English workmen were not to be reduced to starvation by foreign competition. It was all so simple. The prisons and poorhouses of England were filled with debtors and paupers; it was only necessary to transport them a few thousand miles across the sea and poverty would be replaced by riches and the despondent would become strong men of whom England could feel proud.

The charter was granted in 1732. Money was liberally supplied, the scheme having the powerful patronage of the Church as well as society. To those self-sacrificing clergymen who labored without reward in noisome prisons and among the poor whose condition was so deplorable, this seemed at last a practical way to relieve suffering, and society was dazzled by Oglethorpe's enthusiasm and devotion. He was already distinguished as a soldier, he had mounted the first rounds of a parliamentary career; in every drawing-room there were women whose eyes took on a new light when he approached; life lay before him and offered whatever honors or pleasures he cared to take. And on everything he deliberately turned his back and gave up that which men most covet to suffer the hardships of an emigrant ship of those days and lead his little band of broken-down men to a new life in the wilderness where the Spaniard threatened and the Indian lurked ever alert and treacherous.

The charter granted to Oglethorpe and his associates was unlike that of any other colony. Instead

of the government, to which by that time the people had become accustomed, of a governor and council or the representative of the proprietors and a legislature representing the people, a body of twenty-one trustees was created whose corporate existence was limited to twenty-one years, after which the Crown would determine the form of government best suited for the needs of the colony. The trustees were the government of the colony and were given despotic control, but the charter provided that the settlers should enjoy the liberties of free-born British subjects. Slave labor was prohibited, as was also the importation of rum. As Georgia was intended to be a military outpost against the Spaniards, the presence of a large mass of slaves, as in South Carolina, was considered dangerous to the military security of the province.

Early in 1733, Oglethorpe reached Charleston where he was well received, for the South Carolinians were only too glad to have a buffer erected between themselves and the Spaniards. On the site of what is now Savannah the first settlement was laid. The little colony at once went to work, and Oglethorpe took his share of the labor, assisting in putting up the houses and doing his turn at guard duty. Fresh settlers arrived. Parliament made a grant of £10,000; botanists were sent by private subscription to the West Indies and South America to find plants that would grow in the fertile soil of Georgia. If ever there was a petted colony it was

this refuge for the unfortunate. Highlanders were brought from Scotland, and they were of better texture and more fitted to cope with the hardships of the wilderness than the spawn of the jails and the poorhouses. There came also Protestants from the archbishopric of Bavaria to escape the persecutions of its primate, who attempted to convert them to the Catholic faith. But in a year or two Oglethorpe and the trustees discovered what since then philanthropists have repeatedly found to their sorrow, that men who have made a failure of life seldom, if ever, reassert qualities of success after they have reached a certain age. There is always a chance for the young man to make a new start under more favorable circumstances, but the man of middle age has lost his power of initiative, his character is no longer plastic, and the pleasing fiction of turning over a new leaf exists in imagination only. The debtors and paupers were not regenerated by their passage across the Atlantic, and they were as worthless in Georgia as they had been in England.

But a danger even greater than the worthlessness of his colonists now threatened Oglethorpe. The relations between England and Spain were daily becoming more strained, and the activity of the Spanish guardacostas in enforcing the laws against smuggling, and the contemptuous fashion in which they overhauled and searched British trading vessels, excited so much indignation that it only needed a swashbuckling mariner with an eye to dramatic

effect to fan popular fury into a demand for reprisals. Fate is always ready to find its agents, whether for good or evil, and when the valorous Captain Jenkins brought home his carefully preserved dissevered ear and joyfully exhibited it to his countrymen, daily becoming more angry, as proof of Spanish brutality and the indignities to which freeborn Englishmen were subjected, it was enough, and the war of Jenkins's ear resulted.

Georgia was in the track of the storm. The Spaniards were in a position of strong defense at St. Augustine, and from Havana they could easily summon reinforcements and supplies. Oglethorpe acted with his usual decision and perspicacity. As soon as war was declared he called on the neighboring colonies for assistance, to which South Carolina responded with money and North Carolina and Virginia with men and arms, and he attacked and captured the fort at Picolata on the St. John's River and then moved in force to attack St. Augustine, but the place was too heavily fortified and he was obliged to abandon the siege, having suffered considerable loss but having inflicted a still heavier loss upon the enemy. For the next two years military operations on land practically ceased, then the Spaniards attempted to inflict a crushing blow. A great fleet was fitted out at Havana and an assault made on the forts at Frederica, which Oglethorpe repulsed with such heavy loss that the enemy abandoned the attack. The following year the

Spaniards made another attempt, but Oglethorpe forced their hand by taking the offensive, which had no result except to disconcert them. This ended the war, and it left England in secure possession of Georgia and South Carolina.

While Oglethorpe was repelling the Spaniards his colony was not prospering. It has already been said that the trustees prohibited slavery, although Oglethorpe himself owned a plantation worked by enslaved negroes in South Carolina; but the prohibition was based on economic and military reasons, rather than on the ground of humanity. Black labor was considered unsuited for the products that Georgia was to raise, and as one of the main reasons for creating Georgia was to throw up a barrier between South Carolina and the Spanish possessions, the presence of a large slave population easily to be corrupted by Spanish emissaries would doubly have endangered the security of the colony. In less than ten years after the first settlers landed they began to clamor for the right to bring slaves into the colony, and, jealous of the great prosperity of South Carolina and their own seemingly hopeless struggle, they contended that without negroes it would be impossible for the colony to thrive. The trustees attempted to remain true to themselves and firmly resisted the introduction of slavery, but at last they were compelled to give way, and fifteen years after Oglethorpe had led his first band of settlers to Georgia, ships were discharging their