nce two names of individuals belonging to the Society of
Friends; though I could readily remember half a dozen of every other
culte, from Ultramontanes down to Jumpers. These two, at all events, I
would "interview," and so forestall the Conference with a little select
synod of my own.

It was possible, of course, to find a ludicrous side to the question;
but, as I said, I approached it seriously. Sydney Smith, with his
incorrigible habit of joking, questioned the existence of Quaker
babies--a position which, if proven, would, of course, at once account
for the diminution of adult members of the sect. It was true I had never
seen a Quaker infant; but I did not therefore question their existence,
any more than I believed postboys and certain humble quadrupeds to be
immortal because I had never seen a dead specimen of either. The
question I acknowledged at once to be a social and religious, not a
physiological one. Why is Quakerism, which has lived over two hundred
years, from the days of George Fox, and stood as much persecution as any
system of similar age, beginning to succumb to the influences of peace
and prosperity? Is it the old story of Capua and Cannae over again?
Perhaps it is not quite correct to say that it is now beginning to
decline; nor, as a fact, is this Conference the first inquiry which the
body itself has made into its own incipient decay. It is even said that
symptoms of such an issue showed themselves as early as the beginning of
the eighteenth century; and prize essays have been from time to time
written as to the causes, before the Society so far fell in with the
customs of the times as to call a council for the present very difficult
and delicate inquiry. The first prize essay by William Rountree
attributes the falling off to the fact that the early Friends, having
magnified a previously slighted truth--that of the Indwelling Word--fell
into the natural error of giving it an undue place, so depriving their
representations of Christian doctrine of the symmetry they would
otherwise have possessed, and influencing their own practices in such a
way as to contract the basis on which Christian fellowship rests. A
second prize essay, called "The Peculium," takes a still more practical
view, and points out in the most unflattering way that the Friends, by
eliminating from their system all attention to the arts, music, poetry,
the drama, &c., left nothing for the exercise of their faculties save
eating, dri