hteenth century, but in some of the leading traits of his
character and incidents of his career he was rather a man of the
nineteenth. At the age of twenty-one he was already a veteran of the
army of Prince Eugene, having served with honorable distinction on the
staff of that great commander. Returning to England, in 1722 he entered
Parliament, and soon attained what in that age was the almost solitary
distinction of a social reformer. He procured the appointment of a
special committee to investigate the condition of the debtors' prisons;
and the shocking revelations that ensued led to a beginning of
reformation of the cruel and barbarous laws of England concerning
imprisonment for debt. But being of the higher type of reformers, he was
not content with such negative work. He cherished and elaborated a
scheme that should open a new career for those whose ill success in life
had subjected them to the pains and the ignominy due to criminals. It
was primarily for such as these that he projected the colony of Georgia.
But to a mind like his the victims of injustice in every land were
objects of practical sympathy. His colony should be an asylum for
sufferers from religious persecution from whatever quarter. The
enterprise was organized avowedly as a work of charity. The territory
was vested in trustees, who should receive no pay or emolument for their
services. Oglethorpe himself gave his unpaid labor as military and civil
head of the colony, declining to receive in return so much as a
settler's allotment of land. An appropriation of ten thousand pounds was
made by Parliament for the promotion of the work--the only government
subsidy ever granted to an American colony. With eager and unselfish
hopes of a noble service to be rendered to humanity, the generous
soldier embarked with a picked company of one hundred and twenty
emigrants, and on the 12th of February, 1733, landed at the foot of the
bluff on which now stands the city of Savannah. The attractions of the
genial climate and fertile soil, the liberal terms of invitation, and
the splendid schemes of profitable industry were diligently advertised,
and came to the knowledge of that noble young enthusiast, Zinzendorf,
count and Moravian bishop, whose estate of Herrnhut in Lusatia had
become an asylum for persecuted Christians; and missionary colonists of
that Moravian church of which every member was a missionary, and
companies of the exiled Salzburgers, the cruelty of whos