Page:Notices of Negro slavery as connected with Pennsylvania.djvu/5

Rh despotic prince, and under a charter obtained from him founding a government recognizing the equal rights of all its citizens, educated in times of religious intolerance and persecution, and himself a severe sufferer for conscience sake, when invested with power, granting to such as differed from him in sentiment, nay, even to his oppressors, perfect freedom of religious opinion and practice. We find him who was educated in a country where a sanguinary code of laws made the awful doom of death the indiscriminate punishment for the petty thief and the deliberate murderer, and at a time too when such a change was certain to be pronounced a visionary innovation, advocating and adopting that system of graduated and mitigated punishments which has since received the sanction of the wisest and best of his successors. Sound judgment, comprehensive and enlarged policy, unbroken faith, and unsullied probity, formed in her earlydays the prominent characteristics of Pennsylvanian government; and, much as they may have been aberrated from, by many of her succeeding rulers, the influence of this early example has been powerfully operative upon her character and actions from that day to the present. It is, however, beside our object at this time to expatiate upon the conduct of Penn and his coadjutors, in the prosecution of the ennobling designs to which we have alluded; our view is simply to show that from a government and people recognizing such principles and doctrines, and, in the midst of darkness and ignorance, displaying such vivifying light and knowledge, we might 24