one in each town, on pain of death, if they preached their
doctrines,--and of course they preached them. But their offences and
penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken
open,--a thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do
to any one,--they might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury,
for the first offence be fined, for the second lose one ear, for the
third lose the other ear, and for the fourth be bored with red-hot iron
through the tongue,--though this last penalty remained a dead letter.
They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped through
town after town,--three women were whipped through eleven towns, eighty
miles,--but afterwards the number was limited to three. Their testimony
was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless
among wolves and bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic,
and R for Rogue; they could be sold as slaves; and their graves must not
be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest their poor afflicted bodies
should find rest there.

Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta
and to Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan
must have looked on the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have
since regarded the Bloomer costume,--and the Inquisition imprisoned the
missionaries, though the Sultan did not. But meanwhile the Quaker women
in New England might be walking to execution with their male
companions,--like Mary Dyer in Boston,--under an armed guard of two
hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for
every year. When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus
hand in hand between two young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an
hour of the greatest joy I could enjoy in this world. No tongue could
utter and no heart understand the sweet influence of the Spirit which
now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and covered her face
with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman; and
when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying
that she would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at
last, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.

It is no wonder, if some persons declare that a