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beautiful site of Philadelphia, he thus gives: 'The convenience of the two rivers-Schuylkill and Delaware-the solid character of the land; pure springs of water, and salubrious air, make it a situation not surpassed by one among all the many places I have seen in the world.' 'Here,' wrote his companions at the time, 'we may worship God according to the dictates of the Divine Principle, free from the mouldy errors of tradition; here we may thrive, in peace and retirement, in the lap of unadulterated nature; here we may improve an innocent course of life on a virgin elysian soil.'

Legislation Begins.-Less than three months passed after he had chosen. the spot and obtained its title from the Swedes who owned it, when he invited representatives from the six counties into which his dominions were divided, and these nine representatives, Swedes, Dutch, and Quakers, duly elected by the free inhabitants, met to frame a charter for their government and perpetual liberty. He had indeed drawn up a plan embracing his own views; but when he laid it on the table around which this little Parliament was holding its councils in a log hut, he says: 'You may amend, alter, or add: I am ready to settle such foundations as may be for your happiness.' They did establish a free republican government; so free that throughout his own dominions the Quaker King could not appoint a justice of the peace, or even a constable; nor could the Governor perform any public act without the consent of the Council. All viceroys and governors in America had always and were then deriving a revenue from exports and various taxes. These were expected and offered to Penn: but he declared that the very name of tax-gatherer should be unknown in his province. With the single exception that the office of Proprietary was vested in him, and would remain hereditary, the new government of Pennsylvania was a pure Democracy. William Penn's work was done; and he contemplated it with deeper gratitude and joy perhaps, than was felt by those who had considered themselves his subjects, and who had received, as they declared, more liberty than they expected. 'I only wanted,' he replied, 'to show men as free and as happy as they can be.' Long after he had returned to his native country, where his heart kept beating just as warm, and in the very spot where it was when he called that first Legislature together to make a code for Pennsylvania, he writes to his friends in these words:-'If in the relation between us, the people want of me anything that would make them happier, I should readily grant it. I left them free to change their frame of government when and as they liked. I never wanted to impose my will upon free men.'

In the changes of parties in England, Penn had been deprived of his charter; but it was restored to him in 1694. He would have at once returned to the banks of the Delaware, but he was now a poor man. That portion of

1 It may seem strange, after all this, that Penn should have lived and died a slaveholder; for it was contrary to his creed,-to all his religious and political principles The fact itself was denied for more than a century; nor would it perhaps have been commonly believed at all, had not Bancroft many years ago pub

lished a letter from James Logan to Mrs. Hannah Penn, written 'ye 11th, 3 mo., 1721,' in which are these unmistakable words: The Proprietor, in a letter left with me at his departure hence [death], gave all his negroes their freedom,' etc.

CLOSE OF PENN'S NOBLE CAREER.

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his fortune which he had not lost in England, had been expended upon his colony, which he always treated with the largest magnanimity. But he invested Markham with executive power, and in the spring of 1695 he depu tized him to visit Pennsylvania. The following year Markham met the legis lature, and they enacted such laws as they pleased, with his full concurrence. No attempt was made to interfere with their independence.

In the close of November, 1699, Penn himself once more landed in Philadelphia. He was received with the utmost kindness and respect, and he went to work with earnestness to advance the interests of his people. He made an effort to improve the condition of the Negro slaves, and strongly urged the enactment of a law securing the sanctity of their marriage, with guarantees for their personal safety. He failed in the first, for in no part of the civilized world could he find anybody to agree with him that the institution itself was not just. But he ameliorated their social state, and they suffered few of those privations which were attached to the condition of slavery in other countries. He made new treaties of peace with the Indian tribes all through the territory of Pennsylvania, and away to the north, as far as Oswego. The wide range of the beneficent measures he proposed was warmly adopted by the colonists. There was toleration, protection, and peace; and his great work seemed to be done. It had been his intention, when he returned, to make his permanent home in America, to remove his family to their final settlement, and lay his bones on the banks of the Delaware. In the exercise of his legal power he had divested himself of every attribute of sovereignty; but it still left him the owner of all unappropriated lands in the colony. Having thus stripped himself of all political power, he would have alienated most of his vast estate also, had it not been necessary for him to retain his feudal rights, in order to hold the franchises of his charter, which otherwise would have lapsed to the throne, and thus involved the loss of the liberties of the colony. But having the good of the colony at heart, he remained its feudal sovereign, although the settlers everywhere found him ready to acquiesce in every demand or request that they made. He had founded a democracy, and he interposed no restrictions to the possession of the soil. Nothing was left to be done; and bidding his friends and the colon ists an affectionate farewell, he sailed for the last time for England. The great principles of British liberty now being fully consolidated under the peaceful reign of William and the ascendency of the Whig party, Penn's influence was so great, and the respect entertained for him was so general, that the statesmen and leading men of England were ready to concur in any proposition he made concerning the well-being of his colony; and as long as he lived, this influence was put forth for their good.

Such had been the beginnings of government and Christian civilization in Pennsylvania; and such they have been preserved. His farewell to his colonists is touching and beautiful:- My love and my life are to you,

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and with you, and no water can quench it, nor distance bring it to an end. I have been with you, cared over you, and served you, with unfeigned love; and you are beloved of me and dear to me, beyond utterance. I bless you in the name and power of the Lord; and may God bless you with his righteousness, peace and plenty, all the land over. You are come to a quiet land, and liberty and authority are in your hands. Rule for Him under whom the princes of this world will one day esteem it their honor to govern in His place. * And thou, Philadelphia, the virgin settlement of this province; my soul prays to God for thee; that thou mayest stand in the day of trial; and that thy children be blessed. * Dear friends, my love

salutes you all.' From that hour the image of the grand old Hall of Independence must have risen on the vision of the guardian prophet who watched over the City of Brotherly Love, and he must have known that it was to be the Mecca of liberty forever.

I may leave the history of Pennsylvania for the next hundred years untold. With his characteristic and admirable citations of original authorities, Bancroft illustrates it:-'In August, 1683, Philadelphia consisted of three or four little cottages; the conies were yet undisturbed in their hereditary burrows; the deer fearlessly bounded past blazed trees, unconscious of foreboded streets; the stranger that wandered from the river bank was lost in the thickets of in terminable forests; and two years afterwards, the place contained about six hundred houses, and the school-house and the printing press had begun their work. In three years from its foundation, Philadelphia gained more than New York had done in half a century. This was the happiest season in the public life of William Penn. I must without vanity say—such was his honest exultation—I have led the greatest colony into America that ever any man did, upon private credit; and the most prosperous beginnings that ever were in it are to be found among us. And after he reached England, he assured the eager inquirers that things went on sweetly with Friends in Pennsylvania; that they increased finely in outward things, and in wisdom. On his deathbed, the venerable apostle of equality was lifted above the fear of dying, and esteeming the change hardly deserving of mention, his thoughts turned to the New World. Pennsylvania, and Delaware, and West New Jersey, and now Rhode Island, and in some measure North Carolina, were Quaker States. As his spirit, awakening from its converse with shadows, escaped from the exile of fallen humanity, nearly his last words were-" Mind poor Friends in America, His works praise him. Neither time nor place can dissolve fellowship with his spirit."-Bancroft, vol. ii., pp. 391, 392, 393, 402.

The Colony of Virginia.-We left the colony of Virginia growing strong in the year of the landing of the Pilgrims. Under the wise administration of Yeardley and Sandys, the first free State on American soil seemed to be firmly established. We now return to the banks of the James river to witness a scene of desolation.

THE GREAT INDIAN MASSACRE IN VIRGINIA.

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The Great Indian Massacre, March 22, 1622.-Powhatan had now been dead four years, and the ashes of the red-man's friendship slept in the grave of the honored chief. A younger brother, who succeeded to his rank and possessions, had never looked complacently upon the encroachments of the pale-faces, and he stealthily organized a plot for their complete extermination. The natives within sixty miles of Jamestown hardly exceeded six thousand, and they numbered only twenty-four hundred warriors. They lived chiefly in scattered villages of wigwams clustered around the skirts of the white settlements; nor till nearly at the last moment had a suspicion of their deadly purpose been breathed into the ear of one of the four thousand colonists whose homes dotted the banks of the James for a hundred and forty miles, and stretched far away towards the Potomac. The day and the hour fixed on had come; and as the sun of the 22d of March reached the meridian, the wild yell of the savages rang out on the still air, and the tomahawk fell upon the helpless and unsuspecting dwellers at the same instant in every settlement of the colony of Virginia. The bolt and the flash came together, and there was no mercy. Mothers and babes were cleft down by the same blow. Missionaries of peace, and benefactors who had shown kindness, were murdered alike at their hearth-stones. Death itself could not satiate their ferocious vengeance. They sprang upon the still bleeding corpses, and tore them into fragments like wild beasts. Within that fatal hour three hundred and fortyseven Anglo-Saxons lay mangled and dead. But for the noble though tardy act of a converted Indian, who stole into Jamestown under cover of the previous night, and revealed the plot to a settler whom he wished to save, the ruin would have been complete. Heaven averted so awful a calamity. The conflict and obscurity of the various records leave the exact number of the victims undetermined. We only know that of the four thousand on the morning of the massacre, the entire colony, one year later, counted only twentyfive hundred!

native races of Virginia. They fled from the ashes

This atrocious deed sealed the doom of the They could no longer live among the pale-faces. of their wigwams to the depths of the forests. The bloody story was told in London, and the heart of all England went out to their stricken friends in Virginia. Help reached them as quick as relief ships could cross the ocean : men, money, provisions, and implements of death were the freight. We are prepared for the result which history always records of the indomitable AngloSaxon-the blood of the victims, says Stith, became the nurture of the plantation. Missionary zeal had suddenly cooled, and for a considerable time we find no account of Rolf-Pocahontas nuptials in our little log temple at Jamestown. But we do hear of two other facts that occurred about this time :I. The Bishop of London collected and paid over a thousand pounds to begin the foundation of a University in Virginia:

II. Cotton seeds began to be planted, and they came up plentifully.

We need have no more solicitude for Virginia. She had brave men and devoted women, which gave her a commonwealth too well founded ever to be

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overthrown-tobacco, for export, which gave her commerce and wealth-In dian corn, and sweet-potatoes, which gave her bread-negro slavery, which secured an unfailing supply of labor-a fertile soil and a genial climate-a steady flow of emigration-the seeds of a university-and, above all, citizens to sustain the structure of a Christian civilization. When we again return to Virginia we shall find her grown into a splendid commonwealth, and giving birth to a race of statesmen who, when the hour came, were to light the fires of National Independence.

The Carolinas.-We are now passing to the blushing groves of the magnolia and palmetto regions of the purple South. The first child of the Mother of States was North Carolina. From the overflowing population of Virginia were established the first settlements on Albemarle Sound. Grants were made to Virginians by Sir William Berkeley, as rewards for taking settlers to the new region. He had himself become a joint proprietary of Carolina, in a royal charter already given. New-comers were fast flocking in from discontented parties in Virginia, and Puritans of the north, grown restive under New England restraints. William Druminond, a native of Scotland, of Puritan tendencies, but an enthusiast for popular liberty, was appointed Governor of North Carolina. Genial in disposition, benevolent of heart, and large in his views of liberty, he imposed no restraints on conscience, and extended all possible encouragement to emigrants from any part of the world. A colony of planters came from Barbadoes and settled on a tract thirty-two miles square, which they purchased from the Indians on Cape Fear river. The great Earl of Shaftesbury'-one of the most brilliant and influential statesmen, scholars, and philosophers of his time-had, with Clarendon and other men of rank and wealth, obtained a charter from Charles II., June 13, 1665, covering a territory of vast extent, seven and one-half degrees from the southern line of Virginia, south, and forty degrees west, comprising the two Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and most of Florida, Missouri, Texas, and Mexico. It was a magnificent grant, and vast results came from it, although it was too unwieldy to be managed by any men living in those times. But the large and liberal spirit of Shaftesbury breathed through every line of the charter. Religious freedom was secured as completely as in the charter of Roger Williams.

Locke's Constitution.-This great metaphysician was the chosen friend of Shaftesbury, and together they elaborated the famous Constitution for the new empire, which, at the time, was supposed to be the maximum of all political wisdom. It was a splendid aristocratic structure, but as purely an ideal dream as Plato indulged in for his form of a republic. There could be no

1 Shaftesbury was a: this time in the full maturity of his genius; celebrated for eloquence, philosophic genius, and sagacity; hgh in power, and of aspiring ambition. Born to great hereditary wealth, the pupil of Prideaux had given his early years to the assiduous pursuit of knowledge; the intellectual part of his nature

had from boyhood obtained the mastery over the love of indulgence and luxury. Connected with the great landed aristocracy of England, cradled in politics, and chosen a member of Parliament at the age of nineteen, his long public career was checkered by the greatest varieties of success.-Bancroft, vol. ii., p. 139.