etings, these proposals
could be brought to the attention of many thousands of people, sifted
and culled by persecution, the best stuff for a colony in all the United
Kingdom. The response was immediate. Within a year three ship-loads of
emigrants went out. The next year Penn himself went with a company of a
hundred, and stayed long enough to see the government organized by the
free act of the colonists on the principles which he had set forth, and
in that brief sojourn of two years to witness the beginnings of a
splendid prosperity. His city of Philadelphia consisted in August, 1683,
of three or four little cottages. Two years afterward it contained about
six hundred houses, and the schoolmaster and the printing-press had
begun their work.[117:1] The growth went on accelerating. In one year
seven thousand settlers are said to have arrived; before the end of the
century the colonists numbered more than twenty thousand, and
Philadelphia had become a thriving town.[117:2]

But Great Britain, although the chief source of population, was not the
only source. It had been part of the providential equipment of Penn for
his great work to endow him with the gift of tongues and bring him into
intimate relations with the many congregations of the broken and
persecuted sects kindred to his own on the continent of Europe. The
summer and autumn of 1678, four years before his coming to Pennsylvania,
had been spent by him, in company with George Fox, Robert Barclay, and
other eminent Friends, in a mission tour through Holland (where he
preached in his mother's own language) and Germany. The fruit of this
preaching and of previous missions appeared in an unexpected form. One
of the first important accessions to the colony was the company of
Mennonites led by Pastorius, the "Pennsylvania Pilgrim," who founded
Germantown, now a beautiful suburb of Philadelphia. Group after group of
picturesque devotees that had been driven into seclusion and
eccentricity by long and cruel persecution--the Tunkers, the
Schwenkfelders, the Amish--kept coming and bringing with them their
traditions, their customs, their sacred books, their timid and pathetic
disposition to hide by themselves, sometimes in quasi-monastic
communities like that at Ephrata, sometimes in actual hermitage, as in
the ravines of the Wissahickon. But the most important contribution of
this kind came from the suffering villages of the Rhenish Palatinate
ravaged with fire and sword by