ourite creed; but on
that day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot and made his
treaty with the Red Indians, his creed of humanity did have a triumph
and a triumph that has not turned back. The praise given to him is not a
priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have
illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists have been rather unfair to
Penn even in picking their praises; and they generally forget that
toleration cuts both ways and that an open mind is open on all sides.
Those who deify him for consenting to bargain with the savages cannot
forgive him for consenting to bargain with the Stuarts. And the same is
true of the other city, yet more closely connected with the tolerant
experiment of the Stuarts. The state of Maryland was the first
experiment in religious freedom in human history. Lord Baltimore and his
Catholics were a long march ahead of William Penn and his Quakers on
what is now called the path of progress. That the first religious
toleration ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Catholics is
one of those little informing details with which our Victorian histories
did not exactly teem. But when I went into my hotel at Baltimore and
found two priests waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion, for I
felt that I touched the end of a living chain. Nor was the impression
accidental; it will always remain with me with a mixture of gratitude
and grief, for they brought a message of welcome from a great American
whose name I had known from childhood and whose career was drawing to
its close; for it was but a few days after I left the city that I
learned that Cardinal Gibbons was dead.

On the top of a hill on one side of the town stood the first monument
raised after the Revolution to Washington. Beyond it was a new monument
saluting in the name of Lafayette the American soldiers who fell
fighting in France in the Great War. Between them were steps and stone
seats, and I sat down on one of them and talked to two children who were
clambering about the bases of the monument. I felt a profound and
radiant peace in the thought that they at any rate were not going to my
lecture. It made me happy that in that talk neither they nor I had any
names. I was full of that indescribable waking vision of the strangeness
of life, and especially of the strangeness of locality; of how we find
places and lose them; and see faces for a moment in a far-off land, and
it is equally mys