The Quaker Colonies | Page 7

which erected a government by a landed
aristocracy, they became more and more liberal, until in the end his
frame was very much like the most liberal government of the other
English colonies in America. He had a council and an assembly, both
elected by the people. The council, however, was very large, had

seventy-two members, and was more like an upper house of the
Legislature than the usual colonial governor's council. The council also
had the sole right of proposing legislation, and the assembly could
merely accept or reject its proposals. This was a new idea, and it
worked so badly in practice that in the end the province went to the
opposite extreme and had no council or upper house of the Legislature
at all.
Penn's frame of government contained, however, a provision for its
own amendment. This was a new idea and proved to be so happy that it
is now found in all American constitutions. His method of
impeachment by which the lower house was to bring in the charge and
the upper house was to try it has also been universally adopted. His
view that an unconstitutional law is void was a step towards our
modern system. The next step, giving the courts power to declare a law
unconstitutional, was not taken until one hundred years after his time.
With the advice and assistance of some of those who were going out to
his colony he prepared a code of laws which contained many of the
advanced ideas of the Quakers. Capital punishment was to be confined
to murder and treason, instead of being applied as in England to a host
of minor offenses. The property of murderers, instead of being forfeited
to the State, was to be divided among the next of kin of the victim and
of the criminal. Religious liberty was established as it had been in
Rhode Island and the Jerseys. All children were to be taught a useful
trade. Oaths in judicial proceedings were not required. All prisons were
to be workhouses and places of reformation instead of dungeons of dirt,
idleness, and disease. This attempt to improve the prisons inaugurated a
movement of great importance in the modern world in which the part
played by the Quakers is too often forgotten.
Penn had now started his "Holy Experiment," as he called his enterprise
in Pennsylvania, by which he intended to prove that religious liberty
was not only right, but that agriculture, commerce, and all arts and
refinements of life would flourish under it. He would break the
delusion that prosperity and morals were possible only under some one
particular faith established by law. He, would prove that government
could be carried on without war and without oaths, and that primitive
Christianity could be maintained without a hireling ministry, without
persecution, without ridiculous dogmas or ritual, sustained only by its

own innate power and the inward light.

Chapter II.
Penn Sails For The Delaware
The framing of the constitution and other preparations consumed the
year following Penn's receipt of his charter in 1681. But at last, on
August 30, 1682, he set sail in the ship Welcome, with about a hundred
colonists. After a voyage of about six weeks, and the loss of thirty of
their number by smallpox, they arrived in the Delaware. June would
have been a somewhat better month in which to see the rich luxuriance
of the green meadows and forests of this beautiful river. But the
autumn foliage and bracing air of October must have been inspiring
enough. The ship slowly beat her way for three days up the bay and
river in the silence and romantic loneliness of its shores. Everything
indicated richness and fertility. At some points the lofty trees of the
primeval forest grew down to the water's edge. The river at every high
tide overflowed great meadows grown up in reeds and grasses and red
and yellow flowers, stretching back to the borders of the forest and full
of water birds and wild fowl of every variety. Penn, now in the prime
of life, must surely have been aroused by this scene and by the
reflection that the noble river was his and the vast stretches of forests
and mountains for three hundred miles to the westward.
He was soon ashore, exploring the edge of his mighty domain, settling
his government, and passing his laws. He was much pleased with the
Swedes whom he found on his land. He changed the name of the little
Swedish village of Upland, fifteen miles below Philadelphia, to Chester.
He superintended laying out the streets of Philadelphia and they remain
to this day substantially as he planned them, though unfortunately too
narrow and monotonously regular. He met the Indians at Philadelphia,
sat with them at their