ier city continually isolated from the North, following a
tradition and a policy of its own.

With New Amsterdam was also ceded the small Dutch plantation of
Delaware, which lay between Maryland and the Atlantic, while England at
the same time established her claim to the disputed territory between
the two which became the colony of New Jersey.

Shortly after the cession of New Amsterdam William Penn obtained from
Charles II. a charter for the establishment of a colony to the north of
Maryland, between that settlement and the newly acquired territories of
New Jersey and New York. This plantation was designed especially as a
refuge for the religious sect to which Penn belonged, the Quakers, who
had been persecuted by all religious parties and especially savagely by
the Puritan colonists of New England. Penn, the most remarkable man that
ever professed the strange doctrines of that sect, was a favourite with
the King, who had a keen eye for character, and as the son of a
distinguished admiral he had a sort of hereditary claim upon the
gratitude of the Crown. He easily carried his point with Charles, and
himself supervised the foundations of the new commonwealth of
Pennsylvania. Two surveyors were sent out by royal authority to fix the
boundary between Penn's concession and the existing colony of
Maryland--Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon by name. However elated these two
gentlemen may have been by their appointment to so responsible an
office, they probably little thought that their names would be
immortalized. Yet so it was to be. For the line they drew became the
famous "Mason-Dixon" line, and was to be in after years the frontier
between the Slave States and the Free.

In all that he did in the New World Penn showed himself not only a great
but a most just and wise man. He imitated, with happier issue, the
liberality of Baltimore in the matter of religious freedom, and to this
day the Catholics of Philadelphia boast of possessing the only Church in
the United States in which Mass has been said continuously since the
seventeenth century. But it is in his dealings with the natives that
Penn's humanity and honour stand out most conspicuously. None of the
other founders of English colonies had ever treated the Indians except
as vermin to be exterminated as quickly as possible. Penn treated them
as free contracting parties with full human rights. He bought of them
fairly the land he needed, and strictly observed every article of t