lved no abdication of the power of the sword by the
civil governor. The enactment, however sparing, of capital laws conceded
by implication every point that is claimed by Christian moralists in
justification of war. But it is hardly to be doubted that the tendency
of Quaker politics so to conduct civil government as that it shall
"resist not evil" is responsible for some of the strange paradoxes in
the later history of Pennsylvania. The commonwealth was founded in good
faith on principles of mutual good will with the Indians and tender
regard for Indian rights, of religious liberty and interconfessional
amity, and of a permanent peace policy. Its history has been
characterized, beyond that of other States, by foul play toward the
Indians and protracted Indian wars, by acrimonious and sometimes bloody
sectarian conflicts, by obstinate insurrections against public
order,[144:1] and by cruel and exterminating war upon honest settlers,
founded on a mere open question of title to territory.[144:2]

The failure of Quakerism is even more conspicuous considered as a
church discipline. There is a charm as of apostolic simplicity and
beauty in its unassuming hierarchy of weekly, monthly, quarterly, and
yearly meetings, corresponding by epistles and by the visits of
traveling evangelists, which realizes the type of the primitive church
presented in "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." But it was never
able to outgrow, in the large and free field to which it was
transplanted, the defects incident to its origin in a protest and a
schism. It never learned to commend itself to men as a church for all
Christians, and never ceased to be, even in its own consciousness, a
coterie of specialists. Penn, to be sure, in his youthful overzeal, had
claimed exclusive and universal rights for Quakerism as "the alone good
way of life and salvation," all religions, faiths, and worships besides
being "in the darkness of apostasy."[145:1] But after the abatement of
that wonderful first fervor which within a lifetime carried "its line
into all the earth, and its words to the ends of the world," it was
impossible to hold it to this pitch. Claiming no divine right to all
men's allegiance, it felt no duty of opening the door to all men's
access. It was free to exclude from the meeting on arbitrary and even on
frivolous grounds. As zeal decayed, the energies of the Society were
mainly shown in protesting and excluding and expelling. God's husbandry
does