its interests, he did not visit his colony until 1682—and then he almost did
not make it, because smallpox devastated the passengers on his ship. By the
time he left the colony, two years later, the population had reached almost
7,000.
They soon became 7,000 disaffected, ungrateful, avaricious people,
engaged in what was virtually a revolt against the government Penn had
devised. By about 1720, so many European immigrants had poured in—
about 13,500 in 1709 alone—that the colonial administration was
swamped. As the Penn family’s agent and land commissioner, James Logan,
wrote in 1727, the horde of Germans who poured in were “a surly
people...generally well-arm’d.” Penn’s dream of a vast new feudal but
beneficent, tolerant, and “friendly” state evaporated.
“Mother England” Loses Touch 143