Huguenot immigrants, whom the favor of the proprietaries rendered
unwelcome, entirely from the franchise. The popular party passed laws
for electing representatives in every county instead of at Charleston
alone, and for revenue tariffs to pay the debt entailed by war. The
proprietaries vetoed both. They even favored the pirates who harried the
coast. Civil commotions were frequent and growth slow. Interference by
the Crown was therefore most happy. From the time the Carolinas passed
into royal hands, 1729, remarkable prosperity attended them both.

Assuming charge of Carolina, the Crown reserved to itself the Spanish
frontier, and here, in 1732, it settled Oglethorpe, the able and
unselfish founder of Georgia, under the auspices of an organization in
form much like a mercantile company, but benevolent in aim, whose main
purpose was to open a home for the thousands of Englishmen who were in
prison for debt. Many Scotch and many Austrians also came. Full civil
liberty was promised to all, religious liberty to all but papists.
Political strife was warm here, too, particularly respecting the
admission of rum and slaves. Government by the corporators, though
well-meaning, was ill-informed and a failure, and would have been
ruinous to the colony but for Oglethorpe's genius and exertions. To the
advantage of all, therefore, on the lapse of the charter in 1752,
Georgia, like the Carolinas, assumed the status of a royal colony.

[Illustration: Savannah, from a Print of 1741.]

[Illustration: James Oglethorpe.]

CHAPTER VI.

GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE COLONIES

[1750]

The political life, habits, and forms familiar to our fathers were such
as their peculiar surroundings and experience had developed out of
English originals. This process and its results form an interesting
study.

The political unit at the South was the parish; in the North it was the
town. Jury trial prevailed in all the colonies. Local self-government
was vigorous everywhere, yet the most so in the North. The town
regulated its affairs, such as the schools, police, roads, the public
lands, the poor, and in Massachusetts and Connecticut also religion, at
first by pure mass meetings where each citizen represented himself and
which were both legislative and judicial in function, then by combining
these meetings in various ways with the agency of selectmen. Where and
so soon as a colony came to embrace several towns, representative
machinery w