1681.
1869.
The City of Brotherly Love.
At the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers,—a triangle since often worked at by people who, wanting his simplicity, have tried so to draw their lines as to prove that an acute angle is larger than the other two, even if those two be very obtuse,—at this place he halted to work out the problem of a city to be governed by brotherly love. He found clumps of pine, chestnut, and walnut trees,—names which grew to the streets which displaced them. Disliking crowded towns, which he had found to be but nurseries of vice, he desired his city to be planted with gardens round each house, so as to form “a greene countrie towne.” The jealous rivals of the Quaker Emporium assert that he succeeded in carrying out his plan.
He was not pen-urious; but paid the natives for their lands. Peace, Penn, and plenty prevailed through all the borders of the baby settlement. In two years, twenty-five hundred wood-colored bonnets and broad-brims could be counted of a Sunday in the loving city. Unlike most of the other young settlements, the neck of land between the two rivers on which Penn’s pet stood was not wrung by famine or by the hand of political oppression. In March, 1683, Penn granted to the assembly, held in the growing town, an ample charter of liberty. The next year he made a trip to Europe, taking the “Philadelphia line,” which, fortunately for him, did not break before he reached shore.
In 1691 the three counties, now forming the State of Delaware, and of which Penn had procured a conveyance, took it in their heads to try their own luck at housekeeping, and set up a separate kitchen of their own. Penn wished them pot-luck; and off they went in high glee, cultivating their own Pea Patch and sowing their own oats to their heart’s content.
The next year Penn was deprived of his government and shut up in prison for two years. For some time William and Mary, it was supposed, had a taste for his head served up à la John the Baptist; but this dish was at last thought to be too expensive for the English constitution, and so the ruffles around Penn’s neck were untroubled.
In 1699 Penn again visited his North American estate, took an account of stock, gave presents of all the political privileges they asked for, and went home again, for the last time, in high feather.