XVI. CHAP vent, inward affection, made, not for lust, but for love In studying the understanding, Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures. Locke deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon contract, and announces its end to be the security of property; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even to Noah, declares that "there must be a people before a government,"1 and, deducing the right to institute government from man's moral nature, seeks its fundamental rules in the immutable dictates "of universal reason," its end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division, and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure; things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain; and to "inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums, or nuts; "4 Penn esteemed happiness to lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly, that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, "it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in ;"5 Penn, like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity 1 Ar. Union, in Penn. S. Laws. 3 Essay on the Human Under standing, ii. xx. 2. 4 Ibid. ii. xxi. 55 5 Ibid. 2 XVI. from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and CHAI attributes it to nothing but space, duration, and number;1 Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth, and virtue, and God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed "not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for;" Penn likewise vindicated the many, but it was because truth is the common inheritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, inveighed against the methods of persecution as "Popish practices;" Penn censured no sect, but condemned bigotry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American lawgiver, dreaded a too numerous democracy, and reserved all power to wealth and the feudal proprietaries; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, his light in every soul; and therefore, stretching out his arms, he built-such are his own words—“ a free colony for all mankind." This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an age which had seen a popular revolution shipwreck popular liberty among selfish factions, which had seen Hugh Peters and Henry Vane perish by the hangman's cord and the axe; in an age when Sydney nourished the pride of patriotism rather than the sentiment of philanthropy, when Russel stood for the liberties of his order, and 1 Essay on the Human Under- the Quakers. It is not always posstanding, ii. xvii. 1. 2 Ibid. iv. xviii. 7. 3 Ibid. iv. xix. 15. 4 Locke's whole chapter on Enthusiasm was probably levelled at sible to know when Locke is op- XVI. CHAP. not for new enfranchisements, when Harrington, and Shaftesbury, and Locke, thought government should rest on property,-Penn did not despair of humanity, and, though all history and experience' denied thesovereignty of the people, dared to cherish the noble idea of man's capacity for self-government. Conscious that there was no room for its exercise in England, the pure enthusiast, like Calvin and Descartes, a voluntary exile, was come to the banks of the Delaware to institute "THE HOLY EXPERIMENT." Oct. 1682 The news spread rapidly, that the Quaker king was 27, at Newcastle; and, on the day after his landing, in 28. presence of a crowd of Swedes, and Dutch, and English, who had gathered round the court-house, his deeds of feoffment were produced; the duke of York's agent surrendered the territory by the solemn delivery of earth and water, and Penn, invested with supreme and undefined power in Delaware, addressed the assembled multitude on government, recommended sobriety and peace, and pledged himself to grant liberty of conscience and civil freedom. From Newcastle, Penn ascended the Delaware to Chester, where he was hospitably received by the honest, kind-hearted emigrants who had preceded him from the north of England; the little village of herdsmen and farmers, with their plain manners, gentle dispositions, and tranquil passions, seemed a harbinger of a golden age. From Chester, tradition describes the journey of Penn to have been continued with a few friends in an 1 See Hume's account of the meeting of the Long Parliament. 2 Proud, i. 205. The date in Chalmers and Proud, of Penn's landing, is October 24. It is taken from Penn's letter. But the copyist may have mistaken a figure; or Penn may have alluded to his entrance within the capes. See the Newcastle Records, in Watson, 16. XVI. open boat, in the earliest days of November, to the CHAP beautiful bank, fringed with pine-trees, on which the city of Philadelphia was soon to rise. Nov. In the following weeks, Penn visited West and East 1682 New Jersey, New York, the metropolis of his neighbor Dec. proprietary, the duke of York, and, after meeting Friends on Long Island, he returned to the banks of the Delaware.1 3 To this period belongs his first grand treaty with the Indians. Beneath a large elm-tree at Shakamaxon, on the northern edge of Philadelphia, William Penn, surrounded by a few friends, in the habiliments of peace, met the numerous delegation of the Lenni Lenape tribes. The great treaty was not for the purchase of lands, but, confirming what Penn had written, and Markham covenanted, its sublime purpose was the recognition of the equal rights of humanity.* Under the shelter of the forest, now leafless by the frosts of autumn, Penn proclaimed to the men of the Algonquin race, from both banks of the Delaware, from the borders of the Schuylkill, and, it may have been, even from the Susquehannah, the same simple message of peace and love which George Fox had professed before Cromwell, and Mary Fisher had borne to the Grand Turk. The English and the Indian should respect the same moral law, should be alike secure in their pursuits and their possessions, and adjust every difference by a peaceful tribunal, composed of an equal number of men from each race. "We meet "--such were the words of William Penu 1 Penn's Letter. 2 Duponceau and Fisher, 57. On the place, Vaux, Peters, Conyngham, in Penn. Mem. 1. 4 Duponceau and Fisher. See Concessions, xi.-xv., and Penn's letter to the Indians, in which he 1682 1683 XVI. CHAP. "on the broad pathway of good faith and good will, no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall 1682. be openness and love. I will not call you children; Dec. for parents sometimes chide their children too severely; Nov. nor brothers only; for brothers differ. The friendship between me and you I will not compare to a chain; for that the rains might rust, or the falling tree might break. We are the same as if one man's body were to be divided into two parts; we are all one flesh and blood." The children of the forest were touched by the sacred doctrine, and renounced their guile and their revenge. They received the presents of Penn in sincerity; and with hearty friendship they gave the belt of wampum. "We will live," said they, "in love with William Penn and his children, as long as the moon and the sun shall endure." This treaty of peace and friendship was made under the open sky, by the side of the Delaware, with the sun, and the river, and the forest, for witnesses. It was not confirmed by an oath; it was not ratified by signatures and seals; no written record of the conference can be found; and its terms and conditions had no abiding monument but on the heart. There they were written like the law of God, and were never forgotten. The simple sons of the wilderness, returning to their wigwams, kept the history of the covenant by strings of wampum, and, long afterwards, in their cabins, would count over the shells on a clean piece of bark, and recall to their own memory, and repeat to their children or to the stranger, the words of William Penn.' New England had just terminated a disastrous 1 Heckewelder, Hist. Trans. Am. Phil. Soc 176. |