Perfect simplicity of taste and manners, and entire indifference to much of what the world calls pleasure, were necessary to make life tolerable to the first settlers in a trackless wilderness. These habits of thinking and living, so difficult to acquire, and so painful when forced upon the mind by inevitable necessity, the quakers brought with them, and left, without regret, a world from which they were already excluded by that austere simplicity which peculiarly fitted them for their new situation. A kindred simplicity, and a similar ignorance of artificial refinements and high seasoned pleasures, produced the same effect in qualifying the first settlers at Albany to support the privations, and endure the inconveniences of their novitiate in the forests of the new world. But to return to William Penn: the fair fabric he had erected, though it speedily fulfilled the utmost promise of hope, contained within itself the principle of dissolution, and from the very nature of the beings which composed it, must have decayed, though the revolutionary shock had not so soon shaken its foundations. Sobriety and prudence lead naturally to wealth, and wealth to authority, which soon strikes at the root of the short lived principle of equality. A single instance may occur here and there, but who can ever suppose nature running so contrary to her bias, that all the opulent members of a community should acquire or inherit wealth for the mere purpose of giving it away? Where there are no elegant arts to be encouraged, no elegant pleasures to be procured, where ingenuity is not to be rewarded, or talent admired or exercised; what is wealth but a cumbrous load, sinking the owner deeper and deeper into grossness and dulness, having no incitement to exercise the only faculties permitted him to use, and few objects to relieve in a community from which vice and poverty are equally excluded by their industry, and their wholesome rule of expulsion. We all know that there is not in society a more useless and disgusting character than what is formed by the possession of great wealth, without elegance or refinement; without, indeed, that liberality which can only result from a certain degree of cultivation. What then would a community be, entirely formed of such persons, or supposing such a community to exist, how long would they adhere to the simple manners of their founder, with such a source of corruption mingled with their very existence? Detachment from pleasure and from vanity, frugal and simple habits, and an habitual close adherence to some particular trade or employment, are circumstances that have a sure tendency to enrich the individuals who practise them. This, in the end, is “to give humility a coach and six,” that is, to destroy the very principle of adhesion which binds and continues the sect.