George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[142]

New Jersey, now a royal government, enjoyed,

chap. VI.} 1754.

with the aged Belcher, comparative tranquillity. The generality of the people he found to be ‘very rustical,’ and deficient in ‘learning.’¹ To the Calvinist governor the Quakers of this province seemed to want ‘orthodoxy in the principles of religion;’ but he parried for them the oppressive disposition of the Board of Trade, and the rapacity of the great claimants of lands, who held seats in the Council. ‘I have to steer,’ he would say, ‘between Scylla and Charybdis; to please the king's ministers at home, and a touchy people here; to luff for one, and bear away for another.’² Sheltered by its position, New Jersey refused to share the expense of Indian alliances, often left its own annual expenses unprovided for, and, instead of showing zeal in assuming the burdens of war, its gentle and most obstinate enthusiasts trusted in the extension of the peaceable kingdom ‘from sea to sea,’ and the completion of the prophecies, that ‘nation shall not lift up the sword against nation, nor learn war any more.’

There, too, on the banks of the Delaware, men that labored for inward stillness, and to live in the spirit of truth, learned to love God in all his manifestations in the visible world; and they testified against cruelty towards the least creature in whom his breath had kindled the flame of life. Conscious of an enlargement of gospel love, John Woolman, a tailor by trade, content in the happiness of humility, ‘stood up like a trumpet, through which the Lord speaks to his people,’³ to make the negro masters sensible of the