“Bancroft’s writings are as well worthy of study, both for form and substance, as any that have been produced on American soil.”—John McClintock, LL.D.
“His every paragraph is animated with a philanthropic, liberal and progressive spirit.”—D. D. Whedon, D.D.
“The work of Mr. Bancroft may be considered as a copious philosophical treatise, tracing the growth of the idea of liberty in a country designed by Providence for its development. It is written in a style marked by singular elaborateness, compactness, and scholarly grace, and is esteemed one of the noblest monuments of American literature.”—American Cyclopædia.
William Penn.
Penn, despairing of relief in Europe, bent the whole energy of his mind to accomplish the establishment of a free government in the New World. For that “heavenly end” he was prepared by the severe discipline of life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed the basis of his character. The sentiment of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong in his bosom. As with John Eliot and Roger Williams, benevolence gushed prodigally from his ever-flowing heart, and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired, and his reason prostrated by apoplexy, his sweetness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease. Possessing an extraordinary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precision, and surpassing in speculative endowments, conversant with men, with books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations as they existed in England and France, in Holland, and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the source of wisdom in his own soul. Humane by nature and suffering, familiar with the royal family, intimate with Sunderland and Sydney, acquainted with Russel, Halifax, Shaftesbury and Buckingham, as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton, and the great scholars of his age—he valued the promptings of a free mind more than the awards of the learned, and reverenced the simple minded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the wisdom of philosophers. And now, being in the meridian of life, but a year older than was Locke, when, twelve years before, he had framed a constitution for Carolina, the Quaker legislator was come to the New World to lay the foundation of states. Would he imitate the vaunted system of the great philosopher?
Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant; both loved freedom; both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the torch of liberty at the fires of tradition; Penn at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth through the senses and the outward world; Penn looked inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as Hobbs had compared it to a slate, on which time and chance might scrawl their experience; to Penn the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly framed, that, when once set in motion they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist who made them.
To Locke, “Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions;” to Penn it is the image of God, and his oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, esteemed “the duty of parents to preserve their children to not be understood without reward and punishment;” Penn loved his children, with not a thought for the consequences. Locke, who was never married, declares marriage an affair of the senses; Penn reverenced woman as the object of fervent, inward affection, made, not for lust, but for love. In studying the understanding Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures. Locke deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon contract, and announces its end to be the security of property; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even to Noah, declares that there must be a people before a government, and, deducing the right to institute the government from man’s moral nature, seeks its fundamental rules in the immutable dictates of universal reason, its end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division, and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure; things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain; and to inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums or nuts; Penn esteemed happiness to be in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in; Penn, like Plato and Fénelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practiced for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing but space, duration and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth and virtue, and to God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed “not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for;” Penn likewise vindicated the many, but it was because truth is the common inheritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, inveighed against the methods of persecution as “Popish practices;” Penn censured no sect, but condemned bigotry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American lawgiver dreaded a too numerous democracy; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, his light in every soul; and therefore, stretching out his arms, he built—such are his own words—“a free colony for all mankind.” This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an age which had seen a popular revolution shipwreck popular liberty among selfish factions, which had seen Hugh Peters and Henry Vane perish by the hangman’s cord and the ax; in an age when Sydney nourished the pride of patriotism rather than the sentiment of philanthropy, when Russel stood for the liberties of his order, and not for new enfranchisements, when Harrington and Shaftesbury and Locke thought government should rest on property—Penn did not despair of humanity, and, though all his history and experience denied the sovereignty of the people, dared to cherish the noble idea of man’s capacity for self-government. Conscious that there was no room for its exercise in England, the pure enthusiast, like Calvin and Descartes, a voluntary exile, was to come to the banks of the Delaware to institute the “Holy Experiment.”
WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT.
“To Prescott belongs the rare distinction of uniting solid merit with extensive popularity. He has been exalted to the first class of historians, both by the popular voice and the suffrages of the learned. By avoiding all tricks of flippancy or profundity to court any class of readers, he has pleased all.”—E. P. Whipple.