[Footnote 351:  Message of the Assembly to the Governor, 11 Nov.  Ibid. VI. 692.  The words are Franklin’s.]

[Footnote 352:  Message of the Governor to the Assembly, 22 Nov. 1755, in Colonial Records of Pa., VI. 714.]

But now the Assembly began to feel the ground shaking under their feet.  A paper, called a “Representation,” signed by some of the chief citizens, was sent to the House, calling for measures of defence.  “You will forgive us, gentlemen,” such was its language, “if we assume characters somewhat higher than that of humble suitors praying for the defence of our lives and properties as a matter of grace or favor on your side.  You will permit us to make a positive and immediate demand of it."[353] This drove the Quakers mad.  Preachers, male and female, harangued in the streets, denouncing the iniquity of war.  Three of the sect from England, two women and a man, invited their brethren of the Assembly to a private house, and fervently exhorted them to stand firm.  Some of the principal Quakers joined in an address to the House, in which they declared that any action on its part “inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess and have borne to the world appears to us in its consequences to be destructive of our religious liberties."[354] And they protested that they would rather “suffer” than pay taxes for such ends.  Consistency, even in folly, has in it something respectable; but the Quakers were not consistent.  A few years after, when heated with party-passion and excited by reports of an irruption of incensed Presbyterian borderers, some of the pacific sectaries armed for battle; and the streets of Philadelphia beheld the curious conjunction of musket and broad-brimmed hat.[355]

[Footnote 353:  Pennsylvania Archives, II. 485.]

[Footnote 354:  Ibid., II. 487.]

[Footnote 355:  See Conspiracy of Pontiac, Chaps. 24 and 25.]

The mayor, aldermen, and common council next addressed the Assembly, adjuring them, “in the most solemn manner, before God and in the name of all our fellow-citizens,” to provide for defending the lives and property of the people.[356] A deputation from a band of Indians on the Susquehanna, still friendly to the province, came to ask whether the English meant to fight or not; for, said their speaker, “if they will not stand by us, we will join the French.”  News came that the settlement of Tulpehocken, only sixty miles distant, had been destroyed; and then that the Moravian settlement of Gnadenhuetten was burned, and nearly all its inmates massacred.  Colonel William Moore wrote to the Governor that two thousand men were coming from Chester County to compel him and the Assembly to defend the province; and Conrad Weiser wrote that more were coming from Berks on the same errand.  Old friends of the Assembly began to cry out against them.  Even the Germans, hitherto their fast allies, were roused from their attitude of passivity, and four hundred of them came in procession to demand measures of war.  A band of frontiersmen presently arrived, bringing in a wagon the bodies of friends and relatives lately murdered, displaying them at the doors of the Assembly, cursing the Quakers, and threatening vengeance.[357]