the Legislature, the Crown would probably give the executive offices to
Churchmen. They therefore labored hard to discredit the Quakers. They
kept harping on the absurdity of a set of fanatics attempting to govern
a colony without a militia and without administering oaths of office or
using oaths in judicial proceedings. How could any one's life be safe
from foreign enemies without soldiers, and what safeguard was there for
life, liberty, and property before judges, jurors, and witnesses, none
of whom had been sworn? The Churchmen kept up their complaints for along
time, but without effect in England. Penn was able to thwart all their
plans. The bill to change the province into a royal one was never passed
by Parliament. Penn returned to his court life, his preaching, and his
theological writing, a rather curious combination and yet one by which
he had always succeeded in protecting his people. He was a favorite
with Queen Anne, who was now on the throne, and he led an expensive life
which, with the cost of his deputy governor's salary in the colony, the
slowness of his quitrent collections, and the dishonesty of the steward
of his English estates, rapidly brought him into debt. To pay the
government expense of a small colonial empire and at the same time
to lead the life of a courtier and to travel as a preacher would have
exhausted a stronger exchequer than Penn's.

The contests between the different deputy governors, whom Penn or his
descendants sent out, and the Quaker Legislature fill the annals of
the province for the next seventy years, down to the Revolution. These
quarrels, when compared with the larger national political contests of
history, seem petty enough and even tedious in detail. But, looked at
in another aspect, they are important because they disclose how
liberty, self-government, republicanism, and many of the constitutional
principles by which Americans now live were gradually developed as
the colonies grew towards independence. The keynote to all these early
contests was what may be called the fundamental principle of colonial
constitutional law or, at any rate, of constitutional practice, namely,
that the Governor, whether royal or proprietary, must always be kept
poor. His salary or income must never become a fixed or certain sum but
must always be dependent on the annual favor and grants of a legislature
controlled by the people. This belief was the foundation of American
colonial liberty. The