The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-11-11 00:00:00

(From Blackwood's Magazine)

The Quakers pretend to be men of sense, and yet many of
their observations are supremely ridiculous. For example,
the Quaker prides himself on his dress, on his linen, and the
shape of his hat and coat ; all these being made of the finest
materials. The Quaker women are as proud of their hideous
bonnets as if they were badges of honour ; yet the pretence
for all those things is, that they extinguish all pride ! How
humility can be connected with the peculiar cut of a coat,
colour of a bonnet, or shape of a hat, is utterly inconceivable
yet this the Quakers pretend to conceive. It is true,
a peculiar dress were exclusively worn by beggars or ci.
nals, or forced upon any abject portion of the people, as
peculiar dress is forced upon the Jews in Rome, it migbt be
proof of humility to wear that dress ; but there is none in
wearing a bonnet of the best silk, a coat of the best cloth, or
a hat of the best beaver. But, with all their humility, the
Quakers are the proudest of men in other things; they will
acknowledge none of the distinctions of society as established
by the laws, the convenience, and the common sense of all
rational mankind. For instance, they will not call any man
my lord, though it is a title awarded by the state, and a
peerage is absolutely important to the constitution under
which they live. They talk nonsense on such subjects.
A Quaker will not take off his hat to any man, because he
says it is an acknowledgment of that man's superiority, while
every man of common sense knows that it is nothing of the
kind, but merely an act of that civility which it is the pro-
fessed principle of the Quaker to keep up among all mankind.
The Quaker will not change the cut of his own clothes for
any reason of time or circumstance. This, too, is nonsense ;
for though there may be vanity in dressing in what is termed
the height of the fashion, there is absurdity in refusing to
adapt new convenience or beauty in dress, or the general
habit of the age and country, and in stalking through the
streets in foolish formality, a sallow emblem of the clownish-
ness of the last century, laughed at by the_young, pitied by

the old, and wondereda't by'every body. It is curious, too,
that though the Quaker pretends to keep himself pure on this
point, he has no objection whatever to administer to the
vanity of others, provided they will pay him for it. Some
of the most fashionable hat-makers in London are Quakers ;
and though there is not one of them but would declaim
against wearing any thing but a broad brim, the whole sanc-
tity being in the breadth of the beaver, yet there is not one
of them that would hesitate a moment to heap danger on the
head of the unfortunate sinner who wears a hat with-a leaf
as shallow as the top of his snuff-box. A Quaker female
would regard wearing a rose-coloured ribbon as an abomina-
tion before Heaven, but she has no objection to sell every
colour of earth or sky to those giddy ones who think that
Nature never gave even her colours for nothing, and that the
rainbow has not entirely been composed of drab. Tom
Paine, speaking of the Quakers, once said, shrewdly enough,
" If a Quaker had been consulted in the creation, what a
drab-coloured world he would have made it !" The Quaker
refuses to address any man by the word sir, because he says
this acknowledges the man as master, which hurts his feeling
of truth ; and yet he calls every man friend, though he may
never have seen him before, which ought to hurt his feelings
a great deal more if truth were at all concerned in the mat-
ter, which it is not.
It would be a nice question to determine what they are
good for on the face of the earth except for eating and drink-
ing, selling tape and tobacco, and refusing to pay the King's
taxes. If by any ill luck Quakers were ever to have the
supreme direction of things in this country, a French
privateer might scour the coast, burn every ship in the chan-
nel, and throw red-hot shot into every warehouse ; because
the Quaker prime minister would have sent our Nelsons
adrift, and cut up our fleets into fagots. Half a dozen
French regiments might walk from Dover to London, blow
up the Tower, sack the Bank, and carry off the Judges, the
Bishops, the Royal Family; and the Queen, to exhibit in the
menegerie of the Jardin des Plantes ; for the Quaker would
abolish the army, sell the muskets, and confine the defence
of the country to the policeman, whom he would not even
arm with a bludgeon.
If England were all Quakers, she would have no paintings,
no sculpture, no architecture, for Quakerism abhors them
all ; it has never produced any man of capacity in any art
whatever, except the art of amassing money. We should
have no books, for who ever heard of a Quaker author whose
lucubrations were worth a penny ? We should have no in-
vention in science, for of science the Quakers know nothing,
and have never attempted to know any thing. We should
have no oratory, no divinity, no history, no poetry ; for
some of those the Quakers utterly eschew, and in all the rest
nature seems to have denied them any proficiency whatever.
If Quakers had been our masters for the last three hundred
years, what a dismal blank our history would have been ; we
should have stood still, scarcely escaped from barbarism, for
the Quaker never makes any advance. We should have been
either extinguished by France, Spain, or Germany, and lived
in the dismal slavery of men who had neither arms to use,
nor manliness to use them if they had ; or we should have
stagnated into a great moral swamp, a weedy marsh, covered
with drab at top, and filled with mire at bottom. Our Nel-
sons and Wellingtons, our Drydens and Popes, our Rey-
noldses and Lawrences, our Fuselis and Flaxmans, our Pitts
and Foxes, would all have been little pale-faced boys, sharp
in the first four rules of arithmetic—grawing into fat pale-
faced men—cunning in the art of selling tape and tobacco—
and finally withering down into mere automatons, alive to no
feeling but the price of stocks, and namelessly drying up into
the dust of which they were made.