The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 6.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

[435] rights of conscience and worship. Their pertinacious defiance of laws enacted against them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates, must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and high tempered as John Endicott. He had that free-tongued neighbor of his, Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, but it may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as much under Wharton's biting sarcasm and ‘free speech’ as the latter's back did from the magisterial whip.

Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; and their descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error which the Puritan governor shared with the generation in which he lived.