Excerpt from The Quakers as Makers of America

We are apt to think of the Quakers as a people of peculiarities; they are before our mind as men and women of broad-brimmed hats and poke bonnets, drab coats and gray dresses-a serious people of slow movement; a demure people, who are the victims of their own virtues. They are a peculiar people, but behind every Quaker peculiarity there is a consistent reason. The Quakers are more than an embodiment of oddities; they are an embodiment of great prin ciples and an incarnation of a grand life. Both their principles and life have entered into the bone and sinew of our. Republic, and both are still neces sary for the realization of ultimate America. The reproduction of their spirit and purpose by American citizens will make real, by and by, our manifest destiny. We wish to look at this destiny as it ex ists in germ form in the souls of our Quaker ancest ors. There is nothing more interesting or inspiring or profitable than the experience of those great souls who have helped to lead the nations up the heights of civilization and into the advances of civic life; who have lead the human race nearer to God and into genuine and abiding liberty.

The Quakers had such souls. Such souls looked out of the clear and striking faces of George Fox, William Penn and Elizabeth Fry. Around the lives of such heroes and heroines the history of the world has turned on an axis. They have helped to direct the main current of thought in the right di rection. You call them single souls, but they have multiplied themselves into myriad souls; they have become a people. There is no getting away from the true man and the true woman, from the single soul, if you would get at the origin and history of great movements. The tendency of scientific study in our time has perhaps led us to undervalue the in fluence of great souls. History has been believed to advance according to definite laws over which neither human genius nor human freedom has ex erted any appreciable influence. Mr. Buckle ex plains national character as the result of circum stances, and he claims that history and biography are wholly different in their sphere; yet the fact re mains that persons are the ruling centres in history. Take such personalities as Augustine and Luther and Fox and Penn out of history and the course of history ceases to be intelligible. Because this is so, we emphasize the names of the great men who stand chief among the races and peoples who form the constituents of our republic, and we exalt their principles, which form the bone and sinew of Amer ican manhood. The Quakers, when seen at their best. Stand in American history for ideal civilization;and this civilization is their contribution to the American republic. As historic characters the Quakers are a marked and influential people in the midst of the most marked and influential types of mankind. They have put their stamp indelibly on national and international life. If we enter into the courts of justice we can see that they have been there: the substitution of affirmation in place of the oath is their work. The jails of humanity show the results of their reform; it was they who changed our prisons from sties to sanatoriums. The dream of that beautiful prison angel, Elizabeth Fry, is being worked out into reality in criminal law, and the remedial element in punishment is being pushed to the forefront in the administration of justice. They have put their mark even on the pages of our Holy Bible and have made it a book of greater power. They have taken some of its grandest prophecies and statements and commands and beat itudes; and by believing them, living them, trans lating them into reigning forces in the home and in the church and in the state, they have so made these their own that in reading the Book we instinc tively associate their names with these Scriptures.