The combination of circumstances to promote the "Holy Experiment" of William Penn is something prodigious. How he could be a petted favorite at the shameful court of the last two Stuarts, while his brethren throughout the realm were languishing under persecution, is a fact not in itself honorable, but capable of being honorably explained; and both the persecution and the court favor helped on his enterprise. The time was opportune; the period of tragical uncertainty in colonization was past; emigration had come to be a richly promising enterprise. For leader of the enterprise what endowment was lacking in the elegantly accomplished young courtier, holding as his own the richest domain that could be carved out of a continent, who was at the same time brother, in unaffected humility and unbounded generosity, in a great fraternity bound together by principles of ascetic self-denial and devotion to the kingdom of God?
Penn's address inviting colonists to his new domain announced the outlines of his scheme. His great powers of jurisdiction were held by him only to be transferred to the future inhabitants in a free and righteous government. "I purpose," said he, conscious of the magnanimity of the intention, "for the matters of liberty, I purpose that which is extraordinary--to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country;" and added, in language which might have fallen from his intimate friend, Algernon Sidney, but was fully expressive of his own views, "It is the great end of government to support power in reverence with the people, and to secure the people from the abuse of power; for liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery."[116:1] With assurances of universal civil and religious liberty in conformity with these principles, he offered land at forty shillings for a hundred acres, subject to a small quit-rent.
Through the correspondence of the Friends' meetings, these proposals could be brought to the attention of many thousands of people, sifted and culled by persecution, the best stuff for a colony in all the United Kingdom. The response was immediate. Within a year three ship-loads of emigrants went out. The next year Penn himself went with a company of a hundred, and stayed long enough to see the government organized by the free act of the colonists on the principles which he had set forth, and in that brief sojourn of two years to witness the beginnings of a splendid prosperity. His city of Philadelphia consisted in August, 1683, of three or four little cottages. Two years afterward it contained about six hundred houses, and the schoolmaster and the printing-press had begun their work.[117:1] The growth went on accelerating. In one year seven thousand settlers are said to have arrived; before the end of the century the colonists numbered more than twenty thousand, and Philadelphia had become a thriving town.[117:2]