A Tale of The Kloster: A Romance of The German Mystics at The Cocalico

A great New England historian has said that "The colony of Pennsylvania was not only more heterogeneous in population than any of the Others, but it actually was the principal center of distribution of the non-English population from the seaboard to the Allegheny Mountains. All of the population of the Carolinas, as well as in Virginia and Maryland, entered the country by way of Pennsylvania, and this migration was so great, both in its physical dimensions and in the political and social effects which it wrought, that Pennsylvania acquires a special interest as the temporary tarrying place and distributing center for so much that we now call characteristically American." It is undoubtedly true that into none of the Other colonies did there flow such a tide of German immigration, bringing with it many a hardy Swiss and French Huguenot refugee from the Palatinate, along the lower Rhine. Up to the Revolution there were more Germans in Pennsylvania than in all the Other colonies together. Benjamin Franklin, it is well known, feared that the State might become a German province. Among the causes of this resistless tide of immigration were: Religious zeal, fostered by the teachings of William Penn and George Fox and their followers, and Penn's far-sighted pledge of tolerance as to liberty of worship, sectarian ambition, escape from religious persecution, and bad government.