in Christ and his successors, who gained more proselytes than your hierarchal folks lose. Grandeur is what the eye makes it. For my part, I see nothing grand in frocks and flounces: I see nothing grand in a fellow who wears one shirt next his skin and another over his coat. I find in your church Luxuriam spoliorum et censum in damna furentem, as the pagan poet hath it; and we brethren are convinced that it not only is no help or assistance to true piety, but that it torpefies and impedes it. I speak of its effect on the whole; not on one individual, one family, or one parish. Moreover we think, and can prove by figures, that its revenues are more than sufficient to maintain an army (since armies you will maintain) of such strength as should repell the most obstinate aggression. This is not always to be expected: suppose then that warfare shall exist among us, even when we grow wiser, one year in three; the other two years' income might be applied to the education of the poor shortly, it would leave none in that predicament. We demonstrate in our society the practicability of the thing, without any such abundant means at our disposal, and suffering under the aggravation of war-taxes, as may happen, and church-taxes, as must befall us irremissibly. Peterborough. In this you have done admirably, divinely. Religions are calculated for climates. Popery is lax enough for the warmest. Its modification in the Church of England, stiff but elastic, serves best for the variable atmosphere it was composed in. Yours is the most judicious where there is a trade in beavers: the thornier and rigider Calvinism takes root and flourishes under the Alps and Ben-Lomond. I could dandle the pretty baby of Catholicism, with its whistle and bells and coral and flounces about it; but in regard to the capricious and ferocious Tiger-God, that looks at it with such growls, I think it prudent to stand on this side of the grating. Penn. Governors, who are the gainers, will allow any creed, provided the people pay them regularly, and ask no questions. Calvinism is the product of cold and gloomy countries; and such countries being likewise poor, nobody is at the trouble to extirpate it out of them, if the natives will but abstain from leagues and covenants. Let it however sprout up for a season in any rich soil and sunny exposure, and thou shalt find dragoons turned into the field against it, with such hoes and harrows as the like husbandmen use most expertly. Languedoc has witnessed this. The catholic priest himself is less intolerant than one might imagine: and it is not the reprobate creed that troubleth his slumbers: it is the new-fangled bolt wrapt up in it, made on purpose for the apartment of thy daughter. An accursed creed it turneth him out of more dormitories than were contained in the palace of Priam, and strippeth from him the supervisorship of more kitchen-stoves than smoked for Elagabalus. With one foot upon thy bed and the other upon thy belly, he fancied thee fairly his: and now he thinks the devil must be in thee if thou hast turned thy back against him. He curses thee, kicks thee, and leaves thee to that Evil one's disposal. Peterborough. I am not sordid nor avaricious; yet, in my opinion, the worst of the matter is the money we are obliged to contribute, although we have no appetite for the ordinary. Those who receive the best education, and who want no new instruction, pay the most: those who, being seceders, decline the doctrine and follow another, pay for both, and perhaps thrice as much for that which they reject as for that which they cherish. This in another age or two will be incredible, at least in England and in America. There are two reasons however why I never could become a member of your society: first, I never should be quiet or good enough: secondly, supposing me to have acquired all the tranquillity and virtue requisite, my propensity toward the theatre and its fair actresses would seduce me. Penn. Thy language is light and inconsequent. Thou couldst not indeed be quiet and good enough for any rational and sedate society, and oughtest not even to discourse with any confidence on virtue, unless thou hadst first subdued such an idle fantasy as that of mockery, and such vile affections as those for paint and fiddles, and windinstruments and female ones. Peterborough. They who are to live in the world, must see what the world is composed of; its better and its worse. Penn. No doubt; he who is to live in a street, must see the cleaner parts of the pavement and the dirtier: but must he put his foot into them equally? or, according to thy system, step over the plain flagstone to splash into the filth? Peterborough. Philosophers tell us our passions and follies should be displayed to us together with their evil consequences, that we may regulate and control them. Penn. In my opinion, who am no philosopher, we should grow as little familiar even with their faces as may be. We ought to have nothing to do with such as are exhibited on the tragic stage: if they really exist, they are placed by Providence out of our range; they can not hurt us unless we run after them on purpose. Then do we want strange characters of less dimensions, such as can come under our doorway and affect us at home? We meet them everywhere; nay, we can not help it. Peterborough. Elevated sentiment is found in tragedy; elegant reproof in comedy. Penn. Comedy is the aliment of childish malice; tragedy of malice full-grown. Comedy has made many fools, and tragedy many criminals. Show me one man who hath been the wiser or the better for either, and I will show you twenty who have been made rogues and coxcombs, by aping the only models of fashion they can find admittance to, and as many more who have grown indifferent and hard-hearted, and whatever else is repre- | for a second world to conquer: but no man is a hensible in higher life. fool who wishes for the enjoyment of two; the fortune, I had almost said of a calamity, to confound them. This is done by the stage: it is likewise done by engravings in books, which have a great effect in weakening the imagination, and are serviceable only to those who have none, and who read negligently and idly. I should be sorry if the most ingenious print in the world were to cover the first impression left on my mind of such characters as Don Quixote and Sancho: yet probably a very indifferent one might do it; for we can not master our fancies, nor give them at will a greater or less tenacity, a greater or less promptitude in coming and recurring. Who, being thoughtless, ignorant, self-sufficient, real and ideal: nor is it anything short of a miswould not be moody, vindictive, unforgiving, if great monarchs set the example before him? and who fears those chastisements at the end, which it would be a thousand times more difficult for him to run into than to avoid? There is only one thing in either kind of scenic representation which is sure enough never to hit him; the moral. If however thou visitest the theatre for reflection, thou art the first that ever went there for it, although not the first that found it there. Reflection, from whatever quarry extracted, is the foundation of solid pleasures, which foundation, we think, can not be laid too early in the season. Peterborough. Solid pleasures, like other solid things, grow heavy and tiresome: I would rather have three or four lighter, of half the value, readily taken up, and as readily laid down again. Penn. The time will come, young man, when thou wilt reason better, and wilt detest that wit, the rivet of sad consistency. Thou hast spoken, as thou fanciest, a smart and lively thing; and, because thou hast spoken it, thou wilt tie thy body and soul to it. Peterborough. Possibly the time may come, but it lies beyond my calculation, when the frame of my mind may be better adapted to those cubic joys you were proposing for me: but I have observed that all who in their youthful days are the well-strapt even-paced porters of them, have been the first broken down by calamity or infirmity. Penn. The greater sign of infirmity, the greater of calamity, is there apparent, where the intertexture of pleasures and duties seems intractable. Peterborough. If the theatre were as hostile and rancorous against the church, as the church in some countries is against the theatre, we should call it very immoral, not because it had less justice on its side, but because it had more virulence. Splendour and processions and declamation and rodomontade are high delights to the multitude. Accompanied by lofty and generous sentiments, they do good; accompanied by merriment and amusement, they do more good still: for lofty and generous sentiments are so ill fitted to the heads and hearts of most men, that they fall off in getting through the crowd in the lobby; but the amusement and merriment go to bed with man and wife, and something of them is left for the children the next morning at breakfast. I have no greater objection to parade and stateliness in that theatre where the actors have been educated at the university, than in that where one can more easily be admitted behind the scenes: what I want is, a little good-nature and good manners, and that God should be thought as tolerant as my lord chamberlain. The worst objection I myself could ever find against the theatre is, that I lose in it my original idea of such men as Cæsar and Coriolanus, and, where the loss affects me more deeply, of Juliet and Desdemona. Alexander was a fool to wish You friends are no less adverse to representations by painting than by acting. Penn. We do not educate our youth to such professions and practices. Thou, I conceive, art unconcerned and disinterested in this matter. Peterborough. Nearly, but not quite. I am ignorant of the art, and prefer that branch of it which to many seems the lowest; I mean portraiture. I can find flowers in my garden, landscapes in my rides, the works of saints in the bible, of great statesmen and great captains in the historians, and of those who with equal advantages had been the same, in the Newgate Calendar. The best representation of them can only give me a high opinion of the painter's abilities, fixed on a point of time. But when I look on a family-picture by Vandyk; when I contemplate the elegant and happy father in the midst of his blooming progeny, and the partner of his fortunes and his joys beside him; I am affected very differently, and much more. He who there stands meditating for them some delightful scheme of pleasure or aggrandisement, has bowed his head to calamity, perhaps even to the block. Those roses gathered from the parterre behind, those taper fingers negligently holding them, that hair, the softness of which seems unable to support the riot of its ringlets, are moved away from earth, amid the tears and aching hearts of the very boys and girls who again are looking at me with such unconcern. Faithfullest recorder of domestic bliss, perpetuator of youth and beauty, vanquisher of time, leading in triumph the Hours and Seasons, the painter here bestows on me the richest treasures of his enchanting art. Penn. Vanity! vanity! vanity! as thou hast proved. The fine arts, as you call them, have always been the attractive clothing of a venal religion. Ours is none such, and needs no such lures. Come away: let us leave the vain, and look once again at the grasping. Religion ought no more to be forced on us for payment, than soap and candles. The first property was a portion set apart for the Gods; that is for the conjurors or priests. Shortly, those who decided on subjects of litigation, took presents for their good offices, and by degrees claimed rewards. Hence originated two classes or professions, which have absorbed in the course of ages, more by many times than the feesimple of the whole cultivated earth. They are contrary to Christianity and subversive of it. Peterborough. I know enough of both to see this. Here indeed you stand beyond controversy. Penn. Friend, whenever thou hearest it said, as thou often must do, that there is some excellent sense in this man or the other, thou mayest always find it in strict correspondence with the preconceived opinions of the sage observer: and where the author or speaker is wrong, he is wrong exactly where he would set his reader or hearer right, and can not. If we are weak in proportion to our failures, the best intellects, as ye would call them, are the feeblest of all: for the most rational advice has the fewest followers, the plainest reasoning the most obstinate opposers. We have no right to be angry or vexed at any such disappointment. When a wise man can not make an unwise one better, shall he therefore let the unwise one make him worse? Shall the weak, while he holdeth pertinaciously to his ignorance, snatch away temper and discretion from the strong? Peterborough. Argumentative enough: but the business is, to remove those insects, which, deriving their sustenence from the juices of the state, take its colour and seem its substance. Penn. Our society, although it be extinguished, and although its extinction be as early even as thou prognosticatest, will at least leave behind it the remembrance that it marched foremost of the vanguard, and opposed those inveterate unrelenting pestilences, in the spirit of justice and in the gentleness of consistency. That communities, in their most depraved and rotten state, stand more upright without them, is plain and evident; in regard to one, from the practice of your judges, who, whenever a case of property is most difficult and delicate, recommend it to the arbitration of friends; in regard to the other, from the manifestation of more quietude, regularity, and happiness, in those who have seceded from the toilet, the feast, and the theatre, of a city-bred court-aping religion, into their own family party, their private sheltered walks and noiseless untrampled grassplots. I do not calculate here on worldly loss and profit. I do not demonstrate to thee, as I might do in figures, that after government hath fairly done its worst, a fifth of every man's remaining goods and chattels are piled up and swept away; and we are at last so pressed and elbowed, so jostled and trodden on, between the bar and the pulpit, while we clap our hands to our seals our pockets are slit to the very bottom, with little care or concern for the skin under; and, if we cry out, there is always a hand in readiness to stop our mouths, and to stifle and strangulate such as would resist. Where the lawyers flourish, there is a certain sign that the laws do not for this flourishing can only arise from the perplexity or the violation of them. If an English lawyer is in danger of starving in a market-town or village, he invites another, and both thrive. Hence, though litigation is their business, they usually are courteous one to another, whenever and for whatever purposes they meet: on the same principle of abstinence as is displayed by vultures, which, however hungry and strangers, do not attack the stronger the weaker, but, sullenly concentrated, await in calm providence the weltering breeze, laden with glad tidings of pestilence or of battle. What is more wonderful and inexplicable to a man who thinks on it, than that, after many hundred years of the same government, and this government called a good one, a wise one, an example to others, some new statute should be deemed requisite every week? When children break their toys and cry for fresh ones, we attend to them only because they are children: when men break those bonds which hold them together, and, as often as the gravest of them assemble, want some of another colour and quality, we give them honourable names for it, instead of scourg ing and sending them supperless to bed. I fear, my friend, that laws are contrived rather to increase the fortunes of the few than to secure those of the many. The makers and menders of them do a great deal of work in a little time, and have hardly put into their pockets the money for it, when our victuals drop out of some unsoldered chink into the fire, and the same tinkers must hammer, and the same payers must pay, again.* Peterborough. English law, like the torpedo, kills only those who have no metal to put between it and them. It does not appear that God will ever let the world rest, without one or more of his curses on it. When the rattle-snakes and alligators are exterminated in this country, barristers and attorneys may shoot up. Penn. Our Maker's plagues upon wealth and avarice!.. but the religion we profess will never allow such a dreadful scourge to infest our people. Peterborough. Our English Themis, venerable for her paunch, and glorious in the rich array of native carbuncles, makes her scales of gold, her weights of rubies. Penn. Truly doth she, and rubies concreted from the heart-blood of the people in her cranks and crevices. If, after what goes among the lawyers, the English are to pay a tenth to the clergy, and a tenth to the civil power in taxes, they, on the score of property, derive no advan tages whatever from the social state. For, sup posing the whole island to be as much over-run by robbers as any part of the globe ever was, you can not yet suppose that these robbers could take to themselves a fifth of all property, immovable | and movable. Districts the most infested by them would suffer in a much less degree than this: and common sense and common interest would unite the population, however rude and scattered, how * General Bathurst, examined before a committee of the Commons on the county rates, stated that poor persons avoid the fees: the fee for an acquittal in the Western Circuit being one pound six shillings and eightpence. were recommended by their solicitors to plead guilty, to ever timorous and abject, against such despoilers. | acquainted with his abilities and his virtues, are The most exposed to their outrages would be ex- without the power of placing them where they posed to less ruinous demands; and these demands shall be serviceable to the community. He withers themselves would soon cease: whereas there is no with his fruit upon his branches: and the sycoappearance that those heavier ones under which phant, sunned in idleness and vacuity, points at our mother country labours, will have any other him as a lusus naturæ. termination than such as our peaceful habits and humane religion teach us to deprecate and avoid. Tithes, according to the practice of the AngloSaxon and British church, never were intended for the priest alone; but, beside the maintenance of the clergymen, for the repairs of the church, for the relief of the poor, and for the entertainment of the pilgrim and stranger. Thus we can not suppose that more than a third of them went to the parson; particularly as the distribution was left to the bishop and his assistants. The tithes of a whole diocese were collected, and as the duties in each parish were the same, so the stipends of the ministers were equal. Men in those days fled from the sword to the church; in these we flee from the church to the wilderness; a longer flight indeed, but a safer refuge. Value the life of every man, in possession of goods, at ten years' purchase; he pays two years' income to be allowed the other eight and on what security? How does he know that the posse curia may not encroach as deeply on the rest? Can any wise man endure this state of things, with the power of avoiding it? any brave man with the power of overturning it? Peterborough. Faith! no. But we always are either-staggering drunk with war, or fast asleep with peace. Penn. Here in Pennsylvania, those who guide us are chosen by us for our guides; those who protect us are chosen by us for our protectors. We do not ask favours from them; we do not solicit that a portion of our own be thrown back to us, like the entrails of a beast to the dogs that have been chasing it; we do not stipulate that one of our sons may have, openly or secretly, a part of what his brothers and cousins, and many houses round, have contributed. Our agents can not form themselves into gangs against us; can not board our vessels, burn our plantations of tobacco, enter our houses, break open our cellars, cast out the materials of our beverage, whip us into their worship, or fine and imprison us for neglecting to attend it. Peterborough. You lay rather too much stress upon what you call liberty of conscience, and are inconsistent in hating King James for having too much enlarged it. In fact all people in all countries may worship what objects they please, if they will only be contented to keep within doors. But even the quietest love display and dominion in worship. Political freedom is more material. Penn. Be it as thou sayest. According to the clearest, simplest, best definition, the office and nature of Justice is to give everyone his due. Now, under kingly government, a man not only hath not his due, but hath not the means or even the chance of obtaining it. Those who are most intimately Peterborough. If the world were not composed of opposites, and if the actions of men were not in eternal contravention to their reasonings, I should have imagined that the peaceful manners of your people, and your abstinence from resisting, not only against authority, but even against wrong, would have rendered you more favourable to monarchy than to republicanism. Penn. Although we resist not against wrong, we may like right better. Peterborough. Quiet is the principle of your institution, the rule of your lives and thoughts: now nothing is further from it than the spirit of democracy; as we may clearly see in the democratical portion of our constitution at home. Go, at the time of an election, to some borough unbiassed by aristocratical influence and ministerial seduction: you will not find the wisest or most upright of its burgesses in the chair; but either a stranger from a distance or an intriguer in the town: and not only the rabble are his partisans: the better sort, as they are called, lean toward him, rather than toward one whose shadow chills them, whose genius is a sting and whose grandeur of soul a reproof to them. Newton, Milton, and Shakspeare, would never have been proposed or thought of, in any borough where they might happen to be born, supposing them likewise to have received the requisites of fortune. Had they offered themselves, they would have been told, "We do not want men of books or genius, but men of business:" as if men of genius are not men of business in the higher sense of the word; of business in which the state and society are implicated for ages. Common minds revolve these reasonings about them. Let them be contented with the prospect of their future glory; let us be, with the certainty of never being heard of hereafter which saves us a great deal of concern, and allows us a perfect freedom of action. Penn. Thou reasonest well, and from observation. Thy arguments are the surest proof I could adduce, that a sounder morality and a purer religion are necessary, to guide the inconsiderateness of those whom thou callest (I wish the word were gentler) the rabble, and to mollify the malignity of (here too the expression is susceptible of improvement) the better sort. Institutions can not make men perfect. Fraud, injury, violence, may be discountenanced and diminished, if thou removest those whose authority began upon them, rests upon them, and must go upon them. Keep thy fellow-creatures temperate, keep them sane, strong, tractable, by early and late discipline: speak mildly to the obedient; more mildly to the refractory; and on one side of thee thou wilt soon find friendship in the bonds of peace, and violence on the other selfdisarmed. Penn. By the help of God I will undertake the other experiment. If I am to raise discontent, be it on this foundation! if men are to scorn me, be it for this offence ! Peterborough. The object of your institution is to establish universal peace on universal equality. I do not assert that equality, inasmuch as relates to rights, is impracticable; which many have done too rashly: but I doubt its extent; I doubt its durability. Beside, since violence is the thing most hateful to you, I must remind you again and again that republics are usually more turbulent than monarchies. Penn. The mother who gives her own milk to her infant, hath often more trouble to make him quiet, than a boon-companion hath, twenty years afterward, to make him drunk, and may seem severer to the dissolute. Monarchy lets the wood Peterborough. We should imagine, if we did not much reflect on the subject, that equality is a very natural sentiment; yet there is none to which nearly the universality of mankind is constantly so averse. Bring before you the whole train of your acquaintance, of all ages, tempers, and conditions, and you will acknowledge at once the justice of my remark. I have observed among the peers whom I was accustomed to meet at my father's and uncle's, that they invariably bear toward one another a constrained familiarity or a frigid courtesy: while to their huntsmen and their prickers, to their chaplains and their cooks, or indeed another man's, they display unequivocal signs of ingenuous cordiality. Baronets are prouder than anything we see on this side of the Dardanelles, excepting the proctors of universi-run wild, lets swamps extend through it, and repties, and the vergers of cathedrals; and their pride is kept in eternal agitation, both from what is above them and from what is below. Gentlemen of any standing are apt to investigate their claims a little too minutely; and nobility has neither bench nor joint-stool for them in the vestibule. During the whole course of your life, have you ever seen one, among this our King James's breed, that either did not curl himself up and lie snug and warm in the lowest company, or slaver and whimper in fretful quest of the highest? Penn. Without any disposition to answer what never engaged a moment of my attention, let me suggest to thee, that whether thy remark be well or ill founded, the desire of equality is not the less nurtured by reason or the less approved by Christianity. Mankind is certainly quite as averse to patience, to forbearance, to returning good on receiving evil: still I never heard of the preacher who discountenanced the recommendation of them. Peterborough. I mean only to show you that, founded upon abstract principles, your society can not last long. Penn. Not among the meal and tallow that breed the grubs thou hast thrown out before me: I know it but friend Mordaunt, there are sieves and ventilators in the world, and there will always be people who know alike how to make and where to exercise them. tiles infest it: this is her easiness, this is her providence, this is the blessing she imparts. If in a republic thou tracest the mark of the waggonwheel and of the hatchet, do not suddenly set it down among the certainties, that they were brought in for devastation: look round a little : see whether the plants are not the larger and the loftier and the healthier for letting in air and light; whether the grass can not grow under them for pasture, whether the alleys are not useful for the exportation and importation of what is profitable, and whether they do not enable the proprietor to watch that "no thieves break in and steal." Teach people to rule themselves, and they will neither bear violence nor inflict it. Something of consistency, one would desire, should appertain to those discreet and regular men who uphold the government of hereditary kings, unanswerable for their misdemeanours, both as the most lawful and the most convenient. If the gardener had pruned thy fruit-trees improperly, wouldst not thou admonish him or dismiss him? Peterborough. Certainly. Penn. Thou thinkest it equitable and expedient. Penn. If he seized thee by the throat for it, and protested he would hang thee, calling it atrocious, and insisting that only the devil could have instigated thee. Peterborough. I would trip up the knave's heels, and cudgel him soundly. Peterborough. Men can only be kept in concord by their vanity; which, weak as you may call it, is the strongest and most sensitive nerve in the human heart. If you will not let them be unjust, nay, if you will not be unjust toward the greater part of them, this greater part itself will scorn you. Nothing would raise such violent and such general discontent, as giving to every man his due. Penn. Such alas is the world! May we not acquired a knowledge of horticulture or not; for improve it? Peterborough. May you not turn wolves into fawns, thistles into wheat, granite into peas and clover? Try this first. Penn. There are those peradventure who would incline to say that he deserved no better at thy hands. Howbeit, suppose he should struggle and prevail against thee, and asseverate that not only he himself would continue to manage thy fruittrees as beliked him, but that furthermore his son and grandson should do likewise, whether they had that, as his father had been thy father's gardener, |