and leisure and education and access to authorities, and a large list of friends with whom to advise. He was, therefore, a fair representative of his people, and his Frames of Government largely expressed their convictions and temper. The colonists accepted all the liberty he gave them, but, as it seemed to him rather ungenerously, demanded more. His paternal assumptions, which were accepted in his gracious and forceful presence, could not in his absence or in the hands of his heirs become permanent. The friction engendered by them was evidently a source of surprise and disappointment to him. That the peaceable and long-suffering Friends should quickly become staunch and well-organized supporters of popular rights, finding leaders of their own not entirely in sympathy with him, was an unwelcome and unexpected discovery. Yet it was in reality only a development of his own expressed ideas, a corollary of the principles he had so frequently and so forcibly enumerated. "For the matters of liberty and privilege I propose that which is extraordinary, and to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief; so that the will of one man may not hinder the good of the whole country," he wrote, in 1681, and the province accepted the

grant as fully as it was offered. Had the colonists of Pennsylvania been thrown together without previous arrangements, a government in harmony with the Quaker mind, free and democratic, shorn of the proprietary idea, concentrating the power in the popularly elected Assembly would have been the inevitable result.

It is not unlikely that the reaction from the restrictions of England carried the democratic party too far in its opposition to what little power the Proprietary hoped to preserve out of the advancing flood of popular privileges. The people, mostly farmers, underlings at home, now found themselves in a situation to secure all and more than all they had ever hoped for. "This people think privileges their due, and all that can be grasped to be their native right . ... Some people's brains are as soon intoxicated with power as the natives are with their beloved liquor, and as little to be trusted with it,"* Logan writes in 1704. But Logan was never democratic in his tendencies, was violent in his statements, and just at this time was in the heat The life of Penn was of partisan conflict. greatly embittered by what he considered the in

* Penn and Logan Correspondence, I., page 299.

gratitude of his people. After being most liberal in his concessions their repeated demands for more seemed to him to indicate " an excess of vanity that is apt to creep in upon the people in power in America, who, having got out of the crowd in which they were lost here, upon every little eminency there think nothing taller than themselves but the trees." He suggests that those in office should be brought occasionally to London "that they might lose themselves again amongst the crowds of so much more considerable people."* But this has been the charge urged against Americans in all ages since then. Whether the climate or the distance from established institutions has been the cause, the Pennsylvanians displayed very early the qualities which have made America free and vigorous, as well as sometimes self-assertive and irreverent. It was a pleasing sentiment that William Penn and his family should live as gracious and kindly feudal lords, dispensing the blessings of religious and civil liberty upon willing and trusting freemen, but it was opposed to the spirit of the age and of the race and could not be. The great goodness and liberality of the Proprietor, his

Penn and Logan Correspondence, I., page 374.

misfortunes from the hands of those he trusted most, his evident desire to have his Province happy and prosperous and his perfect willingness to make any reasonable sacrifice in order to make it so cause our sympathies to go out to him in his differences with an ungrateful people. In one sense a sadder life than his we seldom know. His letters again and again, sometimes pathetic,* sometimes indignant, portray the keen disappointment of an honest, conscientious and sensitive soul. There was undoubtedly provocation. Demagogues then, as always, led the people

"O Pennsylvania! what hast thou cost me! Above £30,000 more than I ever got by it, two hazardous and most fatiguing voyages, my straits and slavery here, and my child's soul almost."-Penn and Logan Correspondence, I., page 280.

"I have cause to believe that had he (Logan) been as much in opposition, as he has been understood to stand for me, he might have met with milder treatment from his persecutors, and to think that any man should be the more exposed there on my account, and instead of finding favor, meet with enmity, for his being engaged in my service, is a melancholy consideration. In short, when I reflect upon all these heads of which I have so much cause to complain, and at the same time think of the hardships, I and my suffering family have been reduced to, in no small measure owing to my endeavors for, and disappointments from that province, I cannot but mourn the unhappiness of my portion dealt to me from those of whom I had reason to expect much better and different things."-Proud, " History of Pennsylvania."