the years 1904-6, only one
Protestant child, in an enrollment of twenty to thirty.

The other school-districts are maintained "in the old back-country way,"
their attendance is small and no effort is made to raise the standard of
teaching.

It has been accepted for generations among the authoritative leaders on
Quaker Hill that "higher education was not good for the poor." Of this
doctrine, Albert Akin, generally progressive, was a firm believer. He
insisted, and other representatives of the leading families have done
the same, that "to offer them higher education only makes them
discontented"; "they won't work if you get them to studying--and
somebody must do the work."

It seems in strict harmony with this opinion, which I never heard
opposed on the Hill, that Quaker Hill has never until 1904 sent a young
man or woman through the college or university. Albert J. Akin, 2d, was
a member of class of 1904 of Columbia University, but he was not born on
the Hill, and never long resided there. Indeed, the town of Pawling has
not another college graduate among its sons. There have been, however, a
few who have gone to school to the grade of high school and no normal
schools. In the past ten years ten young men and women have done so. One
youth all but completed a college course in 1906. Two young women are
just completing courses as nurses.

Personality is the field in which the conscious purpose cherished on
Quaker Hill would have wrought its best efforts. But personality was
always on Quaker Hill inhibited, restrained and schooled into
mediocrity. Variation was repressed. Spontaneity was forbidden.
Ingenuous spirits were firmly and effectively directed into channels
believed to be harmless.

The result has been that mediocre people have both lived on the Hill,
and gone away from it, in voluntary exile from its beautiful scenes, but
not in exile from its spirit of plainness. No person of brilliant mind
or of uncommon talents has ever come of the Quaker Hill population.
There is not among the sons or daughters of this place one whose name is
of lasting interest to any beyond the limits of Pawling. No artist or
poet has ever ventured to express the intense feeling of the aesthetic
which pervades the place, but has always been hushed from singing,
restrained from picturing.

I think the end for which the Quaker Hill population have lived could be
called Individual-Social. They are consciously individual, and
unconscious