morality upon which the Quakers had grafted their beliefs, are secondary to his work in America, for which he gave up all he possessed--influence, the prospect of a brilliant career at home, friends, fortune, and health. [Footnote 18: The first Quakers to reach America were two women, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher. When they arrived at Boston, their luggage was searched, their books were burned in the market-place by the hangman; they were stripped and examined for signs of witchcraft, and after five weeks' imprisonment and cruelty were shipped back to Barbadoes. Then followed a series of persecutions too horrible to be detailed, increasing in severity from fines--fireless, bedless, and almost foodless--imprisonment in chains in the Boston winter, floggings (one part alone of the punishment of the aged William Brand consisted of 117 blows on his bare back with a barred rope, while two women were stripped to the waist in the mid-winter snow and lashed at the cart-tail through eleven towns), ear-croppings, and tongue-borings, to the death penalty suffered by three men and one woman. The intervention of Charles II. referred only to the death penalty. Whippings continued until 1677, and imprisonment for tithes until 1724.] This colony, bought strip by strip in honest treaty with the Indians, developed more quickly than any other. It was a home for refugees of every shade of opinion. Friends at no time formed more than half the population, but their influence was supreme. [Footnote 19: It is interesting that Penn did his utmost--even to attempting to bribe the secretaries when the charter was drawn up--to abolish the _Penn_ prefixed by James II. to his own original _Sylvania_.] Two years after the settlement of the State[20] Penn writes that two general assemblies had been held with such concord and despatch that they sat but three weeks, and at least seventy laws were passed without one dissent in any material thing. For thirty years there was peace, liberty, and refuge for all, and an unrivalled prosperity. We may picture Penn, in the days of witch crazes, holding his one trial of a witch, and establishing the precedent of finding the woman guilty of the common fame of being a witch, but not guilty as indicted; and in another characteristically Friendly moment refusing, when greatly in need of funds, six thousand pounds for a trade monopoly which would have violated his principle of fairness to the Indians. Free thought was encouraged, and a little group of distinguished men appeared in Philadelphia. The final downfall of Friendly administration in Pennsylvania was the result of the refusal on the part of the majority of the Quakers to adjust their principles to the demand sent to the Quaker legislature for means to proceed against the French and the Indians. [Footnote 20: In 1683.]