[Footnote 17: As early as 1657, and before he had come in contact with slavery, Fox addressed a letter of advice from England to all slave-holding Friends. In 1671, seeing for himself the system at work in Barbadoes, he recommended that the holders should free their slaves after a term of service, and should arrange for their welfare when freed. The first documentary protest against slavery put forward by any religious body came from the German Quakers in Philadelphia (Germantown); they had come as settlers from Kirchheim in Germany, where Penn's teaching had met with an ardent response. John Woolman spent twenty years in ceaseless labour on behalf of the slaves. Throughout the society the work went on; meetings were held, individual protests were made, slave-holding Friends were visited. By 1755 it was generally agreed that negroes should be neither bought nor imported by Friends, and less than thirty years later the society, with the exception of a few isolated and difficult cases, was free of slavery. Many Friends paid their slaves for past services, and in all cases provision was made for their welfare.] For more than half a century after the savage persecution[18] by the Puritans--reaching its fullest fury in Boston under Governor Endicott--had come to an end, Quakerism was a steadily growing power in America. The Quakers flourished in Rhode Island, to whom they supplied many Governors, and where at one time they were continually in office; they made fair headway in Connecticut. In Long Island their establishment was finally secured by the advice of the Dutch home Government on the ground of their excellence as citizens. They achieved a foothold in Virginia in face of the indignant persecutions of the Episcopalians. Their history in Maryland is an excellent illustration of the nature of their work on behalf of religious toleration. When, in 1691, an Act was framed to secure the establishment of the Protestant church, the Quakers, who were by this time both numerous and influential in the colony, laboured in opposition to it until they brought the bill to nought. They supported the Catholics in their struggle for emancipation, and were largely instrumental in securing the repeal, in 1695, of the Act against them. They also joined with Rome to prevent the Episcopalian Church from being established by law, but in this they were only partially successful. In the Carolinas they appear to have fared well. For years, though in a minority, they controlled the government. New Jersey was thrown open to them by a large purchase of land. William Penn's share in this transaction was the beginning of his practical interest in America, finally to express itself in the foundation of the Quaker State of Pennsylvania,[19] which was very largely his own work. His labours as a religious apologist, filling some five volumes, and representing in his graceful, polished style the application to social life of the Puritan