"To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals."

His description of the wise man is also rather good.

"The wise man is cautious, but not cunning; judicious but not crafty; making virtue the measure of using his excellent understanding in the conduct of his life."

"The wise man is equal, ready, but not officious."

His maxim, "The less form in religion the better, since God is a spirit," is a very complete though brief summary of his religion and the religion of the Quakers. In his letter to William Popple, he, without perhaps intending it, made an excellent maxim.

"We can never be the better for our religion if our neighbor be the worse for it."

There is only one of his maxims that savors at all of the keen shrewdness of Franklin's. It, perhaps, can be applied to our own times.

"Let the people think they govern and they will be governed."

According to Bishop Burnet, Penn's conversation was even more wordy and cumbersome than his political writings.

"He was a vain talking man. He had such an opinion of his own faculty of persuading, that he thought none could stand before it, though he was singular in that opinion; for he had a tedious, luscious way of talking not apt to overcome a man's reason, though it might tire his patience."

There may be some truth in this statement. Penn was an enthusiast, and when talking on his favorite themes he very likely heaped up the words and bore

down opposition by energy and long-windedness. He was "luscious," or nauseatingly eloquent, as the word may be translated, from excessive zeal in his subject.

way.

Burnet himself was also afflicted in that

But other and less prejudiced persons than Burnet found great pleasure in Penn's conversation, and there is every reason to believe that it was by no means so dull as his writing. Swift, who was surely a judge of such things, said he "talked very agreeably and with much spirit." Tillotson found great pleasure in his acquaintance; Clarkson calls attention to the Gentleman's Magazine of April, 1737, where some one who had travelled with Penn in a stage-coach, says, "And a pleasant companion he was.' The tradition among the Quakers in England seems to have been that he was rather animated in conversation and disposed to be facetious; and some of the traditions and anecdotes preserved in Pennsylvania are also to that effect. He certainly had seen a great deal of the world, and this, with his wide. reading and genial temperament, must have made his conversation very agreeable when he was not carried away by zeal for his unusual opinions. His usual manner, I am inclined to think from various incidents I have read, was one of bluff heartiness.

It would seem that, until he became a rather old man, Penn was very free from disease. But the details we have of his life are not complete, and he might have had illnesses which have not been recorded. He had a vigorous constitution, and, without it, could hardly have endured, without serious

injury, the frequent imprisonments in pestilential dungeons which he suffered in his youth.

For the rest of his life we find him very actively engaged in the varied business of a leader and organizer of the Quakers, a defender of them from persecution, a politician, a courtier, a founder of a colony, and suffering great losses of fortune and severe anxiety. He was of a sanguine temperament, and this disposition may have contributed to his health. As he grew older he had the gout; but it seems he was careful to take systematic exercise, and the disease never seized him with any great severity.

II

THE TIMES

PENN was born October 14, 1644, and, as we read English history, that seems a troublous time for a child to come into the world, especially a child that was to be a man of peace. England was full of religious and political confusion. The great ideas of government and religion by which we have been living for two hundred years were then struggling for existence in their primitive form, and for the next fifty years were tossed about in the wild tumult of wars, revolution, and religious persecution.

There were two great political parties, the Royalists and the Roundheads, and several great religious parties, the Church of England, the various divisions of the Puritans, and the Roman Catholics, besides numerous fanatical small sects which were fiercely in earnest to establish their principles of politics or religion. At that time the discussion of such principles was not confined to argument. Each party and each religion was prepared for force, to inflict or to suffer martyrdom, to fight or to die in their cause.

For nearly half a century the king had been struggling hard to build up the power and privileges of the crown against Parliament and the people.

James I. had been very diligent in this, and tyranny was gaining in spite of the frantic and spasmodic struggles of the people against it. Tyranny was growing because England was growing. As the island became more and more civilized and began to take a place among the nations, organization became more and more necessary. Regular methodical government must succeed the easy, noble, and manly freedom which was instinctive with the descendants of the Vikings, Angles, and Saxons. The followers of the king and all who admired absolute monarchy or loved place and power took advantage of this necessity to develop royalty and a church established by law, and for a long time they were very successful.

Other things, however, were growing besides the royal power and the Church of England. The great movement of the Reformation, starting in the invention of printing and the revival of learning, was still stimulating independent thought, arousing and encouraging more and more the Puritan sects, and leading them to see their interest in developing the ancient Anglo-Saxon liberties, as the Royalists saw their interest in developing the kingly power.

Strange creatures were those Puritans and other sects who had only recently broken through the restraints of the Middle Ages and begun to think for themselves. From the system of the Middle Ages, which ignored the Bible altogether, they had rushed to the opposite extreme of accepting it so literally that they gave their children the strange un-English names they found in the Old Testament. From the