Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/31

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Introduction
xxi

in connection with the story of contemporary Dutch colonization in America. The Knickerbockers of New York and the Boers of the Transvaal are of common origin,—a fact frankly recognized by the Holland Society of New York in its expressions of sympathy with the Dutch element in South Africa in its struggle against fate.

The history of the communities of Pennsylvania affords a convenient initiation into much of the complex religious and ecclesiastical history of Europe. Penn brought the Quakers and other fine English stock from the middle and north of England for reasons that go to the very heart of the English life of the seventeenth century. A little later the Protestant Germans of the Palatinate came in great numbers, impelled by motives to understand which is to find oneself essentially comprehending the conditions of Church and State that so disturbed and harassed Western Europe for a long period. Thus, to study the great city of Philadelphia in its origins, its later accretions and its existing conditions, is to find inviting avenues leading into many fields of historical inquiry both of the new world and the old.

What single spot could one find anywhere