It is pleasant now to turn from this record of Proprietary harshness — this intolerant sympathy of Deputy Executives, to the action of the representatives of the people and of the people themselves ; and here my defence of Pennsylvania properly begins.
The student of our colonial history need not be reminded of the dismal continuity of disputes beween the Assembly and the Governors on the question of Taxation and supplies. It is hard to deduce any political principle from our records, unless it be new confirmation of the truth that all absenteeism, and all imitation of fendalism, with its manors, and its quit-rents, and its privileged estates, are especially uncongenial to our Pennsylvania habits of thought and action. It is scarcely worth while now to inquire who were right and who were wrong, for it is all swept away as part of the rubbish of our story. The poor Deputy Governors, agents of the Proprietaries, had a hard time. Exactions from the metropolitan authorities — actual invasion and danger on the one hand, and on the other, annoying resistance, and cavilling, and murmurs on the part of those who alone could raise revenue to meet their demands and requisitions. The Neutrals arrived, however, at a propitious moment. There happened to be a lull in the storm of controversy. On the very day that Governor Morris sent to the Assembly his message about the Neutrals, he communicated the soothing news that the Proprietaries, on hearing of Gen. Braddock’s defeat, had sent an order on the Receiver General for £5000, to be applied for the common safety. The Assembly was for the time pacified. They voted a new Bill of Supplies and resolved at the same moment to make provision for the sustenance and protection of the Neutrals. (Votes, 519, 523).
I am proud to say that, in their relations to those unfortunate fugitives, I find on the records of the popular representative body no trace of the malignant animosity and sectarian antipathy which actuated the Executive. Painfully impracticable as Penn’s principles had shown themselves when applied to periods of war and invasion, and danger from the strong and armed arm without, yet when the homeless fugitive and stranger came and asked a place of refuge, the beautiful feature of the Quaker character, charity, in its highest sense, and charity, too, which knows no difference of creed, seemed more beautiful than ever. The great principle of liberty of conscience and toleration was put in practice towards these exiled « Papists », and it certainly is very hard, with this unquestioned record before is, that the Friends of Pennsylvania should be now-a-days charged with mercenary inhumanity.
But our meagre records show there was another influence in favor of the exile. There were hereditary national sympathies at work aside from all matters of technical religion, which gave the French exiles in Philadelphia welcome that they had no right to expect, Papists or not, they were French men and women and children — and there were in Quaker garb, living in Philadelphia, men of French descent, who though Hugonots, and sprung from that glorious race of men, the European Protestants of the sixteenth century, still felt kindly to
