wed science, research, and all the kindly arts
of life to flourish; and seemed perfectly contented with the damnation
in the other world to which those who flourished under his rule
consigned him.

In discussing the remarkable success of the province, the colonists
always disputed whether the credit should be given to the fertile soil
or to the liberal laws and constitution. It was no doubt due to
both. But the obvious advantages of Penn's charter over the mixed and
troublesome governmental conditions in the Jerseys, Penn's personal fame
and the repute of the Quakers for liberalism then at its zenith, and the
wide advertising given to their ideas and Penn's, on the continent of
Europe as well as in England, seem to have been the reasons why more
people, and many besides Quakers, came to take advantage of that fertile
soil.

The first great increase of alien population came from Germany, which
was still in a state of religious turmoil, disunion, and depression from
the results of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War. The reaction
from dogma in Germany had produced a multitude of sects, all yearning
for greater liberty and prosperity than they had at home. Penn and other
Quakers had made missionary tours in Germany and had preached to the
people. The Germans do not appear to have been asked to come to the
Jerseys. But they were urged to come to Pennsylvania as soon as the
charter was obtained; and many of them made an immediate response. The
German mind was then at the height of its emotional unrestraint. It was
as unaccustomed to liberty of thought as to political liberty and it
produced a new sect or religious distinction almost every day. Many
of these sects came to Pennsylvania, where new small religious bodies
sprang up among them after their arrival. Schwenkfelders, Tunkers,
Labadists, New Born, New Mooners, Separatists, Zion's Brueder,
Ronsdorfer, Inspired, Quietists, Gichtelians, Depellians, Mountain Men,
River Brethren, Brinser Brethren, and the Society of the Woman in the
Wilderness, are names which occur in the annals of the province. But
these are only a few. In Lancaster County alone the number has at
different times been estimated at from twenty to thirty. It would
probably be impossible to make a complete list; some of them, indeed,
existed for only a few years. Their own writers describe them as
countless and bewildering. Many of them were characterized by the
strangest sort of German mysticism, and