340 THE WAR OF SEPARATION CHAP. 



They were champions of freedom, and their liberties had 

 cost them much : they had come out of persecution in 

 the old country to found a free community. It was a 

 famous Friend, Isaac Norris, Speaker of the Pennsylvanian 

 Assembly, who chose the inscription for the Liberty Bell, 

 rung on the day of Independence : " Proclaim liberty 

 throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof" 

 (Lev. xxv. 10). But after their seventy years' rule in 

 that province, the Quakers had gradually withdrawn, as 

 we have seen, from political life, although there were 

 some members of the society in the Assembly down to the 

 time of the Revolutionary War. Quietist in religion, 

 they had become politically a sort of colonial aristocracy, 

 wealthy, conservative and inclined to be loyalist. 1 When, 

 therefore, the colonists rose in defence of their liberties, 

 most Friends felt that they could take no part in " com- 

 motions," disloyalty and opposition to the ruling powers, 

 quoting from an ancient testimony of English Friends in 

 1696 on the occasion of a plot against King William III. 

 The setting up, they said, and putting down of kings and 

 governments is God's peculiar prerogative ; it is not our 

 business to have any hand or contrivance therein, much 

 less to plot the ruin or overturn of any of them ; but to 

 pray for the king, and for the safety of our nation, that 

 we may live a peaceable and quiet life under the govern- 

 ment which God is pleased to set over us. To this Samuel 

 Adams replied that he rejoiced that in the course of 

 Divine Providence the time had come for setting up an 

 independent empire in the Western Hemisphere. 2 



The province of Pennsylvania, indeed, at that time a 

 foremost colony, was rich and prosperous, and even apart 

 from Quaker influence disinclined for revolution. John 

 Dickinson, chief spokesman of the province and a birth- 

 right Friend, whose famous " Farmer's Letters " in 1768 



1 C. H. Lincoln, The Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania, 1760-1776, 

 p. 14. 



2 Address of Philadelphia Meeting for Sufferings, ist mo. 2oth 1776, in 

 Sharpless, Quakers in the Revolution, p. 127. The quotation is from Sewel, 

 History of the Quakers, 1722, p. 665. For Adams, see John Fiske, The American 

 Revolution, i. 186. See also MS. Letters from J. F. to W. Logan, Mar. and 

 June 1775, J. M. Fox MSS. 



