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c, even that of simplest melody, it has come to the Hill, but it "knows not Joseph." An elderly son of Quakerism said: "You will find no Quaker or son of the Quakers who can sing; if you do find one who can sing a little, it will be a limited talent, and you will unfailingly discover that he is partly descended from the world's people." The effect of this aesthetic negation appears, it seems to the present writer, in a certain rudeness or more precisely a certain lack in the domain of manners, outside of the interests in which Quakerism has given so fine a culture. This appears to be keenly felt by the descendants of Friends. Not in business matters; for they are made directors of savings banks and corporations, and trustees, and referees, and executors of estates, in all which places they find themselves at home. Nor is it a lack of dignity and composure in the parlor or at the table. Nor is it a lack of sense of propriety in meetings of worship. But it is in matters ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility constitute the trust; in these, the men and women trained in Quakerism are lacking throughout whole areas of the mind, and lacking, too, in ethical standards, which can only appeal to those whose experience has fed on a rich diversity of sources and distinctions. In this I speak only of the Quaker group and of those who have been under its full influence. It does not apply to the Irish Catholics, nor to the incomers from the city. The Quakers and their children lack precisely those elements of aesthetic breeding which would be legitimately derived from contemplation and enjoyment of beauty aside from ethical values. Ethical beauty, divorced from pure beauty, a stern, bare, grim beauty they have, and their children and employees have. But they have little sense of order in matters that do not proceed to the ends of money-making, housekeeping and worship. They do not seem to possess instinctive fertility of moral resource. It may be due to other sources as well, but it seems to the present writer that the moral density shown by some of these birthright Quakers, upon matters outside of their wonted and trodden ethical territories, is due to their long refusal to recognize aesthetic values, and to see discriminations in the field in which ethics an
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