. This
great economic movement expressed the degree to which the Quaker
discipline merged the religious life in the economic life. This
consolidation of religious and economic life was essential in the
community building of the Quakers.

It is surprising to many to discover that the "Pennsylvania Dutch" were
part of the same movement of population which brought the Quakers into
Pennsylvania. William Penn spoke German as well as English. His mother
was a German. When he inherited his father's claim against the British
Crown, and received from Charles the Second the grant of that extensive
territory in America on which he launched his Holy Experiment, he began
to advertise and to seek for settlers on the Continent as well as in
England.

William Penn was a Quaker, and on the Continent he found immediate
response in the greatest number of cases among the various branches of
Mennonites, Anabaptist, and other sects, who shared a common group of
beliefs and experienced at this time a common persecution. William Penn,
therefore, reaped a harvest of responses in the territory between the
mouth of the Rhine and the Alps. His proposal made its own selection,
and brought to America a population calculated like the Quaker
population for the building of communities. The largest single
contribution was made by the Palatinates, who were at that period
undergoing extreme persecution.

The communities founded within the first century after the opening of
Pennsylvania have remained to the present day, and the earliest
establishments of Mennonites and Quaker communities in Pennsylvania have
been duplicated in the westward stream of immigration, especially in
Ohio and in Iowa. These people are roughly called the "Pennsylvania
Dutch." Even when one meets them in Michigan, Iowa or Minnesota, this
name clings to them, and the form of social organization which they
elaborated in Eastern Pennsylvania still persists.

This social organization has varying characteristics. It is somewhat
difficult to analyze the intricate windings and entanglements of
doctrinal and practical belief in custom among the Mennonites, Amish and
Dunkers. Old school and new school have been formed in almost every one
of these sects. Eccentric and peculiar principles of belief in
organization have formed the lesser and the least permanent groups; but
there is a common principle in them all. Their ability to form
communities in the midst of hostile populations and adv