BY HAMPTON L. CARSON, ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF PENNSYLVANIA. (An address delivered before The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.)

My aim to-night will be to state, in a general way, the character of the debt which we owe to WILLIAM PENN AS A LAW-GIVER.

Iu wil

or seriously inclined to analyze our instituclub them to their true sources, the Seventeenth Century presents features of interest and importance unrivalled and unmatched by anything in our annals. It was during that century that every colony except Georgia was planted. From the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1606, to the landing of Penn at Chester, in 1682, we have a period which embraces all that is original and fundamental in the era of state building. The preceding two hundred years can be summed up in a sentence. We recall in a general way that Henry VII was on the throne of England and the feeble minded Charles VIII on the throne of France at the time when the generous Isabella of Spain made it possible for Columbus to discover the New World. We associate the name of Francis I with the days of Cartier and Champlain VOL. XXX.-1

(1)

in exploring the Canadian wilderness, just as we associate the exploits of Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher and the far nobler Raleigh with the great name of Elizabeth, but it is not until we reach the reign of James I, beginning, as it did, in 1604, that we enter upon a period of actual colonization. Then, through a term of seventy-five years, "stern men with empires in their brains pitched new states as Old World men pitched tents." It was a season when both Church and State were in ferment and later, in torment, resulting in the birth of our civil and religious liberty.

I cannot stop to dwell upon the features of this extraordinary struggle, but as a necessary prelude to a statement of what was actually accomplished by the founder of our Commonwealth towards the close of the period of state planting, I invite you to glance briefly at what had been written and argued upon the subject of government.

The discovery of the New World, following hard upon the invention of printing, had fired the imaginations of men. and produced a class of philosophic visionaries. Sir Thomas More wrote his Utopia, but his views were shaped by the idealism of Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus, as well as by a the New Atlantis, and Campanella, his Italian contemporary, composed in prison, his City of the Sun. Later James Harrington published his Oceana. All these, however, were but lofty dreams; they did not touch the vital nerves of the question. The real discussion began with Richard Hooker, a divine, who published but a few years before the ascension of James I, his celebrated Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. His purpose was to show that the Puritans were wrong where they strove to plant themselves upon Revelation and he sought to show by reason the necessity for a Church establishment. With the Church wholly in his mind, he hardly thought of the possible application of his argument to civil polity. Revelation, Hooker, had taught, is concerned only with matters of faith, but for all else that God had given to men, Reason is his guide. Men, equal by

nature, sought communion and fellowship with others to guard against the weakness and the danger of solitary life. This was the cause of men uniting themselves into societies; societies could not exist without government, nor government without a distinct law of its own. Strifes and troubles would be endless, unless men gave a common consent that all should be ordered by some one whom they should agree upon, for without consent there was no reason that one man should take upon himself to be lord or judge of another, "so that in a word, all public rule, of what kind soever, evidently seemeth to have arisen from deliberate advise, consultation and composition between men, judging it convenient and behoveful." These were the views of Hooker as to the social compact, though he confined them to a Church establishment. It is easy to see, however, that they were equally applicable to affairs of State. James I, who united personal pedantry to official egotism, pompously advocated the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. Even before his ascension to the English throne, he had promulgated the theory of an absolute royalty in his work on "The True Law of Free Monarchy," and announced that "although a good King will form his actions according to law, yet he is not bound thereto, but of his own will and for example giving to his subjects." The notion was a wholly new one. An "absolute King," or an "absolute monarchy" meant with the Tudor statesman who had used the phrase, a sovereignty or rule complete in itself and independent of all foreign or Papal interference. James chose to regard the words as implying the monarch's "freedom from all control by law, irresponsibility to anything but his own royal will.” The King's blunder, however, became a system of government, a doctrine which bishops preached from the pulpit and for which brave men laid their heads upon the block. "As it is Atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do," said James in a speech in the Star Chamber, " so it is presumption and a high contempt in a subject to dispute what a King can do, or to say that a King cannot do this or that."

These words startled English ears and a debate to the death was begun. Thomas Hobbes, the greatest philosopher and thinker of the day, impressed with the views of Hooker, strove in his Leviathan to state the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. He labored to define the limits of authority, and spent his mighty energies in the endeavor to set forth a system of political philosophy. Like Hooker, he founded government upon a social compact among men by nature equal, each of them gave up to the central power some part of his private right, in order that each might be protected by the strength of all. But Hobbes diverged widely from Hooker at the next stage of the argument. Hooker had said that if the government so established should fail to fulfil its purpose, those who established it might end and reshape it. Hobbes contended that the authority, when once established, became absolute. The grant was irrevocable. There was no power to take back what had once been given. Absolute government was the form thus established; and this form was best. The State was a great body Politic, as Leviathan was a great body natural and could be well ruled only when all members were subject to the control of a single head. In the Church as in the State, there should be one Directing will, and that the King's. It was for the King to say what doctrines are fit and to be taught the subject.

Sir Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, went far beyond this. He held that Hobbes conceded too much where he based his theory of absolute sovereignty upon a social compact among men equal by nature. There never was a time, said he, when men were equal. When there were only two in the world, one of them was master. When children were born, Adam was master over them. Authority was founded by God himself in fatherhood. Out of fatherhood came Royalty. The Patriarch was King.

Against these slavish doctrines, the opposition was hot. Practical statesmen like Pym and Hampden denounced them

in Parliament and resisted them in Court.

Oliver Cromwell

fought them in battle at Naseby and Marston Moor. The royal head of Charles I was severed from his body. Poets and Philosophers wrote and reasoned against them. In this last class there were three men whose names can never die, the friends of Penn, whose views shaped and controlled his own, whose labors, far less successful than his, had a decided influence in framing his government. The oldest of them was, next to Shakespeare, the greatest of English Poets; the second, a seasoned man of sixty, died on the scaffold, a martyr for the cause; the third, a man but little older than Penn, and his companion at Oxford, proved himself to be the most renowned of English Metaphysicians-an incomparable trinity of intellect, inspiration and courage. The first was the author of the Areopagitica, or an Essay upon the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing; the second was the author of Discourses upon Government; the third was the author of Two Treatises of Government, in the first of which "The False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and overthrown;" in the latter of which is an Essay concerning the True, Original Estate, and end of Civil Government. Consider these men-the friends of Penn-John Milton, Algernon Sydney and John Locke.

John Milton had said:

"Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governours. A nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.

Behold now, this vast city; a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleagured truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious