n all goods passing up the
Delaware, now established commissioners at Salem to collect the duties.

This action brought up the whole question of the authority of Andros.
The trustee proprietors of West Jersey appealed to the Duke of York, who
was suspiciously indifferent to the matter, but finally referred it
for decision to a prominent lawyer, Sir William Jones, before whom the
Quaker proprietors of West Jersey made a most excellent argument. They
showed the illegality, injustice, and wrong of depriving the Jerseys
of vested political rights and forcing them from the freeman's right
of making their own laws to a state of mere dependence on the arbitrary
will of one man. Then with much boldness they declared that "To exact
such an unterminated tax from English planters, and to continue it after
so many repeated complaints, will be the greatest evidence of a design
to introduce, if the Crown should ever devolve upon the Duke, an
unlimited government in old England." Prophetic words which the Duke, in
a few years, tried his best to fulfill. But Sir William Jones deciding
against him, he acquiesced, confirmed the political rights of West
Jersey by a separate grant, and withdrew any authority Andros claimed
over East Jersey. The trouble, however, did not end here. Both the
Jerseys were long afflicted by domineering attempts from New York.

Penn and his fellow trustees now prepared a constitution, or
"Concessions and Agreements," as they called it, for West Jersey, the
first Quaker political constitution embodying their advanced ideas,
establishing religious liberty, universal suffrage, and voting by
ballot, and abolishing imprisonment for debt. It foreshadowed some of
the ideas subsequently included in the Pennsylvania constitution. All
these experiences were an excellent school for William Penn. He learned
the importance in starting a colony of having a carefully and maturely
considered system of government. In his preparations some years
afterwards for establishing Pennsylvania he avoided much of the bungling
of the West Jersey enterprise.

A better organized attempt was now made to establish a foothold in West
Jersey farther up the river than Fenwick's colony at Salem. In 1677 the
ship Kent took out some 230 rather well-to-do Quakers, about as fine a
company of broadbrims, it is said, as ever entered the Delaware. Some
were from Yorkshire and London, largely creditors of Byllinge, who
were taking land to satisfy their