Our first century . e with his religion, whichtaught that all war is wrong and wicked. But it wasalso good policy from the point of view of business in-terests. It is always and everywhere much cheaper todeal fairly with men and to keep the peace with themthan it is to fight them. Accordingly one of William Penns earliest proceedings,after his settlement in the colony, was to invite the chiefsof the Indians, who lived near at hand, to meet him forthe purpose of making a treaty. He frankly recognizedtheir right to the country which had been granted tohim by an English king who did not own it, a
Our first century . e with his religion, whichtaught that all war is wrong and wicked. But it wasalso good policy from the point of view of business in-terests. It is always and everywhere much cheaper todeal fairly with men and to keep the peace with themthan it is to fight them. Accordingly one of William Penns earliest proceedings,after his settlement in the colony, was to invite the chiefsof the Indians, who lived near at hand, to meet him forthe purpose of making a treaty. He frankly recognizedtheir right to the country which had been granted tohim by an English king who did not own it, and he pro-posed to purchase from them, as other colonists had nowand then done, all the lands that this English king had 136 OUR FIRST CENTURY given to him. The purchase of course involved theexpenditure of very Httle money, as the Indians heldtheir lands cheap, and it secured peace as well as posses-sion. Penn explained to the Indians the principles of his re-ligion and asked them to live with him and his colonists. Wampum belt, presented by Indians to William Penn.(By permission of the Library Company of Philadelphia.) upon those terms of friendship which were the bases ofthat religion. The Indians, who were friendlier than thosein most other colonies had been, were glad enough to dothis. They took the price that he offered them for theirlands, and they promised * to live in love with WilliamPenn and his children, while grass grows and waterruns. That was the Indian equivalent of the abstractword forever. It is a fact illustrating the good faithof the Indians, that so long as William Penn lived, noIndian ever killed a Quaker. Thus between 1607, when the first permanent Englishcolony was planted at Jamestown in Virginia, and the mid-dle of that century, English adventurers of various sorts NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 137 had possessed themselves of the country from Maine onthe north to the Savannah River on the south. In everypart of that region thriving settlements had been b
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