tions-an original and august conception; one to keep his name for ever in the memories of mankind. His experiment was to bear witness to the world that there is in human nature virtue for self-government. In the colony of his brain there should be equal laws. The sovereignty-judicial, representative, administrative-should be with the people. Every office should be filled by men elected to their functions, and paid out of the public revenue for their services. The state should employ the best of servants, and admit no masters. There should be no privileged order. In Utopia there should be no power, not even his own, above the law. Justice should be equally administered. To the natives of the soil he would offer protection, the useful arts, European comforts, above all the gospel. Love should brood over all his projects. Freedom of the conscience -equality of political and civil rights-respect for personal liberty—and full regard for the rights of property these were the points of his scheme.

The block of country lay to the north of that Catholic province of Maryland, which was owned by Baltimore. For eastern boundary it had the state of New Jersey, with the affairs of which Penn was now familiar. It had only one outlet to the sea; by means of the river Delaware; but it stretched inland over an undefined country, across the Alleghannies to the banks of the Ohio on the west, and to Lake Erie on the north. The length of this province was nearly three hundred miles; its width about one hundred and sixty miles; and it contained no less than forty-seven thousand square miles of surface; little less than the entire area of England. Much of the land was hilly, and the hills were green with wood. The Indians hunted elk and deer over its plains,

danced the war-dance, and smoked the pipe of peace beneath the shade of its majestic oaks. Nature, it is true, had not been prodigal in this region; mountain chains covered a large portion of its area; and while the adjoining states of Virginia, Maryland, and New York, were alive with industry, hardly an English settler had as yet thought of sitting down in this bleaker clime. The winters were severe on the eastern slopes, and men supposed they must be colder in the valleys on the west. Yet the land was rich in many of the best elements of wealth. Between Cape Henlopen and Cape May, the Delaware offered a basin in which the commerce of a great continent would have room. The Susquehannah, the Delaware, the Ohio, the Alleghanny, and a host of rivers either watered the interior of the country or washed its boundaries. It was rich in mineral treasures. Iron was found in a thousand mines; to the west of the Alleghannies lay inexhaustible fields of coal; and anthracite beds of the same fossil were found in almost every part of the province. Near the banks of the Ohio lay concealed a treasury of saltsprings. Limestone was abundant; in the southeast there was a quarry of marble not unworthy of Italy and Greece. Nor was the whole of the province like the slopes of the mountain districts. Though the rock lay near the surface, it was covered with loam. Sand and alluvial deposits existed in the same locality. Brooks and streams ran down its valleys, glens, and gorges, fertilising the soil and breeding myriads of ducks, curlews, geese, and other water-fowl. Remarkable for fertility were the lower flats about the Skuykill and the Delaware. Between the head-waters of the Alleghanny and Lake Erie, and on both banks of the Susquehannah, the soil was rich and capable

of culture. When the forest should be felled and the surface cleared, wheat, barley, rye, Indian corn, hemp, oats, and flax, would take their place. The climate had the softness of the south of France; and the purity of the atmosphere reminded Penn of Languedoc. The forests supplied woods of almost every kind, cypress, cedar, chestnut, oak, and walnut. Poplars were common. Oaks of several kinds were found. The pine, the cedar, and the wild myrtle filled the air with fragrance; and a slight breeze brought from the heart of boundless woods a stimulating scent. Beasts of prey were absent; but the woods abounded in wild game, and the venison was superior to anything of the kind out of England. Fowls grew to an uncommon size; turkeys to forty or fifty pounds weight a-piece. Partridges and pigeons made the fields vocal with their cries. The rivers yielded fish, especially perch and trout, shad and rock, roach, smelt, and eels. Oysters, crabs, cockles, conch and other shell-fish, were abundant. Fruits grew wild about the country-grapes, peaches, strawberries, plums, chestnuts, and mulberries; while the eye was charmed with the virgin flowers of spring and with the forest radiance of the fall.

But these advantages were not all known. Penn never suspected he was asking for a kingdom in return for a debt of sixteen thousand pounds. He had no hope of making money by his province; and to his death he never dreamt that it would pay him back the money he had spent. For years it was a waste. In that age people looked on a settlement among the Alleghannies as their descendants look on a removal into the gorges of the Rocky Mountains. Men went thither who could settle nowhere else. When Gustavus Adolphus came

to the throne of Sweden he found nearly the whole of the American continent in the possession of one or other power; but anxious, as he said, 'to convert the heathen and to extend his dominions; to enrich the treasury and lessen the public taxes,' he sent out colonists from Sweden to take possession of the unoccupied country on the Delaware. This colony was the beginning of a state. They found a few Dutch settlers there, who had at first no friendly feeling towards the new comers. But they found that these industrious neighbours would be useful to them; for the Swedes turned their attention to farming, while the Hollanders preferred to fetch and carry, and to buy and sell. They suited each other. With the Swedes went out a number of Finns; and a village was formed by them at Wicocoa, now within the suburbs of Philadelphia. The Swedes bestowed the name of New Suabia on the whole country, and scattered themselves far and wide over its surface. They had, however, advanced but a little way towards the formation of a state when Penn became a petitioner to the King. Not a single house had been built at Philadelphia-a spot marked out by nature as the site of a great city; for such of the Hollanders as fixed their residence at the confluence of the two rivers were content to harbour in the holes and caves.

The red men were a branch of the Lenni Lenapé. This name, signifying 'the original people,' was a common term, under which were included all the Indian tribes speaking dialects of the widelyspread Algonquin language. An obscure tradition among them pointed to a great migration from the west, in ages long ago. They may have been the remnants of a conquering race which had subdued and swept away the civilised people whose

monuments still arrest attention in the great valley of the Mississippi. The northern regions were held by Iroquois-a race of red men famous in the history of New York under the name of the Six Nations. As compared with whites, the tribes presented the same general characteristics—they were hardy, cunning, cruel, brave. They claimed the lordship of the soil as theirs by immemorial right. But as they hunted only, the grounds were of no use to them except so long as the rivers yielded fish and the forests yielded game. Men who have no fixed place of residence—no altars and no homes-have yet to acquire the means whereby a sense of property in the soil grows up. The Iroquois and the Lenapé built no cities-permanently kept no fields. Wherever the woods afforded sport the lodge was pitched. The men tightened their bows and sharpened their hatchets; the women planted a rood or two of maize; and when the forest spoils and field produce were got in, they marched to more attractive spots. Their sachem was an hereditary ruler; but the order of succession was by the female line. The children of the reigning sachem could not succeed him in his regal office, but the next son of his mother, after whom came in the sister's eldest son.

Such was the country which Penn petitioned the King to grant him in lieu of his claim.

A year was wasted in debates. The Royalists lost all patience when they heard that Penn was asking for a grant of land, to put in practice certain theories held to be Utopian by wise and moderate politicians and denounced by courtier and cavalier as dangerous to the Crown and State. Events had slackened his hold on James. Penn had publicly expressed his belief in the Popish