Protection begins about this time to manifest itself as essential to the success of domestic industry. Acts also were passed for the protection of river fisheries. The manufacture of nails and hemp duck were encouraged--nails by a loan and duck by a bounty. With the increase of population new guarantees were required to secure purity of suffrage. In the winter of 1724 the freehold act was passed "requiring a freehold qualification of the value of one hundred pounds, or an annual income of two pounds derived from real estate to enable any man to become a freeman." With modification of detail but none of principle, this law held its place on the statute book for a hundred and twenty years. "Freemen of the towns who were not freemen of the Colony were allowed to vote for deputies." In 1721 a new bank or loan for forty thousand pounds was established upon the same principle as the first. Hemp and flax were received in payment of interest. Specie had become so scarce that an English half-penny passed for three half-pence, and it was soon manifest that the introduction of paper money had raised prices and encouraged speculation in land. But nothing occurred to break the monotony of colonial life so important as the capture in 1723 of a pirate schooner and the trial of her crew by a court of admiralty. Twenty-six of the prisoners were condemned to death, hanged at Gravelly or Bull's Point, and buried on Goat Island between high and low water mark. One of the important events of 1722-3, and which must be considered as a favorable indication of the increase of population was the division of Kingston into two towns. In 1724 the failure of the crops led again to the prohibition of the exportation of grain. Two thousand bushels of Indian corn were bought on public account and sold to the people at low prices. In Newport no one was allowed to have more than four bushels at a time--in the other towns not more than eight. The temperance question, also, began to attract attention at an early day, and various efforts were made to check drunkenness. Among them was an act prohibiting the selling of liquor to common drunkards, and to ensure the carrying out of the act town councils were required to post in their own and the neighboring towns those who came under it. In nothing, however, was the progress of the Colony more evident than in the growth of the religious sentiments. The soul liberty of its founder had been mistaken for license. Towards the close of the seventeenth century Cotton Mather had written: "Rhode Island is a colluvies of Antinomians, Familists, Anabaptists, Anti-Sabbatarians, Arminians, Socinians, Quakers, Ranters, everything in the world but Roman Catholics and true Christians." A quarter of a century later he wrote: "Calvinists with Lutherans, Presbyterians with Episcopalians, Pedobaptists with Anabaptists, beholding one another to fear God and work righteousness, do with delight sit down together at the same table