this was finally accomplished, and soon afterwards he secured from the
crown a charter for a great strip of country in that region. Penn named
this region "Sylvania," or "Woodland," but when the King came to approve
the charter, he wrote the name "Penn" before "Sylvania," and when Penn
protested, assured him laughingly that the name was given the country
not in his honor but in that of his father, and so it stood.

Penn had been allowed a free hand in shaping the policy of his colony,
and forthwith proclaimed such a government as existed nowhere else on
earth. Absolute freedom of conscience was guaranteed to everyone; it was
declared that governments exist for the sake of the governed, that to
reform a criminal is more important than to punish him, that the death
penalty should be inflicted only for murder or high treason, and that
every man had a right to vote and to hold office. All of which are such
matters of course to-day that we can scarcely realize how revolutionary
they were two centuries ago.

To all who should come to his colony, Penn offered land at the rate of
forty shillings for a hundred acres, and the experiment, denounced at
first as visionary and certain of failure, was so successful that within
a year, more than three thousand persons had sailed to settle along the
Delaware. In the summer of 1682, Penn himself sailed for the New World,
and late in the following autumn, at a spot just above the junction of
the Schuylkill and Delaware, laid out a city as square and level as a
checker-board, and named it Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.
Before taking possession of the land, he concluded a treaty with the
Delaware Indians, to whom it belonged, "the only treaty," as Voltaire
says, "between savages and Christians that was never sworn to and never
broken." Penn's stately and distinguished bearing, his affability and
kindness of heart, made a deep impression upon the Indians; they always