and restored it to its former
efficiency. In the long list of Quakers eminent in all walks of
life, not only in Pennsylvania but elsewhere, are to be found
John Bright, a lover of peace and human liberty through a long
and eminent career in British politics; John Dickinson of
Philadelphia, who wrote the famous Farmer's Letters so signally
useful in the American Revolution; Whittier, the American poet, a
Quaker born in Massachusetts of a family converted from
Puritanism when the Quakers invaded Boston in the seventeenth
century; and Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial
times, an artist of permanent eminence, one of the founders of
the Royal Academy in England and its president in succession to
Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Wherever Quakers are found they are the useful and steady
citizens. Their eminence seems out of all proportion to their
comparatively small numbers. It has often been asked why this
height of attainment should occur among a people of such narrow
religious discipline. But were the Quakers really narrow, or were
they any more narrow than other rigorously self-disciplined
people: Spartans, Puritans, soldiers whose discipline enables
them
to achieve great results? All discipline is in one sense narrow.
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