lution, that under no pretence would they furnish means to needy Palatines, except to pay their fares back to their fatherland. By rigidly maintaining this rule, and thus ending where they undoubtedly should have commenced, the committee put a complete stop to emigration. On the 17th of March they reported that they had already accomplished their object, and from that time they were not again troubled with requests for passage-money to North America.[1] In the meanwhile their adherence to this resolution caused some coolness between the communities in the Netherlands and in Pennsylvania. Still their intercourse was not entirely terminated. A special circumstance gave an impulse which turned the Pennsylvanians again toward our brotherhood in 1742. Their colony had increased wonderfully; they enjoyed prosperity, rest, and what the remembrance of foreign sufferings made more precious than all, complete religious freedom; but they talked with some solicitude about their ability to maintain one of their points of belief — absolute nonparticipation in war, even defensive. They had at first been so few in numbers that they were unnoticed by the government, but now it was otherwise. Could they, when a general arming of the people was ordered to repel a hostile invasion of the neighboring French colonists or an incursion of the Indians, refuse to go, and have their con-
- ↑ This is of course correct as far as the committee at Amsterdam is concerned, but neither emigration nor Mennonite aid ended at this time. The Schwenckfelders, some of whom came over only the next year, speak in warm and grateful terms of the aid rendered them by the Mennonites. Their MS. journal, now in the possession of Abraham H. Cassel, says “Mr. Henry Van der Smissen gave us on the ship 16 loaves of bread, 2 Dutch cheeses, 2 tubs of butter, 4 casks of beer, two roasts of meat, much flour and biscuit, and 2 bottles of French brandy, and otherwise took good care of us”
