now an opportunity of ample remuneration for all his sacrifices and toil, by "the sale of domains." For a monopoly of the Indian trade, he was offered "six thousand pounds and an annual revenue." Will he yield to the temptation? Hear him: "I will not abuse the love of God, nor act unworthy of his providence, by defiling what came to me clean. No: let the Lord guide me by his wisdom to honor his name, and serve his truth and people, that an example and a standard may be set up to the nations. There may be room there, though not here, for the holy experiment."

Subject only to the careless negligence or capricious exactions of a weak king, Penn was now an absolute sovereign over a growing and confiding people. Was this right? Would he hold on to this power, and attempt to give it hereditary descent? Hear him again: "For the matter of liberty, I purpose that which is extraordinary,

to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief; that the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country. It is the great end of government to support power in reverence with the people, and to secure the people from the abuse of power; for liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery."

Noble words, and as real and sincere as they are noble. How high he rose above the governmental theories of English civilization!

If it be asked, "How came this man to be so nobly superior to the selfishness of his time?" we must candidly answer, His views of himself and his fellow-men arose directly from his conceptions of God. Glance at his history, and you see this distinctly. Bred an Independent, he became, at twelve years, serious and thoughtful. It was only necessary for him to hear a Quaker at Oxford to start the train of spiritual thought and expression which would expel him for nonconformity. From his own father's hand he received the first personal violence for the freedom he claimed for his conscience. Becoming a studied and travelled gentle

man, his way was open to preferment; but he had met and once more heard his old friend Thomas Loe, and his spiritual consciousness was at once attentive to "the voice within," and "William Penn was a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing." "God," said he, "in his everlasting kindness, guided my feet in the flower of my youth, when about two and twenty years of age." In jail for the free action of conscience, he said, "Religion is my crime and my innocence: it makes me a prisoner to malice, but my own freeman." For asserting his rights, and professing his faith, through the press, he was a prisoner in the Tower until he should learn the virtues of conformity. "My prison shall be my grave" was his noble answer. To the king he wrote grandly, "The Tower is to me the worst argument in the world." He was at large once more, but had spoken at a conventicle," and was again under arrest. "Not all the powers on earth shall divert us from meeting to adore our God who made us," said the lofty soul of this prince of men. When the magistrate remonstrated with him, he answered, "I prefer the honestly simple to the ingeniously wicked." His notes of freedom rang out from Newgate: "If we cannot obtain the olive-branch of toleration, we bless the providence of God, resolving by patience to outweary persecution, and by our constant sufferings to obtain a victory more glorious than our adversaries can achieve by their cruelties." He was before a committee of the Commons to plead for liberty, not for the Quakers merely, but for all. "We must give the liberty we ask," said he: "we cannot be false to our principles, though it were to relieve ourselves; for we would have none to suffer for dissent on any hand." To the electors in a canvass he said, "Your well-being depends upon your preservation of your right in the government. You are free; God and nature and the constitution have made you trustees for posterity. Choose men who will, by all just and legal ways, firmly keep and zealously promote your power."

This was the man, who, under the crown, was intrusted with the civil liberties of Delaware, a good part of New Jersey, and the vast State of Pennsylvania. Who could have any doubt as to what he would do? With the great sovereign of human liberty before his eyes, and fresh from the cruel sufferings borne for conscience' sake in his native land, he hastened to the field of his mission across the waters. With his heart glowing with love, he entered the land of his inheritance, "a free colony for all mankind,” to try "THE HOLY EXPERIMENT." Swedes, Dutch, and English hailed him as a common protector and friend; and wild savages were quiet as lambs at his feet, when they had heard his words, and gazed deep down into his heart under "the large elm-tree at Shakamaxon." "We will live," responded the Lenni Lenapes, "in love with William Penn and his children as long as the moon and the sun shall endure;" and no Quaker ever perished from Indian arrow. "We have done better," said the Quakers, "than if, with the proud Spaniards, we had gained the mines of Potosi. We may make the ambitious heroes, whom the world admires, blush for their shameful victories. To the poor, dark souls round about us, we teach their RIGHTS AS MEN."

We have no reason to trace the action of these humane principles in the formation of a government. The people, so far as Penn could make them, were free as air. They might assemble as a general convention, or by representatives. They preferred the latter, and, in the simplicity of their faith, listened to the voice within to give them their laws; and be assured this voice would suggest nothing but pure freedom to a Quaker. Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and English were completely and alike invested with the rights of freemen, and could exult in the language of Lawrence Cook, "It is the best day we have ever seen." Penn had founded in the New World a pure democracy.

It was not, to be sure, to be all sunshine. The great proprietor, who had reserved nothing for himself, must leave

his people to their own wisdom. There would be divisions among them for a time. Delaware must set up for herself and finally his Majesty's commissioners must come to vex the honest Quakers. But they had passed through the fire in other days. They would vindicate the hopes of their founder, and, amid the praises of the world, sustain their own liberties with the noblest moral heroism.

THE GREAT WEST.

We have thus traced the history of God's providence in the settlement of all the original thirteen States, so far as to identify the religious force active in their colonization and the foundation of their respective systems of civil liberty. The Northern group, commencing thirteen years later than the Southern, has shown great vigor, and attracted a hardy, enterprising population, and, before the war of the Revolu tion, reached a commanding position in all the elements of a growing civilization.

But the Northern group was far from being completed. Within the bosom of the great wilderness, stretching out over the vast prairies, and on over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, lay the great States and Territories of the West. The boundary-line between the Southern and Northern group was not at once clearly defined. The institution of slavery alone would determine it. During the period now under consideration, the colonies were alike free to adopt or reject the system of slave-labor, as States are free, if they will, to violate all moral principle, and fix upon themselves the guilt of crime which will some day demand a fearful and bloody retribution. And, with notable exceptions, there was a strange want of conscience in the North, which required the demonstration, that the nature of the soil and the severity of the climate would not allow reliance upon slave-labor, to place it clearly on the side of emancipation. Slowly the beginnings of this foul system of oppression in the North dis

appeared; and free labor moved southward, until the famous Mason and Dixon's Line became distinct, and the equally famous Missouri Compromise stretched the line between the two groups farther west. But the boundary between freedom and slavery was not physically indicated in the West and South-west. The interference of God's providence was necessary to save large portions of the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific coast from the deep stain; and hence the population went into these territories from American States and from Europe, firmly fixed against slavery. The struggle went on for two generations: and, under the divine control, the area of freedom extended so rapidly as to parallel, and at length fairly outstrip, the progress of slavery; and the Northern group completed embraced, in addition to her large portion of the old thirteen, the vast territories and teeming population of Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Dacotah, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Montana, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. What could resist the spirit of freedom under guidance of Providence, controlling the millions who would inhabit a region so immense in extent, and inexhaustible in resources?

Slavery struggled hard for predominance over the southern portion of this great West, and thus over the nation; and if the talents and shrewdness, the political scheming and wealth, of men could have produced it, this result would have been inevitable. The final defeat of this grasping tyranny, and the grand triumph of liberty in the West, argue a reigning Divinity in the affairs of men. The battle was at length fairly joined; and, when it reached its colossal proportions, the parties were so large and potent, and so nearly balanced, as to bring out before the eyes of men the extreme force and terrific energy of both slavery and freedom. This the purposes of God required; and all the efforts of humanity during a hundred years were utterly inadequate to prevent it.