Having originally acquired their land simply by taking it, ...
they naturally grew up with rather liberal views as to their right to any additional territory that pleased their fancy." No purchase by Penn was made with more scrupulous regard to the rights of the Indians than the purchases by which the settlers of Connecticut acquired title to their lands; but I know of no New England precedent for the somewhat Punic piece of sharp practice by which the metes and bounds of one of the Pennsylvania purchases were laid down.
The long exemption of Pennsylvania from trouble with the Indians seems to be due to the fact that an exceptionally mild, considerate, and conscientious body of settlers was confronted with a tribe of savages thoroughly subdued and cowed in recent conflicts with enemies both red and white.

It seems clear, also, that the exceptional ferocity of the forty years of uninterrupted war with the Indians that ensued was due in part to the long dereliction by the Quaker government of its duty of protecting its citizens and punishing murder, robbery, and arson when committed by its copper-colored subjects.
[145:1] Penn's "Truth Exalted" (quoted in "Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol.xviii., p.

493).
[147:1] In 1741, after a decade of great activity and growth, the entire clerical strength of the American Presbyterian Church, in its four presbyteries, was forty-seven ministers (Thompson, "Presbyterian Churches," p.

33).
[148:1] It is a subject of unceasing lament on the part of historians of the American Episcopal Church that the mother church, all through the colonial days, should have obstinately refused to the daughter the gift of the episcopate.

There is no denying the grave disadvantages thus inflicted.