more rotund in feature and person than their neighbors.  Yet, broad and humanizing as was their faith, they were capable of extreme bitterness towards opponents, clung tenaciously to power, and were jealous for the ascendency of their sect, which had begun to show signs of wavering.  On other sects they looked askance; and regarded the Presbyterians in particular with a dislike which in moments of crisis rose to detestation.[338] They held it sin to fight, and above all to fight against Indians.

[Footnote 338:  See a crowd of party pamphlets, Quaker against Presbyterian, which appeared in Philadelphia in 1764, abusively acrimonious on both sides.]

Here was one cause of military paralysis.  It was reinforced by another.  The old standing quarrel between governor and assembly had grown more violent than ever; and this as a direct consequence of the public distress, which above all things demanded harmony.  The dispute turned this time on a single issue,—­that of the taxation of the proprietary estates.  The estates in question consisted of vast tracts of wild land, yielding no income, and at present to a great extent worthless, being overrun by the enemy.[339] The Quaker Assembly had refused to protect them; and on one occasion had rejected an offer of the proprietaries to join them in paying the cost of their defence.[340] But though they would not defend the land, they insisted on taxing it; and farther insisted that the taxes upon it should be laid by the provincial assessors.  By a law of the province, these assessors were chosen by popular vote; and in consenting to this law, the proprietaries had expressly provided that their estates should be exempted from all taxes to be laid by officials in whose appointment they had no voice.[341] Thomas and Richard Penn, the present proprietaries, had debarred their deputy, the Governor, both by the terms of his commission and by special instruction, from consenting to such taxation, and had laid him under heavy bonds to secure his obedience.  Thus there was another side to the question than that of the Assembly; though our American writers have been slow to acknowledge it.

[Footnote 339:  The productive estates of the proprietaries were taxed through the tenants.]

[Footnote 340:  The proprietaries offered to contribute to the cost of building and maintaining a fort on the spot where the French soon after built Fort Duquesne.  This plan, vigorously executed, would have saved the province from a deluge of miseries.  One of the reasons assigned by the Assembly for rejecting it was that it would irritate the enemy.  See supra, p. 63.]

[Footnote 341:  A Brief View of the Conduct of Pennsylvania for the year 1755.]