If you are disposed
to relieve your country, you have many other ways of granting money to
which I shall have no objection. I shall put one proof more both of your
sincerity and mine in our professions of regard for the public, by
offering to agree to any bill in the present exigency which it is
consistent with my duty to pass; lest, before our present disputes can
be brought to an issue, we should neither have a privilege to dispute
about, nor a country to dispute in."[352] They stood fast; and with an
obstinacy for which the Quakers were chiefly answerable, insisted that
they would give nothing, except by a bill taxing real estate, and
including that of the proprietaries.

[Footnote 349: _Colonial Records of Pa_., VI. 682.]

[Footnote 350: _Message of the Governor to the Assembly, 8 Nov. 1755_,
in _Colonial Records of Pa._, VI. 684.]

[Footnote 351: _Message of the Assembly to the Governor, 11 Nov. Ibid._
VI. 692. The words are Franklin's.]

[Footnote 352: _Message of the Governor to the Assembly, 22 Nov. 1755_,
in _Colonial Records of Pa._, VI. 714.]

But now the Assembly began to feel the ground shaking under their feet.
A paper, called a "Representation," signed by some of the chief
citizens, was sent to the House, calling for measures of defence. "You
will forgive us, gentlemen," such was its language, "if we assume
characters somewhat higher than that of humble suitors praying for the
defence of our lives and properties as a matter of grace or favor on
your side. You will permit us to make a positive and immediate demand of
it."[353] This drove the Quakers mad. Preachers, male and female,
harangued in the streets, denouncing the iniquity of war. Three of the
sect from England, two women and a man, invited their brethren of the
Assembly to a private house, and fervently exhorted them to stand firm.
Some of the principal Quakers joined in an address to the House, in
which they declared that any action on its part "inconsistent with the
peaceable testimony we profess and have borne to the world appears to us
in its consequences to be destructive of our religious liberties."[354]
And they protested that they would rather "suffer" than pay taxes for
such ends. Consistency, even in folly, has in it something respectable;
but the Quakers were not consistent. A few years after, when heated
with party-passion and excited by reports of an irruption of incensed
Presbyterian borderers, some of the pacific sectaries arme