antage of these river valleys for descending into the whole Atlantic
seaboard and the valley of the Mississippi. They had in consequence
conquered all the tribes south of them as far even as the Carolinas and
Georgia. All their trails of conquest led across Pennsylvania.

The Germans in their expansion at first seem to have followed up the
Schuylkill Valley and its tributaries, and they hold this region to the
present day. Gradually they crossed the watershed to the Susquehanna and
broke into the region of the famous limestone soil in Lancaster County,
a veritable farmer's paradise from which nothing will ever drive them.
Many Quaker farmers penetrated north and northeast from Philadelphia
into Bucks County, a fine rolling and hilly wheat and corn region,
where their descendants are still found and whence not a few well-known
Philadelphia families have come.

The Quaker government of Pennsylvania in almost a century of its
existence largely fulfilled its ideals. It did not succeed in governing
without war; but the war was not its fault. It did succeed in governing
without oaths. An affirmation instead of an oath became the law of
Pennsylvania for all who chose an affirmation; and this law was soon
adopted by most American communities. It succeeded in establishing
religious liberty in Pennsylvania in the fullest sense of the word. It
brought Christianity nearer to its original simplicity and made it less
superstitious and cruel.

The Quakers had always maintained that it was a mistake to suppose that
their ideas would interfere with material prosperity and happiness;
and they certainly proved their contention in Pennsylvania. To Quaker
liberalism was due not merely the material prosperity, but prison reform
and the notable public charities of Pennsylvania; in both of which
activities, as in the abolition of slavery, the Quakers were leaders.
Original research in science also flourished in a marked degree in
colonial Pennsylvania. No one in those days knew the nature of thunder
and lightning, and the old explanation that they were the voice of an
angry God was for many a sufficient explanation. Franklin, by a long
series of experiments in the free Quaker colony, finally proved in 1752
that lightning was electricity, that is to say, a manifestation of
the same force that is produced when glass is rubbed with buckskin. He
invented the lightning rod, discovered the phenomenon of positive and
negative electricity, explained