After months of vicissitude, the great exile reached the shores of Narragansett Bay, and founded Providence. As he floated down the stream in his canoe, and neared the site of the beautiful city born of his piety, the Indians shouted, “Wha-cheer, friend; wha-cheer?” and grasped his hand with cordial sympathy as he stepped ashore.[863] A large grant of land was easily obtained from Canonicus and Miantonomoh—easily obtained because of the love and favor which they bore him, since Williams says that money could not have bought it without affection and confidence[864]—and as the whole domain was his, he might have lived as lord-proprietor; but principle forbade. “On the hill the forests, just clothed in their full leafage, bowed their heads to this fugitive, the hero of a great idea, and whispered ‘Liberty!’”[865] He heeded that whisper, and dedicated the infant state to the most radical idea of liberty; so that it became the asylum of the oppressed; and as the Hebrew prophet always prayed with his window open towards Jerusalem, so distressed consciences, when they felt the sting of persecution, murmured, Providence. Roger Williams planted a democracy—a government of the people, by the people, for the people.[866] He cemented his state by toleration. “The removal of the yoke of soul-oppression,” said he, “as it will prove an act of mercy and righteousness to the enslaved nations, so it is of binding force to engage the whole and every interest and conscience to preserve the common liberty and peace.”[867] So it proved; for, spite of Cotton Mather’s epigram, that it was “_bona terra, mala gens_”[868]—a good land and a wicked people—it increased and prospered from the outset, justifying the motto of the commonwealth, _Amor vincet omnia_.[869] While Roger Williams believed in toleration, he did not believe in license, but was always earnest for liberty regulated by law. Thus when the _Ranters_ appeared and railed against all order, he invoked the judicial arm to suppress their madness.[870] But when the Quakers invaded the state, he attacked them only with syllogisms. He was ardently opposed to their tenets; but he essayed to “dig George Fox out of his burrows” with words only, and returned a stern “No” to the thrice-repeated request of Massachusetts that they be expelled from his jurisdiction.[871] “We find,” he wrote, “that where these people are most of all supposed to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by argument, there they least of all desire to come.”[872]