The Romance of Old Philadelphia

ck- Beard's" Charmed Life?Forbidden Amusements?The Election Riot or 1742?An Unwilling Mayor-elect. WHEN William Penn planned his colony on the Delaware he had the amazing notion that he wanted his people to be governed in such a way that they would be happy. He had had enough of rulers who cared nothing for the people except as they ministered to the satisfaction and comfort of those in authority. It was his purpose, on the contrary, to do righteously, to show mercy, and to make it evident in all things that government's sole excuse for existence was to add to the sum of human happiness. His own bitter experience of persecution and imprisonment because of his religious convictions convinced him that it was time to make a fight for civil liberty, and that it was his duty to take a leading part in the contest. In 1679, when Charles I called for the election of a new Parliament, Penn prepared and circulated a pamphlet which he called "England's Great Interest in the Choice of this Parliament." In this were many declarations that sound like a prophecy of the Declaration of Independence, issued nearly a century later from the city for whose founding he had not then made any preparation. He spoke of three rights of the individual that could not be altered or abrogated: "The first of these fundamentals is right and title to your house, liberties and estates. In this every man is a sort of little sovereign in himself . . . Only your own transgression of the la...