Imagination delights to dwell on the tranquil abodes of plenty, content, and equanimity, that so quickly rose like an exhalation in the domains of this pacific legislator. That he should expect to protect the quiet abodes of his peaceful and industrious followers, merely with a fence of olive, (as one may call his gentle institutions,) is wonderful; and the more so, when we consider him to have lived in the world, and known too well, by his own experience, of what discordant elements it is composed. A mind so powerful and comprehensive as his, could not but know, that the wealth which quiet and blameless industry insensibly accumulates, proves merely a lure to attract the armed spoiler to the defenceless dwellings of those, who do not think it a duty to protect themselves. “But when divine ambition swell’d his mind, Ambition truly great, of virtuous deeds,” he could no otherwise execute his plan of utility, than by the agency of a people who were bound together by a principle, at once adhesive and exclusive, and who were too calm and self-subdued, too benignant and just, to create enemies to themselves among their neighbours. There could be no motive but the thirst of rapine, for disturbing a community so inoffensive; and the founder, no doubt, flattered himself that the parent country would not fail to extend to them that protection, which their useful lives and helpless state both needed and deserved. Never, surely, were institutions better calculated for nursing the infancy of a sylvan colony, from which the noisy pleasures, and more bustling varieties of life were necessarily excluded. The serene and dispassionate state, to which it seems was the chief aim of this sect to bring the human mind, is precisely what is requisite to reconcile it to the privations that must be encountered, during the early stages of the progression of society, which necessarily excluded from the pleasures of refinement, should be guarded from its pains. Where nations, in the course of time, become civilized, the process is so gradual from one race to another, that no violent effort is required to break through settled habits, and acquire new tastes and inclinations, fitted to what might be almost styled a new mode of existence. But when colonies are first settled in a country so entirely primitive as that to which William Penn led his followers, there is a kind of retrograde movement of the mind, requisite to reconcile people to the new duties and new views that open to them, and to make the total privation of wonted objects, modes, and amusements, tolerable.