alteration; and to the forty laws were added twenty-one others, and the infant code was passed in form.

The new laws only regulated the practical working of ideas and principles embodied in the frame of government; the chief of them providing-that every man should be free to believe in any doctrine whatever not destructive of the peace and honour of civil society; that every Christian man of twentyone years, unstained by crime, should be eligible to elect and be elected a member of the Colonial Parliament; that every child of twelve, whether rich or poor, should be instructed in some useful trade or skill, all work being honourable in a democratic state, all idleness a shame; that fees of law should be fixed at a low rate, and hung up in every court of justice; that persons wrongly imprisoned should have double damages from the prosecutor ; that prisons should be changed from nurseries of vice, idleness, and misery, into houses of industry, honesty, and education. These legislators adopted the humane views of their Governor even where they seemed to be least supported by tradition and experience. The English penal laws were much at variance with Penn's ideas; and at one bold stroke he blotted out the whole catalogue of crimes punished with death excepting only two,-the crimes. of murder and treason. The Assembly passed law embodying this humane and enlightened policy, and also a general act of naturalisation for aliens. There was little talk, much work in this first parliament. On the third day the session was

completed, and Penn prorogued the members. They had left their ploughs for half a week; they had met together and made a State.

No reader needs to be reminded how the moral sentiment and state policy of Europe and America have followed in the wake of these ideas. Toleration was in Penn's day but the creed of those who doubted everything; religious men of almost every shade denied it as a suggestion of the evil spirit. Locke could ask for charity towards error, as he found no certitude in truth; but earnest Christians, holding God's Word to be infallible, could show no mercy to the unbeliever. Governor Bradford, one of the noblest of the Pilgrim Fathers, had denounced the folly of toleration as tending to misrule. Endicott had on one occasion said to his prisoner-Renounce your religion or die. President Oakes had looked on toleration as the first-born of all abominations. These were statesmen, but the clergy had been no less hot against opinion. It is doing the religious martyrs of the New World no wrong to say that the cruelties exercised by them on men who differed in opinion were worthy of the best days of the Star Chamber and the Court of Inquisition. Penn was equally before his sect and country. It remained for Howard, Eden, and Romilly, more than a century after that Colonial Assembly met in Chester, to introduce Penn's principles into the administration of our prisons and the reformation of our penal code.

Penn paid some visits to the neighbouring seats of government in New York, Maryland, and the

Jerseys. At West River, Lord Baltimore came forth to meet him with a retinue of the chief persons in the province. Colonel Tailler offered the hospitalities of his mansion in the Ridge, Anne Arundel county, to these visitors, and they held a long and spirited conference. It was impossible to adjust the boundary, and the two proprietors separated with the resolution to maintain their several rights. Penn had sent out a surveyor, Thomas Holme, some months before he himself left England; and this able servant, assisted by Markham and the commissioners, had already held interviews with the Indian sachems, made extensive purchases of land, and acquired so much knowledge of the interior as to enable him to divide the whole province into counties. The lands already bought from the Redmen were now put up for sale at four-pence an acre, with a reserve of one shilling for every hundred acres as quit-rent; the latter sum intended to form a state revenue for the Governor's support. In marking out the various districts Penn set apart equal lots for each of his three children. Two manors of ten thousand acres each he reserved as a present for the Duke of York. Amidst these sales and settlements he recollected George Fox, for whose use and profit he set aside a thousand acres of the best land in the province, free of all claims for quit-rent, costs of transfer, and even of titledeeds.

Penn was no less careful for the Redskins. Laying on one side all ceremonial manners, he won their hearts by his easy confidence and familiar

speech. He walked with them alone into the forests. He sat with them on the ground to watch the young men dance. He joined in their feasts, and ate their roasted hominy and acorns. When they expressed delight at seeing the great Onas (native name for Penn) imitate their national customs, not to be outdone in any of those feats of prowess which the Red men value, Penn, in whom the swordsman of Paris and the volunteer of Carrickfergus were not lost, leapt up from his seat, entered the lists, and beat them all; on seeing which the younger warriors could hardly control the extravagance of their joy.

Markham had already made his purchase of land, and entered with the natives into a treaty of peace and amity. When he had explained to them the beneficent intentions of the great man who was coming to live and trade with them; when he had told them that, although the King had granted him the whole country, from the Cape of Henlopen to those distant regions stretching away beyond the great mountains to the northern lakes, of which their people had remote traditions, yet he would not take from them by force a single rood of their hunting-grounds, but would buy it from them with their full consent; when he had told them that the great Onas would never allow his children to wrong the Indians, to cheat them of their fish, their wild game, or their beaver-skins; that in his just mind he had ordained that if a quarrel should ever arise in that country between a white man and a red one, twelve men, six Indian

and six English, should meet together and judge them; when he laid before them the presents which he had brought as a sign of amity and goodwill from his master, the sachems gave the wampum belt to the young colonel, and replied, with all the emphasis of sincerity, ' We will live in peace with Onas and his children as long as the sun and moon endure.'

Beyond this purchase Penn felt that, for the moment, it would be unwise to go. Their huntinggrounds were dear to them. Had he shown desire to possess their lands before he had secured their friendship, suspicions would have been engendered in their minds. The experiment he had to conduct was so novel that care was needful at every step. It would have been madness to offend the Iroquois, while the settlers in his villages refused to carry arms. Not till he had spent seven months in the country would he make proposals for the purchase of unoccupied lands. Having now become intimate with Taminent and other of the native kings, who had approved these treaties, seeing great advantages in them for their people, he proposed to hold a conference with the chiefs and warriors, to confirm the former treaties and form a lasting league of peace.

On the banks of the Delaware, in the suburbs of the rising city of Philadelphia, lay a natural amphitheatre, used from time immemorial as a place of meeting for the native tribes. The name of Sakimaxing-now corrupted by the white men into Shackamaxon-means the place of kings. At this