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