e supposed to be somewhat
inconsistent with Quaker doctrine. General Greene, the most capable
American officer of the Revolution, after Washington, was a Rhode Island
Quaker. General Mifflin of the Revolution was a Pennsylvania Quaker.
General Jacob Brown, a Bucks County Pennsylvania Quaker, reorganized the
army in the War of 1819. and restored it to its former efficiency.
In the long list of Quakers eminent in all walks of life, not only in
Pennsylvania but elsewhere, are to be found John Bright, a lover of
peace and human liberty through a long and eminent career in British
politics; John Dickinson of Philadelphia, who wrote the famous Farmer's
Letters so signally useful in the American Revolution; Whittier, the
American poet, a Quaker born in Massachusetts of a family converted from
Puritanism when the Quakers invaded Boston in the seventeenth century;
and Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times, an artist of
permanent eminence, one of the founders of the Royal Academy in England
and its president in succession to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Wherever Quakers are found they are the useful and steady citizens.
Their eminence seems out of all proportion to their comparatively small
numbers. It has often been asked why this height of attainment should
occur among a people of such narrow religious discipline. But were
the Quakers really narrow, or were they any more narrow than other
rigorously self-disciplined people: Spartans, Puritans, soldiers whose
discipline enables them to achieve great results? All discipline is
in one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and retirement probably conserved
mental energy instead of dissipating it. In an age of superstition and
irrational religion, their minds were free and unhampered, and it was
the dominant rational tone of their thought that enabled science to
flourish in Pennsylvania.

Chapter V. The Troubles Of Penn And His Sons

The material prosperity of Penn's Holy Experiment kept on proving itself
over and over again every month of the year. But meantime great events
were taking place in England. The period of fifteen years from Penn's
return to England in 1684, until his return to Pennsylvania at the close
of the year of 1699, was an eventful time in English history. It was
long for a proprietor to be away from his province, and Penn would have
left a better reputation if he had passed those fifteen years in his
colony, for in England during that period he took what