a perversity on the part of the complainants which would disqualify them for self-government.  Affairs thus reached an impasse.  Contributions stopped; Parliament gave merely enough money for routine expenses; the trustees lost their zeal but not their crotchets; the colony went from bad to worse.  Out of perhaps five thousand souls in Georgia about 1737 so many departed to South Carolina and other free settlements that in 1741 there were barely more than five hundred left.  This extreme depression at length forced even the staunchest of the trustees to relax.  First the exclusion of rum was repealed, then the introduction of slaves on lease was winked at, then in 1749 and 1750 the overt importation of slaves was authorized and all restrictions on land tenure were canceled.  Finally the stoppage of the parliamentary subvention in 1751 forced the trustees in the following year to resign their charter.

Slaveholders had already crossed the Savannah River in appreciable numbers to erect plantations on favorable tracts.  The lapse of a few more transition years brought Georgia to the status on the one hand of a self-governing royal province and on the other of a plantation community prospering, modestly for the time being, in the production of rice and indigo.  Her peculiarities under the trustee regime were gone but not forgotten.  The rigidity of paternalism, well meant though it had been, was a lesson against future submission to outward control in any form; and their failure as a peasantry in competition with planters across the river persuaded the Georgians and their neighbors that slave labor was essential for prosperity.

It is curious, by the way, that the tender-hearted, philanthropic Oglethorpe at the very time of his founding Georgia was the manager of the great slave-trading corporation, the Royal African Company.  The conflict of the two functions cannot be relieved except by one of the greatest of all reconciling considerations, the spirit of the time.  Whatever else the radicals of that period might wish to reform or abolish, the slave trade was held either as a matter of course or as a positive benefit to the people who constituted its merchandise.

The narrow limits of the rice and indigo regime in the two colonies made the plantation system the more dominant in its own area.  Detailed statistics are lacking until the first federal census, when indigo was rapidly giving place to sea-island cotton; but the requirements of the new staple differed so little from those of the old that the plantations near the end of the century were without doubt on much the same scale as before the Revolution.  In the four South Carolina parishes of St. Andrew’s, St. John’s Colleton, St. Paul’s and St. Stephen’s the census-takers of 1790 found 393 slaveholders with an average of 33.7 slaves each, as compared with a total of 28 non-slaveholding families.  In these and seven more parishes, comprising together the rural portion of the area known politically as the Charleston