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186 being continually increased by new fugitives and exiles from Switzerland, they finally determined upon other measures, and, at a meeting of their elders at Manheim, in February, 1717, decided to call upon the Netherlanders for help in carrying out the great plan of removing to Pennsylvania, which they had long contemplated, and which had then come to maturity. Strange as it may appear at first glance, the very land to which the Swiss tyrants had once wanted to banish them had then become the greatest attraction. Still there was reason enough for it; reason, perhaps, in the information which their brethren sent from there to the Palatinate, but before all, in the pressing invitation or instruction of the English King, George I., through his agent (Muntmeester) Ochse, at the court. “Since it has been observed,” so reads the beginning of this remarkable paper, “that the Christians, called Baptists or Mennonites, have been denied freedom of conscience in various places in Germany and Switzerland, and endure much opposition from their enemies, so that with diffilculty they support themselves, scattered here and there, and have been hindered in the exercise of their religion,” the king offers to them for a habitation the country west of the Allegheny mountains, then considered a part of Pennsylvania, but not yet belonging to it. Each family should have fifty acres of land in fee simple, and for the first ten years the use, without charge, of as much more as they should want, subject only to the stipulation that after this time the yearly rent for a hundred acres should be two shillings, i. e., about a guilder, less six kreutzers. “There is land enough for a hundred thousand families. They shall have permission to live there, not as foreigners, but on their engagement, without oath, to be true and obedient to the king, be bound as lawful subjects, and possess their