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.