“There may be room there, though not here for such an holy experiment.” William Penn (1644-1718) wrote these words to a friend in America before he set sail across the Atlantic to found a colony in the New World. The holy experiment he spoke about was a plan to establish a new polity founded on the principles of freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, respect for life and property and peaceful coexistence with all neighboring peoples. Was this a revolutionary’s dream?
In fact, Penn found these principles to be the natural inheritance of the English people, a tradition of rights safeguarded by centuries of charters and statutes that were designed specifically to guarantee the people’s freedom from any arbitrary exercise of power. For Penn, the most important of these rights was the one for which evidence in the tra