To cite one colony as in a way characteristic of the whole attitude of the colonists toward slavery, Georgia might be taken. Georgia was originally an asylum for the bad boys of too respectable British families and for discharged convicts and hopeless drunkards. Royal charter guaranteed freedom of religion (except to Papists); an embargo was placed on West Indian trade, so as to stop the inflow of rum; and Negro slavery was forbidden. All for the good of reprobates making a fresh start! Invalids and merchants settled on the coast and made the society of Savannah. The bad boys proved to be too poor stuff with which to found a colony, and a special body of a hundred and thirty frugal and industrious Scots and a hundred and seventy carefully chosen Germans were brought in. Real work in Georgia commenced at Ebenezer, on the Savannah River, and at New Inverness. The merchants strove to get slavery introduced; the Scots and the Germans strove to keep it out. At Savannah every night polite society toasted “_The One Thing Needful_”—Slavery. The common talk of the townsfolk was of the extra prosperity that would come to Georgia if slaves were brought in, the extra quantities of cotton, of rice, of timber, and all that middlemen could re-sell. The ministers of religion actually preached in churches in favor of an institution sanctioned by the Bible, and it was thought that a service was done for Christ by bringing the black men out of Africa, where they were somewhat inaccessible, and throwing them into the bosom of the Christian family in America. But the Scots and the Germans remonstrated against the permission of an evil shocking to human nature and likely to prove in time not a blessing but a scourge. Over in South Carolina slavery was in full possession, and the wealth of the Carolinian merchants was a soreness to the lean traders of Georgia. Cupidity prompted underhand means to achieve the desired end. Slaves were imported on life lease from owners in South Carolina. One could not purchase the freehold of a Negro’s liberty and energy, only a ninety-nine years’ lease of it, as it were, but that sufficed. Freedom fell, the charter was abrogated, and under the sway of a royal governor the floodgates of slavery were opened wide. In due time Georgia became one of the worst slave States of the South. It remains to this day one of those where in any case the contemporary record of burning and lynching is most lurid. It would not be unsafe to draw the conclusion that the introduction of slavery did as much harm to the souls of the original Germans, Scots, and English and their descendants as to the Negroes themselves.