Here lies our sovereign lord the King
Whose word no man relies on;
He never says a foolish thing
Nor ever does a wise one.


His sayings, Charles aptly replied, were his own; his acts those of his
ministers. He ordered well indeed when he placed Penn where he did in the
New World and he meant wisely when he decreed that the red races should
possess, free and forever, the lands beyond the Alleghanies. With Penn's
venture we need have no more to do than to recall that so long as his
control lasted or his wishes extended, the Pennsylvania Indians and their
cousins of New York and Ohio, were at peace with the whites; that his words
and those of his agents were trusted; that Pennsylvania sheltered the
persecuted Palatines and that the Liberty Bell first rang in the city he
had named Philadelphia--the City of Brotherly Love!

The Trial here recited began in London, on the first of September, 1670, a
fortnight before his father's death, while the disturbance of which it was
the outgrowth, occurred on the fourth of August preceding.

The text is repeated from the report embedded in the second volume of the
four great folios, comprising "A Compleat Collection of State Tryals,"
covering the period of English justice and injustice from the reign of King
Henry the Fourth to the end of that of Anne, printed for six venturesome
London booksellers, Timothy Goodwin, John Walthoe, Benjamin Tooke, John
Darby, Jacob Tonson, and John Walthoe, Junior, in 1719, where is found this
first record of a legal effort to punish free speech among the English
race--and by the same token to vindicate it. Reported by the accused, it no
less reads fair. The "Observer" whose comments interlard and conclude the