Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/27

Rh The Quakers have always been the best friends of the negro-slave, and the fugitive slaves from the slave states find, at the present time, their most powerful protectors and advocates among the Friends. Many of the Quaker women are distinguished by their gifts as public speakers, and have often come forward in public assemblies as forcible advocates of some question of humanity. At the present time they take the lead in the anti-slavery party, and a celebrated speaker on this subject, Lucretia Mott, was among one of my late visitors here. She is a handsome lady, of about fifty, with fine features, splendid eyes, and a very clear, quiet, but decided manner—crystal-like, I might say.

June 25th.—Yesterday, midsummer-day, I visited the old Swedish church here. For the Swedes were the first settlers on the river Delaware, and were possessed of land from Trenton Falls to the sea, and it was from them that William Penn bought the ground on which Philadelphia now stands. It was the great Gustavus Adolphus who, together with Oxenstjerna, sketched out a plan for a Swedish colony in the new world, and the king himself became surety to the royal treasury for the sum of 400,000 rix-dollars for the carrying it out. Persons of all conditions were invited to co-operate in the undertaking. The colony was to exist by free labour. “Slaves,” said they, “cost a great deal, work unwillingly, and soon perish from hard usage. The Swedish people are laborious and intelligent, and we shall certainly gain more by a free people with wives and children.” The Swedes found a new paradise in the new world, and believed that the proposed colony would become a secure asylum for the wives and daughters of those who had become fugitives by religious persecution, or war; would be a blessing at once for individual man and the whole Protestant world. “It may prove an advantage to the whole of oppressed Christendom,” said