A proprietary party and a larger popular party were continually at feud, not seldom with arms, support of the Church allying itself mainly with the former, dissent with the latter, Zealots for the Church wished to exclude dissenters from the assembly. Their opponents would keep Huguenot immigrants, whom the favor of the proprietaries rendered unwelcome, entirely from the franchise. The popular party passed laws for electing representatives in every county instead of at Charleston alone, and for revenue tariffs to pay the debt entailed by war. The proprietaries vetoed both. They even favored the pirates who harried the coast. Civil commotions were frequent and growth slow. Interference by the Crown was therefore most happy. From the time the Carolinas passed into royal hands, 1729, remarkable prosperity attended them both. Assuming charge of Carolina, the Crown reserved to itself the Spanish frontier, and here, in 1732, it settled Oglethorpe, the able and unselfish founder of Georgia, under the auspices of an organization in form much like a mercantile company, but benevolent in aim, whose main purpose was to open a home for the thousands of Englishmen who were in prison for debt. Many Scotch and many Austrians also came. Full civil liberty was promised to all, religious liberty to all but papists. Political strife was warm here, too, particularly respecting the admission of rum and slaves. Government by the corporators, though well-meaning, was ill-informed and a failure, and would have been ruinous to the colony but for Oglethorpe's genius and exertions. To the advantage of all, therefore, on the lapse of the charter in 1752, Georgia, like the Carolinas, assumed the status of a royal colony. [Illustration: Savannah, from a Print of 1741.] [Illustration: James Oglethorpe.] CHAPTER VI. GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE COLONIES [1750] The political life, habits, and forms familiar to our fathers were such as their peculiar surroundings and experience had developed out of English originals. This process and its results form an interesting study.