point of right, not for the sake of honour, but for the suppressing of vice, &c.'

To wade through the whole of this provincial controversy which, at several reprisals, lasted till Gookin was superseded in the year 1717, and replaced by William Keith, Esq. (afterward Sir William Keith, Bart.) would be a task of great prolixity, and what consequently might prove as tedious to the reader as laborious to the writer.

Enough has been recited, to shew upon what terms Mr. Penn was first followed by his flock, as a kind of patriarch, to Pennsylvania; as also, what failures in his conduct towards them were complained of by them; and as to the conduct of the several assemblies, which, in the several periods of this interval, maintained this controversy, a bare perusal of their proceedings is in general sufficient for their justification.

Men they were; passions and interests they consequently had; and, if they were sometimes carried away a little too far by them, it is obvious the passions and interests of others worked up the ferment first, and never relented to the last.

It is true, an over rigid performance of conditions is not to be expected of government, and seldom can be exacted from it but then if the representative part is not tenacious, almost to a fault, of the rights and claims of the people, they will in a course of time lose their very pretensions to them.

Against Logan, the proprietary's minister, stands upon record, still unanswered, thirteen articles of malversation, by way of impeachment, which the governor (Evans) found means to evade, against the repeated offers of the assembly to produce their witnesses and fasten their proofs upon him and against the governor himself, twelve in the shape of remonstrances, which argue him loose in principle, arbitrary in disposition, and scandalous in his private life and deportment.

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So unpopular was he, that an unanimous vote of thanks to the proprietary was passed on his being removed, almost before his face, for he was still a resident among them: and as

I

he had been Logan's screen, so his successor, Gookin, was little better than Logan's tool. The first had the name; the latter the power; and by the help of the council, spurred him on, or reined him in, as he pleased.

Both were necessitous, consequently craving alike; and having each considered himself first, and the proprietary next, had little consideration left for the crown, and none at all for the people.

If Evans adventured to act in many respects as if there was neither charter nor assembly, or, rather, as if he was authorised by his commission to do what he pleased in contempt of both, (as appears by his arbitrary dismission of one assembly, merely because they could not be brought to obey his dictature) Gookin after his example, and at the instance of Logan, declared another assembly to be no assembly, and refused to hold any further correspondence with them: and yet when he was on the point of being recalled, he was both mean enough and desperate enough to convene the assembly, purposely to make them this laconic proposition, viz. That, for the little time he had to stay, he was ready to do the country all the service he could:-and that they might be their own carvers, in case they would in some measure provide for his going back to seek another employment." Of which, however, they made no other use than to gratify him with a present of two hundred pounds.

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Lastly, that the reader may have a general idea of those assemblies, represented in proprietary language as so refractory and turbulent, so pragmatical and assuming, let him accept of a passage out of one of their own papers to governor Evans, in which they thus characterise themselves. "And though we are mean men, and represent a poor colony, yet as we are the immediate grantees of one branch of the legislative authority of this province, (which we would leave to our posterity as free as it was granted) we ought to have been, and do expect to be more civilly treated by him that claims the other branch of the same authority, and under the same royal grant, and has his support from us and the people we represent.

It is by this time apparent enough, that though the proprietary and popular interests spring from one and the same source, they divide as they descend: that every proprietary governor, for this reason, has two masters; one who gives him his commission, and one who gives him his pay: that he is on his good behaviour to both: that if he does not fulfil with rigour every proprietary command, however injurious to the province or offensive to the assembly, he is recalled: that if he does not gratify the assembly in what they think they have a right to claim, he is certain to live in perpetual broils, though uncertain whether he shall be enabled to live at all: and that, upon the whole, to be a governor upon such terms, is to be the most wretched thing alive.

Sir William Keith could not be ignorant of this: and therefore, however he was instructed here at home, either by his principal or the lords of trade, resolved to govern himself when he came upon the spot, by the governing interest there: so that his administration was wholly different from that of his two predecessors.

With as particular an eye to his own particular emolu ment, he did indeed make his first address to the assembly: but then all he said was in popular language: he did not so much as name the proprietary: and his hints were such as could not be misunderstood, that in case they would pay him well, he would serve them well.

The assembly, on the other hand, had sense enough to discern, that this was all which could be required of a man who had a family to maintain with some degree of splendor, and who was no richer than plantation governors usually are in short, they believed in him, were liberal to him, and the returns he annually made them were suitable to the confidence they placed in him: so that the proper operation of one master-spring kept the whole machine of govern ment, for a considerable period of time, in a more consistent motion than it had ever known before.

Of all political cements reciprocal interest is the strongest; and the subject's money is never so well disposed of, as in the maintenance of order and tranquillity, and the purchase

of good laws; for which felicities Keith's administration was deservedly memorable.

Under proprietary displeasure, however, by the resentment and artifice of Logan, the proprietary secretary, excited and aggravated by some neglects and mistakes of his own, he sunk at last; after what manner, it may not be altogether unuseful to intimate.

When Mr. Penn died in the year 1718, he left his hold of the province (which was much incumbered, by a mortgage on one hand, and by a transfer of it to the crown for ten thousand pounds, of which he had received two thousand pounds, on the other) in the hands of trustees, namely, his widow, Henry Gouldney, Joshua Gee, and his all-sufficient secretary Logan.

The difficulties thus resting in his family were very well known in the province; notwithstanding which the inhabitants, satisfied with their governor, persevered in all duties to them; nor seemed to entertain a thought to their disadvantage.

Logan and his creatures were the only malcontents; and why they were so will be made sufficiently obvious. The governor and assembly in concurrence, could govern the province without his participation; so he remained without importance to either, till this share of the trust enabled him to interpose, and intitled him to be heard, at the expense of both.

In the second year after Keith's arrival, Logan had divided his council against him, and carried off a majority; and ever after had represented him in his dispatches, as having substituted his own interest in the place of the proprietary's, and confederated with the assembly to make both branches of the legislature equally subservient to popular purposes.

Subtle, however, as he was, and practised in all the arts of political disguise, he could not long conceal himself from the penetration of Keith. Thus having been detected (as Keith says) in aggravating, and even in altering certain

5 Governor Keith's letter to the widow Penn, September 24, 1724.

minutes of the council-proceedings for the purposes before specified; and, in full confidence of proprietary protection, defending himself therein, with much personal abuse against the governor ; the latter dismissed him from his post as secretary, and substituted another in his place.

With this, and a variety of other complaints, all of the same tendency, Logan therefore made a voyage to England, soon after he became a trustee, and there made his court so effectually to the widow, &c. that they freighted him back with letters of reproof, and private instructions to Keith, not only to reinstate him, but in effect, to be governed by him, as implicitly as Gookin had been governed before.

Keith, on the other hand, being a man of too much spirit to submit to such treatment, and presuming beside, that his services to and interest in the colony, and his connexions with the most considerable men in it, would uphold him against all opposition whatsoever, communicated all to the assembly, together with his own answers: and this he thought was the more incumbent on him, because Logan had already been making his efforts to stir up a party against him."

Logan, upon this, commences advocate in form for the proprietary interest; presents a written plea on its behalf to the assembly, justifying therein all the restrictions laid on the governor by those instructions, (which will be in the next session explained) and whether by chance or design, it is hard to pronounce, suffered the secret of the quarrel to escape, by insinuating, that the proprietary, during his absence, had not received one penny either to himself or his family from the government, whereas others had received large sums. The assembly, however, not being in a humour to pay two government subsidies instead of one, when exempted by the original article of quit-rents from the obligation of paying any, did not so much as take notice of this point; but on the contrary, closing with the governor, desired his concurrence with them, and offered their concurrence to him, in withstanding whatever was in the said instructions contained, repugnant to their charter, or inconsistent with their privileges.