Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/344

 spring. He drew his settlers in the north of the kingdom from the line of Fox's trips, whose Cumberland and Lancashire converts dotted the region about Philadelphia with names familiar in his Journal, Lancaster, Swarthmore, Merion, and Haverford. All South England had been stirred by Monmouth's Rebellion and the Revolution, the work of the South as the Commonwealth had its leader in the North. Philadelphia, therefore, drew chiefly from Saxon, and less from Danish or Celtic England, than had New England. Its leaders came from the thrifty business classes of London, "city" people, instead of from the gentry as had Virginia's. Ten years later, Louis was harrying the Palatinate, and a German population, skilled in the mechanic arts, came and gave Philadelphia its manufacturing foundation. Penn was pietistic, his mother was from Holland, and this gave him continental acquaintance and sympathy with continental dissent, which later brought the Moravians and gave the colony relations with Central Europe, an early and prolific press, and patience with political oppression, a dubious virtue still surviving.

The town grew like a weed and as rank.