The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-04-09 00:00:00

THE REMAINS OF WILLIAM PENN.

The Daily Telegraph has a leader on the proposition to
remove the remains of William Penn from their present rest-
ing-place in England to the city which he founded in America.
—We make the following extract from the article :

Who can wonder that the second city in the United
States—a city whieh, in the estimation of its existing
sons and daughters, is equal, or more than equal, to
New York and Boston in culture, refinement, and a
settled love for .temperate liberty—should now desire
to transfer the honoured dust of William Penn from
its 3bscure and forgotten testing-place in alittle English
county to thelanks of the Delaware and Schuylkill r ivera
which lave that great and flourishing camp of human
beings where on the 4th of July, 1776, the Declara-
tion of Independence was first promulgated? In the
sisterhood of States constituting the American Union,
there are four—Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia,
and Pennsylvania—which take their names ft:9m
men or women of English birth. Virginia waFr so
called after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen; North
Carolina after Charles IL, Georgia after George 11.,
and Pennsylvania after William Penn. It may be
noticed parenthetically that the first Europeans
who occupied South Carolina were a party of
French Huguenots who, in 1562, built a fort
upon an island in Port Royal Harbour, and called it
Carolina," in honour of Charles IX., King a
France. Reverting, however, to the four above-
named States, we can have little difficulty in under-
standing why it is that William Penn, the founder of
Pennsylvania, is at present an object of far greater
interest to Americans than the Royal founders of
Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. With all the
deductions from his fame by Lord Macaulay and
others, William Penn can never be deposed from
a prominent place among the makers of history.
He must, indeed, be regarded rather as a mythical
than as an historical person, seeing that while Eng-
land, the land of his birth, is still proud of his name,
"a great commonwealth across the Atlantic regards
him," according to Lord Macaulay, "with a rever-
ence similar to that which tae Athenians felt for
Theseus, and the Romans for Quirinus." The
Quakers honour him as an apostle, and other
persuasions deem him to have been a bright pat-
tern of Christian virtue. Again, the French
encyclopmdists of last century assigned to him
a niche in their "Temple of Fame," by reason.
of his dislike for priests of all kinds ard his philan-
thropic benevolence. He was billt London, on
October 14, 1644, and died at Rua be, near Twy-
ford, July 30, 1718; the last resting•place, where his
bones still lie, in a spot which is well known, though
unmarked by any memorial stone or monument, being
at Jordan'g, or Jourdan's, Burial Ground, near
Beaconsfield; in Buckinghamshire—a cemetery once
set apart for the interment of Quakers, though no
longer used for that purpose.

It is exactly two centuries ago since, on March 12,
1681, King Charles 11. conceded to William Fenn, in
satisfaction of an old debt long due to his family from
the Crown, an immense tract of land in the North
American Colonies. This region, now covered by
the wealthy and powerful State of Pennsylvania,
was sparsely settled, two centuries since, by a
few Red Indian savages, and in 1682 William
Penn set out from England to join the colony of
Quakers which he had already sent ont, and
which, "keepimg in view the principle of brotherly
love, which is the foundation of civil society," had
begun to build the city of Philadelphia. . . .
As regards Willidm Penn, there will, among Eng-
lishmen, be a general harmony of opinion that the
citi2,-ens of Pennsylvania, are justified in desiring to
possess all that remains of him whom they regard
as a great, good, and humane man, and to whom
they are indebted for the name which their State
bears. In England there have bean none,
either with or without, the blood of William
Penn im their veins, who, since 1718, when he died,
have cared to set up a monument to his memory. At
Philadelphia on the other hand, his dust will be
received with acclamations of reverence, and such a
memorial as France has raised above the ashes of the
great Napoleon under the dome of the Invalides, or as
Scotland has erected in Edinburgh to the immortal
memory of Sit Walter Scott, will ascend In honour of
William Penn on the bank of the Delaware