ge, had seventy-two members, and was more like
an upper house of the Legislature than the usual colonial governor's
council. The council also had the sole right of proposing legislation,
and the assembly could merely accept or reject its proposals. This was
a new idea, and it worked so badly in practice that in the end the
province went to the opposite extreme and had no council or upper house
of the Legislature at all.

Penn's frame of government contained, however, a provision for its own
amendment. This was a new idea and proved to be so happy that it is now
found in all American constitutions. His method of impeachment by which
the lower house was to bring in the charge and the upper house was
to try it has also been universally adopted. His view that an
unconstitutional law is void was a step towards our modern system. The
next step, giving the courts power to declare a law unconstitutional,
was not taken until one hundred years after his time. With the advice
and assistance of some of those who were going out to his colony he
prepared a code of laws which contained many of the advanced ideas
of the Quakers. Capital punishment was to be confined to murder and
treason, instead of being applied as in England to a host of minor
offenses. The property of murderers, instead of being forfeited to the
State, was to be divided among the next of kin of the victim and of
the criminal. Religious liberty was established as it had been in Rhode
Island and the Jerseys. All children were to be taught a useful trade.
Oaths in judicial proceedings were not required. All prisons were to
be workhouses and places of reformation instead of dungeons of dirt,
idleness, and disease. This attempt to improve the prisons inaugurated
a movement of great importance in the modern world in which the part
played by the Quakers is too often forgotten.

Penn had now started his "Holy Experiment," as he called his enterprise
in Pennsylvania, by which he intended to prove that religious liberty
was not only right, but that agriculture, commerce, and all arts and
refinements of life would flourish under it. He would break the delusion
that prosperity and morals were possible only under some one particular
faith established by law. He, would prove that government could
be carried on without war and without oaths, and that primitive
Christianity could be maintained without a hireling ministry, without
persecution, without ridiculous dogmas or ritual, s