had been established slowly and with much privation and
suffering. But the settlement of Philadelphia was like a summer
outing. There were no dangers, the hardships were trifling, and
there was no sickness or famine. There was such an abundance of
game close at hand that hunger and famine were in nowise to be
feared. The climate was good and the Indians, kindly treated,
remained friendly for seventy years.

It is interesting to note that in that same year, 1682, in which
Penn and his friends with such ease and comfort founded their
great colony on the Delaware, the French explorers and voyageurs
from Canada, after years of incredible hardships, had traversed
the northern region of the Great Lakes with their canoes and had
passed down the Mississippi to its mouth, giving to the whole of
the Great West the name of Louisiana, and claiming it for France.
Already La Salle had taken his fleet of canoes down the
Mississippi River and had placed the arms of France on a post at
its mouth in April, 1682, only a few months before Penn reached
his newly acquired colony. Thus in the same year in which the
Quakers established in Pennsylvania their reign of liberty and of
peace with the red men, La Salle was laying the foundation of the
western empire of despotic France, which seventy years afterwards
was to hurl the savages upon the English colonies, to wreck the
Quaker policy of peace, but to fail in the end to maintain itself
against the free colonies of England.

While they were building houses in Philadelphia, the settlers
lived in bark huts or in caves dug in the river bank, as the
early settlers in New Jersey across the river had lived.
Pastorius, a learned German Quaker, who had come out with the,