se to the
universal and the true. The highest art is absolute and knows no appeal.
It is in harmony with universal law, both spiritual and physical.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Naumann.

SETTLEMENT OF GEORGIA

A.D. 1732

WILLIAM B. STEVENS

It was not only the beginning of a new commonwealth, destined to
become an important State of the American Union, but also the spirit
and purpose which led to it, that made the English colonization of
Georgia a great and unique event in the history of this country.

Seldom have military and philanthropic achievements been combined in
the career of one man. James Oglethorpe was already a distinguished
soldier and a member of the English Parliament when in 1732 he
sailed with one hundred twenty men and founded Savannah. His express
object was the settlement of Georgia, not only as a home for
insolvent debtors, who suffered in English jails, but also for
persecuted Protestants of the Continent. It was not the least of his
services that on his second visit to the future "Empire State of the
South" he took with him John and Charles Wesley, whose influence has
been so marked among the American people.

Prior to the undertaking of Sir Robert Montgomery in 1717, with
which Stevens' narrative begins, few white men had visited the
Georgia country, which was the home of various Indian tribes. De
Soto traversed it on his great westward expedition (1539-1542), but
little was known of it when in 1629 it was included in King Charles
I's Carolina grant to Sir Robert Heath, or even at the time of the
next Carolina grant (1663), when it passed to Monk, Clarendon, and
others. Under the later proprietors it became known to Englishmen
through such glowing descriptions as naturally aroused an interest
in its settlement.

It was not until 1717 that any effort was made to improve the lands
between the Savannah and the Altamaha. In that year Sir Robert
Montgomery, Bart., whose father was joined with Lord Cardross in his
measures for establishing a Scots colony in Port Royal, published _A
Discourse Concerning the Designed Establishment of a new Colony to the
South of Carolina_, in what he termed "the most delightful country in
the universe." This pamphlet was accompanied by a beautiful but fanciful
plan representing the form of settling the districts or county divisions
in his province, which he styled