the growth of the colony by impediments in the way of freeholders. What was lost, however, in the slow development of agriculture was made up in part by an increase of trade. So in a fashion the society of England was duplicated. Sons of the landed proprietors went in for trade as well as the Church and the army; daughters of rich merchants married sons of landed families; and after New York became a royal province on the coronation of James, in 1685, a little flavor of the court gave tone to the ceremonial life of the upper classes.
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Among the colonies developed as economic undertakings and religious havens by corporations and proprietors, it is rather difficult to place Georgia, the last of the English settlements in America. It did not spring from the enterprise of a commercial company, the ambitions of a rich adventurer, or the aspirations of seekers after religious liberty. It had its origin in the dream of a philanthropist, James Oglethorpe. That gallant soldier was long oppressed in spirit by the horrible plight of poor wretches languishing in English prisons—often merely unlucky debtors, sometimes unhappy persons unable to accept the prevailing styles in religion, or again the victims of one of the sternest criminal codes to be found in the annals of man's inhumanity.
After pondering long upon the problem thus presented, Oglethorpe came to the conclusion that the solution lay in another American colony. Acting largely on his motion, George II in 1732 vested in the hands of a board of trustees a large dominion below South Carolina, charging them to administer their estate "as one body politic and corporate." At Savannah, during the next year, Oglethorpe made the first settlement in the new colony.
In this undertaking, business and philanthropy were to be combined. Lands were to be granted to emigrants in small
