The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsylvania in America
This book is not a narrative or a memoir but a constitutional instrument: a printed pamphlet setting out the plan of government William Penn drew up for his American province, together with the body of laws that were to accompany it. As its full title-page announces, the work consists of the Frame of Government itself, “together with certain Laws agreed upon in England, by the Governor and divers Freemen of the aforesaid Province,” which were “to be further explained and confirmed there by the first Provincial Council, if they see meet.” The book therefore presents itself as a provisional settlement — a scheme drafted at a distance by the proprietor and his associates and sent across the Atlantic for ratification or amendment by the colonists themselves. Three parts make up its contents: a prefatory discourse, the Frame or constitution in twenty-four articles, and the appended laws.
The Preface
The book opens with a substantial preface, signed by Penn, which is less a legal preamble than a short essay on the nature and ends of government. Its argument begins from the ground that government is a divine ordinance, “a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and end,” so that the magistrate’s authority is to be understood as a trust accountable to God as well as to the people. From this premise the preface moves to a candid survey of the three classical forms — monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy — conceding the virtues and exposing the vices of each, and concluding that none is good or bad simply by its name; the character of any constitution depends on the men who administer it. Governments, Penn observes, resemble clocks: they go according to the motion men give them, and as they are made and moved by men, so by men they may be ruined.
The most celebrated passage of the preface sets out the criterion by which the Frame asks to be judged: “Any government is free to the people under it, whatever be the frame, where the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws; and more than this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion.” The counterpart proposition follows shortly after, that the great ends of all government are to support power in reverence with the people and to secure the people from the abuse of power, so that they may be free by their just obedience and the magistrates honourable for their just administration. The preface also insists that unjust commands are not law and bind no conscience, and it presents the Frame that follows not as a sacred or unalterable text but as a foundation capable of being built upon and corrected by experience.
The Frame of Government
The Frame proper is a systematic constitution in twenty-four articles. Its first article establishes the frame of the whole: the government of the province is placed in the Governor and the freemen of the province, meeting as a Provincial Council and a General Assembly, and by them jointly are all laws to be made, all officers appointed, and all public business transacted.
The Provincial Council is the centrepiece. It was to consist of seventy-two members chosen by the freemen, with a rotating membership: at the first election one third were chosen for three years, one third for two years, and one third for one year, so that thereafter twenty-four new members would come in annually and the whole body would turn over in three years. The Governor or his deputy was to be perpetual president of the Council, but his vote was only a treble one, so that he could not carry measures by his own authority. The Council was divided into four standing committees — commonly described as concerned with plantations, with justice and safety, with trade and treasury, and with manners and education — through which proposals of law were to be prepared before being laid before the Assembly.
The General Assembly, by contrast, was to be the consenting body. At the outset it was to consist of all the freemen of the province; when numbers made that impracticable it was to be reduced to a body of two hundred, chosen by the freemen. Its function in the legislative process was to accept or reject the laws prepared and proposed by the Council; the Council retained the initiative and the execution. The Frame thus sets up an explicit division between a proposing and executing council and a consenting assembly, with the Governor as a permanent but limited president over both. Provision is made for annual sessions and elections, for public and open courts with juries, for the keeping of registers of births, deaths, marriages, and transfers of land, for the appointment of officers, and for the manner of amending or explaining the Frame itself — the last of these being referred to the first Provincial Council in the province.
The Laws Agreed upon in England
Bound with the Frame is a schedule of laws agreed upon in England by the Governor and the freemen who had subscribed as adventurers and purchasers. These are the first “Great Law” provisions of the province, and they cover several broad areas of public life.
Religious liberty stands at their head. No person who acknowledges one Almighty God was to be molested or prejudiced in his person or estate for his conscientious persuasion or practice, nor compelled to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place, or ministry contrary to his mind. This was the province’s foundational guarantee of liberty of conscience, extending toleration to all professing belief in God while restricting officeholding to Christians.
The laws also address civil justice and the economy of the courts: pleadings were to be short, justice was not to be sold, denied, or delayed, and provision was made for the relief of debtors who surrendered their estates. Marriage was regulated and required to be registered, with parental consent and solemnization before witnesses. Education and industry were legislated for: children were to be taught to read and write and to be brought up to some useful trade or skill, and the poor were to be provided for by the province. Provision was made for the fair treatment of the Indians, for the punishment of offences against them, and for the settlement of disputes between Indians and colonists by arbitration rather than by force. The laws also deal with capital crimes and with public morals — prohibiting disorderly houses and certain popular amusements such as gaming and blood sports — and with the maintenance of roads, records, weights and measures, and the militia.
The Character of the Work
Taken as a whole, the book is a blueprint rather than a report. It combines an argument about the ends of government, a detailed institutional design, and a body of substantive law, all presented as a single package for the colonists to accept, explain, and confirm. Its institutional scheme — a large rotating council as the engine of legislation, a broader assembly as the seat of consent, and a governor with a limited and defined share of power — reflects the classical “mixed” or balanced commonwealth familiar from republican theory, adapted to the circumstances of a proprietary colony. Throughout, the book’s controlling idea is the one its preface states most plainly: that the people must be a party to the laws that rule them, and that the security of the governed against the abuse of power is the proper measure of any frame of government.
The Preface and the Ends of Government
The book begins with a preface that is itself a short treatise on political authority. It argues that government is ordained for the good of the governed, that rulers are accountable for the justice they administer, and that the chief threat to liberty is the corruption of power. Its remedy is constitutional rather than personal: a balanced frame, frequent elections, and rotation in office are presented as the means by which the governed can hold power to its proper end. The preface thus supplies the argument that the articles then embody, and it frames the whole as a Christian commonwealth in which civil order and liberty of conscience are mutually supporting.
A Published Fundamental Law
The book’s combination of a frame of government with a schedule of agreed laws gives it the character of a written fundamental law. The Frame creates and limits the offices; the Laws fix the rules those offices must administer. Because the frame is published, subscribed, and made amendable only by the procedure it sets down, it stands as a declared limit on the governor as well as a grant of authority to the governed. In this sense the book advances the idea that a commonwealth can be founded on a public, written compact—knowable in advance, binding on rulers, and open to the consent of those who are to live under it. The title’s word “frame” carries this sense of government as an artifact to be designed and inspected, not merely inherited.
