or be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious worship or ministry contrary to his mind, but shall fully and freely enjoy his Christian liberty in all respects without molestation or interruption." He laid the foundation for the public schools by declaring that the governor and provincial council shall erect an order of public schools, and encourage and reward the authors of useful sciences and laudable inventions in the said provinces. In the 30th section he declared "That all scandalous and malicious reporters, backbiters, defamers and spreaders of false news, whether against Magistrates or private persons, shall be accordingly severely punished, as enemies to the peace and concord of this province." He severed Church from State, secured the rights of conscience, wedded religious liberty to civil security; encouraged immigration; armed the citizens with the ballot; converted prisons into workhouses; abolished the infamy of jailers' fees; punished perjury and extortion; destroyed multiplicity of suits; overturned the inequalities of primogeniture; suppressed piracy, assailed vice; stripped the criminal law of ferocious punishment; encouraged literature; rewarded science, and thus strove to secure the peace, purity and happiness of his people. In all these provisions we recognize the great features of our State jurisprudence, and on critically comparing them with the condition of the law that then prevailed in England and with all that has been since accomplished by Howard, Romilly, Brougham, Peel and Gladstone, we are astounded at the extent and boldness of his innovations. To sum up the main incidents in his career it is seen that his preparation for his crowning work had been ample and peculiar. He was the son of an English Admiral, illustrious and successful in the days when the English admirals triumphed over the greatest of the Dutch. He went to Christ Church College, Oxford, at the age of 16, and there met John Locke, the great philosopher. Two years later, because of his religious views, he was expelled from College and in consequence was turned out of doors by his father, travelled in France and in Italy, fought with a desperado in the streets of Paris, and was skillful enough in fencing to strike his opponent's sword from his hands, but he chivalrously declined to stab to death his disarmed enemy as he had a right to do under the code. He studied theology under Moses Amyrault, a famous divine of the time, at the Protestant College at Saumur. He subsequently studied law at Lincoln's Inn. He read with attention Lord Coke and Magna Charta, and made each word of gold his own. He kindled at the protest of the Barons at Runnymede, and breathed a similar spirit of defiance. He had scanned the whole fabric of social freedom and pen in hand, had traced to their fountains the liberties of Englishmen. In his own person he had felt the fierce grasp of arbitrary power, and suffered the horrors of the dock and the jail. The inner light had dispersed the darkness of his cell, and his soul had expanded beneath the ministry of Fox. He had divined the truth that about the person and the mind of man there is something too sacred for even the anointed fingers of a king to touch. He had seen the flames curl about Elizabeth Gaunt and had gazed on the mutilated limbs of Henry Cornish at Cheapside. He had debated the loftiest propositions of government with Algernon Sydney; he had talked with John Milton of Pym and Hamden, and dreamed with Sir Thomas More and Harrington of the ideal state. He had seen at Whitehall the pleasure barks of Charles II launched upon the tears of his subjects. the tears of his subjects. He had witnessed with disgust the exaltation of vice and the despair of virtue, and marked the coarse and cruel contrast between the features of royalty and his own unrealized democracy. His mind was a battleground. The superstition of the past and the iron tyranny of the present met the hopes of the future and convulsed his soul as by the shock of arms. The result was a paradox. A friend of the people, he was the favorite of Kings; a man of peace, yet the apostle of progress; an advocate of toleration, yet the champion of aggressive re form; an angel of mercy, yet a bolt of destruction; the herald of the things to be, the executioner of the things that are. With such singular characteristics, trained in such schools, and not without experience in the work of colonization, endowed by nature with an intellect bold and commanding, and a heart gentle and benevolent, sustained by an unfaltering trust in God, holding the charter of a matchless Province, he resolved, in the prime of vigorous manhood, to follow the Pilgrims across the sea, and build a great government of the people, founded upon mercy and justice, walled in by truth, peace, love and plenty, crowned by virtue, liberty and independence, the refuge and abiding place of persecuted man. We are told by Plutarch that Lycurgus, charmed with the beauty and greatness of his political establishment, exacted an oath from the Spartan people never to alter it until his return from Delphi, and then departed never to return, and thus secured the inviolability of his laws. Though William Penn demanded no such pledge, and doubtless had no such expectations of devotion, though since his death the world has been shaken by successive revolutions, yet the great principles upon which he founded his free and happy Commonwealth are still living forces, unchanged in efficiency and usefulness, while the mode of their adminis tration only has been shaped from time to time to meet the wants of a growing people. In the judgment of competent critics, Penn ranks among those founders of States who, by the wisdom and liberality and beneficence of their laws, are justly entitled to the admiration and gratitude of mankind. It was Penn's good fortune to be practical and successful. Locke failed, but he triumphed; Harrington dreamed, but he acted; Sydney died upon the scaffold for his unpublished opinions, but Penn lived to see his plans in peaceful oper ation. To the enraptured gaze of Scipio there was revealed a place in heaven assigned to all those who have preserved their country or increased her glory, where an eternity of |