But even in these, and still more in the application of them, there were traces of that widely prevalent feeling that punishment is society's bitter and malignant revenge on the criminal.

The penal code and the prison discipline of Pennsylvania became an object of admiring study for social reformers the world over, and marked a long stage in the advancement of the kingdom of God.

The city of Philadelphia early took the lead of American towns, not only in size, but in its public charities and its cultivation of humane arts.
Notwithstanding these eminent honors, there is much in the later history of the great commonwealth in which Quakerism held dominion for the greater part of a century to reflect doubt on the fitness of that form of Christianity for conducting the affairs, either civil or religious, of a great community.
There is nothing in the personal duty of non-resistance of evil, as inculcated in the New Testament, that conflicts with the functions of the civil governor--even the function of bearing the sword as God's minister.

Rather, each of these is the complement and counterpart of the other.

Among the early colonial governors no man wielded the sword of the ruler more effectively than the Quaker Archdale in the Carolinas.