sixteen feet by twenty-four, its sides to be enclosed with unplaned boards, and its floor to be of rough deals, and its roof of shingle. Each freeholder was allotted fifty acres of ground, five of which were near Savannah, and the remaining forty-five farther off. Thus began the commonwealth of Georgia. The humane reformer of prison life was already the father of a state. A large number of Indians met him to make an alliance with his colony; the meeting was friendly; to each chief he gave a laced coat, a hat, and a shirt; and to their attendants gunpowder, bullets, linen, tobacco, pipes, tape, and eight kegs of rum, to carry home as presents to their respective towns. In a letter, dated June 9, 1733, Oglethorpe states that a door was opened for the conversion of the Indians; and nothing seemed to be wanting but a minister who understood their language: in action and expression, they were masters of eloquence, and many of their speeches were equal to those which scholars most admire in the Greek and Roman writings.[142] The next company of emigrants belonged to a different class. About a year before the charter for the Georgian colony was granted, a remarkable revival of religion took place at Saltzburg, in Germany. By merely reading the Bible, above twenty thousand people were led to renounce Popery and to embrace the Reformed religion. The popish priests complained to the Archbishop of Saltzburg that these Protestant converts assembled in various places, and sang hymns and offered prayers. The archbishop published an edict prohibiting such assemblies, upon pain of fines, corporal punishments, and even death itself. The new converts, however, still assembled as before; and now his serene highness the archbishop let loose his partisans, and commenced a murderous persecution, which drove thousands of innocent, unoffending, godly people into exile. Numbers were dragged to prison; some were led about with ropes round their necks; others had their hands so tightly tied with cords behind their backs that the blood spurted from their finger ends. The archbishop’s soldiers struck some of them in the face with their fists, calling them “heretic dogs and hell-hounds.” One poor fellow was fined seventy florins for singing a Protestant psalm of praise. Protestant preachers were called “murderers, buffle-heads, and children of the devil;” and the Protestant doctrine was stigmatised as “faith for swine and stinking goats.” Every one who embraced Luther’s doctrines “would be roasted in hell;” and the moment any one read his books the reader “became an offering to the devil.”[143]