Up to the time of this occurrence it had seemed as if America were on the way to becoming an autonomous province of the British Empire, steered by Quaker principles. Privilege after privilege had been quietly secured by Penn from the home government, and it is not difficult to believe that if on the eve of the Revolution negotiations had been left in Friendly hands, the war of separation need not have taken place. When it broke out, the Quakers retired decisively from legislative and municipal positions. A Quakerized liberty party carried on the traditions of civil liberty up to the last moment. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who despised the Quakers, and treated the Indians as heathen to be exterminated, formed the main body of the Pennsylvanian revolutionary party. Friends suffered under English taxation, and their principles prevented them from smuggling, yet they opposed not merely warfare, but revolution, disowning those who supported it, and reiterated their loyalty to England. They were arrested and imprisoned as friends of the British, their goodly farms and their meeting-houses were placed at the mercy of troopers and foragers, whose pay they would not accept. Their decent streets were demoralized. They went quietly about their business as best they might, pursuing, even while the war was in progress, their labours in the aid of drunkards and slaves, their succour of the uneducated. They built schools for the negroes, and when, after the revolution was at an end (whereupon they duly suffered at the hands of the rejoicing multitude), there came the scandal of the "walking purchase" of land from the Indians and the fear of a serious outbreak, they formed a private association and pacified the Indians, preventing warfare at the cost to themselves of weeks of negotiation and the sum of five thousand pounds paid by them. Incidents of this type occur again and again in Quaker history, and are practical proof of the fact that their avoidance of the spirit of strife, so often present in political life, was no kind of timidity, of passive resistance, or comfortable retirement from the business of the world. Least of all was it indifference to what went forward in the public affairs of the nation. Apart from its temporary dominion of "affairs," American Quakerism follows much the same line of development as does the movement at home. The original impulse tends to be superseded for the imitative mass by a doctrine embodied in an institution; the dogma of the Inner Light becomes dangerously absolutist. There is a corresponding return to the steadying refuge of an infallible scripture, and the modern church, while still united and distinguishable by the marks of Quaker culture, of faith and practice, kindling here and there to the older insight and vision, shows a divided front.