After his father’s death, in 1670, Penn found himself heir to a great estate, and began to devote himself entirely to the defense and explanation of Quakerism.  Again and again, he was thrown into prison and kept there for months on end, but gradually he began to win for the Friends a certain degree of respect and consideration, perhaps as much because of his high social station, gallant bearing and magnetic personality, as because of any of his arguments.  In 1677, he made a sort of missionary tour of Europe, returning to England to set actively afloat the project for Quaker colonization in America which he had long been turning over in his mind.

Three years, however, passed before he could secure from the Duke of York a release of all his powers of sovereignty over West Jersey, but this was finally accomplished, and soon afterwards he secured from the crown a charter for a great strip of country in that region.  Penn named this region “Sylvania,” or “Woodland,” but when the King came to approve the charter, he wrote the name “Penn” before “Sylvania,” and when Penn protested, assured him laughingly that the name was given the country not in his honor but in that of his father, and so it stood.

Penn had been allowed a free hand in shaping the policy of his colony, and forthwith proclaimed such a government as existed nowhere else on earth.  Absolute freedom of conscience was guaranteed to everyone; it was declared that governments exist for the sake of the governed, that to reform a criminal is more important than to punish him, that the death penalty should be inflicted only for murder or high treason, and that every man had a right to vote and to hold office.  All of which are such matters of course to-day that we can scarcely realize how revolutionary they were two centuries ago.

To all who should come to his colony, Penn offered land at the rate of forty shillings for a hundred acres, and the experiment, denounced at first as visionary and certain of failure, was so successful that within a year, more than three thousand persons had sailed to settle along the Delaware.  In the summer of 1682, Penn himself sailed for the New World, and late in the following autumn, at a spot just above the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware, laid out a city as square and level as a checker-board, and named it Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.  Before taking possession of the land, he concluded a treaty with the Delaware Indians, to whom it belonged, “the only treaty,” as Voltaire says, “between savages and Christians that was never sworn to and never broken.”  Penn’s stately and distinguished bearing, his affability and kindness of heart, made a deep impression upon the Indians; they always remembered him with trust and affection; and seventy years elapsed before Pennsylvania tasted the horrors of Indian warfare.

The growth of the new city was phenomenal.  Settlers came so fast that cabins could not be built for them, and many of them lived for a time in caves along the river.  The remainder of Penn’s life was spent for the most part in England, where his interests demanded his presence, but he built a handsome residence in the city which he had founded and lived there at intervals until his death.