several belonging to Henry White, had of late come to meetings, and having a sense of truth, several others thereway were likewise convinced, and like to do well.  And the morning that we came from Thomas Simons’s, my companion speaking some words of truth to his negro woman, she was tendered; and as I passed on horseback by the place where she stood weeping, I gave her my hand, and then she was much more broken:  and finding the day of the Lord’s tender visitation and mercy upon her, I spake encouragingly to her, and was glad to find the poor blacks so near the truth and reachable.’  She stood there, looking after us and weeping, as long as we could see her.  I had inquired of one of the black men how long they had come to meetings, and he said ’they had always been kept in ignorance, and disregarded as persons who were not to expect any thing from the Lord, till Jonathan Taylor, who had been there the year before, discoursing with them, had informed them that the grace of God, through Christ, was given also to them; and that they ought to believe in and be led and taught by it, and so might come to be good Friends, and saved as well as others.  And on the next occasion, which was when William Ellis and Aaron Atkinson were there, they went to meetings, and several of them were convinced.’  Thus one planteth and another watereth, but God giveth the increase.”]

“William Penn was highly gratified by the consideration of what has been done on this important subject.  From the very first introduction of enslaved Africans into this province, he had been solicitous about their temporal and eternal welfare.  He had always considered them as persons of the like nature with himself; as having the same desire of pleasure and the same aversion from pain; as children of the same Father, and heirs of the same promises.  Knowing how naturally the human heart became corrupted and hardened by the use of power, he was fearful lest, in time, these friendless strangers should become an oppressed people.  Accordingly, as his predecessor, George Fox, when he first visited the British West Indies, exhorted all those who attended his meetings for worship there, to consider their slaves as branches of their own families, for whose spiritual instruction they would one day or other be required to give an account, so William Penn had, on his first arrival in America, inculcated the same notion.  It lay, therefore, now upon his mind to endeavor to bring into practice what had appeared to him to be right in principle.  One of them was to try to incorporate the treatment of slaves, as a matter of Christian duty, into the discipline of his own religious society; and the other, to secure it among others in the colony of a different religious description, by a legislative act.  Both of these were necessary.  The former, however, he resolved to attempt first.  The Society itself had already afforded him a precedent, by its resolutions in 1688 and in 1696, as before