with the great example of their Spiritual Leader, in his
arrest, suffering, and sublimest act of forgiveness on the
cross, who forbade his servants to fight, and prayed for
his enemies, " Father forgive them, for they know not
what they do." No two nations, both just and wise,
ever went to war. Friends' example and warning are to
both and to all, and the force of that example and warn-
ing would be lost if they mingled at all in the fierceness
of strife and bloodshed. Unresistant by force, they suf-
fered torture, imprisonment, and death, by thousands, in
Old England, and were whipped and hung in New Eng-
land. By their patient, firm, and resolute heroism,
what did they not accomplish, not for themselves only,
but for all others ? Inhumanity and cruelty at length
relented, wearied of their persecutions, and human rights,
by the fidelity and sufferings of Friends, became secured
by better laws. When vested with political power in a
new commonwealth, they acted not on that too common
principle of our nature, that makes the slave put in
power the severest taskmaster, or the persecuted in his
turn the severest persecutor, as if by infliction on others
to compensate for former sufferings endured. Friends in
Pennsylvania were, by their toleration and justice, the
admiration of the wise and good of all the world ; and
their pacific principle and practice, even as a worldly
policy, put to shame the wisdom of the other earlier set-
tlpFS oif this pontineiit. Without arms they landed among



PRINCIPLE OF PEACE. 75

and exposed themselves to the tender mercies of those
called savages. They formed a treaty of peace with them,
the only one it is said ever formed without an oath, and
the only one never broken ; and if violated ever in spirit,
it was not by the Indians so much as by those descendants
and agents of the famjjy of William Penn, who, in depart-
ing from his strict sense of justice, as they did also from
his religious profession, overreached the Indians by "lony
walks" accelerated to running, to encompass undue quan-
tities of land, and hence bred a discontent and insecurity
of far greater loss and disadvantage than the price that
would have been cheerfully taken for the lands thus un-
justly gained. 