Page:A New England Tale.djvu/198

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A NEW-ENGLAND TALE.
187

excellent Penn. See him patiently and firmly enduring persecution, and calumny, and oppression at home; giving up his time, his fortune, his liberty, to the cause of suffering humanity, in every mode of its appeal to his benevolence. Follow him with his colony to the wilderness, and see him the only one of all the colonial leaders (I grieve that I cannot except our fathers, the pilgrims) the only one who treated the natives of the land with justice and mercy. Our fathers, Edward, refused to acknowledge the image of God in the poor Indian. They affected to believe they were the children of the evil one, and hunted them like beasts of prey, calling them 'worse than Scythian wolves;' while Penn, and his peaceful people, won their confidence, their devotion, by treating them with even-handed justice, with brotherly kindness; and they had their reward; they lived unharmed among them, without forts, without a weapon of defence. Is it not the Friends that have been foremost and most active in efforts for the abolition of slavery? Among what people do we find most reformers of the prisons—guardians of the poor and the oppressed—most of those who 'remember the forgotten, and attend to the neglected—who dive into the depths of dungeons, and plunge into the infection of hospitals'?"

There was a mingled expression of archness and admiration in Edward's smile as he replied, "My dear Jane, you are almost fit to speak in meeting. All that your defence wants in justness, is made