Democracy an& TReUglon.

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equality before the law for all the members of thecolony, and, further, equality in manners andmorals, the style of clothing and style of life.Quakers said " thou " to everyone so long as" you " was the prerogative of persons of quality ;they refused to doff the hat to anyone, even kingsand emperors, so long as the men of superiorstation refused the same courtesy to theirinferiors. Penn maintained, to the astonishmentof his contemporaries, that even the Negro " hada soul," and declared that the education of thecoloured was a plain duty of Friends : it is, infact, a duty which they are still discharging throughNegro schools.

As early as 1688 the German Quakers ofGermantown declared that slavery was irrecon-cilable with Christianity ; in 1711 the legislativeassembly of Pennsylvania prohibited the impor-tation of Negroes ; and since 1787 no Negro wasany longer the property of any recognised memberof the Society of Friends. In this matter theQuakers were a century in advance of theircontemporaries—and that, too, at a time whenNegro slavery was reckoned indispensable for theopening up of these wide and fruitful new terri-tories, and when the zenith of the development ofslavery, following upon the invention of cottongin in 1793, was still in the future. In defiance ofeconomic interest the Pennsylvania Quaker, JohnWoolman, became the great protagonist of theabolitionist movement in the eighteenth century.

(3) Penn received his territories to hold andpossess entirely at his own disposal; he might

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