[Illustration:  STATUE OF WILLIAM PENN. (On the Tower of the new City Hall, Philadelphia.)]

From that time, for sixty years, the Pennsylvania settlers and the Indians were fast friends.  The Indians said, “The Quakers are honest men; they do no harm; they are welcome to come here.”  In New England there had been, as we have seen,[8] a terrible war with the savages, but in Pennsylvania, no Indian ever shed a drop of Quaker blood.

[Footnote 5:  Founds:  begins to build.]

[Footnote 6:  Treaty:  an agreement; and see paragraph 69.]

[Footnote 7:  See Rev. i. 11 and iii. 7.]

[Footnote 8:  See paragraph 90.]

100.  How Philadelphia grew; what was done there in the Revolution; William Penn’s last years and death.—­Philadelphia grew quite fast.  William Penn let the people have land very cheap, and he said to them, “You shall be governed by laws of your own making.”  Even after Philadelphia became quite a good-sized town, it had no poor-house, for none was needed; everybody seemed to be able to take care of himself.

When the Revolution began, the people of Pennsylvania and of the country north and south of it sent men to Philadelphia to decide what should be done.  This meeting was called the Congress.  It was held in the old State House, a building which is still standing, and in 1776 Congress declared the United States of America independent of England.  In the war, the people of Delaware and New Jersey fought side by side with those of Pennsylvania.

William Penn spent a great deal of money in helping Philadelphia and other settlements.  After he returned to England he was put in prison for debt by a rascally fellow he had employed.  He did not owe the money, and proved that the man who said that he did was no better than a thief.  Penn was released from prison; but his long confinement in jail had broken his health down.  When he died, the Indians of Pennsylvania sent his widow some beautiful furs, in remembrance of their “Brother Penn,” as they called him.  They said that the furs were to make her a cloak, “to protect her while passing through this thorny wilderness without her guide.”

[Illustration:  WILLIAM PENN’S GRAVE AT JORDANS’S MEETING-HOUSE, ENGLAND.]

About twenty-five miles west of London, on a country road within sight of the towers of Windsor Castle,[9] there stands a Friends’ meeting-house, or Quaker church.  In the yard back of the meeting-house William Penn lies buried.  For a hundred years or more there was no mark of any kind to show where he rests; but now a small stone bearing his name points out the grave of the founder of the great state of Pennsylvania.

[Footnote 9:  Windsor Castle:  see paragraph 77.]

101.  Summary.—­Charles the Second, king of England, owed William Penn, a young English Quaker, a large sum of money.  In order to settle the debt, the king gave him a great piece of land in America, and named it Pennsylvania, or Penn’s Woods.  Penn wished to make a home for Quakers in America; and in 1682 he came over, and began building the city of Philadelphia.  When the Revolution broke out, men were sent from all parts of the country to Philadelphia, to hold a meeting called the Congress.  In 1776, Congress declared the United States independent.