ition may
have been general throughout the Eastern States.

Let the doctrinal causes of this schism be considered elsewhere.[32]
Economic causes are hinted at in the above paragraphs. There came in
many embellishments of life which must have seemed to early Friends mere
luxuries, and to the stricter few must have appeared instruments of sin,
as "beads," "ribbons," velvet, silk, braid, crepe, shawls, dress
handkerchiefs, buckles, silk flags, pearl buttons--these are expressions
of new states of mind. The economic change underlying the social
convulsion is seen in the increase of varied stuffs for costume,
articles and materials for the food and medicine cupboards of the
farmhouses, and in more varied tools and materials both for industry and
house furnishing.

Even more influential than the exciting power of luxuries would be the
quieter and more pervasive stimulus of comfort. Houses that are glazed
and ceiled and furnished with well adapted implements in every room;
tables set with all the wares of leisurely and pleasurable feeding speak
a new state of affairs. The people so clothed and so fed begin to
produce in every family some members of cultured tastes, some of
independent thought, who are restive under the denials of Quakerism.

Business and industry too become more varied; and the effect of this
prosperous and varied industry shows itself in active and critical
minds. Importation from places beyond Poughkeepsie awakened imagination
and invited reflection upon the state of the world.

All this time the daily wage continued to fall, from $1 and $1.50 in
1814 to 50c., 65c. and 75c. in 1833. It is said that men bitterly
commented, in those days of the rapid development of the country, that a
farmer who paid a laborer fifty cents for a day's labor in the hay-field
from daybreak to dark, would pay the same amount, fifty cents, for his
supper on the Hudson River boat, when he made his annual visit to the
great city of New York.

We have, then, in John Toffey's daybook a reflection of conditions
which had to do with the break-up of the community, as truly as did the
theological difference between Elias Hicks and the Orthodox. Comfortable
living, diversified and intensified industry, importation of expensive
and stimulating comforts, leisure with its sources in wealth, and its
tendencies toward reflection, and especially a differentiation of the
homogeneous community into diverse classes, owing to lowered wages and