Pennsylvanian

“ They are at the same time bold and enterprising. The women are educated to housewifery, excellent companions and housekeepers, spending their leisure time in reading books of useful information and rendering themselves not only useful but amiable and pleasing.”
“What is the state of science in New England?”
“It is greatly cultivated and more generally diffused among the inhabitants than in any other part of the world.”
“What is the character of the Pennsylvanians?”
“Pennsylvania is inhabited by a great variety of people. ”

“ How is it our independent friends cannot realize, that the average man in public affairs, is the same as the average man outside?
I have been acquainted with every governor of Pennsylvania since 1860. I have had a reasonable intimacy with the political intrigues of their administration, and their achievements, and I say, challenging contradiction, that yours, for its exclusion of politics and for things done, stands out in bold relief compared with them all. May the world come to know you as some of your friends do. ”

“ For the long line of distinguished men New England has produced, Pennsylvania has only to express her sincere appreciation and her emphatic approval. In all her efforts to ameliorate the condition of the human race and to advance the cause of literature and of science, Pennsylvania has had the warm support of the sons of New England. The American Philosophical Society, which was the first of our scientific institutions, has had in that blessed land many successors. ”

“ It was a spectacle the like of which never before had met his gaze and — Benjamin Franklin discovered Philadelphia. For sixty years he walked the streets of this great city, beaming benevolence and beneficence upon men of substance and influence, and casting cheerful glances upon lustful young women. He lived to a good old and honored age, and he died, his head stored with worldly wisdom and his pockets filled with the accumulations of his long and eventful life. ”

“ While the financial condition of the state is prosperous and promising, and while the real needs of the government should be provided for without parsimony, there should be scrupulous care that none of its resources are misdirected, or wasted in mere extravagance. Providence has so willed it that in the advocacy of those principles that now dominate the conduct of the national government, Pennsylvania has the leading position. ”

“ I became Governor of Pennyslvania because one grandfather earned and gave to me the money with which to read law, and the other grandfather, in obedience to family traditions, took into his home and provided for a helpless child. The deeds of virtue, as well as the sins of the fathers, are visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generations. Consequently, if we wish to understand a man and his work, it is necessary to know how he came about and what there is back of him.
The people of Pennsylvania are more blended in race than those of any of the other American colonies. ”

“ The adoption of the Constitution of the United States in Pennsylvania in December, 1787, was followed by its adoption in Massachusetts in February, 1788. The principles of religious liberty, established by Penn in Pennsylvania, in 1682, now prevail in every hamlet and township from Maine to Connecticut. ”

“ The settlers flocked into this new region from two directions. The Scots from the Cumberland Valley and other settled posts of the Province made their way westward along the Forbes military road and planted their cabins along its course. These men were loyal Pennsylvanians, and they held their lands under the Provincial Government. Other Scots came from the South, principally from the Old Dominion; they crossed the mountains by the Braddock road and occupied the fertile lands along the Monongahela and Youghiogheny Rivers and Chartiers Creek. ”

“ It was the most complete collection of the early literature relating to Pennsylvania which any individual had ever possessed. It is impossible that any man shall ever again have one of like importance. To part with it was to tear up forty years of my life by the roots. I had made a secret covenant with the commonwealth, unknown to the commonwealth, that if my future were provided for by a return to the Bench or otherwise, this record of its life should be preserved intact. ”

“ The answer is one of fundamental importance for the comprehension of the status of the Negro in the social consciousness of the nation now as well as then. The people of Pennsylvania had been educated for generations in the great traditions of freedom. These traditions had their roots in the religious emancipation of the reformation and gradually extended to the political sphere and became endeared to the hearts of all Americans through the struggle with Great Britain. Pennsylvanians had little special love for the Negro but they loved these traditions dearly. ”

“ On the 19th of May, 1900, I was elected president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. This venerable institution is the strongest in the United States devoted to its line of investigation and possesses volumes and manuscripts worth two or three millions of dollars. The papers which tell the story of Pennsylvania are within its walls. ”

“ It was fitting that Pennsylvania should arise to repel the invaders. It was meet that at every vital point in this most fateful of contests, fought upon her soil, her sons should be to the fore. Happy is that land, and much has the future in store for it, which, when grave dangers threaten, can call upon young and old, soldier and citizen, to come to the rescue and call not in vain. While such courage and such virtue characterize its people it need fear neither aggression from abroad nor dissension at home. ”

“ I have been a pretty thorough student of Pennsylvania history, and I feel that I am entirely within the bounds of fact when I say that more has been accomplished in general progress in the line of great constructive improvement, as well as in the bettering of conditions of government, during your administration than in any two equal periods in the career of the commonwealth. ”

“ Biologists and breeders alike have learned the law of nature that the crossing of allied stocks leads to the increase of vital activities. To interbreed, or, as it is called, to keep a strain pure is to prevent further development. Substantially all of my American ancestors were residents of Pennsylvania, save a few from New Jersey, and in almost all of my lines they came to the country among the earliest settlers. But among them were Dutch, English, Germans, Welsh, Swedes, Scotch-Irish and French Huguenots, though in the main my blood is English. ”

“ On this occasion and to this vast audience I said:
The Republican party held its first convention in that city of Western Pennsylvania which, in energy, enterprise and wealth, rivals the great mart upon the shores of the inland lakes, wherein, after the lapse of nearly half a century, we meet to-day. Pennsylvania may well claim to be the leader among Republican states. The principles which are embodied in the platform of the party as we have adopted it are the result of the teachings of her scholars and statesmen. ”

“ Every other county in Pennsylvania is in excellent shape, outside of Philadelphia, with the exception of some eight or ten counties in which trouble of strictly local character exists. There is absolutely nothing in the nature of a concerted move through the state, and I do not recall an election for state treasurer in the last ten years, with the exception of the election of the present incumbent, Mathues, in which there appeared to be as little serious disaffection. ”

“ The University of Pennsylvania should be cared for by the state as provided for in the Constitution of 1776.
11. Newspapers ought to be held responsible for the want of reasonable care in what they publish, and to be required to publish the names of their owners with each issue.
12. The state should aid Pittsburgh to unite, in one municipality, the populations at the head waters of the Ohio.
13. The state should aid Philadelphia in opening a way to the sea. ”

“ Several years ago more than one thousand persons from every section of Pennsylvania, and not a few from Southern New York State, journeyed to a most out-of-the-way place up in the wilds of Potter County to do homage to the memory of a great man, and to view the scene of one of the saddest failures in the history of the settlement of our great Commonwealth. ”

“ Public spirit was more active in Pennsylvania than in New York. More roads and canals were building; a new turnpike ran from Philadelphia to Lancaster, and the great highway to Pittsburg was a more important artery of national life than was controlled by any other State. The exports of Pennsylvania amounted to $12,000,000, and the custom-house produced $1,350,000. The State contained six hundred thousand inhabitants—a population somewhat larger than that of New York. ”

“ The value of Pennsylvania to the Union lay not so much in the democratic spirit of society as in the rapidity with which it turned to national objects. Partly for this reason the State made an insignificant figure in politics. As the nation grew, less and less was said in Pennsylvania of interests distinct from those of the Union. Too thoroughly democratic to fear democracy, and too much nationalized to dread nationality, Pennsylvania became the ideal American State, easy, tolerant, and contented. If its soil bred little genius, it bred still less treason. ”

“ We trust we shall not indulge hopes too sanguine, if we should now anticipate, that by the united labors of our Society, Pennsylvania will receive that illustration of her annals, character, and resources, which has so long been due to a State whose history in many important features is unique, and whose moral conduct exhibits lessons the most instructive, and examples the most encouraging, of active practical benevolence, and the positive application of the principles of Christianity to the administration of human affairs. ”

“ Furthermore, the promise of Penn's "Holy Experiment," in which men of diverse backgrounds could [Pg 25] live together peacefully in religious freedom and political equality, encouraged them to come to Pennsylvania. However, once the dominant group of the Fair Play frontier, the Scotch-Irish, arrived in Pennsylvania, they found themselves unsuited to the settled areas. The natural enemy of the English, who had oppressed them at home, these settlers soon found themselves repeating the Old World conflicts. In addition, the German Pietists caused them further embarrassment in their new homes. ”

“ The first colonists of Pennsylvania, were, perhaps, less negligent in providing the means of elementary instruction, than those of most of the other settlements. In the year 1689, only seven years after the foundation of Philadelphia, a public school was established in this city, by members of the Society of Friends, which was incorporated in 1697, and after undergoing various changes in its organization, received, in 1711, a final charter from William Penn. ”

“ The planting of Pennsylvania was a true colonization. Not only did it amount to the creation of a great and model commonwealth, full-fledged, with a composite new-world population, in twenty or even ten years' time, but it furnished the keystone to the arch of states that constituted the American republic in the next century after Penn's settlement. ”

“ The same earnest solicitude for public education which made itself manifest in the settlement of the New England Colonies in an unusual degree does not run through the early history of Pennsylvania, yet, outside of the Puritan settlements, there was no other colony which paid so much attention as Pennsylvania to the mental training of youth.
During the seventeenth century the general character of the province, as regards the intelligence of its people, stood deservedly high. ”

“ In deciding the issue of this struggle, as in every other issue that concerned the Union, the voice which spoke in most potent tones was that of Pennsylvania. This great State, considering its political importance, was treated with little respect by its neighbors; and yet had New England, New York, and Virginia been swept out of existence in 1800, democracy could have better spared them all than have lost Pennsylvania. The only true democratic community then existing in the eastern States, Pennsylvania was neither picturesque nor troublesome. ”

“ The Church of England people formed a curious and decidedly hostile element in the early population of Pennsylvania. They established themselves in Philadelphia in the beginning and rapidly grew into a political party which, while it cannot be called very strong in numbers, was important in ability and influence. After Penn's death, his sons joined the Church of England, and the Churchmen in the province became still stronger. ”

“ The settlement of the province was confined for a long time to the eastern section. No population was more varied. The Scotch and Irish were mainly in the central portion, the Dutch and Germans in the east and northeast, and the English in the southeastern part of the colony. There are hundreds of people to-day in Pennsylvania, whose ancestors for several generations have been born there, who are unable to speak or understand a word of English. ”

“ When we recollect that nearly one third of the population of Pennsylvania are of the great German race, and speak the noble German language, to which they are greatly attached, and hence the difficulty of introducing common English public schools in the State, the advantage, in this respect, of Pennsylvania over Virginia is most extraordinary. ”