This new constitution was quite liberal.The most noticeable feature of it was the absence of any provision for the large elective council or upper house of legislation, which had been very unpopular.The Assembly thus became the one legislative body.There was incidental reference in the document to a governor's council, although there was no formal clause creating it.Penn and his heirs after his death always appointed a small council as an advisory body for the deputy governor.The Assembly was to be chosen annually by the freemen and to be composed of four representatives from each county.It could originate bills, control its own adjournments without interference from the Governor, choose its speaker and other officers, and judge of the qualifications and election of its own members.These were standard Anglo-Saxon popular parliamentary rights developed by long struggles in England and now established in Pennsylvania never to be relaxed.Finally a clause in the constitution permitted the Lower Counties, or Territories, under certain conditions to establish home rule.In 1705 the Territories took advantage of this concession and set up an assembly of their own.
Immediately after signing the constitution, in the last days of October, 1701, Penn sailed for England, expecting soon to return.
But he became absorbed in affairs in England and never saw his colony again.This was unfortunate because Pennsylvania soon became a torment to him instead of a great pleasure as it always seems to have been when he lived in it.He was a happy present proprietor, but not a very happy absentee one.
The Church of England people in Pennsylvania entertained great hopes of this proposal to turn the proprietary colonies into royal provinces.Under such a change, while the Quakers might still have an influence in the Legislature, the Crown would probably give the executive offices to Churchmen.They therefore labored hard to discredit the Quakers.They kept harping on the absurdity of a set of fanatics attempting to govern a colony without a militia and without administering oaths of office or using oaths in judicial proceedings.How could any one's life be safe from foreign enemies without soldiers, and what safeguard was there for life, liberty, and property before judges, jurors, and witnesses, none of whom had been sworn? The Churchmen kept up their complaints for along time, but without effect in England.
Penn was able to thwart all their plans.The bill to change the province into a royal one was never passed by Parliament.Penn returned to his court life, his preaching, and his theological writing, a rather curious combination and yet one by which he had always succeeded in protecting his people.He was a favorite with Queen Anne, who was now on the throne, and he led an expensive life which, with the cost of his deputy governor's salary in the colony, the slowness of his quitrent collections, and the dishonesty of the steward of his English estates, rapidly brought him into debt.To pay the government expense of a small colonial empire and at the same time to lead the life of a courtier and to travel as a preacher would have exhausted a stronger exchequer than Penn's.
The contests between the different deputy governors, whom Penn or his descendants sent out, and the Quaker Legislature fill the annals of the province for the next seventy years, down to the Revolution.These quarrels, when compared with the larger national political contests of history, seem petty enough and even tedious in detail.But, looked at in another aspect, they are important because they disclose how liberty, self-government, republicanism, and many of the constitutional principles by which Americans now live were gradually developed as the colonies grew towards independence.The keynote to all these early contests was what may be called the fundamental principle of colonial constitutional law or, at any rate, of constitutional practice, namely, that the Governor, whether royal or proprietary, must always be kept poor.His salary or income must never become a fixed or certain sum but must always be dependent on the annual favor and grants of a legislature controlled by the people.This belief was the foundation of American colonial liberty.The Assemblies, not only in Pennsylvania but in other colonies, would withhold the Governor's salary until he consented to their favorite laws.If he vetoed their laws, he received no salary.
One of the causes of the Revolution in 1776 was the attempt of the mother country to make the governors and other colonial officials dependent for their salaries on the Government in England instead of on the legislatures in the colonies.
So the squabbles, as we of today are inclined to call them, went on in Pennsylvania--provincial and petty enough, but often very large and important so far as the principle which they involved was concerned.The Legislature of Pennsylvania in those days was a small body composed of only about twenty-five or thirty members, most of them sturdy, thrifty Quakers.They could meet very easily anywhere--at the Governor's house, if in conference with him, or at the treasurer's office or at the loan office, if investigating accounts.Beneath their broad brim hats and grave demeanor they were as Anglo-Saxon at heart as Robin Hood and his merry men, and in their ninety years of political control they built up as goodly a fabric of civil liberty as can be found in any community in the world.
