he
most active was William Penn, who had suffered ridicule and persecution
for his faith, and who now desired a clearer field than the Jerseys
offered for his political and religious experiments. In 1681 he
therefore procured from the king a proprietary grant of the territory
lying west of the Delaware from "twelve miles north of New Castle Town
unto the three and fortieth degree of Northern Latitude." The land
within these vague limits was thought to be "wholly Indian," and the
purposes of Penn did not run counter to the colonial policy of the
Government. Optimism or ignorance disposed the Lords of Trade to believe
that Pennsylvania could as readily as the Carolinas be devoted to the
cultivation of "oyle, dates, figgs, almons, raisins, and currans." To
the political hobbies of Penn the Government was indifferent, while the
intractable Quakers were classed with jailbirds and political offenders
as people who were more useful to England in the plantations than at
home. The proprietor's "Account of the Province of Pennsylvania,"
translated into Dutch, German, and French, promising religious and
political liberty, and offering land on easy terms to rich and poor
alike, attracted good colonists in large numbers. Within ten years there
were 10,000 people, mostly Quakers, in Pennsylvania and the Delaware
counties. Political wrangling, somewhat difficult to understand and
scarcely worth unraveling, distracted the colony of brotherly love for
many years; but from the beginning the province prospered. The settlers
were as thrifty as New England Puritans, and they had better soil and a
more hospitable climate. Provisions were soon raised for export; and in
1700, according to Robert Quarry, the Quakers of Pennsylvania had
"improved tillage to that degree that they have made bread, flower, and
Beer a drugg in all the markets of the West Indies."

II

As early as 1656 London merchants were inquiring "whether it would not
be a prudentiall thing to draw all the Islands, Colonies, and Dominions
of America under one and the same management here." Enterprising
capitalists who had ventured their money in Jamaica or Barbados were
content to leave the honor and profit of founding new colonies to
idealists like Penn and Shaftesbury; but they eagerly welcomed the
restored monarch after the unsettled conditions of 1659, and were
prepared, even before he landed, to tell him "how the forraigne
plantations may be made most useful to the Trade