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to light and freedom multitudes, who, by long confine-
ment for debt, were strangers and helpless in the country of their birth.’
He did more.
For them, and for persecuted Protestants, he planned an asylum and a new destiny in
America, where former poverty would be no reproach, and where the simplicity of piety could indulge the spirit of devotion, without fear of persecution from men who hated the rebuke of its example.
It was not difficult for
Oglethorpe to find associates in his disinterested purpose.
To further this end, a charter from George II., dated the ninth day of June,
1732, erected the country between the
Savannah and the Alatamaha, and from the head-springs of those rivers due west to the
Pacific, into the province of
Georgia, and placed it, for twenty-one years, under the
Establishment of the Colony of Georgia |
guardianship of a corporation, ‘in trust for the poor.’
The common seal of the corporation, having on one side
Georgia a group of silk-worms at their toils, with the motto,
Non sibi, sed aliis,—Not for themselves, but for others,—expressed the disinterested purpose of the patrons, who, by their own request, were restrained from receiving any grant of lands, or any emolument whatever.
On the other side of the seal, the device represented two figures reposing on urns, emblematic of the boundary rivers, having between them the genius of ‘
Georgia Augusta,’ with a cap of liberty on her head, a spear in one hand, the horn of plenty in the other.
But the cap of liberty was, for a time at least, a false emblem; for all executive and legislative power, and the institution of courts, were, for twenty-one years, given exclusively to the trustees, or their common council, who
were appointed during good behavior.
The trustees, men of benevolence and of leisure, ignorant of the value or the nature of popular power, held these grants
