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50 GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS
thorpe's face. Here was a nice dilemma. To have challenged him in
stantly might have fixed a quarrelsome character upon the young soldier;
to have taken no notice of it might have been considered as cowardice.
Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye upon the prince and smiling all
the time as if he took what his highness had done in jest, said, 'Mon
Prince' (I forget the French words he used; the purport, however, was),
'that's a good joke, but we do it much better in England,' and threw a
whole glass of wine in the prince's face. An old general, who sat by,
said, 'II a Hen fait, mon Prince, vous 1'avez commence;' and thus all
ended in good humor."
But an unexpected turn of affairs soon launched Oglethorpe upon a
political career. His brother, Theophilus, dying, he succeeded to the
family estate at Westbrook. In 1722, as a member from Haslemere, in
the County of Surry, he took his seat in the House of Commons.
Though not a trained debater, he continued, despite numerous interrup
tions and through frequent changes of administration, to represent his
ancient borough in Parliament for a period of thirty-two years.
Throughout his long sojourn in Georgia, he was continuously a member
of the House of Commons. Finally he met defeat in 1754. Like most
of the country gentlemen of the period, Oglethorpe was a pronounced
Tory: and though he entered Parliament at a time when the Jacobites
were meditating a restoration of the Stuarts, a line to which his family
was attached, he maintained an independent course; spoke seldom, but
always to the point; and was chiefly interested in legislation for extend
ing commerce, for propagating knowledge, and for ameliorating distress.
Oglethorpe may possibly have been interested in the reform of Eng
lish prisons before his visit to the Fleet; but his zeal for the cause re
ceived .a fresh inspiration, a new baptism, from this hour. In 1729, we
find him chairman of a committee to visit the Fleet, the Marshalsea, and
the King's Bench—three noted debtor prisons—to inquire rigidly into
the conditions of each and to submit a report thereon to the House of
Commons. It is needless to say that Oglethorpe's exposure of prison
abuses was ruthlessly severe. He applied the scorpion's lash with vigor,
not only to paid underlings but to high officials. However, when sifted
to its last analysis, the responsibility attached to England .for tolerating
a system which permitted such enormities; and he proposed to dig to the
roots, to perform a major operation in surgery, for the purpose of ex
tirpating a cancerous growth. As appears from the records, three
separate reports were made by him from time to time, in consequence of
which radical reforms were effected not only in the management of
prisons but in the statute law itself, prescribing how these institutions
should be governed.
We have already intimated that Oglethorpe's idea of founding a
colony in the new world for insolvent debtors was inspirationally given;
but intimate contact with these unfortunate individuals only confirmed
him in his project. It also gave him an opportunity for working out its
details. There were scores of men to be found in these debtor prisons,
who possessed good family connections, upon whom no stigma of guilt,
no shadow of crime, rested, who only needed an opportunity, under uni
form and just laws, to show what was really in them; and why not or
ganize these men into a colony and give them a fresh _start in the new