Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind

John Woolman's Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind, and How It Is to Be Maintained was published in Philadelphia in 1770, two years before the author's death. It is the fifth and last of the tracts he issued under the general title of Considerations. Woolman, a Quaker tailor and itinerant minister from Mount Holly, New Jersey, had spent decades pressing his fellow Friends to examine their complicity in slaveholding, and in this later tract he widened the inquiry to the whole fabric of economic and social life. The occasion was a Quaker community that had prospered materially and was beginning to resemble the world around it in its appetites, its labor arrangements, and its ease with inequality.

The treatise argues that the harmony God intends among people is destroyed by what Woolman calls the spirit of oppression, and that this spirit takes root wherever the desire for wealth and display governs how people live. His central move is to trace outward disorders, including war, slavery, and the grinding labor of the poor, back to an inward source: a heart attached to possessions and status rather than yielding to the love of God. He presses the point that Christians cannot hold a clear conscience while profiting from labor extracted unjustly, and he urges a plain, simple manner of living that costs others nothing. The remedy he proposes is not a program but a conversion, a turning of the affections so that one's use of property, trade, and household goods flows from tender regard for every person as a creature of the same Maker. Throughout, Woolman writes in the measured, unadorned manner characteristic of his journal and tracts, appealing to conscience rather than to argument by authority, and asking readers to test their daily practice against the inward guidance he believed every person could receive.

The work has endured because it joins spiritual formation to economic conscience more directly than almost any text of its century. Woolman refuses to let inner devotion stand apart from the question of who works, who profits, and who bears the cost. His influence runs through later Quaker testimony on simplicity and equality, and his insistence that consumption is a moral and spiritual matter has found new readers among those troubled by the distance between faith and ordinary buying and selling.

Who should read this: readers who want to see how an eighteenth-century Quaker connected the practice of prayerful attentiveness to concrete questions of labor, ownership, and daily consumption, and who are willing to be examined rather than flattered. It is not for those seeking a systematic theology, a historical survey of Quaker thought, or a practical guide to reform; Woolman offers a searching, quiet appeal to the conscience and nothing more.