Elizabeth Fry

When thee builds a prison, thee had better build with the thought ever in thy mind that thee and thy children may occupy the cells.--Report on Paris Prisons, Addressed to the King of France

The Mennonite, Dunkard, Shaker, Oneida Communist, Mormon and Quaker are
all one people, varying only according to environment.

They are all Come-Outers.

They turn to plain clothes, hard work, religious thought, eschewing the
pomps and vanities of the world--all for the same reasons. Scratch any one
of them and you will find the true type. The monk of the Middle Ages was
the same man, his peculiarity being an extreme asceticism that caused him
to count sex a mistake on the part of God. And this same question has been
a stumbling-block for ages to the type we now have under the glass. A man
who gives the question of sex too much attention is very apt either to
have no wife at all or else four or five. If a Franciscan friar of the
olden time happened to glance at a clothesline on which, gaily waving in
the wanton winds, was a smock-frock, he wore peas in his sandals for a
month and a day.

The Shaker does not count women out because the founder of the sect was a
woman, but he is a complete celibate and depends on Gentiles to populate
the earth. The Dunkard quotes Saint Paul and marries because he must, but
regards romantic love as a thing of which Deity is jealous, and also a bit
ashamed. The Oneida Community clung to the same thought, and to
obliterate selfishness held women in common, tracing pedigree, after the
manner of ancient Sparta, through the female line, because there was no
other way. The Mormon incidentally and accidentally adopted polygamy.

The Quakers have for the best part looked with disfavor on passionate
love. In the worship of Deity they separate women from men. But all
oscillations are equalized by swingings to the other side. The Quakers
have often discarded a distinctive marriage-ceremony, thus slanting toward
natural selection. And I might tell you of how in one of the South
American States there is a band of Friends who have discarded the rite
entirely, making marriage a private and personal contract between the man
and the woman--a sacred matter of conscience; and should the man and woman
find after a trial that their mating was a mistake, they are as free to
separate as they were to marry, and no obloquy is attached in any event.
Harriet Martineau, Quaker in sympathy, although not in name, being an
independent fighter armed with a long squirrel-rifle of marvelous range
and accuracy, pleaded strongly and boldly for a law that would make
divorce as free and simple as marriage. Harriet once called marriage a
mouse-trap, and thereby sent shivers of surprise and indignation up a
bishop's back.