* William Penn was born in London, October 14th, 1644, and in his fifteenth year entered, as a gentleman commoner, a college in Oxford. Brilliant talents and unaffected goodness characterized his early youth. While at Oxford, he heard an itinerant Quaker preach, and was so impressed with the doctrines which he taught, that he joined, with other students similarly impressed, in withdrawing from the established worship and holding meetings by themselves. He was fined for non-conformity and expelled from college when he was sixteen years of age. Parental discipline attempted to reclaim him, but in vain. He was sent to France, where he passed two years, and became a very polished young gentleman. He studied law in Lincoln's Inn until the breaking out of the plague in London in 1665. He was sent to Ireland in 1666, to manage an estate for his father, but, associating with Quakers there, he was recalled. He could not be persuaded to take off his hat in the presence of his father or the king, and for this inflexibility he was expelled from his father's house. He became an itinerant Quaker preacher, and made many proselytes. He suffered much "for conscience' sake," sometimes by revilings, sometimes by imprisonments. He wrote much, and preached with daily increasing fervor. In 1668 he wrote his _No Cross, no Crown_; and in 1670 he was tried at the Old Bailey, but acquitted by the jury. His father died soon afterward, leaving him a very large estate, but he continued to travel, preach, and write as usual. Having obtained a charter for a province in America, and settled his government on a sure basis, he formed a plan for a capital city, and named it Philadelphia--brotherly love. Two years after it was founded it contained two thousand inhabitants. On returning to England in 1684, he obtained the release of thirteen hundred Quakers then in prison. He resided mostly in England, but visited his colony occasionally. He was seized with a paralytic disorder in 1712, which terminated his life on the 30th of July, 1718, at the age of seventy-three. His posterity held his possessions till the Revolution. His last surviving son, Thomas Penn, died in 1775. [[[Penn's Just Dealings with the Natives.--Effect of his Justice.--Treaty Monument.]]] {254}beneath the wide-spread branches of a huge elm. "Under the shelter of the forest, now leafless by the frosts of autumn," says Bancroft, "Penn proclaimed to the men of the Algonquin race, from both banks of the Delaware--from the border of the Schuylkill, and, it may have been, from the Susquehanna--the same simple message of peace and love which George Fox had professed before Cromwell, and Mary Fisher had borne to the Grand Turk. [Illustration: 8262] The English and the Indian should respect the same moral law, should be alike secure in their pursuits and their possessions, and adjust every difference by a peaceful tribunal, composed of an equal number of men from each race."