The isolation of the several elements of population in the colony was still further favoured by the fact that, at first, the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware colonists who followed Penn resembled their Swedish predecessors and were not commercial in their instincts like the Dutch, who were aggressively mercantile with their fur trade. What they needed for home consumption the early Pennsylvanians made for themselves, so far as they could, and in every way were essentially agricultural and diametrically opposed to the Dutch. For some years after the founding of the colony, Swedes, English, Welsh, and Germans alike turned their eyes inland. We might say that their policy of colonisation was introspective rather than expansive. This introspective policy of colonisation did not tend toward the expansion or the prosperity of the colony and, while the colonists led lives of comfort in their own preferred seclusion, it was not until they turned their eyes to the sea and engaged in commerce that the prosperity of Philadelphia, and of the colony generally, increased by leaps and bounds. The roads, for the most part, were extremely bad and, in the winter and spring, were hopelessly miry. Where the settlers did not follow the course of the streams for the spread of their area of colonisation, they followed the Indian trails, and most of the old roads leading out from Philadelphia, the old arteries of traffic along which the colonists made their homesteads, and from which they pushed farther and farther into the interior, were originally the pathways worn by the red men through the forest. While the Swedes chose the streams to determine their course of colonisation, the Germans usually stuck to the Indian trails which, in time, became the highroads to their various communities. In the earliest times, the German lads and lasses forded the streams and came on horseback along these roads, carrying their goods for market in the city in panniers. It was not long, however, before sufficient improvement was made in the condition of the highways to allow the great four, six, and eight horse wains to be driven to the city periodically from the more remote settlements. In these wains were contained the products of the six months’ or year’s labour on the farms and, with the money from what they sold, the farmers bought materials which they took home to be manufactured into the various articles of necessity or comfort required by the different members of their households.