ence' sake; New York by a company of merchants and adventurers in
search of gain; Maryland, by papists retiring from Protestant
intolerance; Virginia, by ambitious cavaliers; Carolina by the scheming
and visionary Shaftesbury, and others, for private aims and individual
aggrandizement; but Georgia was planted by the hand of benevolence, and
reared into being by the nurturings of a disinterested charity.

But the colony was not to be confined to the poor and unfortunate. The
trustees granted portions of five hundred acres to such as went over at
their own expense, on condition that they carried over one servant to
every fifty acres, and did military service in time of war or alarm.
Thus the materials of the new colony consisted of three classes: the
upper, or large landed proprietors and officers; the middle, or
freeholders, sent over by the trustees; and the servants indented to
that corporation or to private individuals.

Subsidiary to the great design of philanthropy was the further purpose
of making Georgia a silk, wine, oil, and drug-growing colony. "Lying,"
as the trustees remark, "about the same latitude with part of China,
Persia, Palestine, and the Madeiras, it is highly probable that when
hereafter it shall be well peopled and rightly cultivated England may be
supplied from thence with raw silk, wine, oil, dyes, drugs, and many
other materials for manufactures which she is obliged to purchase from
southern countries."

Such were the principal purposes of the trustees in settling Georgia.
Extravagance was their common characteristic; for in the excited visions
of its enthusiastic friends, Georgia was not only to rival Virginia and
South Carolina, but to take the first rank in the list of provinces
depending on the British Crown. Neither the El Dorado of Raleigh nor the
Utopia of More could compare with the garden of Georgia; and the poet,
the statesman, and the divine lauded its beauties and prophesied its
future greatness. Oglethorpe, in particular, was quite enthusiastic in
his description of the climate, soil, productions, and beauties of this
American Canaan. "Such an air and soil," he writes, "can only be fitly
described by a poetical pen, because there is but little danger of
exceeding the truth."

With such blazoned exaggerations, strengthened by the interested efforts
of a noble and learned body of trustees, and by the personal supervision
of its distinguished originator, it is no matter of wonder tha