of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your
death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an
alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties
were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to
death from the beginning;--of course, four too many.

Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not
theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the
Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered
no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best
possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their
modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly
approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain
Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the
Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,--coming into meeting
dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their
feet,--or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and
fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the
vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body. The
Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and
so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed,
the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in
Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,--playing over again upon George
Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and
imprisonment from which they had just escaped;--as minorities have
persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.

Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the