xxiv FRIENDS' CARE OF THE INDIANS 311 



for the future. Friends' efforts on their behalf were 

 often resented by the settlers, who were smarting under 

 their sufferings, and doubtless approved the saying : 

 " There is no good Indian but a dead Indian." In 1764, 

 some Quakers of standing in Philadelphia had to flee from 

 that city to escape the violence of armed mobs. Yet the 

 influence of Friends and that of the Moravian F.C. Post, 

 exercised steadily through succeeding years, kept the 

 Pennsylvanian Indians quiet, and so helped to prevent 

 the French from making use of them to harass the pro- 

 vince. The care of the Indians they number at the 

 present day no more than one-third of a million has 

 ever since claimed the interest of the Friends in America : 

 an important share in their management was given to 

 Friends by General Grant in 1869, and since the close of 

 this official work, which lasted fifteen years, it has con- 

 tinued to engage the earnest and self-denying labours of 

 members of the society. 1 



Reviewing the epoch of Quaker government, we see 

 that it was an honest attempt to rule a state by the pure 

 principles of Christianity. Friends were sons of Puritan 

 Britain, and they stood for freedom, and a standard of 

 justice and of love in advance of their own age ; a standard 

 towards which mankind is still progressing, substituting, 

 if we may use the phrase of Huxley, for the " cosmic 

 process " of the lower nature the " ethical process " of 

 the higher. They held their place and carried out their 

 principles whilst the people they ruled continued to be 

 animated by a like faith. But the historian will not be 

 surprised that after seventy years, when the community 

 had grown so much that their own body formed but a 



1 " We are forming a plan for an honest trade with the Indians, and trying 

 to settle the heads of a Bill with the Proprietaries for this purpose, to be 

 passed in the Assembly of Pennsylvania ; if it succeeds, we are in hopes it 

 will secure the Indians effectually to the British interest." MS. Letter, J. F. 

 to S. Fothergill, 1758. See also Letter, James Pemberton to Joseph Phinn, 

 15.11.1763 ; Substance of a Conversation at Israel Pemberton' s house between 

 Indians and Friends, including W. Logan, 1756 ; Address of Seneca Indians 

 " to the Children of the Friends of Onas" 1791, and reply ; and Letter of Friends 

 to " Brothers of the Cherokee Nation," 1792, with the endorsement of the 

 President of the United States to Jas. Pemberton. All these MSS. are in 

 Frds. Ref. Lib. See, too, J. S. Walton, Conrad Weiser and the Indian Policy 

 of Pennsylvania, Phila. (1900). 



