The next year Penn himself went with a company of a hundred, and stayed long enough to see the government organized by the free act of the colonists on the principles which he had set forth, and in that brief sojourn of two years to witness the beginnings of a splendid prosperity.

His city of Philadelphia consisted in August, 1683, of three or four little cottages.

Two years afterward it contained about six hundred houses, and the schoolmaster and the printing-press had begun their work.[117:1] The growth went on accelerating.

In one year seven thousand settlers are said to have arrived; before the end of the century the colonists numbered more than twenty thousand, and Philadelphia had become a thriving town.[117:2] But Great Britain, although the chief source of population, was not the only source.

It had been part of the providential equipment of Penn for his great work to endow him with the gift of tongues and bring him into intimate relations with the many congregations of the broken and persecuted sects kindred to his own on the continent of Europe.