The arrival of colonists in Pennsylvania in greater numbers than
in Delaware and the Jerseys was the more notable because, within
a few years after Pennsylvania was founded, persecution of the
Quakers ceased in England and one prolific cause of their
migration was no more. Thirteen hundred Quakers were released
from prison in 1686 by James II; and in 1689, when William of
Orange took the throne, toleration was extended to the Quakers
and other Protestant dissenters.

The success of the first Quakers who came to America brought
others even after persecution ceased in England. The most
numerous class of immigrants for the first fifteen or twenty
years were Welsh, most of whom were Quakers with a few Baptists
and Church of England people. They may have come not so much from
a desire to flee from persecution as to build up a little Welsh
community and to revive Welsh nationalism. In their new
surroundings they spoke their own Welsh language and very few of
them had learned English. They had been encouraged in their
national aspirations by an agreement with Penn that they were to
have a tract of 40,000 acres where they could live by themselves.
The land assigned to them lay west of Philadelphia in that high
ridge along the present main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad,
now so noted for its wealthy suburban homes. All the important
names of townships and places in that region, such as Wynnewood,
St. Davids, Berwyn, Bryn Mawr, Merion, Haverford, Radnor, are
Welsh in origin. Some of the Welsh spread round to the north of
Philadelphia, where names like Gwynedd and Penllyn remain as
their memorials. The Chester Valley bordering the high ridge of
their first settlement they called Duffrin Mawr or Great Valley.

These Welsh, like so many of the Quakers, were of a well-to-do
class. They rapidly developed their fertile land and, for
pioneers, lived quite luxuriously. They had none of the usual
county and township officers but ruled their Welsh Barony, as it
was called, through the authority of their Quaker meetings. But
this system eventually disappeared. The Welsh were absorbed into
the English population, and in a couple of generations their
language disappeared. Prominent people are descended from them.
David Rittenhouse, the astronomer, was Welsh on his mother's
side. David Lloyd, for a long time the leader of the popular
party and at one time Chief Justice, was a Welshman. Since the
Revolution the Welsh names of Cadwalader and Meredith have been
conspicuous.

The Church of England people formed a curious and decidedly
hostile element in the early population of Pennsylvania. They
established themselves in Philadelphia in the beginning and
rapidly grew into a political party which, while it cannot be
called very strong in numbers, was important in ability and
influence. After Penn's death, his sons joined the Church of
England, and the Churchmen in the province became still stronger.
They formed the basis of the proprietary party, filled executive
offices in the Government, and waged relentless war against the
Quaker majority which controlled the Legislature. During Penn's
lifetime the Churchmen were naturally opposed to the whole
government, both executive and legislative. They were constantly
sending home to England all sorts of reports and information
calculated to show that the Quakers were unfit to rule a
province, that Penn should be deprived of his charter, and that
Pennsylvania should be put under the direct rule of the King.

They had delightful schemes for making it a strong Church of
England colony like Virginia. One of them suggested that, as the
title to the Three Lower Counties, as Delaware was called, was in
dispute, it should be taken by the Crown and given to the Church
as a manor to support a bishop. Such an ecclesiastic certainly
could have lived in princely state from the rents of its fertile
farms, with a palace, retinue, chamberlains, chancellors, feudal
courts, and all the appendages of earthly glory. For the sake of
the picturesqueness of colonial history it is perhaps a pity that
this pious plan was never carried out.

As it was, however, the Churchmen established themselves with not
a little glamour and romance round two institutions, Christ
Church for the first fifty years, and after that round the old
College of Philadelphia. The Reverend William Smith, a pugnacious
and eloquent Scotchman, led them in many a gallant onset against
the "haughty tribe" of Quakers, and he even suffered imprisonment
in the cause. He had a country seat on the Schuylkill and was in
his way a fine character, devoted to the establishment of
ecclesiasticism and higher learning as a bulwark against the
menace of Quaker fanaticism; and but for the coming on of the
Revolution he might have become the first colonial bishop with
all the palaces, pomp, and glory appertaining thereunto.

In spite of this opposition, however, the Quakers continued their
control of the colony, serenely tolerating the anathemas of the
learned Churchmen and the fierce curses and brandished weapons of
the Presbyterians and Scotch-Irish. Curses and anathemas were no
check to the fertile soil. Grist continued to come to the mill;
and the agricultural products poured into Philadelphia to be
carried away in the ships. The contemplative Quaker took his
profits as they passed; enacted his liberalizing laws, his prison
reform, his charities, his peace with the savage Indians; allowed
science, research, and all the kindly arts of life to flourish;
and seemed perfectly contented with the damnation in the other
world to which those who flourished under his rule consigned him.

In discussing the remarkable success of the province, the
colonists always disputed whether the credit should be given to
the fertile soil or to the liberal laws and constitution. It was
no doubt due to both. But the obvious advantages of Penn's
charter over the mixed and troublesome governmental conditions in
the Jerseys, Penn's personal fame and the repute of the Quakers
for liberalism then at its zenith, and the wide advertising given
to their ideas and Penn's, on the continent of Europe as well as
in England, seem to have been the reasons why more people, and
many besides Quakers, came to take advantage of that fertile
soil.

The first great increase of alien population came from Germany,
which was still in a state of religious turmoil, disunion, and
depression from the results of the Reformation and the Thirty
Years' War. The reaction from dogma in Germany had produced a
multitude of sects, all yearning for greater liberty and
prosperity than they had at home. Penn and other Quakers had made
missionary tours in Germany and had preached to the people. The
Germans do not appear to have been asked to come to the Jerseys.
But they were urged to come to Pennsylvania as soon as the
charter was obtained; and many of them made an immediate
response. The German mind was then at the height of its emotional
unrestraint. It was as unaccustomed to liberty of thought as to
political liberty and it produced a new sect or religious
distinction almost every day. Many of these sects came to
Pennsylvania, where new small religious bodies sprang up among
them after their arrival. Schwenkfelders, Tunkers, Labadists, New
Born, New Mooners, Separatists, Zion's Brueder, Ronsdorfer,
Inspired, Quietists, Gichtelians, Depellians, Mountain Men, River
Brethren, Brinser Brethren, and the Society of the Woman in the
Wilderness, are names which occur in the annals of the province.
But these are only a few. In Lancaster County alone the number
has at different times been estimated at from twenty to thirty.
It would probably be impossible to make a complete list; some of
them, indeed, existed for only a few years. Their own writers
describe them as countless and bewildering. Many of them were
characterized by the strangest sort of German mysticism, and some
of them were inclined to monastic and hermit life and their
devotees often lived in caves or solitary huts in the woods.

It would hardly be accurate to call all the German sects Quakers,
since a great deal of their mysticism would have been anything
but congenial to the followers of Fox and Penn. Resemblances to
Quaker doctrine can, however, be found among many of them; and
there was one large sect, the Mennonites, who were often spoken
of as German Quakers. The two divisions fraternized and preached
in each other's meetings. The Mennonites were well educated as a
class and Pastorius, their leader, was a ponderously learned
German. Most of the German sects left the Quakers in undisturbed
possession of Philadelphia, and spread out into the surrounding
region, which was then a wilderness. They and all the other
Germans who afterwards followed them settled in a half circle
beginning at Easton on the Delaware, passing up the Lehigh Valley
into Lancaster County, thence across the Susquehanna and down the
Cumberland Valley to the Maryland border, which many of them
crossed, and in time scattered far to the south in Virginia and
even North Carolina, where their descendants are still found.

These German sects which came over under the influence of Penn
and the Quakers, between the years 1682 and 1702, formed a class
by themselves. Though they may be regarded as peculiar in their
ideas and often in their manner of life, it cannot be denied that
as a class they were a well-educated, thrifty, and excellent
people and far superior to the rough German peasants who followed
them in later years. This latter class was often spoken of in
Pennsylvania as "the church people," to distinguish them from
"the sects," as those of the earlier migration were called.

The church people, or peasantry of the later migration, belonged
usually to one of the two dominant churches of Germany, the
Lutheran or the Reformed. Those of the Reformed Church were often
spoken of as Calvinists. This migration of the church people was
not due to the example of the Quakers but was the result of a new
policy which was adopted by the British Government when Queen
Anne ascended the throne in 1702, and which aimed at keeping the
English people at home and at filling the English colonies in
America with foreign Protestants hostile to France and Spain.

Large numbers of these immigrants were "redemptioners," as they
were called; that is to say, they were persons who had been
obliged to sell themselves to the shipping agents to pay for
their passage. On their arrival in Pennsylvania the captain sold
them to the colonists to pay the passage, and the redemptioner
had to work for his owner for a period varying from five to ten
years. No stigma or disgrace clung to any of these people under
this system. It was regarded as a necessary business transaction.
Not a few of the very respectable families of the State and some
of its prominent men are known to be descended from
redemptioners.

This method of transporting colonists proved a profitable trade
for the shipping people, and was soon regularly organized like
the modern assisted immigration. Agents, called "newlanders" and
"soul-sellers," traveled through Germany working up the
transatlantic traffic by various devices, some of them not
altogether creditable. Pennsylvania proved to be the most
attractive region for these immigrants. Some of those who were
taken to other colonies finally worked their way to Pennsylvania.
Practically none went to New England, and very few, if any, to
Virginia. Indeed, only certain colonies were willing to admit
them.

Another important element that went to make up the Pennsylvania
population consisted of the Scotch-Irish. They were descendants
of Scotch and English Presbyterians who had gone to Ireland to
take up the estates of the Irish rebels confiscated under Queen
Elizabeth and James I. This migration of Protestants to Ireland,
which began soon after 1600, was encouraged by the English
Government. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century the
confiscation of more Irish land under Cromwell's regime increased
the migration to Ulster. Many English joined the migration, and
Scotch of the Lowlands who were largely of English extraction,
although there were many Gaelic or Celtic names among them.

These are the people usually known in English history as
Ulstermen--the same who made such a heroic defense of Londonderry
against James II, and the same who in modern times have resisted
home rule in Ireland because it would bury them, they believe,
under the tyranny of their old enemies, the native Irish Catholic
majority. They were more thrifty and industrious than the native
Irish and as a result they usually prospered on the Irish land.
At first they were in a more or less constant state of war with
the native Irish, who attempted to expel them. They were
subsequently persecuted by the Church of England under Charles I,
who attempted to force them to conform to the English established
religion. Such a rugged schooling in Ireland made of them a very
aggressive, hardy people, Protestants of the Protestants, so
accustomed to contests and warfare that they accepted it as the
natural state of man.

These Ulstermen came to Pennsylvania somewhat later than the
first German sects; and not many of them arrived until some years
after 1700. They were not, like the first Germans, attracted to
the colony by any resemblance of their religion to that of the
Quakers. On the contrary they were entirely out of sympathy with
the Quakers, except in the one point of religious liberty; and
the Quakers were certainly out of sympathy with them. Nearly all
the colonies in America received a share of these settlers.
Wherever they went they usually sought the frontier and the
wilderness; and by the time of the Revolution, they could be
found upon the whole colonial frontier from New Hampshire to
Georgia. They were quite numerous in Virginia, and most numerous
along the edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness. It was apparently
the liberal laws and the fertile soil that drew them to
Pennsylvania in spite of their contempt for most of the Quaker
doctrines.

The dream of their life, their haven of rest, was for these
Scotch-Irish a fertile soil where they would find neither Irish
"papists" nor Church of England; and for this reason in America
they always sought the frontier where they could be by
themselves. They could not even get on well with the Germans in
Pennsylvania; and when the Germans crowded into their frontier
settlements, quarrels became so frequent that the proprietors
asked the Ulstermen to move farther west, a suggestion which they
were usually quite willing to accept. At the close of the
colonial period in Pennsylvania the Quakers, the Church of
England people, and the miscellaneous denominations occupied
Philadelphia and the region round it in a half circle from the
Delaware River. Outside of this area lay another containing the
Germans, and beyond that were the Scotch-Irish. The principal
stronghold of the Scotch-Irish was the Cumberland Valley in
Southern Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna, a region now
containing the flourishing towns of Chambersburg, Gettysburg,
Carlisle, and York, where the descendants of these early settlers
are still very numerous. In modern times, however, they have
spread out widely; they are now to be found all over the State,
and they no longer desire so strongly to live by themselves.

The Ulstermen, owing to the circumstances of their earlier life,
had no sympathy whatever with the Quaker's objection to war or
with his desire to deal fairly with the Indians and pay them for
their land. As Presbyterians and Calvinists, they belonged to one
of the older and more conservative divisions of the Reformation.
The Quaker's doctrine of the inward light, his quietism,
contemplation, and advanced ideas were quite incomprehensible to
them. As for the Indians, they held that the Old Testament
commands the destruction of all the heathen; and as for paying
the savages for their land, it seemed ridiculous to waste money
on such an object when they could exterminate the natives at less
cost. The Ulstermen, therefore, settled on the Indian land as
they pleased, or for that matter on any land, and were
continually getting into difficulty with the Pennsylvania
Government no less than with the Indians. They regarded any
region into which they entered as constituting a sovereign state.
It was this feeling of independence which subsequently prompted
them to organize what is known as the Whisky Rebellion when,
after the Revolution, the Federal Government put a tax on the
liquor which they so much esteemed as a product, for corn
converted into whisky was more easily transported on horses over
mountain trails, and in that form fetched a better price in the
markets.

After the year 1755, when the Quaker method of dealing with the
Indians no longer prevailed, the Scotch-Irish lived on the
frontier in a continual state of savage warfare which lasted for
the next forty years. War, hunting the abundant game, the deer,
buffalo, and elk, and some agriculture filled the measure of
their days and years. They paid little attention to the laws of
the province, which were difficult to enforce on the distant
frontier, and they administered a criminal code of their own with
whipping or "laced jacket," as they called it, as a punishment.
They were Jacks of all trades, weaving their own cloth and making
nearly everything they needed. They were the first people in
America to develop the use of the rifle, and they used it in the
Back Country all the way down into the Carolinas at a time when
it was seldom seen in the seaboard settlements. In those days,
rifles were largely manufactured in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and
there were several famous gunsmiths in Philadelphia. Some of the
best of these old rifles have been preserved and are really
beautiful weapons, with delicate hair triggers, gracefully curved
stocks, and quaint brass or even gold or silver mountings. The
ornamentation was often done by the hunter himself, who would
melt a gold or silver coin and pour it into some design which he
had carved with his knife in the stock.

The Revolution offered an opportunity after the Ulstermen's
heart, and they entered it with their entire spirit, as they had
every other contest which involved liberty and independence. In
fact, in that period they played such a conspicuous part that
they almost ruled Philadelphia, the original home of the Quakers.
Since then, spread out through the State, they have always had
great influence, the natural result of their energy,
intelligence, and love of education.

Nearly all these diverse elements of the Pennsylvania population
were decidedly sectional in character. The Welsh had a language
of their own, and they attempted, though without success, to
maintain it, as well as a government of their own within their
barony independent of the regular government of the province. The
Germans were also extremely sectional. They clung with better
success to their own language, customs, and literature. The
Scotch-Irish were so clannish that they had ideas of founding a
separate province on the Susquehanna. Even the Church of England
people were so aloof and partisan that, though they lived about
Philadelphia among the Quakers, they were extremely hostile to
the Quaker rule and unremittingly strove to destroy it.

All these cleavages and divisions in the population continue in
their effects to this day. They prevented the development of a
homogeneous population. No exact statistics were taken of the
numbers of the different nationalities in colonial times; but
Franklin's estimate is probably fairly accurate, and his position
in practical politics gave him the means of knowing and of
testing his calculations. About the year 1750 he estimated the
population as one-third Quaker, one-third German, and one-third
miscellaneous. This gave about 50,000 or 60,000 to each of the
thirds. Provost Smith, of the newly founded college, estimated
the Quakers at only about 40,000. But his estimate seems too low.
He was interested in making out their numbers small because he
was trying to show the absurdity of allowing such a small band of
fanatics and heretics to rule a great province of the British
Empire. One great source of the Quaker power lay in the sympathy
of the Germans, who always voted on their side and kept them in
control of the Legislature, so that it was in reality a case of
two-thirds ruling one-third. The Quakers, it must be admitted,
never lost their heads. Unperturbed through all the conflicts and
the jarring of races and sects, they held their position
unimpaired and kept the confidence and support of the Germans
until the Revolution changed everything.

The varied elements of population spread out in ever widening
half circles from Philadelphia as a center. There was nothing in
the character of the region to stop this progress. The country
all the way westward to the Susquehanna was easy hill, dale, and
valley, covered by a magnificent growth of large forest
trees--oaks, beeches, poplars, walnuts, hickories, and ash--which
rewarded the labor of felling by exposing to cultivation a most
fruitful soil.

The settlers followed the old Indian trails. The first westward
pioneers seem to have been the Welsh Quakers, who pushed due west
from Philadelphia and marked out the course of the famous
Lancaster Road, afterwards the Lancaster Turnpike. It took the
line of least resistance along the old trail, following ridges
until it reached the Susquehanna at a spot where an Indian
trader, named Harris, established himself and founded a post
which subsequently became Harrisburg, the capital of the State.

For a hundred years the Lancaster Road was the great highway
westward, at first to the mountains, then to the Ohio, and
finally to the Mississippi Valley and the Great West. Immigrants
and pioneers from all the New England and Middle States flocked
out that way to the land of promise in wagons, or horseback, or
trudging along on foot. Substantial taverns grew up along the
route; and habitual freighters and stage drivers, proud of their
fine teams of horses, grew into characters of the road. When the
Pennsylvania Railroad was built, it followed the same line. In
fact, most of the lines of railroad in the State follow Indian
trails. The trails for trade and tribal intercourse led east and
west. The warrior trails usually led north and south, for that
had long been the line of strategy and conquest of the tribes.
The northern tribes, or Six Nations, established in the lake
region of New York near the headwaters of the Delaware, the
Susquehanna, and the Ohio, had the advantage of these river
valleys for descending into the whole Atlantic seaboard and the
valley of the Mississippi. They had in consequence conquered all
the tribes south of them as far even as the Carolinas and
Georgia. All their trails of conquest led across Pennsylvania.

The Germans in their expansion at first seem to have followed up
the Schuylkill Valley and its tributaries, and they hold this
region to the present day. Gradually they crossed the watershed
to the Susquehanna and broke into the region of the famous
limestone soil in Lancaster County, a veritable farmer's paradise
from which nothing will ever drive them. Many Quaker farmers
penetrated north and northeast from Philadelphia into Bucks
County, a fine rolling and hilly wheat and corn region, where
their descendants are still found and whence not a few well-known
Philadelphia families have come.

The Quaker government of Pennsylvania in almost a century of its
existence largely fulfilled its ideals. It did not succeed in
governing without war; but the war was not its fault. It did
succeed in governing without oaths. An affirmation instead of an
oath became the law of Pennsylvania for all who chose an
affirmation; and this law was soon adopted by most American
communities. It succeeded in establishing religious liberty in
Pennsylvania in the fullest sense of the word. It brought
Christianity nearer to its original simplicity and made it less
superstitious and cruel.

The Quakers had always maintained that it was a mistake to
suppose that their ideas would interfere with material prosperity
and happiness; and they certainly proved their contention in
Pennsylvania. To Quaker liberalism was due not merely the
material prosperity, but prison reform and the notable public
charities of Pennsylvania; in both of which activities, as in the
abolition of slavery, the Quakers were leaders. Original research
in science also flourished in a marked degree in colonial
Pennsylvania. No one in those days knew the nature of thunder and
lightning, and the old explanation that they were the voice of an
angry God was for many a sufficient explanation. Franklin, by a
long series of experiments in the free Quaker colony, finally
proved in 1752 that lightning was electricity, that is to say, a
manifestation of the same force that is produced when glass is
rubbed with buckskin. He invented the lightning rod, discovered
the phenomenon of positive and negative electricity, explained
the action of the Leyden jar, and was the first American writer
on the modern science of political economy. This energetic
citizen of Pennsylvania spent a large part of his life in
research; he studied the Gulf Stream, storms and their causes,
waterspouts, whirlwinds; and he established the fact that the
northeast storms of the Atlantic coast usually move against the
wind.

But Franklin was not the only scientist in the colony. Besides
his three friends, Kinnersley, Hopkinson, and Syng, who worked
with him and helped him in his discoveries, there were David
Rittenhouse, the astronomer, John Bartram, the botanist, and a
host of others. Rittenhouse excelled in every undertaking which
required the practical application of astronomy, He attracted
attention even in Europe for his orrery which indicated the
movements of the stars and which was an advance on all previous
instruments of the kind. When astronomers in Europe were seeking
to have the transit of Venus of 1769 observed in different parts
of the world, Pennsylvania alone of the American colonies seems
to have had the man and the apparatus necessary for the work.
Rittenhouse conducted the observations at three points and won a
world-wide reputation by the accuracy and skill of his
observations. The whole community was interested in this
scientific undertaking; the Legislature and public institutions
raised the necessary funds; and the American Philosophical
Society, the only organization of its kind in the colonies, had
charge of the preparations.

The American Philosophical Society had been started in
Philadelphia in 1743. It was the first scientific society to be
founded in America, and throughout the colonial period it was the
only society of its kind in the country. Its membership included
not only prominent men throughout America, such as Thomas
Jefferson, who were interested in scientific inquiry, but also
representatives of foreign nations. With its library of rare and
valuable collections and its annual publication of essays on
almost every branch of science, the society still continues its
useful scientific work.

John Bartram, who was the first botanist to describe the plants
of the New World and who explored the whole country from the
Great Lakes to Florida, was a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial
times, farmer born and bred. Thomas Godfrey, also a colonial
Pennsylvanian, was rewarded by the Royal Society of England for
an improvement which he made in the quadrant. Peter Collinson of
England, a famous naturalist and antiquarian of early times, was
a Quaker. In modern times John Dalton, the discoverer of the
atomic theory of colorblindness, was born of Quaker parents, and
Edward Cope, of a well-known Philadelphia Quaker family, became
one of the most eminent naturalists and paleontologists of the
nineteenth century, and unaided discovered over a third of the
three thousand extinct species of vertebrates recognized by men
of science. In the field of education, Lindley Murray, the
grammarian of a hundred years ago, was a Quaker. Ezra Cornell, a
Quaker, founded the great university in New York which bears his
name; and Johns Hopkins, also a Quaker, founded the university of
that name in Baltimore.

Pennsylvania deserves the credit of turning these early
scientific pursuits to popular uses. The first American
professorship of botany and natural history was established in
Philadelphia College, now the University of Pennsylvania. The
first American book on a medical subject was written in
Philadelphia by Thomas Cadwalader in 1740; the first American
hospital was established there in 1751; and the first systematic
instruction in medicine. Since then Philadelphia has produced a
long line of physicians and surgeons of national and European
reputation. For half a century after the Revolution the city was
the center of medical education for the country and it still
retains a large part of that preeminence. The Academy of Natural
Sciences founded in Philadelphia in 1812 by two inconspicuous
young men, an apothecary and a dentist, soon became by the
spontaneous support of the community a distinguished institution.
It sent out two Arctic expeditions, that of Kane and that of
Hayes, and has included among its members the most prominent men
of science in America. It is now the oldest as well as the most
complete institution of its kind in the country. The Franklin
Institute, founded in Philadelphia in 1824, was the result of a
similar scientific interest. It was the first institution of
applied science and the mechanic arts in America. Descriptions of
the first 2900 patents issued by the United States Government are
to be found only on the pages of its Journal, which is still an
authoritative annual record.

Apart from their scientific attainments, one of the most
interesting facts about the Quakers is the large proportion of
them who have reached eminence, often in occupations which are
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.