iction; and the variations from plainness
in the direction of gayety were sternly denounced as immoral. Also the
struggle with the wilderness occupied and exhausted the powers of the
exceptional as well as of the average man. But when with wealth came
leisure, there were born sons of the Quakers who rebelled against the
discipline of life that repressed variation, who demanded
self-expression in dress, in language, in tastes, and in pleasures.
Gradually but surely, as the outside world was brought nearer, these
persons were influenced in their restiveness by books and examples, by
imitation and other stimuli from new sources, until they cast off in
their minds the Quaker ideal of plainness. To be ordinary no longer
seemed to them a way of goodness. They were oppressed and stifled by the
ban of the meeting upon variation. And though the ideal of plainness has
subtly ruled them even in their rebellion and freedom, it has done so by
its negative power, in that the community has never furnished
exceptional education. The positive dominion of the meeting broken, the
negative "plainness" of the community rules all the children of the Hill
to this day. So few are the sources of individual variation furnished,
in the form of books, music, education, art, that no son or daughter of
Quaker Hill has attained a place of note even in New York State. The
ideal of "plainness" has been an effectual restraint.

CHAPTER IV.

THE COMMON MIND.

The common mind has been formed to a great degree by strong
personalities; for the common mind has held an ideal of perfection in a
person. The force which at the beginning assembled its elements was
personal. The type represented by George Fox, as interpreted by Barclay,
embodied this influence. In all the history of the place response to
strong personality has been immediate and general. The past is a history
of names. William Russell led the community in erecting a Meeting House,
and then a second one--which still stands. Ferriss, the early settler,
located the meeting house on his land, as later Osborn located the
Orthodox Meeting House, at the Division, on his land. Judge Daniel Akin,
in the early Nineteenth Century, was a leader of the economic activities
of this Quaker community, then differentiating themselves from the
religious. So, too, his nephew, Albert Akin, in the last half of that
century was a leader, gathering up the money of the wealthy farmers to
invest in railroads, fo