Any government is free to the people under it where the laws rule and the people are a party to the laws.

William Penn (1644–1718), the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, wrote frequently on “good government” while designing a colony meant to avoid the arbitrary rule and religious coercion common in Restoration England. In the early 1680s, as Pennsylvania’s Frame of Government and related laws were being drafted and revised, Penn argued that liberty depends less on the name or form of a regime than on whether power is constrained by known laws made with the people’s participation. The line is commonly cited as part of Penn’s broader defense of constitutional limits, representative lawmaking, and the rule of law as the practical foundation of civil freedom in the new province.

Penn distinguishes “free government” from mere slogans about freedom. A people are free when law—not personal will—governs, and when the governed have a real share in making the laws that bind them. The first claim anticipates the modern ideal of the rule of law: predictable, public rules constrain rulers as well as subjects. The second stresses consent and participation, implying representative institutions and civic responsibility. Together, the sentence suggests that liberty is institutional and procedural: it arises from lawful limits on power and from political inclusion, not from the character of a single ruler or the formal label of a constitution.