[18] The first Quakers to reach America were two women, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher. When they arrived at Boston, their luggage was searched, their books were burned in the market-place by the hangman; they were stripped and examined for signs of witchcraft, and after five weeks’ imprisonment and cruelty were shipped back to Barbadoes. Then followed a series of persecutions too horrible to be detailed, increasing in severity from fines—fireless, bedless, and almost foodless—imprisonment in chains in the Boston winter, floggings (one part alone of the punishment of the aged William Brand consisted of 117 blows on his bare back with a barred rope, while two women were stripped to the waist in the mid-winter snow and lashed at the cart-tail through eleven towns), ear-croppings, and tongue-borings, to the death penalty suffered by three men and one woman. The intervention of Charles II. referred only to the death penalty. Whippings continued until 1677, and imprisonment for tithes until 1724.
[19] It is interesting that Penn did his utmost—even to attempting to bribe the secretaries when the charter was drawn up—to abolish the Penn prefixed by James II. to his own original Sylvania.
[20] In 1683.
[21] “According to recent statistics, the membership of the fourteen orthodox bodies is upward of 90,000; of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 4,400; of the Conservative Yearly Meeting, about 4,000; and of seven Hicksite Yearly Meetings, under 19,000—say, 27,500 Friends belonging to Yearly Meetings in America with which we do not correspond” (Facts about Friends. Headley Bros. 1912).
[22] The Perrot Schism, 1661.
[23] The Friend, March, 1912: “Woman in the Church.”
[24] The Beacon Controversy, so named from Isaac Crewdson’s publication in 1835, expressing Evangelical views of an advanced type.
[25] The Friends’ Retreat at York, established in 1796, was the beginning of humane treatment of the insane in this country.
[26] In 1845 by Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham.
[27] Authority and the Light Within.