68 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE 
endured only through being evaded. Though the 
first three-quarters of the eighteenth century included 
British successes overseas, most memorable alike in 
number and in kind, trade in its ugliest forms darkened 
the path of Empire. When the British Government 
of the day cast up the accounts of the Seven Years 
War and decided which of the spoils taken from 
France should be retained and which should be 
restoted, it was decided to keep Canada and to give 
back the rich sugar island of Guadeloupe. The reasons 
for the decision were various and complicated, but 
the fact of very common knowledge remains that 
Guadeloupe was set in the balance against Canada, 
so omnipresent and overpowering were trade con- 
siderations in the eighteenth century. 
Yet no such considerations, no thoughts of gain of 
any kind, were in James Oglethorpe’s mind when, in 
1732, he set his hand to the colonisation of Georgia. 
His was a very long as well as a vety noble and useful 
life. Born in December 1696, he lived for eighty-nine 
years, and died on July 1, 1785, having survived the 
Old Empire. The respect and affection with which 
heinspired Dr. Johnson, who was avowedly willing to 
be his biographer, was a great tribute to his worth. 
He was a soldier of distinction and a philanthropist, 
having, as a young member of the House of Commons, 
fathered and presided over a Parliamentary Com- 
mittee of inquiry into the condition of the debtors’ 
prisons ; and he conceived the plan of a colony 
which would at once provide homes and livelihood for 
paupets from these prisons, and be of value from a 
military point of view. These conditions were fulfilled