There was a man in England in the first half of the eighteenth century who became so impressed by the misfortunes of men thrown into prison for debt that he resolved to do what he could to help them. The man was James Oglethorpe, and the result of his resolve was the founding of the colony of Georgia, which in time became one of the original thirteen colonies of the United States. To owe money was regarded as a most serious crime in England in those days, at least four thousand men were sent to prison every year for inability to pay their debts, and many of these debtors spent their lives in jail, since it was next to impossible for them to secure any money while they were imprisoned. The prisons, moreover, were vile dens of pestilence, where smallpox often raged, jailers treated their prisoners barbarously, and the man who had stolen a few shillings was kept in the same pen with the worst of pirates and murderers. A man named Castell, an architect and writer, was arrested for debt, and thrown into a prison where smallpox was rife. In spite of his protests he was kept there, and caught the disease and died. James Oglethorpe knew Castell, and the story of the architect's imprisonment roused Oglethorpe to action in aid of others who might be similarly treated. Oglethorpe was a man of influence in England. He had studied at Oxford, served in the army, and was a member of Parliament. He had a committee appointed to investigate the prisons, and, acting as its chairman, he unearthed so many cases of barbarities and showed that so many of the jailers were inhuman wretches that Parliament interfered and righted at least a few of the most crying wrongs. But his plans went farther than that; he wanted to give men who had the misfortune to be in debt a chance to start new lives, not simply to stay in jail with no chance to better their condition, and to this end he looked across the ocean to the great, unsettled continent of America, and planned his new home for debtors there.