their passage. On
their arrival in Pennsylvania the captain sold them to the colonists
to pay the passage, and the redemptioner had to work for his owner
for a period varying from five to ten years. No stigma or disgrace
clung to any of these people under this system. It was regarded as a
necessary business transaction. Not a few of the very respectable
families of the State and some of its prominent men are known to be
descended from redemptioners.
This method of transporting colonists proved a profitable trade for
the shipping people, and was soon regularly organized like the
modern assisted immigration. Agents, called "newlanders" and
"soul-sellers," traveled through Germany working up the
transatlantic traffic by various devices, some of them not
altogether creditable. Pennsylvania proved to be the most attractive
region for these immigrants. Some of those who were taken to other
colonies finally worked their way to Pennsylvania. Practically none
went to New England, and very few, if any, to Virginia. Indeed, only
certain colonies were willing to admit them.
Another important element that went to make up the Pennsylvania
population consisted of the Scotch-Irish. They were descendants of
Scotch and English Presbyterians who had gone to Ireland to take up
the estates of the Irish rebels confiscated under Queen Elizabeth
and James I. This migration of Protestants to Ireland, which began
soon after 1600, was encouraged by the English Government. Towards
the middle of the seventeenth century the confiscation of more Irish
land under Cromwell's regime increased the migration to Ulster. Many
English joined the migration, and Scotch of the Lowlands who were
largely of English extraction, although there were many Gaelic or
Celtic names among them.
These are the people usually known in English history as
Ulstermen--the same who made such a heroic defense of Londonderry
against James II, and the same who in modern times have resisted
home rule in Ireland because it would bury them, they believe, under
the tyranny of their old enemies, the native Irish Catholic
majority. They were more thrifty and industrious than the native
Irish and as a result they usually prospered on the Irish land. At
first they were in a more or less constant state of war with the
native Irish, who attempted to expel them. They were subsequently
persecuted by the Church of England under Charles I, who attempted
to force them to conform to the English established religion. Such a
rugged schooling in Ireland made of them a very aggressive, hardy
people, Protestants of the Protestants, so accustomed to contests
and warfare that they accepted it as the natural state of man.
These Ulstermen came to Pennsylvania somewhat later than the first
German sects; and not many of them arrived until some years after
1700. They were not, like the first Germans, attracted to the colony
by any resemblance of their religion to that of the Quakers. On the
contrary they were entirely out of sympathy with the Quakers, except
in the one point of religious liberty; and the Quakers were
certainly out of sympathy with them. Nearly all the colonies in
America received a share of these settlers. Wherever they went they
usually sought the frontier and the wilderness; and by the time of
the Revolution, they could be found upon the whole colonial frontier
from New Hampshire to Georgia. They were quite numerous in Virginia,
and most numerous along the edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness. It
was apparently the liberal laws and the fertile soil that drew them
to Pennsylvania in spite of their contempt for most of the Quaker
doctrines.
The dream of their life, their haven of rest, was for these
Scotch-Irish a fertile soil where they would find neither Irish
"papists" nor Church of England; and for this reason in America they
always sought the frontier where they could be by themselves. They
could not even get on well with the Germans in Pennsylvania; and
when the Germans crowded into their frontier settlements, quarrels
became so frequent that the proprietors asked the Ulstermen to move
farther west, a suggestion which they were usually quite willing to
accept. At the close of the colonial period in Pennsylvania the
Quakers, the Church of England people, and the miscellaneous
denominations occupied Philadelphia and the region round it in a
half circle from the Delaware River. Outside of this area lay
another containing the Germans, and beyond that were the
Scotch-Irish. The principal stronghold of the Scotch-Irish was the
Cumberland Valley in Southern Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna,
a region now containing the flourishing towns of Chambersburg,
Gettysburg, Carlisle, and York, where the descendants of these early
settlers are still very numerous. In modern times, however, they
have spread out widely; they are now to be found all over the State,
and they no longer desire so strongly to live by themselves.
The Ulstermen, owing to the circumstances of their earlier life, had
no sympathy whatever with the Quaker's objection to war or with his
desire to deal fairly with the Indians and pay them for their land.
As Presbyterians and Calvinists, they belonged to one of the older
and more conservative divisions of the Reformation. The Quaker's
doctrine of the inward light, his quietism, contemplation, and
advanced ideas were quite incomprehensible to them. As for the
Indians, they held that the Old Testament commands the destruction
of all the heathen; and as for paying the savages for their land, it
seemed ridiculous to waste money on such an object when they could
exterminate the natives at less cost. The Ulstermen, therefore,
settled on the Indian land as they pleased, or for that matter on
any land, and were continually getting into difficulty with the
Pennsylvania Government no less than with the Indians. They regarded
any region into which they entered as constituting a sovereign
state. It was this feeling of independence which subsequently
prompted them to organize what is known as the Whisky Rebellion
when, after the Revolution, the Federal Government put a tax on the
liquor which they so much esteemed as a product, for corn converted
into whisky was more easily transported on horses over mountain
trails, and in that form fetched a better price in the markets.
After the year 1755, when the Quaker method of dealing with the
Indians no longer prevailed, the Scotch-Irish lived on the frontier
in a continual state of savage warfare which lasted for the next
forty years. War, hunting the abundant game, the deer, buffalo, and
elk, and some agriculture filled the measure of their days and
years. They paid little attention to the laws of the province, which
were difficult to enforce on the distant frontier, and they
administered a criminal code of their own with whipping or "laced
jacket," as they called it, as a punishment. They were Jacks of all
trades, weaving their own cloth and making nearly everything they
needed. They were the first people in America to develop the use of
the rifle, and they used it in the Back Country all the way down
into the Carolinas at a time when it was seldom seen in the seaboard
settlements. In those days, rifles were largely manufactured in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and there were several famous gunsmiths in
Philadelphia. Some of the best of these old rifles have been
preserved and are really beautiful weapons, with delicate hair
triggers, gracefully curved stocks, and quaint brass or even gold or
silver mountings. The ornamentation was often done by the hunter
himself, who would melt a gold or silver coin and pour it into some
design which he had carved with his knife in the stock.
The Revolution offered an opportunity after the Ulstermen's heart,
and they entered it with their entire spirit, as they had every
other contest which involved liberty and independence. In fact, in
that period they played such a conspicuous part that they almost
ruled Philadelphia, the original home of the Quakers. Since then,
spread out through the State, they have always had great influence,
the natural result of their energy, intelligence, and love of
education.
Nearly all these diverse elements of the Pennsylvania population
were decidedly sectional in character. The Welsh had a language of
their own, and they attempted, though without success, to maintain
it, as well as a government of their own within their barony
independent of the regular government of the province. The Germans
were also extremely sectional. They clung with better success to
their own language, customs, and literature. The Scotch-Irish were
so clannish that they had ideas of founding a separate province on
the Susquehanna. Even the Church of England people were so aloof and
partisan that, though they lived about Philadelphia among the
Quakers, they were extremely hostile to the Quaker rule and
unremittingly strove to destroy it.
All these cleavages and divisions in the population continue in
their effects to this day. They prevented the development of a
homogeneous population. No exact statistics were taken of the
numbers of the different nationalities in colonial times; but
Franklin's estimate is probably fairly accurate, and his position in
practical politics gave him the means of knowing and of testing his
calculations. About the year 1750 he estimated the population as
one-third Quaker, one-third German, and one-third miscellaneous.
This gave about 50,000 or 60,000 to each of the thirds. Provost
Smith, of the newly founded college, estimated the Quakers at only
about 40,000. But his estimate seems too low. He was interested in
making out their numbers small because he was trying to show the
absurdity of allowing such a small band of fanatics and heretics to
rule a great province of the British Empire. One great source of the
Quaker power lay in the sympathy of the Germans, who always voted on
their side and kept them in control of the Legislature, so that it
was in reality a case of two-thirds ruling one-third. The Quakers,
it must be admitted, never lost their heads. Unperturbed through all
the conflicts and the jarring of races and sects, they held their
position unimpaired and kept the confidence and support of the
Germans until the Revolution changed everything.
The varied elements of population spread out in ever widening half
circles from Philadelphia as a center. There was nothing in the
character of the region to stop this progress. The country all the
way westward to the Susquehanna was easy hill, dale, and valley,
covered by a magnificent growth of large forest trees--oaks,
beeches, poplars, walnuts, hickories, and ash--which rewarded the
labor of felling by exposing to cultivation a most fruitful soil.
The settlers followed the old Indian trails. The first westward
pioneers seem to have been the Welsh Quakers, who pushed due west
from Philadelphia and marked out the course of the famous Lancaster
Road, afterwards the Lancaster Turnpike. It took the line of least
resistance along the old trail, following ridges until it reached
the Susquehanna at a spot where an Indian trader, named Harris,
established himself and founded a post which subsequently became
Harrisburg, the capital of the State.
For a hundred years the Lancaster Road was the great highway
westward, at first to the mountains, then to the Ohio, and finally
to the Mississippi Valley and the Great West. Immigrants and
pioneers from all the New England and Middle States flocked out that
way to the land of promise in wagons, or horseback, or trudging
along on foot. Substantial taverns grew up along the route; and
habitual freighters and stage drivers, proud of their fine teams of
horses, grew into characters of the road. When the Pennsylvania
Railroad was built, it followed the same line. In fact, most of the
lines of railroad in the State follow Indian trails. The trails for
trade and tribal intercourse led east and west. The warrior trails
usually led north and south, for that had long been the line of
strategy and conquest of the tribes. The northern tribes, or Six
Nations, established in the lake region of New York near the
headwaters of the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Ohio, had the
advantage of these river valleys for descending into the whole
Atlantic seaboard and the valley of the Mississippi. They had in
consequence conquered all the tribes south of them as far even as
the Carolinas and Georgia. All their trails of conquest led across
Pennsylvania.
The Germans in their expansion at first seem to have followed up the
Schuylkill Valley and its tributaries, and they hold this region to
the present day. Gradually they crossed the watershed to the
Susquehanna and broke into the region of the famous limestone soil
in Lancaster County, a veritable farmer's paradise from which
nothing will ever drive them. Many Quaker farmers penetrated north
and northeast from Philadelphia into Bucks County, a fine rolling
and hilly wheat and corn region, where their descendants are still
found and whence not a few well-known Philadelphia families have
come.
The Quaker government of Pennsylvania in almost a century of its
existence largely fulfilled its ideals. It did not succeed in
governing without war; but the war was not its fault. It did succeed
in governing without oaths. An affirmation instead of an oath became
the law of Pennsylvania for all who chose an affirmation; and this
law was soon adopted by most American communities. It succeeded in
establishing religious liberty in Pennsylvania in the fullest sense
of the word. It brought Christianity nearer to its original
simplicity and made it less superstitious and cruel.
The Quakers had always maintained that it was a mistake to suppose
that their ideas would interfere with material prosperity and
happiness; and they certainly proved their contention in
Pennsylvania. To Quaker liberalism was due not merely the material
prosperity, but prison reform and the notable public charities of
Pennsylvania; in both of which activities, as in the abolition of
slavery, the Quakers were leaders. Original research in science also
flourished in a marked degree in colonial Pennsylvania. No one in
those days knew the nature of thunder and lightning, and the old
explanation that they were the voice of an angry God was for many a
sufficient explanation. Franklin, by a long series of experiments in
the free Quaker colony, finally proved in 1752 that lightning was
electricity, that is to say, a manifestation of the same force that
is produced when glass is rubbed with buckskin. He invented the
lightning rod, discovered the phenomenon of positive and negative
electricity, explained the action of the Leyden jar, and was the
first American writer on the modern science of political economy.
This energetic citizen of Pennsylvania spent a large part of his
life in research; he studied the Gulf Stream, storms and their
causes, waterspouts, whirlwinds; and he established the fact that
the northeast storms of the Atlantic coast usually move against the
wind.
But Franklin was not the only scientist in the colony. Besides his
three friends, Kinnersley, Hopkinson, and Syng, who worked with him
and helped him in his discoveries, there were David Rittenhouse, the
astronomer, John Bartram, the botanist, and a host of others.
Rittenhouse excelled in every undertaking which required the
practical application of astronomy, He attracted attention even in
Europe for his orrery which indicated the movements of the stars and
which was an advance on all previous instruments of the kind. When
astronomers in Europe were seeking to have the transit of Venus of
1769 observed in different parts of the world, Pennsylvania alone of
the American colonies seems to have had the man and the apparatus
necessary for the work. Rittenhouse conducted the observations at
three points and won a world-wide reputation by the accuracy and
skill of his observations. The whole community was interested in
this scientific undertaking; the Legislature and public institutions
raised the necessary funds; and the American Philosophical Society,
the only organization of its kind in the colonies, had charge of the
preparations.
The American Philosophical Society had been started in Philadelphia
in 1743. It was the first scientific society to be founded in
America, and throughout the colonial period it was the only society
of its kind in the country. Its membership included not only
prominent men throughout America, such as Thomas Jefferson, who were
interested in scientific inquiry, but also representatives of
foreign nations. With its library of rare and valuable collections
and its annual publication of essays on almost every branch of
science, the society still continues its useful scientific work.
John Bartram, who was the first botanist to describe the plants of
the New World and who explored the whole country from the Great
Lakes to Florida, was a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times,
farmer born and bred. Thomas Godfrey, also a colonial Pennsylvanian,
was rewarded by the Royal Society of England for an improvement
which he made in the quadrant. Peter Collinson of England, a famous
naturalist and antiquarian of early times, was a Quaker. In modern
times John Dalton, the discoverer of the atomic theory of
colorblindness, was born of Quaker parents, and Edward Cope, of a
well-known Philadelphia Quaker family, became one of the most
eminent naturalists and paleontologists of the nineteenth century,
and unaided discovered over a third of the three thousand extinct
species of vertebrates recognized by men of science. In the field of
education, Lindley Murray, the grammarian of a hundred years ago,
was a Quaker. Ezra Cornell, a Quaker, founded the great university
in New York which bears his name; and Johns Hopkins, also a Quaker,
founded the university of that name in Baltimore.
Pennsylvania deserves the credit of turning these early scientific
pursuits to popular uses. The first American professorship of botany
and natural history was established in Philadelphia College, now the
University of Pennsylvania. The first American book on a medical
subject was written in Philadelphia by Thomas Cadwalader in 1740;
the first American hospital was established there in 1751; and the
first systematic instruction in medicine. Since then Philadelphia
has produced a long line of physicians and surgeons of national and
European reputation. For half a century after the Revolution the
city was the center of medical education for the country and it
still retains a large part of that preeminence. The Academy of
Natural Sciences founded in Philadelphia in 1812 by two
inconspicuous young men, an apothecary and a dentist, soon became by
the spontaneous support of the community a distinguished
institution. It sent out two Arctic expeditions, that of Kane and
that of Hayes, and has included among its members the most prominent
men of science in America. It is now the oldest as well as the most
complete institution of its kind in the country. The Franklin
Institute, founded in Philadelphia in 1824, was the result of a
similar scientific interest. It was the first institution of applied
science and the mechanic arts in America. Descriptions of the first
2900 patents issued by the United States Government are to be found
only on the pages of its Journal, which is still an authoritative
annual record.
Apart from their scientific attainments, one of the most interesting
facts about the Quakers is the large proportion of them who have
reached eminence, often in occupations which are supposed to be
somewhat inconsistent with Quaker doctrine. General Greene, the most
capable American officer of the Revolution, after Washington. was a
Rhode Island Quaker. General Mifflin of the Revolution was a
Pennsylvania Quaker. General Jacob Brown, a Bucks County
Pennsylvania Quaker, reorganized the army in the War of 1819. and
restored it to its former efficiency. In the long list of Quakers
eminent in all walks of life, not only in Pennsylvania but
elsewhere, are to be found John Bright, a lover of peace and human
liberty through a long and eminent career in British politics; John
Dickinson of Philadelphia, who wrote the famous Farmer's Letters so
signally useful in the American Revolution; Whittier, the American
poet, a Quaker born in Massachusetts of a family converted from
Puritanism when the Quakers invaded Boston in the seventeenth
century; and Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times,
an artist of permanent eminence, one of the founders of the Royal
Academy in England and its president in succession to Sir Joshua
Reynolds.
Wherever Quakers are found they are the useful and steady citizens.
Their eminence seems out of all proportion to their comparatively
small numbers. It has often been asked why this height of attainment
should occur among a people of such narrow religious discipline. But
were the Quakers really narrow, or were they any more narrow than
other rigorously self-disciplined people: Spartans, Puritans,
soldiers whose discipline enables them to achieve great results? All
discipline is in one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and retirement
probably conserved mental energy instead of dissipating it. In an
age of superstition and irrational religion, their minds were free
and unhampered, and it was the dominant rational tone of their
thought that enabled science to flourish in Pennsylvania.
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