The wither’d branch again shall grow,
Till o’er the earth its shade extend—
And this—the gift of foe to foe—
Become the gift of friend to friend.
In the “Conditions” between William Penn, as Proprietary and Governor of Pennsylvania, and the Adventurers and Purchasers in the same province, “in behalf of the Indians it was stipulated, that, as it had been usual with planters to overreach them in various ways, whatever was sold to them in consideration of their furs should be sold in the public market-place, and there suffer the test, whether good or bad: if good, to pass; if not good, not to be sold for good; that the said native Indians might neither be abused nor provoked. That no man should by any ways or means, in word or deed, affront or wrong any Indian, but he should incur the same penalty of the law as if he had committed it against his fellow-planter; and if any Indian should abuse, in word or deed, any planter of the province, that the said planter should not be his own judge upon the said Indian, but that he should make his complaint to the governor of the province, or his deputy, or some inferior magistrate near him, who should to the utmost of his power take care with the king of the said Indian, that all reasonable satisfaction should be made to the said injured planter. And that all differences between planters and Indians should be ended by twelve men, that is, by six planters and six Indians, that so they might live friendly together, as much as in them lay, preventing all occasions of heart-burnings and mischief. These stipulations in favour of the poor natives will for ever immortalize the name of William Penn; for, soaring above the prejudices and customs of his time, by which navigators and adventurers thought it right to consider the inhabitants of the lands they discovered as their lawful prey, or as mere animals of the brute-creation, whom they might treat, use, and take advantage of at their pleasure, he regarded them as creatures endued with reason, as men of the like feelings and passions with himself, as brethren both by nature and grace, and as persons, therefore, to whom the great duties of humanity and justice were to be extended, and who, in proportion to their ignorance, were the more entitled to his fatherly protection and care.”[366]
The identical roll of parchment given by William Penn to the Indians was shown by their descendants to some English officers some years ago. This information, with the following passages, will be found in the “Notes” to “Penn and the Indians,” the poem, by “William and Mary Howitt,” from whence the motto is taken:—
“What shows the scrupulous adherence of the Indians to their engagements in the most surprising light is, that long after the descendants of Penn ceased to possess political influence in the state, in comparatively recent times, when the Indian character was confessedly lowered by their intercourse with the whites, and they were instigated both by their own injuries and the arts of the French to make incursions into Pennsylvania, the ‘Friends’ were still to them a sacred and inviolable people. While the tomahawk and the scalping-knife were nightly doing their dreadful work in every surrounding dwelling—theirs were untouched; while the rest of the inhabitants abandoned their houses and fled to forts for security,—they found more perfect security in that friendship which the wisdom and virtue of Penn had conciliated, and which their own disinterested principles made permanent.”
In endeavouring to conclude with a specimen of the elegant poem of “William and Mary Howitt,” an unexpected difficulty of selection occurs—it is a piece of continuous beauty that can scarcely be extracted from, without injury to the stanzas selected; and therefore, presuming on the kind indulgence of the amiable authors, it is here presented entire:—
PENN AND THE INDIANS.
“I will not compare our friendship to a chain; for the rain might sometimes rust it, or a tree might fall and break it; but I shall consider you as the same flesh and blood as the Christians; and the same as if one man’s body were to be divided into two parts.”