celibacy, oral confession, community, non-resistance, peace, the gift of healing, miracles, physical health and separation from the world.  Like the Rappists, they neither marry nor have any substitute for marriage, receiving all their children by adoption.  They live in large families or communes, consisting of eighty or ninety members, in one big house, men and women together.  Each brother is assigned to a sister, who mends his clothes, looks after his washing, tells him when he needs a new garment, reproves him when not orderly, and has a spiritual oversight over him generally.  Though living in the same house, the sexes eat, labor and work apart.  They keep apart and in separate ranks in their worship.  They do not shake hands with the opposite sex, and there is rarely any scandal or gossip among them, so far as the outside world can learn.  There are two orders, known as the Novitiate and the Church order, the latter having intercourse only with their own members in a sort of monkish seclusion, while the others treat with the outside world.  The head of a Shaker society is a “ministry,” consisting of from three to four persons, male and female.  The society is divided into families, as stated above, each family having two elders, one male and one female.  In their worship they are drawn up in ranks and go through various gyrations, consisting of processions and dances, during which they continually hold out their hands as if to receive something.  The Shakers are industrious, hard-working, economical and cleanly.  They dress uniformly.  Their houses are all alike.  They say “yea” and “nay,” although not “thee” and “thou,” and call persons by their first names.  They confine themselves chiefly to the useful, and use no ornaments.  There are at present eighteen societies of Shakers in the United States, scattered throughout seven States.  They number in all two thousand four hundred and fifteen persons, and own one hundred thousand acres of land.  Their industries are similar to those of the Rappists and True Inspirationists, and are somewhat famed for the excellence of their products.  The Shakers are nearly all Americans, like the Oneidans, next mentioned, and unlike all other communistic societies in the United States.

The Perfectionists of Oneida and Wallingford are perhaps the most singular of all communists.  They were founded by John Humphrey Noyes, who organized a community at Putney, Vermont, in 1846.  In 1848 this was consolidated with others at Oneida in Madison county, New York.  In 1849 a branch community was started at Brooklyn, New York, and in 1850 one at Wallingford, Connecticut, all of which have since broken up or been merged in the two communities of Oneida and Wallingford.  Their principles are perfectionism, communism and free love.  By “perfection” they mean freedom from sin, which they all claim to have, or to seek as practically attainable.  They claim, in explaining their sense of this term, that as a man