ble, full of simplicity
and kindliness, cheerful and brotherly and unfailingly religious. It is
the work of one who is trying his best to live for his brethren and in
Christ's spirit.

Another significant writing of this period is Penn's "Plan for the Peace
of Europe." The calamities of the war then in progress on the Continent
gave him arguments enough for the desirableness of peace. The means of
peace is justice, and the means of justice is government. It is plain to
all that a state wherein any private citizen might avenge himself upon
his neighbor would be a place of confusion and distress. "For this cause
they have sessions, terms, assizes, and parliaments, to overrule men's
passions and resentments, that they may not be judges in their own
cause, nor punishers of their own wrongs." Penn proposes that the same
relation between peace and justice which is enforced between citizen and
citizen be also enforced between nation and nation. "Now," he says, "if
the sovereign princes of Europe ... for love of peace and order [would]
agree to meet by their stated deputies in a general Diet, Estates or
Parliament and there establish rules of justice for sovereign princes to
observe one to another; and thus to meet yearly, or once in two or three
years at the farthest, or as they shall see cause, and to be stiled, The
Sovereign or Imperial Diet, Parliament or State of Europe: before which
Sovereign Assembly should be brought all differences depending between
one sovereign and another that cannot be made up by private embassies
before the sessions begin; and that if any of the sovereignties that
constitute these imperial states shall refuse to submit their claim or
pretensions to them, or to abide and perform the judgment thereof and
seek their remedy by arms, or delay their compliance beyond the time
prefixt in their resolutions, all the other sovereignties, united as one
strength, shall compel the submission and performance of the sentence,
with damages to the suffering party, and charges to the sovereignties
that obliged their submission; ... peace would be procured and
continued in Europe." The principle of international arbitration, the
Conference at the Hague, and all like meetings which shall be held
hereafter, are thus foreshadowed.

These two productions of Penn's season of retirement--the "Fruits of
Solitude," and the "Plan for the Peace of Europe"--illustrate again the
two qualities which make him singularly eminent