Chapter II: Part 2

"My dear wife," he wrote to her ten years later, as he set out for America, "remember thou hast the love of my youth, and much the joy of my life; the most beloved, as well as the most worthy of all earthly comforts. God knows, and thou knowest it. I can say it was a match of Providence's making."

The Declaration of Indulgence, the king's suspension of the penalties legally incurred by dissent, came conveniently at this time to give them a honeymoon of peace and tranquillity. They took up their residence at Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire. In the autumn, William set out again upon his missionary journeys, preaching in twenty-one towns in twenty-one days. "The Lord sealed up our labors and travels," he wrote in his journal, "according to the desire of my soul and spirit, with his heavenly refreshments and sweet living power and word of life, unto the reaching of all, and consolating our own hearts abundantly."

So he returned with the blessings of peace, "which," as he said, "is a reward beyond all earthly treasure."

V

THE BEGINNING OF PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE: THE HOLY EXPERIMENT

In 1673, George Fox came back from his travels in America, and Penn and his wife had great joy in welcoming him at Bristol. No sooner, however, had Fox arrived than the Declaration of Indulgence was withdrawn. It had met with much opposition: partly ecclesiastical, from those who saw in it a scheme to reëstablish relations between Rome and England; and partly political, from those who found but an ill precedent in a royal decree which set aside parliamentary legislation. The religious liberty which it gave was good, but the way in which that liberty was given was bad. What was needed was not "indulgence," but common justice. So the king recalled the Declaration, and Parliament being not yet ready to enact its provisions into law, the prisons were again filled with peaceable citizens whose offense was their religion. One of the first to suffer was Fox, and in his behalf Penn went to court. He appealed to the Duke of York.

The incident is significant as the beginning of another phase of William's life. Thus far, he had been a Quaker preacher. Though he was unordained, being in a sect which made nothing of ordination, he was for all practical purposes a minister of the gospel. He was the Rev. William Penn. But now, when he opened the door of the duke's palace, he entered into a new way of living, in which he continued during most of the remainder of his life. He began to be a courtier; he went into politics. He was still a Quaker, preaching sermons and writing books of theological controversy; he gave up no religious conviction, and abated nothing of the earnestness of his personal piety; but he had found, as he believed, another and more effective way to serve God. He now began to enter into that valuable but perilous heritage which had been left him by his father, the friendship of royalty.

Penn found the duke's antechamber filled with suitors. It seemed impossible to get into the august presence. But Colonel Ashton, one of the household, looked hard at Penn, and found in him an old companion, a friend of the days when William was still partaking of the joys of pleasant society. Ashton immediately got him an interview, and Penn delivered his request for the release of Fox. The duke received him and his petition cordially, professing himself opposed to persecution for religion's sake, and promising to use his influence with the king. "Then," says Penn, "when he had done upon this affair, he was pleased to take a very particular notice of me, both for the relation my father had had to his service in the navy, and the care he had promised to show in my regard upon all occasions." He expressed surprise that William had not been to see him before, and said that whenever he had any business with him, he should have immediate entrance and attention.

Fox was not set at liberty by reason of this interview. The king was willing to pardon Fox, but Fox was not willing to be pardoned; having, as he insisted, done no wrong. Penn, however, had learned that the royal duke remembered the admiral's son. It was an important fact, and William thereafter kept it well in mind. That it was a turning-point in his affairs, appears in his reference to it in a letter which he wrote in 1688 to a friend who had reproached him for his attendance at court. "I have made it," he says, "my province and business; I have followed and pressed it; I took it for my calling and station, and have kept it above these sixteen years."

Penn went back to Rickmansworth, and for a time life went on as before. We get a glimpse of it in the good and wholesome orders which he established for the well-governing of his family. In winter, they were to rise at seven; in summer at five. Breakfast was at nine, dinner at twelve, supper at seven. Each meal was preceded by family prayers. At the devotions before dinner, the Bible was read aloud, together with chapters from the "Book of Martyrs," or the writings of Friends. After supper, the servants appeared before the master and mistress, and gave an account of their doings during the day, and got their orders for the morrow. "They were to avoid loud discourse and troublesome noises; they were not to absent themselves without leave; they were not to go to any public house but upon business; and they were not to loiter, or enter into unprofitable talk, while on an errand."

With the canceling of the Indulgence, the persecution of the Quakers was renewed. Their houses were entered, their furniture was seized, their cattle were driven away, and themselves thrust into jail. When no offense was clearly proved against them, the oath was tendered, and the refusal to take it meant a serious imprisonment.

Under these circumstances, Penn wrote a "Treatise on Oaths." He also addressed the general public with "England's Present Interest Considered," an argument against the attempt to compel uniformity of belief. He petitioned the king and Parliament in "The Continued Cry of the Oppressed." "William Brazier," he said, "shoemaker at Cambridge, was fined by John Hunt, mayor, and John Spenser, vice-chancellor, twenty pounds for holding a peaceable religious meeting in his own house. The officer who distrained for this sum took his leather last, the seat he worked upon, wearing clothes, bed, and bedding." "In Cheshire, Justice Daniel of Danesbury took from Briggs and others the value of one hundred and sixteen pounds, fifteen shillings and tenpence in coin, kine, and horses. The latter he had the audacity to retain and work for his own use," and so on, instance after instance. Penn's acquaintance at court and his friendships with persons of position never made him an aristocrat. He was fraternally interested in farmers and cobblers, and cared for the plain people. Quakerism, as he held it, was indeed a system of theology which he studiously taught, but it was also, and quite as much, a social and intellectual democracy. What he mightily liked about it was that abandonment of artificial distinctions, whereby all Quakers addressed their neighbors by their Christian names, and that refusal to be held by formulas of faith, whereby they were left free to accept such beliefs, and such only, as appealed to their own reason.

About this time he engaged in controversy with Mr. Richard Baxter. Baxter is chiefly remembered as the author of "The Saints' Everlasting Rest," but he was a most militant person, who rejoiced greatly in a theological fight. Passing by Rickmansworth, and finding many Quakers there,--to him a sad spectacle,--he sought to reclaim them, and thus fell speedily into debate with Penn. The two argued from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, a great crowd listening all the time with breathless interest. Neither could get the other to surrender; but so much did William enjoy the exercise that he offered Baxter a room in his house, that they might argue every day.

In 1677, having now removed to an estate of his wife's at Worminghurst, in Sussex, Penn, in company with Fox, Barclay, and other Quakers, made a "religious voyage" into Holland and Germany, preaching the gospel. His journal of these travels is printed in his works. "At Osnaburg," he writes, "we had a little time with the man of the inn where we lay; and left him several good books of Friends, in the High and Low Dutch tongues, to read and dispose of." Then, in the next sentence, he continues, "the next morning, being the fifth day of the week, we set forward to Herwerden, and came thither at night. This is the city where the Princess Elizabeth Palatine hath her court, whom, and the countess in company with her, it was especially upon us to visit." Thus they went, ministering to high and low alike, in their democratic Christian way making no distinction between tavern-keepers and princesses. As they talked with Elizabeth and her friend the countess, discoursing upon heavenly themes, they were interrupted by the rattling of a coach, and callers were announced. The countess "fetched a deep sigh, crying out, 'O the cumber and entanglements of this vain world! They hinder all good.' Upon which," says William, "I replied, looking her steadfastly in the face, 'O come thou out of them, then.'" This journey was of great importance as affecting afterwards the population of Pennsylvania. Here it was that Penn met various communities "of a separating and seeking turn of mind," who found in him a kindred spirit. When he established his colony, many of them came out and joined it, becoming the "Pennsylvania Dutch."

During these travels Penn wrote letters to the Prince Elector of Heidelberg, to the Graf of Bruch and Falschenstein, to the King of Poland, together with an epistle "To the Churches of Jesus throughout the world." This was a kind of correspondence in which he delighted. Like Wesley, after him, he had taken the world for his parish. He considered himself a citizen of the planet, and took an episcopal and pontifical interest in the affairs of men and nations. He combined in an unusual way the qualities of the saint and the statesman. His mind was at the same time religious and political. Accordingly, as he came to have a better acquaintance with himself, he entered deliberately upon a course of life in which these two elements of his character could have free play. He applied himself to the task of making politics contribute to the advancement of religion. Many men before him had been eminently successful in making politics contribute to the advancement of the church. Penn's purpose was deeper and better.

He came near, at this time, to getting Parliament to assent to a provision permitting Quakers to affirm, without oath; but the sudden proroguing of that body prevented it. In the general election which followed, he made speeches for Algernon Sidney, who was standing for a place in Parliament. He wrote "England's Great Interest in the Choice of a New Parliament," and "One Project for the Good of England." The project was that Protestants should stop contending one with another and unite against a common enemy.

This was in 1679. The next year he took the decisive step. He entered upon the fulfillment of that great plan, which had been in his mind since his student days at Oxford, and with which he was occupied all the rest of his life. He began to undertake the planting of a colony across the sea.

Penn had already had some experience in colonial affairs. With the downfall of the Dutch dominion in the New World, England had come into possession of two important rivers, the Hudson and the Delaware, and of the countries which they drained. Of these estates, the Duke of York had become owner of New Jersey. He, in turn, dividing it into two portions, west and east, had sold West Jersey to Lord Berkeley, and East Jersey to Sir George Carteret. Berkeley had sold West Jersey to a Quaker, John Fenwick, in trust for another Quaker, Edward Byllinge. These Quakers, disagreeing, had asked Penn to arbitrate between them. Byllinge had fallen into bankruptcy, and his lands had been transferred to Penn as receiver for the benefit of the creditors. Thus William had come into a position of importance in the affairs of West Jersey. Presently, in 1679, East Jersey came also into the market, and Penn and eleven others bought it at auction. These twelve took in other twelve, and the twenty-four appointed a Quaker governor, Robert Barclay.

Now, in 1680, having had his early interest in America thus renewed and strengthened, Penn found that the king was in his debt to the amount of sixteen thousand pounds. Part of this money had been loaned to the king by William's father, the admiral; part of it was the admiral's unpaid salary. Mr. Pepys has recorded in his diary how scandalously Charles left his officers unpaid. The king, he says, could not walk in his own house without meeting at every hand men whom he was ruining, while at the same time he was spending money prodigally upon his pleasures. Pepys himself fell into poverty in his old age, accounting the king to be in debt to him in the sum of twenty-eight thousand pounds.

Penn considered his account collectible. "I have been," he wrote, "these thirteen years the servant of Truth and Friends, and for my testimony's sake lost much,--not only the greatness and preferment of the world, but sixteen thousand pounds of my estate which, had I not been what I am, I had long ago obtained." It is doubtful, however, if the king would have ever paid a penny. It is certain that when William offered to exchange the money for a district in America, Charles agreed to the bargain with great joy.

The territory thus bestowed was "all that tract or part of land in America, bounded on the east by the Delaware River, from twelve miles northward of New Castle town unto the three and fortieth degree of northern latitude. The said land to extend westward five degrees in longitude, to be computed from the said eastern bounds, and the said lands to be bounded on the north by the beginning of the three and fortieth degree of northern latitude and on the south by a circle drawn at twelve miles distance from New Castle, northward and westward, unto the beginning of the fortieth degree of northern latitude, and then by a straight line westward to the limits of longitude above mentioned."

This was a country almost as large as England. No such extensive domain had ever been given to a subject by an English sovereign: but none had ever been paid for by a sum of money so substantial.

On the 4th of March, 1681, the charter received the signature of Charles the Second. On the 21st of August, 1682, the Duke of York signed a deed whereby he released the tract of land called Pennsylvania to William Penn and his heirs forever. About the same time, by a like deed, the duke conveyed to Penn the district which is now called Delaware. Penn agreed, on his part, as a feudal subject, to render yearly to the king two skins of beaver, and a fifth part of all the gold and silver found in the ground; and to the duke "one rose at the feast of St. Michael the Archangel."

This association of sentiment and religion with a transaction in real estate is a fitting symbol of the spirit in which the Pennsylvania colony was undertaken. Penn received the land as a sacred trust. It was regarded by him not as a personal estate, but as a religious possession to be held for the good of humanity, for the advancement of the cause of freedom, for the furtherance of the kingdom of heaven. He wrote at the time to a friend that he had obtained it in the name of God, that thus he may "serve his truth and people, and that an example may be set up to the nations." He believed that there was room there "for such an holy experiment."

VI

THE SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA: PENN'S FIRST VISIT TO THE PROVINCE

That Penn undertook the "holy experiment" without expectation or desire of profit appears not only in his conviction that he was thereby losing sixteen thousand pounds, but in his refusal to make his new estates a means of gain. "He is offered great things," says James Claypole in a letter dated September, 1681, "£6000 for a monopoly in trade, which he refused.... He designs to do things equally between all parties, and I believe truly does aim more at justice and righteousness and spreading of truth than at his own particular gain." "I would not abuse His love," said Penn, "nor act unworthy of His providence, and so defile what came to me clean. No, let the Lord guide me by His wisdom, and preserve me to honour His name, and serve His truth and people, that an example and standard may be set up to the nations."

So far removed was he from all self-seeking, that he was even unwilling to have the colony bear his name. "I chose New Wales," he says, recounting the action of the king's council, "being, as this, a pretty hilly country,--but Penn being Welsh for head, as Pennanmoire in Wales, and Penrith in Cumberland, and Penn in Buckinghamshire, the highest land in England--[the king] called this Pennsylvania, which is the high or head woodlands; for I proposed, when the secretary, a Welshman, refused to have it called New Wales, Sylvania, and they added Penn to it; and though I much opposed it, and went to the king to have it struck out and altered, he said it was past, and he would take it upon him; nor could twenty guineas move the under-secretary to vary the name, for I feared lest it should be looked on as a vanity in me, and not as a respect in the king, as it truly was, to my father, whom he often mentions with praise."

The charter gave the land to Penn as the king's tenant. He had power to make laws; though this power was to be exercised, except in emergencies, "with the advice, assent, and approbation of the freemen of the territory," and subject to the confirmation of the Privy Council. He was to appoint judges and other officers. He had the right to assess custom on goods laden and unladen, for his own benefit; though he was to take care to do it "reasonably," and with the advice of the assembly of freemen. He was, at the same time, to be free from any tax or custom of the king, except by his own consent, or by the consent of his governor or assembly, or by act of Parliament. He was not to maintain correspondence with any king or power at war with England, nor to make war against any king or power in amity with the same. If as many as twenty of his colonists should ask a minister from the Bishop of London, such minister was to be received without denial or molestation.

The next important document to be prepared was the Constitution, or Frame of Government, and to the task of composing it Penn gave a great amount of time and care. It was preceded by two statements of principles,--the Preface and the Great Fundamental.

The Preface declared the political policy of the proprietor. "Government," he said, "seems to me a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and end." As for the debate between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, "I choose," he said, "to solve the controversy with this small distinction, and it belongs to all three: any government is free to the people under it, whatever be the frame, where the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws." His purpose, he says, is to establish "the great end of all government, viz., to support power in reverence with the people, and to secure the people from the abuse of power, that they may be free by their just obedience, and the magistrates honourable for their just administration; for liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery."

In a private letter, written about the same time, Penn stated his political position in several concrete sentences which interpret these fine but rather vague pronouncements. "For the matters of liberty and privilege," he wrote, "I propose that which is extraordinary, and to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of an whole country; but to publish these things now and here, as matters stand, would not be wise."

The Great Fundamental set forth the ecclesiastical policy of the founder: "In reverence to God, the father of light and spirits, the author as well as the object of all divine knowledge, faith and workings, I do, for me and mine, declare and establish for the first fundamental of the government of my province, that every person that doth and shall reside there shall have and enjoy the free profession of his or her faith and exercise of worship towards God, in such way and manner as every such person shall in conscience believe is most acceptable to God."

These principles of civil and religious liberty constituted the "holy experiment." They made the difference between Penn's colony and almost every other government then existing. In their influence and continuance, until at last they were incorporated in the Constitution of the United States, they are the chief contribution of William Penn to the progress of our institutions.

"All Europe with amazement saw
The soul's high freedom trammeled by no law."

The Constitution was drawn up in Articles to the number of twenty-four, and these were followed by forty Laws.

The Articles provided for a governor, to be appointed by the proprietor, and for two legislative bodies, a provincial council and a general assembly. The provincial council was to consist of seventy-two members. Of these a third were elected for three years, a third for two, and a third for one; so that by the end of the service of the first third, all would have a three-year term, twenty-four going out and having their places filled each year. The business of the council was to prepare laws, to see that they were executed, and in general to provide for the good conduct of affairs. The general assembly was to consist of two hundred members, to be chosen annually. They had no right to originate legislation, but were to pass upon all bills which had been enacted by the council, accepting or rejecting them by a vote of yea or nay.

The Laws enjoined that "all persons who confessed the one almighty and eternal God to be the Creator, Upholder, and Ruler of the world, and who held themselves obliged in conscience to live peaceably and justly in society, were in no ways to be molested for their religious persuasion and practice, nor to be compelled at any time to frequent any religious place or ministry whatever." All children of the age of twelve were to be taught some useful trade. All pleadings, processes, and records in the courts of law were to be as short as possible. The reformation of the offender was to be considered as a great part of the purpose of punishment. At a time when there were in England two hundred offenses punishable by death, Penn reduced these capital crimes to two, murder and treason. All prisons were to be made into workhouses. No oath was to be required. Drinking healths, selling rum to Indians, cursing and lying, fighting duels, playing cards, the pleasures of the theatre, were all put under the ban together.

Penn's provincial council suggested the Senate of the United States. As originally established, however, the disproportion of power between the upper and the lower house was so great as to cause much just dissatisfaction. The council was in effect a body of seventy-two governors; the assembly, which more directly represented the people, could consider no laws save those sent down to them by the council. The Constitution had to be changed.

One of the good qualities of the Constitution was that it was possible to change it. It provided for the process of amendment. That customary article with which all constitutions now end appeared for the first time in Penn's Frame of Government. Another good quality of the Constitution was that it secured an abiding harmony between its fundamental statements and all further legislation. "Penn was the first one to hit upon the foundation or first step in the true principle, now the universal law in the United States, that the unconstitutional law is void."

Whatever help Penn may have had in the framing of this legislation, from Algernon Sidney and other political friends, it is plain that the best part of it was his own, and that he wrote it not as a politician but as a Quaker. It is an application of the Quaker principles of democracy and of religious liberty to the conditions of a commonwealth. From beginning to end it is the work of a man whose supreme interest was religion. It is at the same time singularly free from the narrowness into which men of this earnest mind have often fallen. Religion, as Penn considered it, was not a matter of ordinances or rubrics. It was righteousness, and fraternity, and liberty of conscience.

In this spirit he wrote a letter to the Indian inhabitants of his province. "The great God, who is the power and wisdom that made you and me, incline your hearts to righteousness, love, and peace. This I send to assure you of my love, and to desire you to love my friends; and when the great God brings me among you, I intend to order all things in such a manner that we may all live in love and peace, one with another, which I hope the great God will incline both me and you to do. I seek nothing but the honour of his name, and that we, who are his workmanship, may do that which is well pleasing to him.... So I rest in the love of God that made us."

Now colonists began to seek this land of peace across the sea. A hundred acres were promised for forty shillings, with a quit-rent of one shilling annually to the proprietor forever. In clearing the ground, care was to be taken to leave one acre of trees, for every five acres cleared. All transactions with the Indians were to be held in the public market, and all differences between the white man and the red were to be settled by a jury of six planters and six Indians. Penn also counseled prospective colonists to consider the great inconveniences which they must of necessity endure, and hoped that those who went would have "the permission if not the good liking of their near relations."

There were already in the province some two thousand people, besides Indians,--a peaceable and industrious folk, mostly Swedes and English. They had six meeting-houses; the English settlers being Quakers. They lived along the banks of the Delaware. In the autumn of 1681, the ship Sarah and John brought the first of Penn's emigrants, and in December the ship Bristol Factor added others. In 1682, Penn came himself.

The journey at that time was both long and perilous. If it was accomplished in two months, the voyage was considered prosperous. To the ordinary dangers of the deep was added the terror of the smallpox. Scarcely a ship crossed without this dread passenger. William, accordingly, as one undertaking a desperate adventure, took a tender leave of his family. He wrote a letter whose counsels might guide them in case he never returned. "My dear wife and children," he said, "my love, which neither sea, nor land, nor death itself can extinguish or lessen towards you, most endearedly visits you with eternal embraces, and will abide with you forever; and may the God of my life watch over you, and bless you, and do you good in this world and forever." "Be diligent," he advised his wife, "in meetings for worship and business, ... and let meetings be kept once a day in the family to wait upon the Lord, ... and, my dearest, to make thy family matters easy to thee, divide thy time and be regular; it is easy and sweet.... Cast up thy income, and see what it daily amounts to, ... and I beseech thee to live low and sparingly, till my debts are paid." As for the children, they are to be bred up "in the love of virtue, and that holy plain way of it, which we have lived in, that the world in no part of it get into my family." They are to be carefully taught. "For their learning be liberal, spare no cost." "Agriculture is especially in my eye; let my children be husbandmen and housewives; it is industrious, healthy, honest, and of good example." They are to honor and obey their mother, to love not money nor the world, to be temperate in all things. If they come presently to be concerned in the government of Pennsylvania, "I do charge you," their father wrote, "before the Lord God and the holy angels, that you be lovely, diligent and tender, fearing God, loving the people, and hating covetousness. Let justice have its impartial course, and the law free passage. Though to your loss, protect no man against it; for you are not above the law, but the law above you. Live the lives yourselves, you would have the people live."

Unhappily, of Guli's children, seven in number, four died before their mother, and one, the eldest son, Springett, shortly after. Springett inherited the devout spirit of his parents; his father wrote an affecting account of his pious death. Of the two remaining, William fell into ways of dissipation, and Letitia married a man whom her father disliked. Neither of them had any inheritance in Pennsylvania.

Penn's ship, the Welcome, carried a hundred passengers, most of them Quakers from his own neighborhood. A third part died of smallpox on the way. On the 24th of October, he sighted land; on the 27th, he arrived before Newcastle, in Delaware; on the 28th, he landed. Here he formally received turf and twig, water and soil, in token of his ownership. On the 29th, he entered Pennsylvania. Adding ten days to this date, to bring it into accord with our present calendar, we have November 8 as the day of his arrival in the province. The place was Upland, where there was a settlement already; the name was that day changed to Chester.

Penn was greatly pleased with his new possessions. He wrote a description of the country for the Free Society of Traders. The air, he said, was sweet and clear, and the heavens serene. Trees, fruits, and flowers grew in abundance: especially a "great, red grape," and a "white kind of muskadel," out of which he hopes it may be possible to make good wine. The ground was fertile. The Indians he found to be tall, straight, and well built, walking "with a lofty chin." Their language was "like the Hebrew," and he guessed that they were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. Light of heart, they seemed to him, with "strong affections, but soon spent; ... the most merry creatures that live." Though they were "under a dark night in things relating to religion," yet were they believers in God and immortality.

"I bless the Lord," he wrote in a letter, "I am very well, and much satisfied with my place and portion. O how sweet is the quiet of these parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome solicitations, hurries, and solicitations of woeful Europe!"

In the midst of these fair regions, beside the "wedded rivers," the Delaware and the Schuylkill, in the convenient neighborhood of quarries of building stone, at a place which the Indians called Coaquannoc, he established his capital city, calling it Philadelphia,--perhaps in token of the spirit of brotherly love in which it was founded, perhaps in remembrance of those seven cities of the Revelation wherein was that primitive Christianity which he wished to reproduce.

Here he had his rowers run his boat ashore at the mouth of Dock Creek, which now runs under Dock Street, where several men were engaged in building a house, which was afterwards called the Blue Anchor Tavern. Penn brought a considerable company with him. In the minutes of a Friends' meeting held on the 8th (18th) of November, 1682, at Shackamaxon, now Kensington, it was recorded that, "at this time, Governor Penn and a multitude of Friends arrived here, and erected a city called Philadelphia, about half a mile from Shackamaxon." Presently, the Indians appeared. They offered Penn of their hominy and roasted acorns, and, after dinner, showed him how they could hop and jump. He is said to have entered heartily into these exercises, and to have jumped farther than any of them.

The governor had already determined the plan of the city. There were to be two large streets,--one fronting the Delaware on the east, the other fronting the Schuylkill on the west; a third avenue, to be called High Street (now Market), was to run from river to river, east and west; and a fourth, called Broad Street, was to cross it at right angles, north and south. Twenty streets were to lie parallel with Broad, and to be named First Street, Second Street, and so on in order, in the plain Quaker fashion which had thus entitled the days of the week and the months of the year. Eight were to lie parallel with High, and to be called after the trees of the forest,--Spruce, Chestnut, Pine. In the midst of the city, at the crossing of High and Broad Streets, was to be a square of ten acres, to contain the public offices; and in each quarter of the city was to be a similar open space for walks. The founder intended to allow no house to be built on the river banks, keeping them open and beautiful. Could he have foreseen the future, he would have made the streets wider. He had in mind, however, only a country town. "Let every house be placed," he directed, "if the person pleases, in the middle of its plot, as to the breadth way of it, that so there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a green country town, which will never be burnt and always wholesome."

Among those houses was his own, a modest structure made of brick, standing "on Front Street south of the present Market Street," and still preserved in Fairmont Park. He afterwards gave it to his daughter Letitia, and it was called Letitia House, from her ownership.

In the mean time, he was making his famous treaty with the Indians. Penn recognized the Indians as the actual owners of the land. He bought it of them as he needed it. The transfer of property thus made was a natural occasion of mutual promises. As there were several such meetings between the Quakers and the Indians, it is difficult to fix a date to mark the fact. One meeting took place, it is said, under a spreading elm at Shackamaxon. The commonly accepted date is the 23d of June, 1683. The elm was blown down in 1810. There is a persistent tradition to the effect that William was distinguished from his fellow Quakers in this transaction by wearing a sky-blue sash of silk network. But of this, as of most other details of ceremony in connection with the matter, we know nothing.

Penn gives a general description of his various conferences upon this business. "Their order," he says, "is thus: the king sits in the middle of a half-moon, and has his council, the old and wise, on each hand. Behind them, or at a little distance, sit the younger fry in the same figure." Then one speaks in their king's name, and Penn answers. "When the purchase was agreed great promises passed between us of kindness and good neighbourhood, and that the English and the Indians must live in love as long as the sun gave light, ... at every sentence of which they shouted, and said Amen, in their way." Some earnestness may have been added to these assuring responses by the Indians' consciousness of the fact that the advantages of the bargain were not all on one side. The Pennsylvania tribes had been thoroughly conquered by the Five Nations. There was little heart left in them. But their condition detracts nothing from Penn's Christian brotherliness.

In some such manner the great business was enacted. "This," said Voltaire, "was the only treaty between these people and the Christians that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never broken." That it was never broken was the capital fact. Herein it differed from a thousand other treaties made before or since. In the midst of the long story of the misdealings of the white men with the red, which begins with Cortez and Pizarro, and is still continued in the daily newspapers, this justice and honesty of William Penn is a point of light. That Penn treated the Indians as neighbors and brothers; that he paid them fairly for every acre of their land; that the promises which he made were ever after unfailingly kept is perhaps his best warrant of abiding fame. Like his constitutional establishment of civil and religious liberty, it was a direct result of his Quaker principles. It was a manifestation of that righteousness which he was continually preaching and practicing.

The kindness and courtly generosity which Penn showed in his bargains with the Indians is happily illustrated in one of his purchases of land. The land was to extend "as far back as a man could walk in three days." William walked out a day and a half of it, taking several chiefs with him, "leisurely, after the Indian manner, sitting down sometimes to smoke their pipes, to eat biscuit and cheese, and drink a bottle of wine." Thus they covered less than thirty miles. In 1733, the then governor employed the fastest walker he could find, who in the second day and a half marked eighty-six miles.

The treaty gave the new colony a substantial advantage. The Lenni Lenape, the Mingoes, the Shawnees accounted Penn's settlers as their friends. The word went out among the tribes that what Penn said he meant, and that what he promised he would fulfill faithfully. Thus the planters were freed from the terror of the forest which haunted their neighbors, north and south. They could found cities in the wilderness and till their scattered farms without fear of tomahawk or firebrand. Penn himself went twenty miles from Philadelphia, near the present Bristol, to lay out his country place of Pennsbury.

Ships were now arriving with sober and industrious emigrants; trees were coming down, houses were going up. In July, 1683, Penn wrote to Henry Sidney, in England, reminding him that he had promised to send some fruit-trees, and describing the condition of the colony. "We have laid out a town a mile long and two miles deep.... I think we have near about eighty houses built, and about three hundred farms settled round the town.... We have had fifty sail of ships and small vessels, since the last summer, in our river, which shows a good beginning." "I am mightily taken with this part of the world," he wrote to Lord Culpeper, who had come to be governor of Virginia, "I like it so well, that a plentiful estate, and a great acquaintance on the other side, have no charms to remove; my family being once fixed with me, and if no other thing occur, I am likely to be an adopted American." "Our heads are dull," he added, "but our hearts are good and our hands strong."

In the midst of this peace and prosperity, however, there was a serious trouble. This was a dispute with Lord Baltimore over the dividing line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. By the inaccuracy of surveyors, the confusion of maps, and the indefiniteness of charters, Baltimore believed himself entitled to a considerable part of the territory which was claimed by Penn, including even Philadelphia. The two proprietors had already discussed the question without settlement; indeed, it remained a cause of contention for some seventy years. As finally settled, in 1732, between the heirs of Penn and of Baltimore, a line was established from Cape Henlopen west to a point half way between Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay; thence north to twelve miles west of Newcastle, and so on to fifteen miles south of Philadelphia; thence due west. The surveyors were Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, and the line was thus called Mason and Dixon's Line. This boundary afterwards parted the free States from the slave States. South of it was "Dixie."

Penn now learned that Lord Baltimore was on his way to England to lay the question before the Privy Council. The situation demanded William's presence. "I am following him as fast as I can," he wrote to the Duke of York, praying "that a perfect stop be put to all his proceedings till I come." He therefore took leave of his friends in the province, commissioned the provincial council to act in his stead, and in August, 1684, having been two years in America, he embarked for home.

On board the Endeavour, on the eve of sailing, he wrote a farewell letter. "And thou, Philadelphia," he said, "the virgin settlement of this province, named before thou wert born, what love, what care, what service and what travail has there been to bring thee forth and preserve thee from such as would abuse and defile thee! O that thou mayest be kept from the evil that would overwhelm thee; that faithful to the God of mercies in the life of righteousness, thou mayest be preserved to the end. My soul prays to God for thee that thou mayest stand in the day of trial, that thy children may be blessed of the Lord, and thy people saved by thy power. My love to thee has been great, and the remembrance of thee affects mine heart and mine eye. The God of eternal strength keep and preserve thee to his glory and peace."

VII

AT THE COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND, AND "IN RETIREMENT"

When Penn left the province in 1684, he expected to return speedily, but he did not see that pleasant land again until 1699. The fifteen intervening years were filled with contention, anxiety, misfortune, and various distresses.

In the winter of 1684-85, Charles II. died, and the Duke of York, his brother, succeeded him as James II. And James was the patron and good friend of William Penn. But the king was a Roman Catholic. One of his first acts upon coming to the throne was to go publicly to mass. He was privately resolved upon making the Roman Church supreme in England. Penn was stoutly opposed to the king's religion. In his "Seasonable Caveat against Popery," as well as in his other writings, he had expressed his dislike with characteristic frankness. That he had himself been accused of being a Jesuit had naturally impelled him to use the strongest language to belie the accusation. Nevertheless, William Penn stood by the king. He sought and kept the position of favorite and agent of the court. He upheld, and so far as he could, assisted, the projects of a reign which, had it continued, would probably have contradicted his most cherished principles, abolished liberty of conscience, and made an end of Quakers.

This perplexing inconsistency, which is the only serious blot on Penn's fair fame, appears to have been the result of two convictions.

He was sure, in the first place, of the honesty of the king; he believed in him with all his heart. James had been true to the trust reposed in him by William's father. He had befriended William, taking him out of prison, increasing his estates, granting his petitions. "Anybody," said Penn, "that has the least pretense to good-nature, gratitude, or generosity, must needs know how to interpret my access to the king." With his advance to the crown James's graciousness had increased. He kept great lords waiting without while he conversed at leisure with the Quaker. He liked Penn, and Penn liked him. In spite of the disparities in their age, rank, and creed, William Penn and James Stuart were fast friends, united by the bond of genuine affection.

It was characteristic of Penn to be blind to the faults of his friends. He brought great troubles both upon himself and upon his colony by his refusal to believe the reports which were made to him against the character of men whom he had appointed to office: he was unwilling to believe evil of any man. He fell into bankruptcy, and even into a debtor's prison, by his blind, unquestioning confidence in the agent who managed his business. His faith in James was of a piece with his whole character. He appears to have been temperamentally incapable of perceiving the unworthiness of anybody whom he liked.

Together with this conviction as to the king's honesty, and bound up with it, was a like belief in the wisdom of the king's plan. The king's plan was to remove all disabilities arising from religion. He purposed not only to put an end to the laws under which honest men were kept in prison, but to abolish the "tests" which prevented a Roman Catholic from holding office. And, without tarrying for the action of a cautious Parliament, his intention was to do these things at once by a declaration of the royal will. All this was approved by William Penn.

That the laws which disturbed Protestant dissenters should be changed, he argued at length in a pamphlet entitled "A Persuasion to Moderation." Moderation, as he defined it, meant "liberty of conscience to church dissenters;" a cause which, with all humility, he said, he had undertaken to plead against the prejudices of the times. He maintained that toleration was not only a right inherent in religion, but that it was for the political and commercial good of the nation. Repression and persecution, he said, drive men into conspiracies. The importing of religious distinctions into the affairs of state deprives the country of the services of some of its best men. His father, upon the occasion of the first Dutch war, had submitted to the king a list of the ablest sea officers in the kingdom. The striking of the names of nonconformists from this list had "robbed the king at that time of ten men, whose greater knowledge and valour, than any other ten of that fleet, had, in their room, been able to have saved a battle, or perfected a victory." As for a declaration of indulgence, Penn deemed it "the sovereign remedy of the English constitution."

That the "tests" should be removed, he urged on James's behalf upon William of Orange, to whom he went in Holland on an informal commission from the king. William, by his marriage with James's daughter, was heir apparent to the throne of England, and his consent was necessary to any serious change of national policy. He insisted on the tests. Theoretically, Penn was right. The ideal state imposes no religious tests; every good citizen, no matter what his private creed may be, is eligible to any office. Practically, Penn was wrong, as William of Orange plainly saw. That prince, as appeared afterwards, was as zealous for religious freedom as was Penn himself; but it was plain to him that as matters stood at that time in England, it was necessary to enforce the tests in order to prevent the rise of an ecclesiastical party whose supremacy would endanger all that Penn desired. Penn, with his stout faith in the king, could not see it. There were times, indeed, when he was perplexed and troubled. "The Lord keep us in this dark day!" he wrote to his steward at Pennsbury. "Be wise, close, respectful to superiors. The king has discharged all Friends by a general pardon, and is courteous, though as to the Church of England, things seem pinching. Several Roman Catholics got much into places in the army, navy, court." Nevertheless, the king's plan, as he understood it, gave assurance of liberty of conscience, and the end of persecution for opinion's sake; and he supported the king.

Under these conditions, misled by friendship, seeing, but not perceiving, Penn persuaded himself that he could excellently serve God and his neighbors by becoming a courtier. He took a house in London, within easy distance of Whitehall, and visited the king daily. A great many people therefore visited Penn daily; sometimes as many as two hundred were waiting to confer with him. They desired that he would do this or that for their good with the king. Most of them were Quakers; many were in need of pardon, or were burdened by some oppression.

For example, Sir Robert Stuart of Coltness had been in exile as a Presbyterian, and on his return found his lands in the possession of the Earl of Arran. He brought his case to Penn. Penn went to Arran. "What is this, friend James, that I hear of thee?" he said. "Thou hast taken possession of Coltness's castle. Thou knowest that it is not thine." "That estate," Arran explained, "I paid a great price for. I received no other reward for my expensive and troublesome embassy to France, except this estate." "All very well, friend James," said Penn, "but of this assure thyself, that if thou dost not give me this moment an order on thy chamberlain for two hundred pounds to Coltness to carry him down to his native country, and a hundred a year to subsist on till matters are adjusted, I will make it as many thousands out of thy way with the king." Arran complied immediately.

Again, one day after dinner, as they were drinking a glass of wine together, one of Penn's clients said, "I can tell you how you can prolong my life." "I am no physician," answered William, "but prithee tell me what thou meanest." The client replied that a good friend of his, Jack Trenchard, was in exile, and "if you," he said, "could get him leave to come home with safety and honour, the drinking now and then a bottle with Jack Trenchard would make me so cheerful that it would prolong my life." Penn smilingly promised to do what he could, and in a month the two friends were drinking his good health.

This was the kind of business which he transacted. He had found a way to be of eminent service to his neighbors, and especially to his Quaker brethren, and he made the most of the opportunity. There is no evidence that he departed from the disinterested life which he had previously lived. He attended the court of King James, as he had undertaken the settlement of Pennsylvania, not for what he could get out of it, but for the good he could do by means of it. What he did, he tells us, was upon a "principle of charity." "I never accepted any commission," he says, "but that of a free and common solicitor for sufferers of all sorts and in all parties." Neither is there any instance of his asking anything to increase his own estate or position.

Indeed, he was losing money; for the expenses of life at court were great. Worse still, he was losing his good name. His Quaker friends found him hard to understand. It was true that he had cast in his lot with them, and had suffered for their cause,--he was their great theologian and preacher; but he seemed, nevertheless, to be still a cavalier and a worldly person. They heard--though there was no truth in the report--that he had set up a military company in Pennsylvania. They saw with their own eyes that he lived in a style which must have seemed to them altogether inconsistent with simplicity, and that he consorted with courtiers. And they did not like it,--they said so frankly.