Our first century . 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
Our first century . 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 builtup, farms had been established, plantations had beenopened, the forests had been invaded and the plough andthe hoe had begun to do their work of cultivation andcivilization. In the absence of railways, and steamboats, and steam-. Penns house in Philadelphia. ships, and telegraphs, and even of mails, or country roadsand bridges across streams, there was slow and very in-frequent communication between one and another of thecolonies. But all of them were occupied by English-men inspired by the English love of liberty and the En-gUsh conception of the natural rights of man. In all of 138 OUR FIRST CENTURY them, except Pennsylvania, the colonists were guaran-teed, by their charters or grants of other kinds, thosefundamental rights which from the time of MagnaCharta had belonged to Englishmen. In all of them—not even excepting Pennsylvania—conditions had tendedto develop a certain jealousy of such rights, a jealousywhich was destined, more than a hundred years later, tounite them in a common struggle for independence ofBritish rule. In the meanwhile they had encountered dangers anddifficulties which had served to strengthen the manhoodof their people, and to develop among them a spirit ofself-
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