r knowledge was not exact,
and now virtual revolution in South Carolina assisted their demise.
After lengthy negotiations, at last, in 1729, all except Lord Granville
surrendered to the Crown, for a considerable sum, their rights and
interests. Carolina, South and North, thereupon became royal colonies.

In England there dwelled a man named James Edward Oglethorpe, son of Sir
Theophilus Oglethorpe of Godalming in Surrey. Though entered at Oxford,
he soon left his books for the army and was present at the siege and
taking of Belgrade in 1717. Peace descending, the young man returned to
England, and on the death of his elder brother came into the estate, and
was presently made Member of Parliament for Haslemere in Surrey.

His character was a firm and generous one; his bent, markedly humane.
"Strong benevolence of soul," Pope says he had. His century, too, was
becoming humane, was inquiring into ancient wrongs. There arose, among
other things, a belated notion of prison reform. The English Parliament
undertook an investigation, and Oglethorpe was of those named to
examine conditions and to make a report. He came into contact with the
incarcerated--not alone with the law-breaker, hardened or yet to be
hardened, but with the wrongfully imprisoned and with the debtor. The
misery of the debtor seems to have struck with insistent hand upon his
heart's door. The parliamentary inquiry was doubtless productive of some
good, albeit evidently not of great good. But though the inquiry was
over, Oglethorpe's concern was not over. It brooded, and, in the inner
clear light where ideas grow, eventually brought forth results.

Numbers of debtors lay in crowded and noisome English prisons, there
often from no true fault at all, at times even because of a virtuous
action, oftenest from mere misfortune. If they might but start again, in
a new land, free from entanglements! Others, too, were in prison, whose
crimes were negligible, mere mistaken moves with no evil will behind
them--or, if not so negligible, then happening often through that misery
and ignorance for which the whole world was at fault. There was also the
broad and well-filled prison of poverty, and many of the prisoners there
needed only a better start. James Edward Oglethorpe conceived another
settlement in America, and for colonists he would have all these
down-trodden and oppressed. He would gather, if he might, only those who
when helped would help themselves--who when gi