which facilitate interchange of thought and concerted action on the part of the people."[1] In these cities, too, we find public opinion immediately afifecting the daily life of the people, with the result that the cities were more democratic than the country, where there were no newspapers.
It was in Philadelphia that the first printing press outside the New England colonies was established by William Bradford, a Quaker, who came to America with Penn's colonists in 1682. Through his father-in-law, also a Quaker, Bradford, when very young, met William Penn, and the Great Proprietary, when he was about to sail for Pennsylvania, arranged to take young Bradford with him, that the new colony might have the benefit of a printing press. This was a most fortunate situation for the young man; not only did he have the patronage of a great and wealthy proprietor, but Penn's own taste in literature and his attitude toward the press were those of a man of extreme intelligence and liberality.[2] While it was in Boston that the first newspaper was started, and while New York was the scene of the first notable battle for the freedom of the press, it is to the Philadelphia of William Penn that one would naturally look for leadership in the struggle for a free press, and subsequent history shows how small and apparently unimportant incidents frequently contained within themselves the germ of great influence. It is true that on the Mayflower, with the Pilgrims, came Brewster, with the liberality toward the press that one might assume from his having been a publisher himself, but Pennsylvania's history can more than offset this by pointing to the care that was taken—when the Welcome brought hither William Penn and the
