THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

VOLUME XI SLICE VII
Geoponici to Germany (part)

Articles in This Slice

GEOPONICI,[1] or Scriptores rei rusticae, the Greek and Roman writers on husbandry and agriculture. On the whole the Greeks paid less attention than the Romans to the scientific study of these subjects, which in classical times they regarded as a branch of economics. Thus Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (see also Memorabilia, ii. 4) contains a eulogy of agriculture and its beneficial ethical effects, and much information is to be found in the writings of Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus. About the same time as Xenophon, the philosopher Democritus of Abdera wrote a treatise Περὶ Γεωργἰας, frequently quoted and much used by the later compilers of Geoponica (agricultural treatises). Greater attention was given to the subject in the Alexandrian period; a long list of names is given by Varro and Columella, amongst them Hiero II. and Attalus III. Philometor. Later, Cassius Dionysius of Utica translated and abridged the great work of the Carthaginian Mago, which was still further condensed by Diophanes of Nicaea in Bithynia for the use of King Deïotarus. From these and similar works Cassianus Bassus (q.v.) compiled his Geoponica. Mention may also be made of a little work Περὶ Γεωργικῶν by Michael Psellus (printed in Boissonade, Anecdota Graeca, i.).

The Romans, aware of the necessity of maintaining a numerous and thriving order of agriculturists, from very early times endeavoured to instil into their countrymen both a theoretical and a practical knowledge of the subject. The occupation of the farmer was regarded as next in importance to that of the soldier, and distinguished Romans did not disdain to practise it. In furtherance of this object, the great work of Mago was translated into Latin by order of the senate, and the elder Cato wrote his De agri cultura (extant in a very corrupt state), a simple record in homely language of the rules observed by the old Roman landed proprietors rather than a theoretical treatise. He was followed by the two Sasernae (father and son) and Gnaeus Tremellius Scrofa, whose works are lost. The learned Marcus Terentius Varro of Reate, when eighty years of age, composed his Rerum rusticarum, libri tres, dealing with agriculture, the rearing of cattle, and the breeding of fishes. He was the first to systematize what had been written on the subject, and supplemented the labours of others by practical experience gained during his travels. In the Augustan age Julius Hyginus wrote on farming and bee-keeping, Sabinus Tiro on horticulture, and during the early empire Julius Graecinus and Julius Atticus on the culture of vines, and Cornelius Celsus (best known for his De medicina) on farming. The chief work of the kind, however, is that of Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella (q.v.). About the middle of the 2nd century the two Quintilii, natives of Troja, wrote on the subject in Greek. It is remarkable that Columella’s work exercised less influence in Rome and Italy than in southern Gaul and Spain, where agriculture became one of the principal subjects of instruction in the superior educational establishments that were springing up in those countries. One result of this was the preparation of manuals of a popular kind for use in the schools. In the 3rd century Gargilius Martialis of Mauretania compiled a Geoponica in which medical botany and the veterinary art were included. The De re rustica of Palladius (4th century), in fourteen books, which is almost entirely borrowed from Columella, is greatly inferior in style and knowledge of the subject. It is a kind of farmer’s calendar, in which the different rural occupations are arranged in order of the months. The fourteenth book (on forestry) is written in elegiacs (85 distichs). The whole of Palladius and considerable fragments of Martialis are extant.

The best edition of the Scriptores rei rusticae is by J.G. Schneider (1794-1797), and the whole subject is exhaustively treated by A. Magerstedt, Bilder aus der römischen Landwirtschaft (1858-1863); see also Teuffel-Schwabe, Hist. of Roman Literature, 54; C.F. Bähr in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie.

[1] The latinized form of a non-existent Γεωπονικοί, used for convenience.

GEORGE, SAINT (d. 303), the patron saint of England, Aragon and Portugal. According to the legend given by Metaphrastes the Byzantine hagiologist, and substantially repeated in the Roman Acta sanctorum and in the Spanish breviary, he was born in Cappadocia of noble Christian parents, from whom he received a careful religious training. Other accounts place his birth at Lydda, but preserve his Cappadocian parentage. Having embraced the profession of a soldier, he rapidly rose under Diocletian to high military rank. In Persian Armenia he organized and energized the Christian community at Urmi (Urumiah), and even visited Britain on an imperial expedition. When Diocletian had begun to manifest a pronounced hostility towards Christianity, George sought a personal interview with him, in which he made deliberate profession of his faith, and, earnestly remonstrating against the persecution which had begun, resigned his commission. He was immediately laid under arrest, and after various tortures, finally put to death at Nicomedia (his body being afterwards taken to Lydda) on the 23rd of April 303. His festival is observed on that anniversary by the entire Roman Catholic Church as a semi-duplex, and by the Spanish Catholics as a duplex of the first class with an octave. The day is also celebrated as a principal feast in the Orthodox Eastern Church, where the saint is distinguished by the titles μεγαλόμαρτυρ and τροπαιοφόρος.

The historical basis of the tradition is particularly unsound, there being two claimants to the name and honour. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. viii. 5, writes: “Immediately on the promulgation of the edict (of Diocletian) a certain man of no mean origin, but highly esteemed for his temporal dignities, as soon as the decree was published against the churches in Nicomedia, stimulated by a divine zeal and excited by an ardent faith, took it as it was openly placed and posted up for public inspection, and tore it to shreds as a most profane and wicked act. This, too, was done when the two Caesars were in the city, the first of whom was the eldest and chief of all and the other held fourth grade of the imperial dignity after him. But this man, as the first that was distinguished there in this manner, after enduring what was likely to follow an act so daring, preserved his mind, calm and serene, until the moment when his spirit fled.” Rivalling this anonymous martyr, who is often supposed to have been St George, is an earlier martyr briefly mentioned in the Chronicon Pascale: “In the year 225 of the Ascension of our Lord a persecution of the Christians took place, and many suffered martyrdom, among whom also the Holy George was martyred.”

Two Syrian church inscriptions bearing the name, one at Ezr’a and the other at Shaka, found by Burckhardt and Porter, and discussed by J. Hogg in the Transactions of the Royal Literary Society, may with some probability be assigned to the middle of the 4th century. Calvin impugned the saint’s existence altogether, and Edward Reynolds (1599-1676), bishop of Norwich, like Edward Gibbon a century later, made him one with George of Laodicea, called “the Cappadocian,” the Arian bishop of Alexandria (see [George of Laodicea]).

Modern criticism, while rejecting this identification, is not unwilling to accept the main fact that an officer named Georgios, of high rank in the army, suffered martyrdom probably under Diocletian. In the canon of Pope Gelasius (494) George is mentioned in a list of those “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God,” a statement which implies that legends had already grown up around his name. The caution of Gelasius was not long preserved; Gregory of Tours, for example, asserts that the saint’s relics actually existed in the French village of Le Maine, where many miracles were wrought by means of them; and Bede, while still explaining that the Gesta Georgii are reckoned apocryphal, commits himself to the statement that the martyr was beheaded under Dacian, king of Persia, whose wife Alexandra, however, adhered to the Christian faith. The great fame of George, who is reverenced alike by Eastern and Western Christendom and by Mahommedans, is due to many causes. He was martyred on the eve of the triumph of Christianity, his shrine was reared near the scene of a great Greek legend (Perseus and Andromeda), and his relics when removed from Lydda, where many pilgrims had visited them, to Zorava in the Hauran served to impress his fame not only on the Syrian population, but on their Moslem conquerors, and again on the Crusaders, who in grateful memory of the saint’s intervention on their behalf at Antioch built a new cathedral at Lydda to take the place of the church destroyed by the Saracens. This cathedral was in turn destroyed by Saladin.

The connexion of St George with a dragon, familiar since the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, can be traced to the close of the 6th century. At Arsuf or Joppa—neither of them far from Lydda—Perseus had slain the sea-monster that threatened the virgin Andromeda, and George, like many another Christian saint, entered into the inheritance of veneration previously enjoyed by a pagan hero.[1] The exploit thus attaches itself to the very common Aryan myth of the sun-god as the conqueror of the powers of darkness.

The popularity of St George in England has never reached the height attained by St Andrew in Scotland, St David in Wales or St Patrick in Ireland. The council of Oxford in 1222 ordered that his feast should be kept as a national festival; but it was not until the time of Edward III. that he was made patron of the kingdom. The republics of Genoa and Venice were also under his protection.

See P. Heylin, The History of ... S. George of Cappadocia (1631); S. Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages; Fr. Görres, “Der Ritter St Georg in der Geschichte, Legende und Kunst” (Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie, xxx., 1887, Heft i.); E.A.W. Budge, The Martyrdom and Miracles of St George of Cappadocia: the Coptic texts edited with an English translation (1888); Bolland, Acta Sancti, iii. 101; E.O. Gordon, Saint George (1907); M.H. Bulley, St George for Merrie England (1908).

[1] G.A. Smith (Hist. Geog. of Holy Land, p. 164) points out another coincidence. “The Mahommedans who usually identify St George with the prophet Elijah, at Lydda confound his legend with one about Christ himself. Their name for Antichrist is Dajjal, and they have a tradition that Jesus will slay Antichrist by the gate of Lydda. The notion sprang from an ancient bas-relief of George and the Dragon on the Lydda church. But Dajjal may be derived, by a very common confusion between n and l, from Dagon, whose name two neighbouring villages bear to this day, while one of the gates of Lydda used to be called the Gate of Dagon.” It is a curious process by which the monster that symbolized heathenism conquered by Christianity has been evolved out of the first great rival of the God of Israel.

GEORGE I. [George Louis] (1660-1727), king of Great Britain and Ireland, born in 1660, was heir through his father Ernest Augustus to the hereditary lay bishopric of Osnabrück, and to the duchy of Calenberg, which formed one portion of the Hanoverian possessions of the house of Brunswick, whilst he secured the reversion of the other portion, the duchy of Celle or Zell, by his marriage (1682) with the heiress, his cousin Sophia Dorothea. The marriage was not a happy one. The morals of German courts in the end of the 17th century took their tone from the splendid profligacy of Versailles. It became the fashion for a prince to amuse himself with a mistress or more frequently with many mistresses simultaneously, and he was often content that the mistresses whom he favoured should be neither beautiful nor witty. George Louis followed the usual course. Count Königsmark—a handsome adventurer—seized the opportunity of paying court to the deserted wife. Conjugal infidelity was held at Hanover to be a privilege of the male sex. Count Königsmark was assassinated. Sophia Dorothea was divorced in 1694, and remained in seclusion till her death in 1726. When George IV., her descendant in the fourth generation, attempted in England to call his wife to account for sins of which he was himself notoriously guilty, free-spoken public opinion reprobated the offence in no measured terms. But in the Germany of the 17th century all free-spoken public opinion had been crushed out by the misery of the Thirty Years’ War, and it was understood that princes were to arrange their domestic life according to their own pleasure.

The prince’s father did much to raise the dignity of his family. By sending help to the emperor when he was struggling against the French and the Turks, he obtained the grant of a ninth electorate in 1692. His marriage with Sophia, the youngest daughter of Elizabeth the daughter of James I. of England, was not one which at first seemed likely to confer any prospect of advancement to his family. But though there were many persons whose birth gave them better claims than she had to the English crown, she found herself, upon the death of the duke of Gloucester, the next Protestant heir after Anne. The Act of Settlement in 1701 secured the inheritance to herself and her descendants. Being old and unambitious she rather permitted herself to be burthened with the honour than thrust herself forward to meet it. Her son George took a deeper interest in the matter. In his youth he had fought with determined courage in the wars of William III. Succeeding to the electorate on his father’s death in 1698, he had sent a welcome reinforcement of Hanoverians to fight under Marlborough at Blenheim. With prudent persistence he attached himself closely to the Whigs and to Marlborough, refusing Tory offers of an independent command, and receiving in return for his fidelity a guarantee by the Dutch of his succession to England in the Barrier treaty of 1709. In 1714 when Anne was growing old, and Bolingbroke and the more reckless Tories were coquetting with the son of James II., the Whigs invited George’s eldest son, who was duke of Cambridge, to visit England in order to be on the spot in case of need. Neither the elector nor his mother approved of a step which was likely to alienate the queen, and which was specially distasteful to himself, as he was on very bad terms with his son. Yet they did not set themselves against the strong wish of the party to which they looked for support, and it is possible that troubles would have arisen from any attempt to carry out the plan, if the deaths, first of the electress (May 28) and then of the queen (August 1, 1714), had not laid open George’s way to the succession without further effort of his own.

In some respects the position of the new king was not unlike that of William III. a quarter of a century before. Both sovereigns were foreigners, with little knowledge of English politics and little interest in English legislation. Both sovereigns arrived at a time when party spirit had been running high, and when the task before the ruler was to still the waves of contention. In spite of the difference between an intellectually great man and an intellectually small one, in spite too of the difference between the king who began by choosing his ministers from both parties and the king who persisted in choosing his ministers from only one, the work of pacification was accomplished by George even more thoroughly than by William.

George I. was fortunate in arriving in England when a great military struggle had come to an end. He had therefore no reason to call upon the nation to make great sacrifices. All that he wanted was to secure for himself and his family a high position which he hardly knew how to occupy, to fill the pockets of his German attendants and his German mistresses, to get away as often as possible from the uncongenial islanders whose language he was unable to speak, and to use the strength of England to obtain petty advantages for his German principality. In order to do this he attached himself entirely to the Whig party, though he refused to place himself at the disposal of its leaders. He gave his confidence, not to Somers and Wharton and Marlborough, but to Stanhope and Townshend, the statesmen of the second rank. At first he seemed to be playing a dangerous game. The Tories, whom he rejected, were numerically superior to their adversaries, and were strong in the support of the country gentlemen and the country clergy. The strength of the Whigs lay in the towns and in the higher aristocracy. Below both parties lay the mass of the nation, which cared nothing for politics except in special seasons of excitement, and which asked only to be let alone. In 1715 a Jacobite insurrection in the north, supported by the appearance of the Pretender, the son of James II., in Scotland, was suppressed, and its suppression not only gave to the government a character of stability, but displayed its adversaries in an unfavourable light as the disturbers of the peace.

Even this advantage, however, would have been thrown away if the Whigs in power had continued to be animated by violent party spirit. What really happened was that the Tory leaders were excluded from office, but that the principles and prejudices of the Tories were admitted to their full weight in the policy of the government. The natural result followed. The leaders to whom no regard was paid continued in opposition. The rank and file, who would personally have gained nothing by a party victory, were conciliated into quiescence.

This mingling of two policies was conspicuous both in the foreign and the domestic actions of the reign. In the days of Queen Anne the Whig party had advocated the continuance of war with a view to the complete humiliation of the king of France, whom they feared as the protector of the Pretender, and in whose family connexion with the king of Spain they saw a danger for England. The Tory party, on the other hand, had been the authors of the peace of Utrecht, and held that France was sufficiently depressed. A fortunate concurrence of circumstances enabled George’s ministers, by an alliance with the regent of France, the duke of Orleans, to pursue at the same time the Whig policy of separating France from Spain and from the cause of the Pretender, and the Tory policy of the maintenance of a good understanding with their neighbour across the Channel. The same eclecticism was discernible in the proceedings of the home government. The Whigs were conciliated by the repeal of the Schism Act and the Occasional Conformity Act, whilst the Tories were conciliated by the maintenance of the Test Act in all its vigour. The satisfaction of the masses was increased by the general well-being of the nation.

Very little of all that was thus accomplished was directly owing to George I. The policy of the reign is the policy of his ministers. Stanhope and Townshend from 1714 to 1717 were mainly occupied with the defence of the Hanoverian settlement. After the dismissal of the latter in 1717, Stanhope in conjunction with Sunderland took up a more decided Whig policy. The Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Act were repealed in 1719. But the wish of the liberal Whigs to modify if not to repeal the Test Act remained unsatisfied. In the following year the bursting of the South Sea bubble, and the subsequent deaths of Stanhope in 1721 and of Sunderland in 1722, cleared the way for the accession to power of Sir Robert Walpole, to whom and not to the king was due the conciliatory policy which quieted Tory opposition by abstaining from pushing Whig principles to their legitimate consequences.

Nevertheless something of the honour due to Walpole must be reckoned to the king’s credit. It is evident that at his accession his decisions were by no means unimportant. The royal authority was still able within certain limits to make its own terms. This support was so necessary to the Whigs that they made no resistance when he threw aside their leaders on his arrival in England. When by his personal intervention he dismissed Townshend and appointed Sunderland, he had no such social and parliamentary combination to fear as that which almost mastered his great-grandson in his struggle for power. If such a combination arose before the end of his reign it was owing more to his omitting to fulfil the duties of his station than from the necessity of the case. As he could talk no English, and his ministers could talk no German, he absented himself from the meetings of the cabinet, and his frequent absences from England and his want of interest in English politics strengthened the cabinet in its tendency to assert an independent position. Walpole at last by his skill in the management of parliament rose as a subject into the almost royal position denoted by the name of prime minister. In connexion with Walpole the force of wealth and station established the Whig aristocracy in a point of vantage from which it was afterwards difficult to dislodge them. Yet, though George had allowed the power which had been exercised by William and Anne to slip through his hands, it was understood to the last that if he chose to exert himself he might cease to be a mere cipher in the conduct of affairs. As late as 1727 Bolingbroke gained over one of the king’s mistresses, the duchess of Kendal; and though her support of the fallen Jacobite took no effect, Walpole was not without fear that her reiterated entreaties would lead to his dismissal. The king’s death in a carriage on his way to Hanover, in the night between 10th and 11th June in the same year, put an end to these apprehensions.

His only children were his successor George II. and Sophia Dorothea (1687-1757), who married in 1706 Frederick William, crown prince (afterwards king) of Prussia. She was the mother of Frederick the Great.

(S. R. G.)

See the standard English histories. A recent popular work is L. Melville’s The First George in Hanover and England (1908).

GEORGE II. [George Augustus] (1683-1760), king of Great Britain and Ireland, the only son of George I., was born in 1683. In 1705 he married Wilhelmina Caroline of Anspach. In 1706 he was created earl of Cambridge. In 1708 he fought bravely at Oudenarde. At his father’s accession to the English throne he was thirty-one years of age. He was already on bad terms with his father. The position of an heir-apparent is in no case an easy one to fill with dignity, and the ill-treatment of the prince’s mother by his father was not likely to strengthen in him a reverence for paternal authority. It was most unwillingly that, on his first journey to Hanover in 1716, George I. appointed the prince of Wales guardian of the realm during his absence. In 1717 the existing ill-feeling ripened into an open breach. At the baptism of one of his children, the prince selected one godfather whilst the king persisted in selecting another. The young man spoke angrily, was ordered into arrest, and was subsequently commanded to leave St James’s and to be excluded from all court ceremonies. The prince took up his residence at Leicester House, and did everything in his power to support the opposition against his father’s ministers.

When therefore George I. died in 1727, it was generally supposed that Walpole would be at once dismissed. The first direction of the new king was that Sir Spencer Compton would draw up the speech in which he was to announce to the privy council his accession. Compton, not knowing how to set about his task, applied to Walpole for aid. Queen Caroline took advantage of this evidence of incapacity, advocated Walpole’s cause with her husband and procured his continuance in office. This curious scene was indicative of the course likely to be taken by the new sovereign. His own mind was incapable of rising above the merest details of business. He made war in the spirit of a drill-sergeant, and he economized his income with the minute regularity of a clerk. A blunder of a master of the ceremonies in marshalling the attendants on a levee put him out of temper. He took the greatest pleasure in counting his money piece by piece, and he never forgot a date. He was above all things methodical and regular. “He seems,” said one who knew him well, “to think his having done a thing to-day an unanswerable reason for his doing it to-morrow.”

Most men so utterly immersed in details would be very impracticable to deal with. They would obstinately refuse to listen to a wisdom and prudence which meant nothing in their ears, and which brought home to them a sense of their own inferiority. It was the happy peculiarity of George II. that he was exempt from this failing. He seemed to have an instinctive understanding that such and such persons were either wiser or even stronger than himself, and when he had once discovered that, he gave way with scarcely a struggle. Thus it was that, though in his domestic relations he was as loose a liver as his father had been, he allowed himself to be guided by the wise but unobtrusive counsels of his wife until her death in 1737, and that when once he had recognized Walpole’s superiority he allowed himself to be guided by the political sagacity of the great minister. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of such a temper upon the development of the constitution. The apathy of the nation in all but the most exciting political questions, fostered by the calculated conservatism of Walpole, had thrown power into the hands of the great landowners. They maintained their authority by supporting a minister who was ready to make use of corruption, wherever corruption was likely to be useful, and who could veil over the baseness of the means which he employed by his talents in debate and in finance. To shake off a combination so strong would not have been easy. George II. submitted to it without a struggle.

So strong indeed had the Whig aristocracy grown that it began to lose its cohesion. Walpole was determined to monopolize power, and he dismissed from office all who ventured to oppose him. An opposition formidable in talents was gradually formed. In its composite ranks were to be found Tories and discontented Whigs, discarded official hacks who were hungry for the emoluments of office, and youthful purists who fancied that if Walpole were removed, bribes and pensions would cease to be attractive to a corrupt generation. Behind them was Bolingbroke, excluded from parliament but suggesting every party move. In 1737 the opposition acquired the support of Frederick, prince of Wales. The young man, weak and headstrong, rebelled against the strict discipline exacted by his father. His marriage in 1736 to Augusta of Saxony brought on an open quarrel. In 1737, just as the princess of Wales was about to give birth to her first child, she was hurried away by her husband from Hampton Court to St James’s Palace at the imminent risk of her life, simply in order that the prince might show his spite to his father who had provided all necessary attendance at the former place. George ordered his son to quit St James’s, and to absent himself from court. Frederick in disgrace gave the support of his name, and he had nothing else to give, to the opposition. Later in the year 1737, on the 20th of November, Queen Caroline died. In 1742 Walpole, weighed down by the unpopularity both of his reluctance to engage in a war with Spain and of his supposed remissness in conducting the operations of that war, was driven from office. His successors formed a composite ministry in which Walpole’s old colleagues and Walpole’s old opponents were alike to be found.

The years which followed settled conclusively, at least for this reign, the constitutional question of the power of appointing ministers. The war between Spain and England had broken out in 1739. In 1741 the death of the emperor Charles VI. brought on the war of the Austrian succession. The position of George II. as a Hanoverian prince drew him to the side of Maria Theresa through jealousy of the rising Prussian monarchy. Jealousy of France led England in the same direction, and in 1741 a subsidy of £300,000 was voted to Maria Theresa. The king himself went to Germany and attempted to carry on the war according to his own notions. Those notions led him to regard the safety of Hanover as of far more importance than the wishes of England. Finding that a French army was about to march upon his German states, he concluded with France a treaty of neutrality for a year without consulting a single English minister. In England the news was received with feelings of disgust. The expenditure of English money and troops was to be thrown uselessly away as soon as it appeared that Hanover was in the slightest danger. In 1742 Walpole was no longer in office. Lord Wilmington, the nominal head of the ministry, was a mere cipher. The ablest and most energetic of his colleagues, Lord Carteret (afterwards Granville), attached himself specially to the king, and sought to maintain himself in power by his special favour and by brilliant achievements in diplomacy.

In part at least by Carteret’s mediation the peace of Breslau was signed, by which Maria Theresa ceded Silesia to Frederick (July 28, 1742). Thus relieved on her northern frontier, she struck out vigorously towards the west. Bavaria was overrun by her troops. In the beginning of 1743 one French army was driven across the Rhine. On June 27th another French army was defeated by George II. in person at Dettingen. Victory brought elation to Maria Theresa. Her war of defence was turned into a war of vengeance. Bavaria was to be annexed. The French frontier was to be driven back. George II. and Carteret after some hesitation placed themselves on her side. Of the public opinion of the political classes in England they took no thought. Hanoverian troops were indeed to be employed in the war, but they were to be taken into British pay. Collisions between British and Hanoverian officers were frequent. A storm arose against the preference shown to Hanoverian interests. After a brief struggle Carteret, having become Lord Granville by his mother’s death, was driven from office in November 1744.

Henry Pelham, who had become prime minister in the preceding year, thus saw himself established in power. By the acceptance of this ministry, the king acknowledged that the function of choosing a ministry and directing a policy had passed from his hands. In 1745 indeed he recalled Granville, but a few days were sufficient to convince him of the futility of his attempt, and the effort to exclude Pitt at a later time proved equally fruitless.

Important as were the events of the remainder of the reign, therefore, they can hardly be grouped round the name of George II. The resistance to the invasion of the Young Pretender in 1745, the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the great war ministry of Pitt at the close of the reign, did not receive their impulse from him. He had indeed done his best to exclude Pitt from office. He disliked him on account of his opposition in former years to the sacrifices demanded by the Hanoverian connexion. When in 1756 Pitt became secretary of state in the Devonshire administration, the king bore the yoke with difficulty. Early in the next year he complained of Pitt’s long speeches as being above his comprehension, and on April 5, 1757, he dismissed him, only to take him back shortly after, when Pitt, coalescing with Newcastle, became master of the situation. Before Pitt’s dismissal George II. had for once an opportunity of placing himself on the popular side, though, as was the case of his grandson during the American war, it was when the popular side happened to be in the wrong. In the true spirit of a martinet, he wished to see Admiral Byng executed. Pitt urged the wish of the House of Commons to have him pardoned. “Sir,” replied the king, “you have taught me to look for the sense of my subjects in another place than in the House of Commons.” When George II. died in 1760, he left behind him a settled understanding that the monarchy was one of the least of the forces by which the policy of the country was directed. To this end he had contributed much by his disregard of English opinion in 1743; but it may fairly be added that, but for his readiness to give way to irresistible adversaries, the struggle might have been far more bitter and severe than it was.

Of the connexion between Hanover and England in this reign two memorials remain more pleasant to contemplate than the records of parliamentary and ministerial intrigues. With the support of George II., amidst the derision of the English fashionable world, the Hanoverian Handel produced in England those masterpieces which have given delight to millions, whilst the foundation of the university of Göttingen by the same king opened a door through which English political ideas afterwards penetrated into Germany.

George II. had three sons,—Frederick Louis (1707-1751); George William (1717-1718); and William Augustus, duke of Cumberland (1721-1765); and five daughters, Anne (1709-1759), married to William, prince of Orange, 1734; Amelia Sophia Eleonora (1711-1786); Elizabeth Caroline (1713-1757); Mary (1723-1772), married to Frederick, landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, 1740; Louisa (1724-1751), married to Frederick V., king of Denmark, 1743.

(S. R. G.)

See Lord Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George II., ed. by J. W, Croker (3 vols., London, 1884); Horace Walpole, Mem. of the Reign of George II., with notes by Lord Holland (3 vols., 2nd ed., 1847).

GEORGE III. [George William Frederick] (1738-1820), king of Great Britain and Ireland, son of Frederick, prince of Wales, and grandson of George II., whom he succeeded in 1760, was born on the 4th of June 1738. After his father’s death in 1751 he had been educated in seclusion from the fashionable world under the care of his mother and of her favourite counsellor the earl of Bute. He had been taught to revere the maxims of Bolingbroke’s “Patriot King,” and to believe that it was his appointed task in life to break the power of the Whig houses resting upon extensive property and the influence of patronage and corruption. That power had already been gravely shaken. The Whigs from their incompetency were obliged when the Seven Years’ War broke out to leave its management in the hands of William Pitt. The nation learned to applaud the great war minister who succeeded where others had failed, and whose immaculate purity put to shame the ruck of barterers of votes for places and pensions.

In some sort the work of the new king was the continuation of the work of Pitt. But his methods were very different. He did not appeal to any widely spread feeling or prejudice; nor did he disdain the use of the arts which had maintained his opponents in power. The patronage of the crown was to be really as well as nominally his own; and he calculated, not without reason, that men would feel more flattered in accepting a place from a king than from a minister. The new Toryism of which he was the founder was no recurrence to the Toryism of the days of Charles II. or even of Anne. The question of the amount of toleration to be accorded to Dissenters had been entirely laid aside. The point at issue was whether the crown should be replaced in the position which George I. might have occupied at the beginning of his reign, selecting the ministers and influencing the deliberations of the cabinet. For this struggle George III. possessed no inconsiderable advantages. With an inflexible tenacity of purpose, he was always ready to give way when resistance was really hopeless. As the first English-born sovereign of his house, speaking from his birth the language of his subjects, he found a way to the hearts of many who never regarded his predecessors as other than foreign intruders. The contrast, too, between the pure domestic life which he led with his wife Charlotte, whom he married in 1761, and the habits of three generations of his house, told in his favour with the vast majority of his subjects. Even his marriage had been a sacrifice to duty. Soon after his accession he had fallen in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, and had been observed to ride morning by morning along the Kensington Road, from which the object of his affections was to be seen from the lawn of Holland House making hay, or engaged in some other ostensible employment. Before the year was over Lady Sarah appeared as one of the queen’s bridesmaids, and she was herself married to Sir Charles Bunbury in 1762.

At first everything seemed easy to him. Pitt had come to be regarded by his own colleagues as a minister who would pursue war at any price, and in getting rid of Pitt in 1761 and in carrying on the negotiations which led to the peace of Paris in 1762, the king was able to gather round him many persons who would not be willing to acquiesce in any permanent change in the system of government. With the signature of the peace his real difficulties began. The Whig houses, indeed, were divided amongst themselves by personal rivalries. But they were none of them inclined to let power and the advantages of power slip from their hands without a struggle. For some years a contest of influence was carried on without dignity and without any worthy aim. The king was not strong enough to impose upon parliament a ministry of his own choice. But he gathered round himself a body of dependants known as the king’s friends, who were secure of his favour, and who voted one way or the other according to his wishes. Under these circumstances no ministry could possibly be stable; and yet every ministry was strong enough to impose some conditions on the king. Lord Bute, the king’s first choice, resigned from a sense of his own incompetency in 1763. George Grenville was in office till 1765; the marquis of Rockingham till 1766; Pitt, becoming earl of Chatham, till illness compelled him to retire from the conduct of affairs in 1767, when he was succeeded by the duke of Grafton. But a struggle of interests could gain no real strength for any government, and the only chance the king had of effecting a permanent change in the balance of power lay in the possibility of his associating himself with some phase of strong national feeling, as Pitt had associated himself with the war feeling caused by the dissatisfaction spread by the weakness and ineptitude of his predecessors.

Such a chance was offered by the question of the right to tax America. The notion that England was justified in throwing on America part of the expenses caused in the late war was popular in the country, and no one adopted it more pertinaciously then George III. At the bottom the position which he assumed was as contrary to the principles of parliamentary government as the encroachments of Charles I. had been. But it was veiled in the eyes of Englishmen by the prominence given to the power of the British parliament rather than to the power of the British king. In fact the theory of parliamentary government, like most theories after their truth has long been universally acknowledged, had become a superstition. Parliaments were held to be properly vested with authority, not because they adequately represented the national will, but simply because they were parliaments. There were thousands of people in England to whom it never occurred that there was any good reason why a British parliament should be allowed to levy a duty on tea in the London docks and should not be allowed to levy a duty on tea at the wharves of Boston. Undoubtedly George III. derived great strength from his honest participation in this mistake. Contending under parliamentary forms, he did not wound the susceptibilities of members of parliament, and when at last in 1770 he appointed Lord North—a minister of his own selection—prime minister, the object of his ambition was achieved with the concurrence of a large body of politicians who had nothing in common with the servile band of the king’s friends.

As long as the struggle with America was carried on with any hope of success they gained that kind of support which is always forthcoming to a government which shares in the errors and prejudices of its subjects. The expulsion of Wilkes from the House of Commons in 1769, and the refusal of the House to accept him as a member after his re-election, raised a grave constitutional question in which the king was wholly in the wrong; and Wilkes was popular in London and Middlesex. But his case roused no national indignation, and when in 1774 those sharp measures were taken with Boston which led to the commencement of the American rebellion in 1775, the opposition to the course taken by the king made little way either in parliament or in the country. Burke might point out the folly and inexpedience of the proceedings of the government. Chatham might point out that the true spirit of English government was to be representative, and that that spirit was being violated at home and abroad. George III., who thought that the first duty of the Americans was to obey himself, had on his side the mass of unreflecting Englishmen who thought that the first duty of all colonists was to be useful and submissive to the mother-country. The natural dislike of every country engaged in war to see itself defeated was on his side, and when the news of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga arrived in 1777, subscriptions of money to raise new regiments poured freely in.

In March 1778 the French ambassador in London announced that a treaty of friendship and commerce had been concluded between France and the new United States of America. Lord North was anxious to resign power into stronger hands, and begged the king to receive Chatham as his prime minister. The king would not hear of it. He would have nothing to say to “that perfidious man” unless he would humble himself to enter the ministry as North’s subordinate. Chatham naturally refused to do anything of the kind, and his death in the course of the year relieved the king of the danger of being again overruled by too overbearing a minister. England was now at war with France, and in 1779 she was also at war with Spain.

George III. was still able to control the disposition of office. He could not control the course of events. His very ministers gave up the struggle as hopeless long before he would acknowledge the true state of the case. Before the end of 1779, two of the leading members of the cabinet, Lords Gower and Weymouth, resigned rather than bear the responsibility of so ruinous an enterprise as the attempt to overpower America and France together. Lord North retained office, but he acknowledged to the king that his own opinion was precisely the same as that of his late colleagues.

The year 1780 saw an agitation rising in the country for economical reform, an agitation very closely though indirectly connected with the war policy of the king. The public meetings held in the country on this subject have no unimportant place in the development of the constitution. Since the presentation of the Kentish petition in the reign of William III. there had been from time to time upheavings of popular feeling against the doings of the legislature, which kept up the tradition that parliament existed in order to represent the nation. But these upheavings had all been so associated with ignorance and violence as to make it very difficult for men of sense to look with displeasure upon the existing emancipation of the House of Commons from popular control. The Sacheverell riots, the violent attacks upon the Excise Bill, the no less violent advocacy of the Spanish War, the declamations of the supporters of Wilkes at a more recent time, and even in this very year the Gordon riots, were not likely to make thoughtful men anxious to place real power in the hands of the classes from whom such exhibitions of folly proceeded. But the movement for economical reform was of a very different kind. It was carried on soberly in manner, and with a definite practical object. It asked for no more than the king ought to have been willing to concede. It attacked useless expenditure upon sinecures and unnecessary offices in the household, the only use of which was to spread abroad corruption amongst the upper classes. George III. could not bear to be interfered with at all, or to surrender any element of power which had served him in his long struggle with the Whigs. He held out for more than another year. The news of the capitulation of Yorktown reached London on the 25th of November 1781. On the 20th of March 1782 Lord North resigned.

George III. accepted the consequences of defeat. He called the marquis of Rockingham to office at the head of a ministry composed of pure Whigs and of the disciples of the late earl of Chatham, and he authorized the new ministry to open negotiations for peace. Their hands were greatly strengthened by Rodney’s victory over the French fleet, and the failure of the combined French and Spanish attack upon Gibraltar; and before the end of 1782 a provisional treaty was signed with America, preliminaries of peace with France and Spain being signed early in the following year. On the 3rd of September 1783 the definitive treaties with the three countries were simultaneously concluded. “Sir,” said the king to John Adams, the first minister of the United States of America accredited to him, “I wish you to believe, and that it may be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation: but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.”

Long before the signature of the treaties Rockingham died (July 1, 1782). The king chose Lord Shelburne, the head of the Chatham section of the government, to be prime minister. Fox and the followers of Rockingham refused to serve except under the duke of Portland, a minister of their own selection, and resigned office. The old constitutional struggle of the reign was now to be fought out once more. Fox, too weak to obtain a majority alone, coalesced with Lord North, and defeated Shelburne in the House of Commons on the 27th of February 1783. On the 2nd of April the coalition took office, with Portland as nominal prime minister, and Fox and North the secretaries of state as its real heads.

This attempt to impose upon him a ministry which he disliked made the king very angry. But the new cabinet had a large majority in the House of Commons, and the only chance of resisting it lay in an appeal to the country against the House of Commons. Such an appeal was not likely to be responded to unless the ministers discredited themselves with the nation. George III. therefore waited his time. Though a coalition between men bitterly opposed to one another in all political principles and drawn together by nothing but love of office was in itself discreditable, it needed some more positive cause of dissatisfaction to arouse the constituencies, which were by no means so ready to interfere in political disputes at that time as they are now. Such dissatisfaction was given by the India Bill, drawn up by Burke. As soon as it had passed through the Commons the king hastened to procure its rejection in the House of Lords by his personal intervention with the peers. He authorized Lord Temple to declare in his name that he would count any peer who voted for the bill as his enemy. On the 17th of December 1783 the bill was thrown out. The next day ministers were dismissed. William Pitt became prime minister. After some weeks’ struggle with a constantly decreasing majority in the Commons, the king dissolved parliament on the 25th of March 1784. The country rallied round the crown and the young minister, and Pitt was firmly established in office.

There can be no reasonable doubt[1] that Pitt not only took advantage of the king’s intervention in the Lords, but was cognizant of the intrigue before it was actually carried out. It was upon him, too, that the weight of reconciling the country to an administration formed under such circumstances lay. The general result, so far as George III. was concerned, was that to all outward appearance he had won the great battle of his life. It was he who was to appoint the prime minister, not any clique resting on a parliamentary support. But the circumstances under which the victory was won were such as to place the constitution in a position very different from that in which it would have been if the victory had been gained earlier in the reign. Intrigue there was indeed in 1783 and 1784 as there had been twenty years before. Parliamentary support was conciliated by Pitt by the grant of royal favours as it had been in the days of Bute. The actual blow was struck by a most questionable message to individual peers. But the main result of the whole political situation was that George III. had gone a long way towards disentangling the reality of parliamentary government from its accidents. His ministry finally stood because it had appealed to the constituencies against their representatives. Since then it has properly become a constitutional axiom that no such appeal should be made by the crown itself. But it may reasonably be doubted whether any one but the king was at that time capable of making the appeal. Lord Shelburne, the leader of the ministry expelled by the coalition, was unpopular in the country, and the younger Pitt had not had time to make his great abilities known beyond a limited circle. The real question for the constitutional historian to settle is not whether under ordinary circumstances a king is the proper person to place himself really as well as nominally at the head of the government; but whether under the special circumstances which existed in 1783 it was not better that the king should call upon the people to support him, than that government should be left in the hands of men who rested their power on close boroughs and the dispensation of patronage, without looking beyond the walls of the House of Commons for support.

That the king gained credit far beyond his own deserts by the glories of Pitt’s ministry is beyond a doubt. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that his own example of domestic propriety did much to strengthen the position of his minister. It is true that that life was insufferably dull. No gleams of literary or artistic taste lightened it up. The dependants of the court became inured to dull routine unchequered by loving sympathy. The sons of the household were driven by the sheer weariness of such an existence into the coarsest profligacy. But all this was not visible from a distance. The tide of moral and religious improvement which had set in in England since the days of Wesley brought popularity to a king who was faithful to his wife, in the same way that the tide of manufacturing industry and scientific progress brought popularity to the minister who in some measure translated into practice the principles of the Wealth of Nations.

Nor were there wanting subjects of importance beyond the circle of politics in which George III. showed a lively interest. The voyages of discovery which made known so large a part of the islands and coasts of the Pacific Ocean received from him a warm support. In the early days of the Royal Academy, its finances were strengthened by liberal grants from the privy purse. His favourite pursuit, however, was farming. When Arthur Young was issuing his Annals of Agriculture, he was supplied with information by the king, under the assumed name of Mr Ralph Robinson, relating to a farm at Petersham.

The life of the king was suddenly clouded over. Early in his reign, in 1765, he had been out of health, and—though the fact was studiously concealed at the time—symptoms of mental aberration were even then to be perceived. In October 1788 he was again out of health, and in the beginning of the following month his insanity was beyond a doubt. Whilst Pitt and Fox were contending in the House of Commons over the terms on which the regency should be committed to the prince of Wales, the king was a helpless victim to the ignorance of physicians and the brutalities of his servants. At last Dr Willis, who had made himself a name by prescribing gentleness instead of rigour in the treatment of the insane, was called in. Under his more humane management the king rapidly recovered. Before the end of February 1789 he was able to write to Pitt thanking him for his warm support of his interests during his illness. On the 23rd of April he went in person to St Paul’s to return thanks for his recovery.

The popular enthusiasm which burst forth around St Paul’s was but a foretaste of a popularity far more universal. The French Revolution frightened the great Whig landowners till they made their peace with the king. Those who thought that the true basis of government was aristocratical were now of one mind with those who thought that the true basis of government was monarchical; and these two classes were joined by a far larger multitude which had no political ideas whatever, but which had a moral horror of the guillotine. As Elizabeth had once been the symbol of resistance to Spain, George was now the symbol of resistance to France. He was not, however, more than the symbol. He allowed Pitt to levy taxes and incur debt, to launch armies to defeat, and to prosecute the English imitators of French revolutionary courses. At last, however, after the Union with Ireland was accomplished, he learned that Pitt was planning a scheme to relieve the Catholics from the disabilities under which they laboured. The plan was revealed to him by the chancellor, Lord Loughborough, a selfish and intriguing politician who had served all parties in turn, and who sought to forward his own interests by falling in with the king’s prejudices. George III. at once took up the position from which he never swerved. He declared that to grant concessions to the Catholics involved a breach of his coronation oath. No one has ever doubted that the king was absolutely convinced of the serious nature of the objection. Nor can there be any doubt that he had the English people behind him. Both in his peace ministry and in his war ministry Pitt had taken his stand on royal favour and on popular support. Both failed him alike now, and he resigned office at once. The shock to the king’s mind was so great that it brought on a fresh attack of insanity. This time, however, the recovery was rapid. On the 14th of March 1801 Pitt’s resignation was formally accepted, and the late speaker, Mr Addington, was installed in office as prime minister.

The king was well pleased with the change. He was never capable of appreciating high merit in any one; and he was unable to perceive that the question on which Pitt had resigned was more than an improper question, with which he ought never to have meddled. “Tell him,” he said, in directing his physician to inform Pitt of his restoration to health, “I am now quite well, quite recovered from my illness; but what has he not to answer for, who has been the cause of my having been ill at all?” Addington was a minister after his own mind. Thoroughly honest and respectable, with about the same share of abilities as was possessed by the king himself, he was certainly not likely to startle the world by any flights of genius. But for one circumstance Addington’s ministry would have lasted long. So strong was the reaction against the Revolution that the bulk of the nation was almost as suspicious of genius as the king himself. Not only was there no outcry for legislative reforms, but the very idea of reform was unpopular. The country gentlemen were predominant in parliament, and the country gentlemen as a body looked upon Addington with respect and affection. Such a minister was therefore admirably suited to preside over affairs at home in the existing state of opinion. But those who were content with inaction at home would not be content with inaction abroad. In time of peace Addington would have been popular for a season. In time of war even his warmest admirers could not say that he was the man to direct armies in the most terrible struggle which had ever been conducted by an English government.

For the moment this difficulty was not felt. On the 1st of October 1801, preliminaries of peace were signed between England and France, to be converted into the definitive peace of Amiens on the 27th of March 1802. The ruler of France was now Napoleon Bonaparte, and few persons in England believed that he had any real purpose of bringing his aggressive violence to an end. “Do you know what I call this peace?” said the king; “an experimental peace, for it is nothing else. But it was unavoidable.”

The king was right. On the 18th of May 1803 the declaration of war was laid before parliament. The war was accepted by all classes as inevitable, and the French preparations for an invasion of England roused the whole nation to a glow of enthusiasm only equalled by that felt when the Armada threatened its shores. On the 26th of October the king reviewed the London volunteers in Hyde Park. He found himself the centre of a great national movement with which he heartily sympathized, and which heartily sympathized with him.

On the 12th of February 1804 the king’s mind was again affected. When he recovered, he found himself in the midst of a ministerial crisis. Public feeling allowed but one opinion to prevail in the country—that Pitt, not Addington, was the proper man to conduct the administration in time of war. Pitt was anxious to form an administration on a broad basis, including Fox and all prominent leaders of both parties. The king would not hear of the admission of Fox. His dislike of him was personal as well as political, as he knew that Fox had had a great share in drawing the prince of Wales into a life of profligacy. Pitt accepted the king’s terms, and formed an administration in which he was the only man of real ability. Eminent men, such as Lord Grenville, refused to join a ministry from which the king had excluded a great statesman on purely personal grounds.

The whole question was reopened on Pitt’s death on the 23rd of January 1806. This time the king gave way. The ministry of All the Talents, as it was called, included Fox amongst its members. At first the king was observed to appear depressed at the necessity of surrender. But Fox’s charm of manner soon gained upon him. “Mr Fox,” said the king, “I little thought that you and I should ever meet again in this place; but I have no desire to look back upon old grievances, and you may rest assured I never shall remind you of them.” On the 13th of September Fox died, and it was not long before the king and the ministry were openly in collision. The ministry proposed a measure enabling all subjects of the crown to serve in the army and navy in spite of religious disqualifications. The king objected even to so slight a modification of the laws against the Catholics and Dissenters, and the ministers consented to drop the bill. The king asked more than this. He demanded a written and positive engagement that this ministry would never, under any circumstances, propose to him “any measure of concession to the Catholics, or even connected with the question.” The ministers very properly refused to bind themselves for the future. They were consequently turned out of office, and a new ministry was formed with the duke of Portland as first lord of the treasury and Mr Perceval as its real leader. The spirit of the new ministry was distinct hostility to the Catholic claims. On the 27th of April 1807 a dissolution of parliament was announced, and a majority in favour of the king’s ministry was returned in the elections which speedily followed.

The elections of 1807, like the elections of 1784, gave the king the mastery of the situation. In other respects they were the counterpart of one another. In 1784 the country declared, though perhaps without any clear conception of what it was doing, for a wise and progressive policy. In 1807 it declared for an unwise and retrogressive policy, with a very clear understanding of what it meant. It is in his reliance upon the prejudices and ignorance of the country that the constitutional significance of the reign of George III. appears. Every strong government derives its power from its representative character. At a time when the House of Commons was less really representative than at any other, a king was on the throne who represented the country in its good and bad qualities alike, in its hatred of revolutionary violence, its moral sturdiness, its contempt of foreigners, and its defiance of all ideas which were in any way strange. Therefore it was that his success was not permanently injurious to the working of the constitution as the success of Charles I. would have been. If he were followed by a king less English than himself, the strength of representative power would pass into other hands than those which held the sceptre.

The overthrow of the ministry of All the Talents was the last political act of constitutional importance in which George III. took part. The substitution of Perceval for Portland as the nominal head of the ministry in 1809 was not an event of any real significance, and in 1811 the reign practically came to an end. The king’s reason finally broke down after the death of the princess Amelia, his favourite child; and the prince of Wales (see GEORGE IV.) became prince regent. The remaining nine years of George III.’s life were passed in insanity and blindness, and he died on the 29th of January 1820.

His wife, Charlotte Sophia (1744-1818), was a daughter of Charles Louis of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (d. 1816), and was married to the king in London on the 8th of September 1761. After a peaceful and happy married life the queen died at Kew on the 17th of November 1818.

George III. had nine sons. After his successor came Frederick, duke of York and Albany (1763-1827); William Henry, duke of Clarence, afterwards King William IV. (1765-1837); Edward Augustus, duke of Kent (1767-1825), father of Queen Victoria; Ernest Augustus, duke of Cumberland, afterwards king of Hanover (1771-1851); Augustus Frederick, duke of Sussex (1773-1843); Adolphus Frederick, duke of Cambridge (1774-1850); Octavius (1779-1783); Alfred (1780-1782). He had also six daughters—Charlotte Augusta (1766-1828), married in 1797 to Frederick, afterwards king of Württemberg; Augusta Sophia (1768-1840); Elizabeth (1770-1840), married Frederick, landgrave of Hesse-Homburg, 1818; Mary (1776-1857), married to William Frederick, duke of Gloucester, 1816; Sophia (1777-1848); Amelia (1783-1810).

(S. R. G.)

The numerous contemporary memoirs and diaries are full of the best material for a picture of George III.’s reign, apart from the standard histories. Thackeray’s Four Georges must not be trusted so far as historical judgment is concerned; Jesse’s Memoirs of the Life and Reign of George III. (2nd ed., 1867) is chiefly concerned with personalities. See also Beckles Willson, George III., as Man, Monarch and Statesman (1907).

[1] See Lord Fitzmaurice’s Life of Shelburne, iii. 393.

GEORGE IV. [George Augustus Frederick] (1762-1830), king of Great Britain and Ireland, eldest son of George III., was born at St James’s Palace, London, on the 12th of August 1762. He was naturally gifted, was well taught in the classics, learnt to speak French, Italian and German fluently, and had considerable taste for music and the arts; and in person he was remarkably handsome. His tutor, Bishop Richard Hurd, said of him when fifteen years old that he would be “either the most polished gentleman or the most accomplished blackguard in Europe—possibly both”; and the latter prediction was only too fully justified. Reaction from the strict and parsimonious style of his parents’ domestic life, which was quite out of touch with the gaiety and extravagance of London “society,” had its natural effect in plunging the young prince of Wales, flattered and courted as he was, into a whirl of pleasure-seeking. At the outset his disposition was brilliant and generous, but it was essentially unstable, and he started even before he came of age on a career of dissipation which in later years became wholly profligate. He had an early amour with the actress Mary (“Perdita”) Robinson, and in the choice of his friends he opposed and annoyed the king, with whom he soon became (and always remained) on the worst of terms, by associating himself with Fox and Sheridan and the Whig party. When in 1783 he came of age, a compromise between the coalition ministry and the king secured him an income of £50,000 from the Civil List, and £60,000 was voted by parliament to pay his debts and start his separate establishment at Carlton House. There, under the auspices of C.J. Fox and Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, he posed as a patron of Whig politics and a leader in all the licence and luxury of gay society—the “First gentleman in Europe,” as his flatterers described him as years went on. And at this early age he fell seriously in love with the famous Mrs Fitzherbert.

His long connexion with this lady may most conveniently be summarized here. It was indeed for some time the one redeeming and restraining factor in his life, though her devotion and self-sacrificing conduct were in marked contrast with his unscrupulousness and selfishness. Mary Anne (or as she always called herself, Maria) Fitzherbert (1756-1837) was the daughter of Walter Smythe, the second son of Sir John Smythe, Bart., of Acton Burnell Park, Shropshire, and came of an old Roman Catholic family. Educated at a French convent, she married first in 1775 Edward Weld, who died within the year, and secondly in 1778 Thomas Fitzherbert, who died in 1781, leaving his widow with a comfortable fortune. A couple of years later she became a prominent figure in London society, and her beauty and charm at once attracted the young prince, who wooed her with all the ardour of a violent passion. She herself was distracted between her desire to return his love, her refusal to contemplate becoming his mistress, and her knowledge that state reasons made a regular marriage impossible. The Act of Settlement (1689) entailed his forfeiture of the succession if he married a Roman Catholic, apart from the fact that the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 made any marriage illegal without the king’s consent, which was out of the question. But after trying for a while to escape his attentions, her scruples were overcome. In Mrs Fitzherbert’s eyes the state law was, after all, not everything. To a Roman Catholic, and equally to any member of the Christian church, a formal marriage ceremony would be ecclesiastically and sacramentally binding; and after a period of passionate importunacy on his part they were secretly married by the Rev. R. Burt, a clergyman of the Church of England, on the 15th of December 1785.[1] There is no doubt as to Mrs Fitzherbert’s belief, supported by ecclesiastical considerations, in her correct and binding, though admittedly illegal, relationship to the prince as his canonical wife; and though that relationship was not, and for political reasons could not be, publicly admitted, it was in fact treated by their intimates on the footing of a morganatic marriage. The position nevertheless was inevitably a false one; Mrs Fitzherbert had promised not to publish the evidence of the marriage (which, according to a strict interpretation of the Act of Settlement might have barred succession to the crown), and the rumours which soon got about led the prince to allow it to be disavowed by his political friends. He lived in the most extravagant way, became heavily involved in debt, and as the king would not assist him, shut up Carlton House, and went to live with Mrs Fitzherbert at Brighton. In 1787 a proposal was brought before the House of Commons by Alderman Newnham for a grant in relief of his embarrassments. It was on this occasion that Fox publicly declared in the House of Commons, as on the prince’s own authority, in answer to allusions to the marriage, that the story was a malicious falsehood. A little later Sheridan, in deference to Mrs Fitzherbert’s pressure and to the prince’s own compunction, made a speech guardedly modifying Fox’s statement; but though in private the denial was understood, it effected its object, the House voting a grant of £221,000 to the prince and the king adding £10,000 to his income; and Mrs Fitzherbert, who at first thought of severing her connexion with the prince, forgave him. Their union—there was no child of the marriage—was brutally broken off in June 1794 by the prince, when further pressure of debts (and the influence of a new Egeria in Lady Jersey) made him contemplate his official marriage with princess Caroline; in 1800, however, it was renewed, after urgent pleading on the prince’s part, and after Mrs Fitzherbert had obtained a formal decision from the pope pronouncing her to be his wife, and sanctioning her taking him back; her influence over him continued till shortly before the prince became regent, when his relations with Lady Hertford brought about a final separation. For the best years of his life he had at least had in Mrs Fitzherbert the nearest approach to a real wife, and this was fully recognized by the royal family.[2] But his dissolute nature was entirely selfish, and his various liaisons ended in the dominance of Lady Conyngham, the “Lady Steward” of his household, from 1821 till his death.

Notorious as the prince of Wales had become by 1788, it was in that year that his father’s first attack of insanity made his position in the state one of peculiar importance. Fox maintained and Pitt denied that the prince of Wales, as the heir-apparent, had a right to assume the regency independently of any parliamentary vote. Pitt, with the support of both Houses, proposed to confer upon him the regency with certain restrictions. The recovery of the king in February 1789 put an end, however, to the prince’s hopes. In 1794 the prince consented to a marriage with a German Protestant princess, because his father would not pay his debts on any other terms, and his cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick, was brought over from Germany and married to him in 1795. Her behaviour was light and flippant, and he was brutal and unloving. The ill-assorted pair soon parted, and soon after the birth of their only child, the princess Charlotte, they were formally separated. With great unwillingness the House of Commons voted fresh sums of money to pay the prince’s debts.

In 1811 he at last became prince regent in consequence of his father’s definite insanity. No one doubted at that time that it was in his power to change the ministry at his pleasure. He had always lived in close connexion with the Whig opposition, and he now empowered Lord Grenville to form a ministry. There soon arose differences of opinion between them on the answer to be returned to the address of the Houses, and the prince regent then informed the prime minister, Mr Perceval, that he should continue the existing ministry in office. The ground alleged by him for this desertion of his friends was the fear lest his father’s recovery might be rendered impossible if he should come to hear of the advent of the opposition to power. Lord Wellesley’s resignation in February 1812 made the reconstruction of the ministry inevitable. As there was no longer any hope of the king’s recovery, the former objection to a Whig administration no longer existed. Instead of taking the course of inviting the Whigs to take office, he asked them to join the existing administration. The Whig leaders, however, refused to join, on the ground that the question of the Catholic disabilities was too important to be shelved, and that their difference of opinion with Mr Perceval was too glaring to be ignored. The prince regent was excessively angry, and continued Perceval in office till that minister’s assassination on the 11th of May, when he was succeeded by Lord Liverpool, after a negotiation in which the proposition of entering the cabinet was again made to the Whigs and rejected by them. In the military glories of the following years the prince regent had no share. When the allied sovereigns visited England in 1814, he played the part of host to perfection. So great was his unpopularity at home that hisses were heard in the streets as he accompanied his guests into the city. The disgust which his profligate and luxurious life caused amongst a people suffering from almost universal distress after the conclusion of the war rapidly increased. In 1817 the windows of the prince regent’s carriage were broken as he was on his way to open parliament.

The death of George III. on the 29th of January 1820, gave to his son the title of king without in any way altering the position which he had now held for nine years. Indirectly, however, this change brought out a manifestation of popular feeling such as his father had never been subjected to even in the early days of his reign, when mobs were burning jack-boots and petticoats. The relations between the new king and his wife unavoidably became the subject of public discussion. In 1806 a charge against the princess of having given birth to an illegitimate child had been conclusively disproved, and the old king had consequently refused to withdraw her daughter, the princess Charlotte, from her custody. When in the regency the prince was able to interfere, and prohibited his wife from seeing her daughter more than once a fortnight. On this, in 1813, the princess addressed to her husband a letter setting forth her complaints, and receiving no answer published it in the Morning Chronicle. The prince regent then referred the letter, together with all papers relating to the inquiry of 1806, to a body of twenty-three privy councillors for an opinion whether it was fit that the restrictions on the intercourse between the princess Charlotte and her mother should continue in force. All except two answered as the regent wished them to answer. But if the official leaning was towards the husband, the leaning of the general public was towards the wife of a man whose own life had not been such as to justify him in complaining of her whom he had thrust from him without a charge of any kind. Addresses of sympathy were sent up to the princess from the city of London and other public bodies. The discord again broke out in 1814 in consequence of the exclusion of the princess from court during the visit of the allied sovereigns. In August in that year she left England, and after a little time took up her abode in Italy. The accession of George IV. brought matters to a crisis. He ordered that no prayer for his wife as queen should be admitted into the Prayer Book. She at once challenged the accusation which was implied in this omission by returning to England. On the 7th of June she arrived in London. Before she left the continent she had been informed that proceedings would be taken against her for adultery if she landed in England. Two years before, in 1818, commissioners had been sent to Milan to investigate charges against her, and their report, laid before the cabinet in 1819, was made the basis of the prosecution. On the day on which she arrived in London a message was laid before both Houses recommending the criminating evidence to parliament. A secret committee in the House of Lords after considering this evidence brought in a report on which the prime minister founded a Bill of Pains and Penalties to divorce the queen and to deprive her of her royal title. The bill passed the three readings with diminished majorities, and when on the third reading it obtained only a majority of nine, it was abandoned by the Government. The king’s unpopularity, great as it had been before, was now greater than ever. Public opinion, without troubling itself to ask whether the queen was guilty or not, was roused to indignation by the spectacle of such a charge being brought by a husband who had thrust away his wife to fight the battle of life alone, without protection or support, and who, whilst surrounding her with spies to detect, perhaps to invent, her acts of infidelity, was himself notorious for his adulterous life. In the following year (1821) she attempted to force her way into Westminster Abbey to take her place at the coronation. On this occasion the popular support failed her; and her death in August relieved the king from further annoyance.

Immediately after the death of the queen, the king set out for Ireland. He remained there but a short time, and his effusive declaration that rank, station, honours were nothing compared with the exalted happiness of living in the hearts of his Irish subjects gained him a momentary popularity which was beyond his attainment in a country where he was better known. His reception in Dublin encouraged him to attempt a visit to Edinburgh in the following year (August 1822). Since Charles II. had come to play the sorry part of a covenanting king in 1650 no sovereign of the country had set foot on Scottish soil. Sir Walter Scott took the leading part in organizing his reception. The enthusiasm with which he was received equalled, if it did not surpass, the enthusiasm with which he had been received in Dublin. But the qualities which enabled him to fix the fleeting sympathies of the moment were not such as would enable him to exercise the influence in the government which had been indubitably possessed by his father. He returned from Edinburgh to face the question of the appointment of a secretary of state which had been raised by the death of Lord Londonderry (Castlereagh). It was upon the question of the appointment of ministers that the battle between the Whigs and the king had been fought in the reign of George III. George IV. had neither the firmness nor the moral weight to hold the reins which his father had grasped. He disliked Canning for having taken his wife’s side very much as his father had disliked Fox for taking his own. But Lord Liverpool insisted on Canning’s admission to office, and the king gave way. Tacitly and without a struggle the constitutional victory of the last reign was surrendered. But it was not surrendered to the same foe as that from which it had been won. The coalition ministry in 1784 rested on the great landowners and the proprietors of rotten boroughs. Lord Liverpool’s ministry had hitherto not been very enlightened, and it supported itself to a great extent upon a narrow constituency. But it did appeal to public opinion in a way that the coalition did not, and what it wanted itself in popular support would be supplied by its successors. What one king had gained from a clique another gave up to the nation. Once more, on Lord Liverpool’s death in 1827, the same question was tried with the same result. The king not only disliked Canning personally, but he was opposed to Canning’s policy. Yet after some hesitation he accepted Canning as prime minister; and when, after Canning’s death and the short ministry of Lord Goderich, the king in 1828 authorized the duke of Wellington to form a ministry, he was content to lay down the principle that the members of it were not expected to be unanimous on the Catholic question. When in 1829 the Wellington ministry unexpectedly proposed to introduce a Bill to remove the disabilities of the Catholics, he feebly strove against the proposal and quickly withdrew his opposition. The worn-out debauchee had neither the merit of acquiescing in the change nor the courage to resist it.

George IV. died on the 26th of June 1830, and was succeeded by his brother, the duke of Clarence, as William IV. His only child by Queen Caroline, the princess Charlotte Augusta, was married in 1816 to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, afterwards king of the Belgians, and died in childbirth on the 6th of November 1817.

George IV. was a bad king, and his reign did much to disgust the country with the Georgian type of monarchy; but libertine and profligate as he became, the abuse which has been lavished on his personal character has hardly taken into sufficient consideration the loose morals of contemporary society, the political position of the Whig party, and his own ebullient temperament. Thackeray, in his Four Georges, is frequently unfair in this respect. The just condemnation of the moralist and satirist requires some qualification in the light of the picture of the period handed down in the memoirs and diaries of the time, such as Greville’s, Croker’s, Creevey’s, Lord Holland’s, Lord Malmesbury’s, &c. Among later works see The First Gentleman of Europe, by Lewis Melville (1906), a book for the general reader.

(S. R. G.; H. Ch.)

[1] For a discussion of the ecclesiastical validity of the marriage see W.H. Wilkins, Mrs Fitzherbert and George IV. (1905), chs. vi. and vii.

[2] Mrs Fitzherbert herself, after her final separation from the prince, with an annuity of £6000 a year, lived an honoured and more or less retired life mainly at Brighton, a town which owed its rapid development in fashionable popularity and material wealth to its selection by the prince and herself as a residence from the earliest years of their union; and there she died, seven years after the death of George IV., in 1837. William IV. on his accession offered to create her a duchess, but she declined; she accepted, however, his permission to put her servants in royal livery. William IV. in fact did all he could, short of a public acknowledgment (which the duke of Wellington opposed on state grounds), to recognize her position as his brother’s widow. Charles Greville, writing of her after her death, says in his Diary, “She was not a clever woman, but of a very noble spirit, disinterested, generous, honest and affectionate.” The actual existence of a marriage tie and the documentary evidence of her rights were not definitely established for many years; but in 1905 a sealed packet, deposited at Coutts’s bank in 1833, was at length opened by royal permission, and the marriage certificate and other conclusive proofs therein contained were published in Mr W.H. Wilkins’s Mrs Fitzherbert and George IV. In 1796 the prince had made a remarkable will in Mrs Fitzherbert’s favour, which he gave her in 1799, and it is included among these documents (now in the private archives at Windsor). In this he speaks of her emphatically throughout as “my wife.” It also contained directions that at his death a locket with her miniature, which he always wore, should be interred with him; and Mrs Fitzherbert was privately assured, on the duke of Wellington’s authority, that when the king was buried at Windsor the miniature was on his breast.

GEORGE V. [George Frederick Ernest Albert], king of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, emperor of India (1865-  ), second son of King Edward VII., was born at Marlborough House, London, on the 3rd of June 1865. When four years old, he and his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, two years his senior, were placed under the tutorship of John Neale Dalton, then curate of Sandringham. In 1877 the two princes became naval cadets on the “Britannia” at Spithead, where they passed through the ordinary curriculum, and in 1879 they joined H.M.S. “Bacchante” under the command of Captain Lord Charles Scott, making a voyage to the West Indies, in the course of which they were rated midshipmen. After a month at home in 1880 they returned to the ship to make another prolonged cruise in H.M.S. “Bacchante,” in the course of which they visited South America, South Africa, Australia, the Fiji Islands, Japan, Ceylon, Egypt, Palestine and Greece. A narrative of this voyage, The Cruise of H.M.S. “Bacchante,” compiled from the letters, diaries and notebooks of the princes, was published in 1886. At the close of this tour in 1882 the brothers separated. Prince George, who remained in the naval service, was appointed to H.M.S. “Canada,” commanded by Captain Durrant, on the North American and West Indian station, and was promoted sub-lieutenant. On his return home he passed through the Royal Naval College at Greenwich and the gunnery and torpedo schools, being promoted lieutenant in 1885. A year later he was appointed to H.M.S. “Thunderer” of the Mediterranean squadron, and was subsequently transferred to H.M.S. “Dreadnaught” and H.M.S. “Alexandra.” In 1889 he joined the flagship of the Channel squadron, H.M.S. “Northumberland,” and in that year was in command of torpedo boat No. 79 for the naval manœuvres. In 1890 he was put in command of the gunboat H.M.S. “Thrush” for service on the North American and West Indian station. After his promotion as commander in 1891 he commissioned H.M.S. “Melampus,” the command of which he relinquished on the death of his brother, Albert Victor, the duke of Clarence, in January 1892, since his duties as eventual heir to the crown precluded him from devoting himself exclusively to the navy. He was promoted captain in 1893, rear-admiral in 1901, and vice-admiral in 1903. He was created duke of York, earl of Inverness, and Baron Killarney in 1892, and on the 6th of July 1893 he married Princess Victoria Mary (b. 26th May 1867), daughter of Francis, duke of Teck, and Princess Mary Adelaide, duchess of Teck, daughter of Adolphus Frederick, duke of Cambridge. Their eldest son, Prince Edward Albert, was born at White Lodge, Richmond, on the 23rd of June 1894; Prince Albert Frederick George was born at Sandringham on the 14th of December 1895; Princess Victoria Alexandra on the 25th of April 1897; Prince Henry William Frederick Albert on the 31st of March 1900; Prince George Edward Alexander Edmund on the 20th of December 1902; and Prince John Charles Francis on the 12th of July 1905. The duke and duchess of York visited Ireland in 1899, and it had been arranged before the death of Queen Victoria that they should make a tour in the colonies. On the accession of King Edward VII. (1901) this plan was confirmed. They sailed in the “Ophir” on the 16th of March 1901, travelling by the ordinary route, and landed at Melbourne in May, when they opened the first parliament of the Commonwealth. They then proceeded to New Zealand, returning by way of South Africa and Canada. An official account of the tour was published by Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace as The Web of Empire (1902). In November 1901 the duke was created prince of Wales. On the death of Edward VII. (May 6, 1910) he succeeded to the Crown as George V., his consort taking the style of Queen Mary.

GEORGE V., king of Hanover (1819-1878), was the only son of Ernest Augustus, king of Hanover and duke of Cumberland, and consequently a grandson of the English king George III. Born in Berlin on the 27th of May 1819, his youth was passed in England and in Berlin until 1837, when his father became king of Hanover and he took up his residence in that country. He lost the sight of one eye during a childish illness, and the other by an accident in 1833. Being thus totally blind there were doubts whether he was qualified to succeed to the government of Hanover; but his father decided that he should do so, as the law of the dissolved empire only excluded princes who were born blind. This decision was a fatal one to the dynasty. Both from his father and from his maternal uncle, Charles Frederick, prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1785-1837), one of the most influential men at the Prussian court, George had learned to take a very high and autocratic view of royal authority. His blindness prevented him from acquiring the shrewdness and knowledge of the world which had assisted his father, and he easily fell into the hands of unwise, and perhaps dishonest and disloyal, advisers. A man of deep religious feeling, he formed a fantastic conception of the place assigned to the house of Guelph in the divine economy, and had ideas of founding a great Guelph state in Europe. It is, therefore, not surprising that from the time of his accession in November 1851 he was constantly engaged in disputes with his Landtag or parliament, and was consequently in a weak and perilous position when the crisis in the affairs of Germany came in 1866. Having supported Austria in the diet of the German confederation in June 1866, he refused, contrary to the wishes of his parliament, to assent to the Prussian demand that Hanover should observe an unarmed neutrality during the war. As a result his country and his capital were at once occupied by the Prussians, to whom his army surrendered on the 29th of June 1866, and in the following September Hanover was formally annexed by Prussia. From his retreat at Hietzing near Vienna, George appealed in vain to the powers of Europe; and supported by a large number of his subjects, an agitation was carried on which for a time caused some embarrassment to Prussia. All these efforts, however, to bring about a restoration were unavailing, and the king passed the remainder of his life at Gmünden in Austria, or in France, refusing to the last to be reconciled with the Prussian government. Whilst visiting Paris for medical advice he died in that city on the 12th of June 1878, and was buried in St George’s chapel, Windsor. In February 1843 he had married Marie, daughter of Joseph, duke of Saxe-Altenburg, by whom he left a son and two daughters. His son, Ernest Augustus, duke of Cumberland (b. 1845), continued to maintain the claim of his house to the kingdom of Hanover.

By the capitulation of 1866 the king was allowed to retain his personal property, which included money and securities equal to nearly £1,500,000, which had been sent to England before the Prussian invasion of Hanover. The crown jewels had also been secretly conveyed to England. His valuable plate, which had been hidden at Herrenhausen, was restored to him in 1867; his palace at Herrenhausen, near Hanover, was reserved as his property; and in 1867 the Prussian government agreed to compensate him for the loss of his landed estates, but owing to his continued hostility the payment of the interest on this sum was suspended in the following year (see [Hanover]).

See O. Klopp, König Georg V. (Hanover, 1878); O. Theodor, Erinnerungen an Georg V. (Bremerhaven, 1878); and O. Meding, Memoiren zur Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig, 1881-1884).

GEORGE I., king of the Hellenes (1845-  ), second son of King Christian IX. of Denmark, was born at Copenhagen on the 24th of December 1845. After the expulsion of King Otho in 1862, the Greek nation, by a plebiscite, elected the British prince, Alfred, duke of Edinburgh (subsequently duke of Coburg), to the vacant throne, and on his refusal the national assembly requested Great Britain to nominate a candidate. The choice of the British government fell on Prince Christian William Ferdinand Adolphus George of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, whose election as king of the Hellenes, with the title George I., was recognized by the powers (6th of June 1863). The sister of the new sovereign, Princess Alexandra, had a few months before (10th March) married the prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII., and his father succeeded to the crown of Denmark in the following November. Another sister, Princess Dagmar, subsequently married the grand duke Alexander Alexandrovitch, afterwards Emperor Alexander III. of Russia. On his accession, King George signed an act resigning his right of succession to the Danish throne in favour of his younger brother Prince Waldemar. He was received with much enthusiasm by the Greeks. Adopting the motto, “My strength is the love of my people,” he ruled in strict accordance with constitutional principles, though not hesitating to make the fullest use of the royal prerogative when the intervention of the crown seemed to be required by circumstances. For the events of his reign see [Greece]: History.

King George married, on the 27th of October 1867, the grand duchess Olga Constantinovna of Russia, who became distinguished in Greece for her activity on behalf of charitable objects. Their children were Prince Constantine, duke of Sparta (b. 1868), who married in 1889 Princess Sophia of Prussia, daughter of the emperor Frederick, and granddaughter of Queen Victoria; Prince George (b. 1869), from November 1898 to October 1906 high commissioner of the powers in Crete; Prince Nicholas (b. 1872), who married in 1902 the grand duchess Helen-Vladimirovna of Russia; Prince Andrew (b. 1882), who married in 1903 Princess Alice of Battenberg; Prince Christopher (b. 1888); and a daughter, Princess Marie (b. 1876), who married in 1900 the grand duke George Michailovich of Russia.

GEORGE, king of Saxony (1832-1904), the youngest son of King John of Saxony (d. 1873) and Queen Amelia, was born at Dresden on the 8th of August 1832. From an early age he received a careful scientific and military training, and in 1846 entered the active army as a lieutenant of artillery. In 1849-1850 he was a student at the university of Bonn, but soon returned to military life, for which he had a predilection. In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 he commanded a Saxon cavalry brigade, and in the early part of the war of 1870-71 a division, but later succeeded to the supreme command of the XII. (Saxon) army corps in the room of his brother, the crown prince Albert (afterwards king) of Saxony. His name is inseparably associated with this campaign, during which he showed undoubted military ability and an intrepidity which communicated itself to all ranks under his command, notably at the battles of St Privat and Beaumont, in which he greatly distinguished himself. On his brother succeeding to the throne he became commander-in-chief of the Saxon army, and was in 1888 made a Prussian field marshal by the emperor William I. He married in 1859 the infanta Maria, sister of King Louis of Portugal, and King Albert’s marriage being childless, succeeded on his death in 1902 to the throne of Saxony. He died on the 15th of October 1904, at Pillnitz.

GEORGE OF LAODICEA in Syria, often called “the Cappadocian,” from 356 to 361 Arian archbishop of Alexandria, was born about the beginning of the 4th century. According to Ammianus (xxii. 11), he was a native of Epiphania, in Cilicia. Gregory Nazianzen tells us that his father was a fuller, and that he himself soon became notorious as a parasite of so mean a type that he would “sell himself for a cake.” After many wanderings, in the course of which he seems to have amassed a considerable fortune, first as an army-contractor and then as a receiver of taxes, he ultimately reached Alexandria. It is not known how or when he obtained ecclesiastical orders; but, after Athanasius had been banished in 356, George was promoted by the influence of the then prevalent Arian faction to the vacant see. His theological attitude was that known as semi-Arian or Homoiousian, and his associates were Eustathius of Sebaste and Basil of Ancyra. At George’s instigation the second Sirmian formula (promulgated by the third council of Sirmium 357), which was conciliatory towards strict Arianism, was opposed at the council of Ancyra in 358 (Harnack, Hist. of Dogma, iv. 76). His persecutions and oppressions of the orthodox ultimately raised a rebellion which compelled him to flee for his life; but his authority was restored, although with difficulty, by a military demonstration. Untaught by experience, he resumed his course of selfish tyranny over Christians and heathen alike, and raised the irritation of the populace to such a pitch that when, on the accession of Julian, his downfall was proclaimed and he was committed to prison, they dragged him thence and killed him, finally casting his body into the sea (24th of December 361). With much that was sordid and brutal in his character George combined a highly cultivated literary taste, and in the course of his chequered career he had found the means of collecting a splendid library, which Julian ordered to be conveyed to Antioch for his own use. An anonymous work against the Manicheans discovered by Lagarde in 1859 in a MS. of Titus of Bostra has been attributed to him.

The original sources for the facts of the life of George of Laodicea are Ammianus, Gregory Nazianzen, Epiphanius and Athanasius. His character has been drawn with graphic fidelity by Gibbon in the 23rd chapter of the Decline and Fall; but the theory, accepted by Gibbon, which identifies him with the patron saint of England is now rejected (see [George, Saint]). See C.S. Hulst, St George of Cappadocia in Legend and History (1910).

GEORGE OF TREBIZOND (1395-1484), Greek philosopher and scholar, one of the pioneers of the revival of letters in the Western world, was born in the island of Crete, and derived his surname Trapezuntios from the fact that his ancestors were from Trebizond. At what period he came to Italy is not certain; according to some accounts he was summoned to Venice about 1430 to act as amanuensis to Francesco Barbaro, who appears to have already made his acquaintance; according to others he did not visit Italy till the time of the council of Florence (1438-1439). He learned Latin from Vittorino da Feltre, and made such rapid progress that in three years he was able to teach Latin literature and rhetoric. His reputation as a teacher and a translator of Aristotle was very great, and he was selected as secretary by Pope Nicholas V., an ardent Aristotelian. The needless bitterness of his attacks upon Plato (in the Comparatio Aristotelis et Platonis), which drew forth a powerful response from Bessarion (q.v.), and the manifestly hurried and inaccurate character of his translations of Plato, Aristotle and other classical authors, combined to ruin his fame as a scholar, and to endanger his position as a teacher of philosophy. The indignation against him on account of his first-named work was so great that he would probably have been compelled to leave Italy had not Alphonso V. given him protection at the court of Naples. He subsequently returned to Rome, where he died in great poverty on the 12th of August 1484. He had long outlived his reputation, and towards the end of his life his intellect failed him. From all accounts he was a man of very disagreeable character, conceited and quarrelsome.

See G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des klassischen Altertums (1893), and article by C.F. Bähr in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie. For a complete list of his numerous works, consisting of translations from Greek into Latin (Plato, Aristotle and the Fathers) and original essays in Greek (chiefly theological) and Latin (grammatical and rhetorical), see Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca (ed. Harles), xii.

GEORGE THE MONK [Georgios Monachos], called Hamartolos (Greek for “sinner”), Byzantine chronicler, lived during the reign of Michael III. (842-867). He wrote a Chronicle of events, in four books, from the creation of the world to the death of the emperor Theophilus (842), whose widow Theodora restored the worship of images in the same year. It is the only original contemporary authority for the years 813-842, and therefore so far indispensable; the early parts of the work are merely a compilation. In the introduction the author disclaims all pretensions to literary style, and declares that his only object was to relate such things as were “useful and necessary” with a strict adherence to truth. Far too much attention, however, is devoted to religious matters; the iconoclasts are fiercely attacked, and the whole is interlarded with theological discussions and quotations from the fathers. The work was very popular, and translations of it served as models for Slavonic writers. The MSS. give a continuation down to 948, the author of which is indicated simply as “the logothete,” by whom probably Symeon Metaphrastes (second half of the 10th century) is meant. In this religious questions are relegated to the background, more attention is devoted to political history, and the language is more popular. Still further continuations of little value go down to 1143. The large circulation of the work and its subsequent reissues, with alterations and interpolations, make it very difficult to arrive at the original text.

Editions: E. de Muralt (St Petersburg, 1859); J.P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, cx.; C. de Boor (in Teubner series, 1904-  ). See F. Hirsch, Byzantinische Studien (1876); C. de Boor in Historische Untersuchungen (in honour of Arnold Schäfer, Bonn, 1882); C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897).

GEORGE THE SYNCELLUS [Georgios Synkellos], of Constantinople, Byzantine chronicler and ecclesiastic, lived at the end of the 8th and the beginning of the 9th century A.D. He was the syncellus (cell-mate, the confidential companion assigned to the patriarchs, sometimes little more than a spy; see [Syncellus]) or private secretary of Tara(u)sius, patriarch of Constantinople (784-806), after whose death he retired to a convent, and wrote his Chronicle of events from Adam to Diocletian (285). At his earnest request, the work, which he doubtless intended to bring down to his own times, was continued after his death by his friend Theophanes Confessor. The Chronicle, which, as its title implies, is rather a chronological table (with notes) than a history, is written with special reference to pre-Christian times and the introduction of Christianity, and exhibits the author as a staunch upholder of orthodoxy. But in spite of its religious bias and dry and uninteresting character, the fragments of ancient writers and apocryphal books preserved in it render it specially valuable. For instance, considerable portions of the original text of the Chronicle of Eusebius have been restored by the aid of Syncellus. His chief authorities were Annianus of Alexandria (5th century) and Panodorus, an Egyptian monk, who wrote about the year 400 and drew largely from Eusebius, Dexippus and Julius Africanus.

Editio princeps, by J. Goar (1652); in Bonn Corpus scriptorum hist. Byz., by W. Dindorf (1829). See also H. Gelzer, Sextus Julius Africanus, ii. 1 (1885); C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897).

GEORGE, HENRY (1839-1897), American author and political economist, was born in Philadelphia, Penn., on the 2nd of September 1839. He settled in California in 1858; removed to New York, 1880; was first a printer, then an editor, but finally devoted all his life to economic and social questions. In 1871 he published Our Land Policy, which, as further developed in 1879 under the title of Progress and Poverty, speedily attracted the widest attention both in America and in Europe. In 1886 he published Protection or Free Trade. Henry George had no political ambition, but in 1886 he received an independent nomination as mayor of New York City, and became so popular that it required a coalition of the two strongest political parties to prevent his election. He received 68,000 votes, against 90,000 for the coalition candidate. His death on the 29th of October 1897 was followed by one of the greatest demonstrations of popular feeling and general respect that ever attended the funeral of any strictly private citizen in American history. The fundamental doctrine of Henry George, the equal right of all men to the use of the earth, did not originate with him; but his clear statement of a method by which it could be enforced, without increasing state machinery, and indeed with a great simplification of government, gave it a new form. This method he named the Single Tax. His doctrine may be condensed as follows: The land of every country belongs of right to all the people of that country. This right cannot be alienated by one generation, so as to affect the title of the next, any more than men can sell their yet unborn children for slaves. Private ownership of land has no more foundation in morality or reason than private ownership of air or sunlight. But the private occupancy and use of land are right and indispensable. Any attempt to divide land into equal shares is impossible and undesirable. Land should be, and practically is now, divided for private use in parcels among those who will pay the highest price for the use of each parcel. This price is now paid to some persons annually, and it is called rent. By applying the rent of land, exclusive of all improvements, to the equal benefit of the whole community, absolute justice would be done to all. As rent is always more than sufficient to defray all necessary expenses of government, those expenses should be met by a tax upon rent alone, to be brought about by the gradual abolition of all other taxes. Landlords should be left in undisturbed possession and nominal ownership of the land, with a sufficient margin over the tax to induce them to collect their rents and pay the tax. They would thus be transformed into mere land agents. Obviously this would involve absolute free trade, since all taxes on imports, manufactures, successions, documents, personal property, buildings or improvements would disappear. Nothing made by man would be taxed at all. The right of private property in all things made by man would thus be absolute, for the owner of such things could not be divested of his property, without full compensation, even under the pretence of taxation. The idea of concentrating all taxes upon ground-rent has found followers in Great Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand. In practical politics this doctrine is confined to the “Single Tax, Limited,” which proposes to defray only the needful public expenses from ground-rent, leaving the surplus, whatever it may be, in the undisturbed possession of landowners.

The principal books by Henry George are: Progress and Poverty (1879), The Irish Land Question (1881), Social Problems (1884), Protection or Free Trade (1886), The Condition of Labor (1891), A Perplexed Philosopher (1892), Political Economy (1898). His son, Henry George (b. 1862), has written a Life (1900). For the Single Tax theory see Shearman’s Natural Taxation (1899).

(T. G. S.)

GEORGE PISIDA [Georgios Pisides], Byzantine poet, born in Pisidia, flourished during the 7th century A.D. Nothing is known of him except that he was a deacon and chartophylax (keeper of the records) of the church of St Sophia. His earliest work, in three cantos (ἀκροάσεις), on the campaign of the emperor Heraclius against the Persians, seems to be the work of an eyewitness. This was followed by the Avarica, an account of a futile attack on Constantinople by the Avars (626), said to have been repulsed by the aid of the Virgin Mary; and by the Heraclias, a general survey of the exploits of Heraclius both at home and abroad down to the final overthrow of Chosroes in 627. George Pisida was also the author of a didactic poem, Hexaëmeron or Cosmourgia, upon the creation of the world; a treatise on the vanity of life, after the manner of Ecclesiastes; a controversial composition against Severus, bishop of Antioch; two short poems upon the resurrection of Christ and on the recovery of the sacred crucifix stolen by the Persians. The metre chiefly used is the iambic. As a versifier Pisida is correct and even elegant; as a chronicler of contemporary events he is exceedingly useful; and later Byzantine writers enthusiastically compared him with, and even preferred him to Euripides. Recent criticism, however, characterizes his compositions as artificial and almost uniformly dull.

Complete works in J.P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, xcii.; see also De Georgii Pisidae apud Theophanem aliosque historicos reliquiis. (1900), by S.L. Sternbach, who has edited several new poems for the first time from a Paris MS. in Wiener Studien, xiii., xiv. (1891-1892); C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897); C.F. Bähr in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie.

GEORGE, LAKE, a lake in the E. part of New York, U.S.A., among the S.E. foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. It extends from N.N.E. to S.S.W. about 34 m., and varies in width from 2 to 4 m. It has a maximum depth of about 400 ft., and is 323 ft. above the sea and 227 ft. above Lake Champlain, into which it has an outlet to the northward through a narrow channel and over falls and rapids. The lake is fed chiefly by mountain brooks and submerged springs; its bed is for the most part covered with a clean sand; its clear water is coloured with beautiful tints of blue and green; and its surface is studded with about 220 islands and islets, all except nineteen of which belong to the state and constitute a part of its forest reserve. Near the head of the lake is Prospect Mountain, rising 1736 ft. above the sea, while several miles farther down the shores is Black Mountain, 2661 ft. in height. Lake George has become a favourite summer resort. Lake steamers ply between the village of Lake George (formerly Caldwell) at the southern end of the lake and Baldwin, whence there is rail connexion with Lake Champlain steamers.

Lake George was formed during the Glacial period by glacial drift which clogged a pre-existing valley. According to Prof. J.F. Kemp the valley occupied by Lake George was a low pass before the Glacial period; a dam of glacial drift at the southern end and of lacustrine clays at the northern end formed the lake which has submerged the pass, leaving higher parts as islands. Before the advent of the white man the lake was a part of the war-path over which the Iroquois Indians frequently made their way northward to attack the Algonquins and the Hurons, and during the struggle between the English and the French for supremacy in America, waterways being still the chief means of communication, it was of great strategic importance (see [Champlain], Lake). Father Isaac Jogues, René Goupil and Guillaume Couture seem to have been the first white men to see the lake (on the 9th of August 1642) as they were being taken by their Iroquois captors from the St Lawrence to the towns of the Mohawks, and in 1646 Father Jogues, having undertaken a half-religious, half-political mission to the Mohawks, was again at the lake, to which, in allusion to his having reached it on the eve of Corpus Christi, he gave the name Lac Saint Sacrement. This name it bore until the summer of 1755, when General William Johnson renamed it Lake George in honour of King George II.

General Johnson was at this time in command of a force of colonists and Indians sent against the French at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. The expedition, however, had proceeded no farther than to the head of Lake George when Johnson was informed that a force of French and Indians under Baron Ludwig August Dieskau was pushing on from Crown Point to Fort Lyman (later Fort Edward), 14 m. to the S. of their encampment. Accordingly, on the morning of the 8th of September a detachment of 1000 colonials under Colonel Ephraim Williams (1715-1755) and 200 Indians under Hendrick, a Mohawk chief, was sent to aid Fort Lyman, but when about 3 m. S. of the lake this detachment fell into an ambuscade prepared for it by Dieskau and both Williams and Hendrick were killed. The survivors were pursued to their camp, and then followed on the same day the main battle of Lake George, in which 1000 colonials fighting at first behind a hastily prepared barricade defeated about 1400 French and Indians. Both commanders were wounded; Dieskau was captured; the French lost about 300; and the colonials nearly the same (including those who fell earlier in the day). Johnson now built on the lake shore, near the battlefield, a fort of gravel and logs and called it Fort William Henry (the site was occupied by the Fort William Henry Hotel till it was burned in 1909). In the meantime the French entrenched themselves at Ticonderoga at the foot of the lake. In March 1757 Fort William Henry successfully withstood an attack of 1600 men sent out by the marquis de Vaudreuil, governor of Canada, but on the 9th of August of the same year its garrison, after being reduced to desperate straits, surrendered to the marquis de Montcalm. By the terms of surrender the garrison was to be allowed to march out with the honours of war and was to be escorted to Fort Edward, but the guard provided by Montcalm was inadequate to protect them from his Indian allies and on the day following the surrender many were massacred or taken prisoners. The fort was razed to the ground. In 1758 General James Abercrombie proceeded by way of Lake George against Fort Ticonderoga, and in 1759 Baron Jeffrey Amherst, while on his way to co-operate with General James Wolfe against Quebec, built near the site of Fort William Henry one bastion of a fort since known as Fort George, the ruins of which still remain.

A monument commemorative of the battle of Lake George was unveiled on the 8th of September 1903, on the site of the battle, and within the state reservation of 35 acres known as Fort George Battle Park. Horicon is a name that was given to the lake by James Fenimore Cooper. The Indian name of the lake was Andia-ta-roc-te.

See Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe (Boston, 1884); and E.E. Seelye, Lake George in History (Lake George, 1897).

GEORGE JUNIOR REPUBLIC, an American industrial institution, situated near the small village of Freeville, in Tompkins county, New York, U.S.A., 9 m. E.N.E. of Ithaca, at the junction of the Sayre-Auburn and the Elmira-Cortland branches of the Lehigh Valley railway. The George Junior Republic forms a miniature state whose economic, civic and social conditions, as nearly as possible, reproduce those of the United States, and whose citizenship is vested in young people, especially those who are neglected or wayward, who are thus taught self-reliance, self-control and morality. The founder, William Reuben George (b. 1866), was a native of West Dryden, a village near Freeville, who as a business man in New York City became interested in the Fresh Air Fund charity supervised by the New York Tribune, took charge of summer outings for city children (1890-1894), and, becoming convinced that such charities tended to promote pauperism and crime among the older of their protégés, devised first (1894) the plan of requiring payment by the children in labour for all they received during these summer jaunts, then (1895) self-government for a summer colony near Freeville, and finally a permanent colony, in which the children stay for several years. The Republic was founded on the 10th of July 1895; the only check on the powers of executive, representative and judicial branches of the government lies in the veto of the superintendent. “Nothing without labour” is the motto of the community, so strictly carried out that a girl or boy in the Republic who has not money[1] to pay for a night’s lodging must sleep in jail and work the next day for the use of the cell. The legislative body, originally a House of Representatives and a Senate, in 1899 became more like the New England town meeting. The respect for the law that follows its enactment by the citizens themselves is remarkable in a class so largely of criminal tendencies; and it is particularly noticeable that positions on the police force are eagerly coveted. Fifteen is the age of majority; suffrage is universal, children under fifteen must be in charge of a citizen guardian. The average age of citizens was seventeen in 1908. The proportion of girls to boys was originally small, but gradually increased; in 1908 there were about 70 girls and 90 boys. The tendency is to admit only those aged at least sixteen and physically well equipped. In the Republic’s earlier years the citizens lived in boarding-houses of different grades, but later in family groups in cottages (there were in 1910 twelve cottages) under the care of “house-mothers.” The labour of the place is divided into sewing, laundry work, cooking and domestic service for the girls, and furniture making, carpentry, farm work, baking bread and wafers (the business of an Auburn biscuit factory was bought in 1903), plumbing and printing for the boys. Masonry and shoe and harness making were tried for a few years. There is an efficient preparatory and high school, from which students enter directly leading colleges. The religious influence is strong, wholesome and unsectarian; students in Auburn Theological Seminary have assisted in the religious work; Roman Catholic and Hebrew services are also held; and attendance at church services is compulsory only on convicts and prisoners.

There are “Woman’s Aid” societies in New York City, Ithaca, Syracuse, Buffalo, Boston and elsewhere, to promote the work of the Republic. A “republic” for younger boys, begun at Freeville, was established in Litchfield, Connecticut; and a National Junior Republic near Annapolis Junction, Maryland, and a Carter Junior Republic at Readington, near Easton, Pennsylvania, are modelled on the George Junior Republic. In 1908-1910 new “states” were established at Chino, California, Grove City, Pennsylvania, and Flemington Junction, New Jersey. In February 1908 the National Association of Junior Republics was formed with Mr George (its founder) as its director, its aims being to establish at least one “republic” in each state of the Union, and in other countries similar institutions for youth and miniature governments modelled on that of the country in which each “state” is established, and to establish colonies for younger children, to be sent at the age of fifteen to the Junior Republic. At the time of its formation the National Association included the “states” at Freeville, N.Y., Litchfield, Conn., and Annapolis Junction, Md.; others joined the federation later.

See William R. George, The Junior Republic: its History and Ideals (New York, 1910); The Junior Republic Citizen (Freeville, 1895 sqq.), written and printed by “citizens”; Nothing Without Labor, George Junior Republic (7th ed., Freeville, 1909), a manual; J.R. Commons, “The Junior Republic,” in The American Journal of Sociology (1898); D.F. Lincoln, “The George Junior Republic,” in The Coming Age (1900); and Lyman Abbott, “A Republic within a Republic,” in the Outlook for February 15, 1908.

[1] The “government” issued its own currency in tin and later in aluminium, and “American” money could not be passed within the 48 acres of the Republic until 1906, when depreciation forced the Republic’s coinage out of use and “American” coin was made legal tender.

GEORGETOWN, the capital of British Guiana (see [Guiana]), and the seat of the colonial government, situated on the left bank of the Demerara river at its mouth, in 6° 29′ 24″ N. and 58° 11′ 30″ W. It was known during the Dutch occupation as Stabroek, and was established as the seat of government of the combined colonies of Essequibo and Demerara (now with Berbice forming the three counties of British Guiana) in 1784, its name being changed to Georgetown in 1812. It is one of the finest towns in this part of the world, the streets being wide and straight, intersecting each other at right angles, several having double roadways with lily-covered canals in the centre, the grass banks on either side carrying rows of handsome shade trees. In Main Street, the finest street in Georgetown, the canal has been filled in to form a broad walk, an obvious precedent for the treatment of the other canals, which (however beautiful) are useless and merely act as breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The principal residences, standing in their own gardens surrounded by foliage and flowers, are scattered over the town, as are also the slums, almost the worst of which abut on the best residential quarters. Water Street, the business centre, runs parallel to the river for about 2½ m. and contains the stores of the wholesale and retail merchants, their wharves running out into the river to allow steamers to come alongside. Most of the houses and public buildings are constructed of wood, the former generally raised on brick pillars some 4 ft. to 10 ft. from the ground, the bright colouring of the wooden walls, jalousies and roofs adding to the beauty of the best streets. The large structure known as the Public Buildings in the centre of the city, containing the offices of the executive government and the hall of the court of policy, was erected between 1829 and 1834. It is a handsome, E-shaped, brick-plastered building of considerable size, with deep porticos and marble-paved galleries carried on cast-iron columns. The law courts, built in the ’eighties, have a ground floor of concrete and iron, the upper storey being of hardwood. Among other public buildings are the town hall, the Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals, several handsome churches, the local banks and insurance offices, and the almshouse. The public hospital consists of several large blocks. The Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society has a large reading-room and lending library. The assembly rooms, above and owned by the Georgetown club, has a good stage and is admirably adapted to dramatic and musical entertainments. A museum (free), belonging to the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society, is chiefly devoted to the fauna of British Guiana, but also contains an instructive collection of local economic, mineralogical and botanical exhibits, a miscellaneous collection of foreign birds and mammals, and an interesting series of views of the colony. The botanical gardens to the east of the city are of considerable extent and admirably laid out. The nurseries cover a large area and are devoted chiefly to the raising of plants of economic importance which can be purchased at nominal rates. The collections of ferns and orchids are very fine. In the gardens are also located the fields of the board of agriculture, where experimental work in the growth of sugar-cane, rice, cotton and all tropical plants of economic importance is carried on. Other popular resorts are the sea wall and the promenade gardens in the centre of the city.

The local government of Georgetown is vested in a mayor and town council elected under a very restricted franchise. The city is divided into fourteen wards each with one representative. A councillor must possess, either personally or through his wife, premises within the city of the appraised value of at least $1500. A voter must either own house property of the appraised value of $250 or occupy premises of an annual rental of $240. There are indeed only 297 municipal voters in a population of nearly 50,000. The revenue, just over £50,000 annually, is mainly derived from a direct rate on house property. The colonial government pays rates on its property and also gives a grant-in-aid towards the upkeep of the streets. The expenditure is principally on sanitation, fire brigade, streets, water-supply, street lighting and drainage. Street lighting is carried out under contract by the Demerara Electric Company, which has a monopoly of private lighting and works an excellent tram service. Water for public and domestic purposes is taken from the conservancy of the east coast and is delivered by pumping throughout the city, but drinking-water is collected in tanks attached to the dwellings from the rain falling on the roofs. The fire brigade is a branch of the police force, half the cost being borne by the rates and half by the general revenue. There is an excellent service of telephones, a branch of the post office, and halfpenny postage within the city boundaries. There are in Georgetown two well-equipped foundries, a dry dock, and factories for the manufacture of rice, cigars, soap, boots, chocolate, candles, aerated waters and ice. Georgetown is connected by rail and ferry with New Amsterdam, by ferry and rail with the west coast of Demerara, and by steamer with all the country districts along the coast and up the navigable reaches of the principal rivers.

(A. G. B.*)

GEORGETOWN, formerly a city of the District of Columbia, U.S.A., and now part (sometimes called West Washington) of the city of Washington, U.S.A., at the confluence of the Potomac river and Rock Creek, and on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, about 2½ m. W.N.W. of the National Capitol. Pop. (1890) 14,046; (1900) 14,549. The streets are old-fashioned, narrow and well shaded. On the “Heights” are many fine residences with beautiful gardens; the Monastery and Academy (for girls) of Visitation, founded in 1799 by Leonard Neale, second archbishop of Baltimore; and the college and the astronomical observatory (1842) of Georgetown University. The university was founded as a Roman Catholic Academy in 1789, was opened in 1791, transferred to the Society of Jesus in 1805, authorized in 1815 by Congress to confer college or university degrees, and by the Holy See in 1833 to confer degrees in philosophy and theology, incorporated as Georgetown College by Act of Congress in 1844, and began graduate work about 1856. The college library includes the historical collection of James Gilmary Shea. A school of medicine was opened in 1851, a dental school in 1901 and a school of law in 1870. In 1909-1910 the university had an enrolment of 859 students. Rising in terraces from Rock Creek is Oak Hill Cemetery, a beautiful burying-ground containing the graves of John Howard Payne, the author of “Home, Sweet Home,” Edwin McMasters Stanton and Joseph Henry. On the bank of the Potomac is a brick house which was for several years the home of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; on Analostan Island in the river was a home of James Murray Mason; Georgetown Heights was the home of the popular novelist, Mrs Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (1819-1899). Before the advent of railways Georgetown had an important commerce by way of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, by which considerable coal as well as some grain is still brought hither, and of which Georgetown is now a terminus; the canal formerly crossed the Potomac at this point on an aqueduct bridge (1446 ft. long), but in 1887 the crossing was abandoned and the old bridge was purchased by the United States government, which in 1889 constructed a new steel bridge upon the old masonry piers. Chief among the manufactories are several large flour mills—Georgetown flour was long noted for its excellence. There is a very large fish-market here. Georgetown was settled late in the 17th century, was laid out as a town in 1751, chartered as a city in 1789, merged in the District of Columbia in 1871, and annexed to the city of Washington in 1878. In the early days of Washington it was a social centre of some importance, where many members of Congress as well as some cabinet officers and representatives of foreign countries lived and the President gave state dinners; and here were the studio, for two years, of Gilbert Stuart, and “Kalorama,” the residence of Joel Barlow.

GEORGETOWN, a city and the county-seat of Scott county, Kentucky, U.S.A., about 11 miles N. of Lexington. Pop. (1900) 3823 (1677 negroes); (1910) 4533. Georgetown is served by the Cincinnati Southern (Queen & Crescent Route), the Frankfort & Cincinnati, and the Southern railways, and is connected with Lexington by an electric line. It is the seat of Georgetown College (Baptist, co-educational), chartered in 1829 as the successor of Rittenhouse Academy, which was founded in 1798. Georgetown is situated in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, and the surrounding country is devoted to agriculture and stock-raising. One of the largest independent oil refineries in the country (that of the Indian Refining Co.) is in Georgetown, and among manufactures are bricks, flour, ice, bagging and hemp. The remarkable “Royal Spring,” which rises near the centre of the city, furnishes about 200,000 gallons of water an hour for the city’s water supply, and for power for the street railway and for various industries. The first settlement was made in 1775, and was named McClellan’s, that name being changed to Lebanon a few years afterwards. In 1790 the place was incorporated as a town under its present name (adopted in honour of George Washington), and Georgetown was chartered as a city of the fourth class in 1894. Bacon College, which developed into Kentucky (now Transylvania) University (see Lexington, Ky.), was established here by the Disciples of Christ in 1836, but in 1839 was removed to Harrodsburg.

GEORGETOWN, a city, a port of entry and the county-seat of Georgetown county, South Carolina, U.S.A., at the head of Winyah Bay, and at the mouth of the Pedee river, about 15 m. from the Atlantic Ocean, and about 55 m. N.E. of Charleston. Pop. (1890) 2895; (1900) 4138 (2718 negroes); (1910) 5530. Georgetown is served by the Georgetown & Western railway, has steamship communication with Charleston, Wilmington, New York City and other Atlantic ports, and, by the Pedee river and its tributaries (about 1000 m. of navigable streams), has trade connexions with a large area of South Carolina and part of North Carolina. The principal public buildings are the post office and custom house. Among the city’s manufactures are lumber, foundry and machine-shop products, naval stores and oars; and there are shad and sturgeon fisheries. The growing of cotton and truck-gardening are important industries in the neighbouring region, and there is considerable trade in such products. The first settlement here was made about 1700; and the town was laid out a short time before 1734. The Winyah Indigo Society grew out of a social club organized about 1740, and was founded in 1757 by a group of planters interested in raising indigo; It long conducted a school (discontinued during the Civil War) which eventually became part of the city’s public school system. In 1780 Georgetown was occupied by a body of Loyalist troops, with whom the American troops had several skirmishes, but on the 10th of August 1781 General Francis Marion forced the evacuation of the town and took possession of it. A few days later, an American named Manson, who had joined the British forces, attacked the town from an armed vessel, and burned about forty houses, the small body of militia being unable to make an effective resistance. General Lafayette first landed on American soil at Georgetown on the 24th of April 1777. Georgetown was incorporated as a town in 1805, and was chartered as a city in 1895.

GEORGETOWN, a city and the county-seat of Williamson county, Texas, U.S.A., on the San Gabriel river, about 25 m. N. by E. of Austin. Pop. (1890) 2447; (1900) 2790 (608 negroes); (1910) 3096. The city is served by the International & Great Northern, and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railways. Georgetown is the seat of the Southwestern University (Methodist Episcopal, South, co-educational), formed in 1873 (chartered 1875) by the combination of Ruterville College (Methodist Episcopal, at Ruterville, Texas, chartered in 1840, and closed in 1850), McKenzie College (at Clarksville, Texas, founded in 1841 and closed in 1872), Wesleyan College at San Augustine (chartered in 1844, burned a few years later, and not rebuilt), and Soule University at Chapel Hill (chartered in 1856, but closed in 1870). The university includes a fitting school at Georgetown, and a medical department at Dallas, Texas; in 1909 it had an enrolment of 1037 students. The principal manufactures of Georgetown are cotton and cotton-seed oil, and planing-mill products. In Page Park are mineral springs, whose waters have medicinal qualities similar to the famous Karlsbad waters. The first settlement was made here in 1848; and Georgetown was incorporated as a town in 1866, and was chartered as a city in 1890.

GEORGIA, a southern state of the United States of America, one of the thirteen original states, situated between 30° 31′ 39″ and 35° N., and between 81° and 85° 53′ 38″ W. It is bounded N. by Tennessee and North Carolina, E. by South Carolina and the Atlantic Ocean, S. by Florida, and W. by Alabama. The total area of the state is 59,265 sq. m., of which 540 sq. m. are water surface.

The surface of Georgia is divided into five physiographic zones. From the sea coast, which is skirted by fertile, semi-tropical islands, a plain of 35,000 sq. m., known as South Georgia, extends northward to the “fall-line” passing from Augusta, through Milledgeville and Macon, to Columbus. This is a part of the great Atlantic Coastal Plain. For 20 m. from the coast its elevation is 10 ft., then it rises abruptly 70 ft. higher, and 20 m. farther N. another elevation begins, which reaches 575 ft. at Milledgeville, the average elevation of the entire region being 250 ft. North of the line mentioned, and collectively known as North Georgia, are the four other regions, each with well-defined characteristics. The largest and southernmost, a broad belt extending from the “fall-line” to a line passing through Clarkesville, Habersham county, Cartersville, Bartow county and Buchanan, Haralson county (approximately), is known as the Piedmont Belt or Plateau, being a region of faint relief eroded on highly complicated crystalline rocks. The Blue Ridge escarpment, a striking topographic feature in Virginia and the Carolinas, extends into Georgia along the north-eastern border of this belt, but is less strongly developed here than elsewhere, dying out entirely towards the south-west. North of the Piedmont Belt lie the Appalachian Mountains Region and the Great Valley Region, the former to the east, the latter to the west of a dividing line from Cartersville northward. The former region consists of detached mountain masses of crystalline rocks, not yet eroded down to the level of the Piedmont Belt. In Towns county, in the Appalachian Region, is the highest point in the state, Brasstown Bald, also called Enota Mountain (4768 ft.). The Great Valley Region consists of folded sedimentary rocks, extensive erosion having removed the soft layers to form valleys, leaving the hard layers as ridges, both layers running in a N.E.-S.W. direction. In the extreme north-west corner of the state is a small part of the Cumberland Plateau, represented by Lookout and Sand Mts.

On the Blue Ridge escarpment near the N.E. corner of the state is a water-parting separating the waters which find their way respectively N.W. to the Tennessee river, S.W. to the Gulf of Mexico and S.E. to the Atlantic Ocean; indeed, according to B.M. and M.R. Hall (Water Resources of Georgia, p. 2), “there are three springs in north-east Georgia within a stone’s throw of each other that send out their waters to Savannah, Ga., to Apalachicola, Fla., and to New Orleans, La.” The water-parting between the waters flowing into the Atlantic and those flowing into the Gulf extends from this point first S.E. for a few miles, then turns S.W. to Atlanta, and from there extends S.S.E. to the Florida line. West of where the escarpment dies out, the Great Valley Region and a considerable portion of the Appalachian Mountains Region are drained by the Coosa, the Tallapoosa and their tributaries, into Mobile Bay, but the Cumberland Plateau, like that part of the Appalachian Mountains Region which lies directly N. of the Blue Ridge escarpment, constitutes a part of the Tennessee Basin. The principal rivers of the state are the Chattahoochee and the Flint, which unite in the S.W. corner to form the Apalachicola; the Ocmulgee (whose western tributary, the Towaliga, falls 96 ft. in less than a quarter of a mile), and the Oconee, which unite in the S.E. to form the Altamaha; and the Savannah, which forms the boundary between Georgia and South Carolina. All of these rise in the upper part of the Piedmont Plateau, through which they pursue a rapid course over rocky beds, and are navigable only south of the “fall-line,” at which and north of which they furnish an abundance of water-power. The upper Savannah river first flows S.W., then turns abruptly S.E., while the Chattahoochee river rises near this point and continues S.W. This is because the upper Savannah[1] was formerly part of the Chattahoochee, but was captured and turned S.E. by headward growth of the Savannah. As a result of the capture there is a deep gorge along the upper Savannah, especially along the branch called the Tallulah river; and the upper Tallulah, in a series of cascades, 22⁄3 m. long, falls 525 ft. from the former higher level down to the main bed of the upper Savannah, at Tallulah Falls, a summer resort.

The fauna and flora have no distinctive features. (See [United States].)

Climate and Soils.—The climate of Georgia, though temperate, differs considerably in different parts of the state. All the nine climate belts in the United States, except that of southern Florida, are represented within its borders. The lowest mean annual temperature, 40° F. and below, is that of some of the mountain tops of northern Georgia; from the mountain-sides to the Piedmont Plateau this mean temperature varies from 45° to 60°; on the Piedmont Plateau from 60° to 65°; and on the Coastal Plain from 60° to 70°. The July isotherm of 80° crosses the state a little N. of Augusta and Macon, touching the W. boundary at West Point, Troup county. The mean July temperature for the whole state is 81.8°; for the part S. of the 80° isotherm the average temperature for July is between 80° and 85°. The average rainfall for the state is 49.3 in.; the maximum is 71.7 in., at Rabun Gap in the extreme N.E. part of the state; the minimum is 39.4 at Swainsboro, Emanuel county, a little S.E. of the centre of the state.

Georgia is also notable for the variety of its soils. In the Cumberland Plateau and Great Valley Regions are a red or brown loam, rich in decomposed limestone and calcareous shales, and sandy or gravelly loams. In the Piedmont Plateau and Appalachian Mountains Regions the surface soil is generally sandy, but in considerable areas the subsoil is a red clay derived largely from the decomposition of hornblende. By far the greatest variety of soils is found in the Coastal Plain Region. Here the Central Cotton Belt, extending from the “fall-line” as far S. as a line bisecting Early county in the W. and passing through Baker, Worth, Dooly, Dodge, Laurens, Johnson, Jefferson and Burke counties, has three distinct kinds of soil; a sand, forming what is known as the sand-hill region; red clay derived from silicious rock in the red hills; and grey, sandy soils with a subsoil of yellow loam. South of the Cotton Belt is the Lime Sink Region, which includes Miller, Baker, Mitchell, Colquitt and Worth counties, the northern portions of Decatur, Grady, Thomas, Brooks and Lowndes, the eastern parts of Dooly and Lee, and the eastern portions of Berrien, Irwin, Wilcox, Dodge, and some parts of Burke, Screven and Bulloch. The soft limestone underlying this region is covered, in the uplands, with grey, sandy soils, which have a subsoil of loam; in the lowlands the surface soils are loams, the subsoils clays. Adjoining this region are the pine barrens, which extend S. to a line passing through the northern portions of Pierce, Wayne, Liberty, Bryan and Effingham counties. Here the prevailing soils are grey and sandy with a subsoil of loam, but they are less fertile than those of the Lime Sink or Cotton Belts. The coast counties of the S.E. and generally those on the Florida frontier are not suitable for cultivation, on account of the numerous marshes and swamps, Okefinokee Swamp being 45 m. long and approximately 30 m. wide; but the southern portions of Decatur, Grady, Thomas and Brooks counties are sufficiently elevated for agriculture, and the islands off the coast are exceedingly productive.

Minerals.—The mineral resources of Georgia are as varied as its climate and soils, a total of thirty-nine different mineral products being found within its borders. The most important is stone: in 1905 the value of the granite quarried in the state was $971,207 (Georgia ranking fifth in the United States), of the marble $774,550 (Georgia ranking third in the United States, Vermont and New York being first and second); in 1908 the granite was valued at $970,832 (Georgia ranking fifth in the United States), and the marble at $916,281 (Georgia ranking second in the United States, Vermont being first). Generally more than one-fourth of the granite is used for paving; curb, building and monument stone are next in importance in the order named. Stone Mountain (1686 ft.) in De Kalb county near Atlanta is a remarkable mass of light-coloured muscovite granite, having a circumference at its base of 7 m. Stone Mountain granite was first quarried about 1850; it is extensively used as building material in Georgia and other southern states. A laminated granite, otherwise like the Stone Mountain granite, is found in De Kalb, Rockdale and Gwinnett counties, and is used for curbing and building. Biotite granites, which take a good polish and are used for monuments and for decoration, are quarried in Oglethorpe and Elbert counties. Georgia marble was first quarried on a large scale in Pickens county in 1884; the pure white marble of this county had been worked for tombstones near Tate, the centre of the marble belt, in 1840; after its commercial exploitation it was used in the capitol buildings of Georgia, Rhode Island, Mississippi and Minnesota, in the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C., and in St Luke’s Hospital, New York City. It is sometimes used for the entire building, and sometimes only for decoration. Other colours than the snowy white are found in the main marble belt of the state, which runs from Canton, Cherokee county, 60 m. generally N. to the northern boundary of the state. Other deposits, less well known, are the dark brown and light grey marbles of Whitfield county, which resemble the stone quarried in eastern Tennessee. Limestone and slate are quarried at Rock Mart, Polk county, and there are cement quarries at Cement, near Kingston, Bartow county. Iron deposits occur in Bartow, Polk and Floyd counties, where are the more important brown ores, and (red ores) in Walker and Chattooga counties. The quantity of iron ore mined in Georgia declined from 1890 to 1900; it was 200,842 long tons in 1905 and 321,060 long tons in 1908, when 319,812 tons were brown haematite and 1248 tons were red haematite. Before the discovery of gold in California the Georgia “placers” were very profitable, the earliest mining being in 1829 by placer miners from the fields of Burke county, North Carolina, who began work in what is now White county, and went thence to Habersham and Lumpkin counties. Dahlonega and Auraria, the latter named by John C. Calhoun, who owned a mine there, were the centres of this early gold mining. Work was summarily stopped by Federal troops enforcing the governor’s proclamation in 1831, because of the disorder in the mining region; but it was soon renewed and a mint was established at Dahlonega in 1838. After the discovery of gold in California, mining in Georgia was not renewed on anything but the smallest scale until the early ’eighties. In 1908 the gold product was valued at $56,207 (it was $96,910 in 1905) and the silver product at $106. Up to 1909 the gold product of Georgia (see State Geol. Survey Bulletin 19) was about $17,500,000. Extensive clay deposits occur in all parts of the state, and are remarkable for their comparative freedom from impurities and for their high fusion point; the most valuable are sedimentary, and form a belt several miles wide across the middle of the state from Augusta to Columbus. In 1908 the clay products of the state were valued at $1,928,611. More asbestos has been found in Georgia than in any other state of the Union; it occurs in the amphibole form throughout the N. part of the state, and most of the country’s domestic supply comes from the Sall Mountain mine in White county. Manganese ores, found in Bartow, Polk and Floyd counties, were formerly important; in 1896 4096 long tons were mined, in 1905 only 150 tons, and in 1908 none. Bauxite was found in Georgia first of the United States, near Rome, in 1887; the output, principally from Floyd, Bartow and Polk counties, was the entire product of the United States until 1891, and in 1902 was more than half the country’s product, but in 1908, even when combined with the Alabama output, was less than the amount mined in Arkansas. Coal is not extensively found, but the mine on Sand Mountain, in Walker county, was one of the first opened S. of the Ohio river; in 1908 the value of the coal mined in the state was $364,279 (264,822 short tons), the value of coke at the ovens was $137,524 (39,422 short tons), and the value of ammonium sulphate, coal tar, illuminating gas and gas coke was more than $800,000. Copper was mined in Fannin and Cherokee counties before the Civil War. In 1906 the copper mined was valued at $5057. Corundum was discovered on Laurel Creek in Rabun county in 1871, and was worked there and at Trackrock, Union county, especially between 1880 and 1893, but in later years low prices closed most of the mines. The limestone formations furnished most of the lime for domestic use. Sandstone, ochre, slate, soapstone, graphite are also mined, and lead, zinc, barytes, gypsum and even diamonds have been discovered but not exploited.

Agriculture.—The principal occupation in Georgia is agriculture, which in 1900 engaged seven-tenths of the land surface of the state and the labour of three-fifths of the population, ten years old and over, who are employed in profitable occupations. The products are so diversified that, with the exception of some tropical fruits of California and Florida, almost everything cultivated in the United States can be produced. The chief staple is cotton, of which a valuable hybrid called the Floradora, a cross of long and short staple, has been singularly successful. Cotton is raised in all counties of the state except Rabun, Towns and Fannin in the extreme north, and about one-third of the total cultivated land of the state was devoted to it in 1900-1907. In 1899-1904 the crop exceeded that of the other cotton-producing states except Texas, and in 1899, 1900 and 1903 Mississippi, averaging 1,467,121 commercial bales per annum; the crop in 1904 was 1,991,719 bales, and in 1907-1908 the crop was 1,815,834 bales, second only to the crop of Texas. The cause of this extensive cultivation of cotton is not a high average yield per acre, but the fact that before 1860 “Cotton was King,” and that the market value of the staple when the Civil War closed was so high that farmers began to cultivate it to the exclusion of the cereals, whose production, Indian corn excepted, showed a decline during each decade from 1879 to 1899. But in the ’nineties the price of the cotton fell below the cost of production, owing to the enormous supply, and this was accompanied by economic depression. These conditions have caused some diversification of crops, and successful experiments in cattle-raising, movements encouraged by the Department of Agriculture and the leading newspapers.

The principal cereals cultivated are Indian corn (product, 53,750,000 bushels in 1908) and wheat; the cultivation of the latter, formerly remunerative, declined on account of the competition of the Western States, but revived after 1899, largely owing to the efforts of the Georgia Wheat Growers’ Association (organized in 1897), and in 1908 the yield was 2,208,000 bushels. The sugar-cane crop declined in value after 1890, and each year more of it was made into syrup. In 1908 the tobacco crop was 2,705,625 ℔, and the average farm price was 35 cents, being nearly as high as that of the Florida crop; Sumatra leaf for wrappers is grown successfully. The acreage and product of tobacco and peanuts increased from 1890 to 1900 respectively 188% and 319.2%, and 92.6% and 129.9%, and in the production of sweet potatoes Georgia was in 1899 surpassed only by North Carolina. Alfalfa and grasses grow well. Truck farming and the cultivation of orchard and small fruits have long been remunerative occupations; the acreage devoted to peaches doubled between 1890 and 1900. Pecan nuts are an increasingly important crop.

Agriculture in Georgia was in a state of transition at the beginning of the 20th century. Owing to the abundance of land and to negro slavery, exploitative methods of cultivation were employed before the Civil War, and such methods, by which lands after being worked to exhaustion are deserted for new fields, had not yet been altogether abandoned. One reason for this was that, according to the census of 1900, 36.9% of the farms were operated by negroes, of whom 86% were tenants who desired to secure the greatest possible product without regard to the care of the soil. Consequently there were large tracts of untilled “waste” land; but these rapidly responded to fertilization and rotation of crops, often yielding 800 to 1200 ℔ of cotton per acre, and Georgia in 1899 used more fertilizers than any other state in the Union. Another feature of agriculture in Georgia was the great increase in the number of farms, the average size of plantations having declined from 440 acres in 1860 to 117.5 in 1900, or almost 75%, while the area in cultivation increased only 15.6% between 1850 and 1900. The tenantry system was also undergoing a change—the share system which developed in the years succeeding the Civil War being replaced by a system of cash rental.

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Manufactures.—Although excelled by Alabama in the manufacture of mineral products, and by North Carolina and South Carolina in the number and output of cotton mills, in 1900 and in 1905 Georgia surpassed each of those states in the total value of factory products, which was, however, less than the value of the factory products of Louisiana and Virginia among the southern states. The chief features of this industrial activity are its early beginning and steady, constant development. As far back as 1850 there were 1522 manufacturing establishments (35 of which were cotton mills) in the state, whose total product was valued at $7,082,075. Despite the Civil War, there was some advance during each succeeding decade, the most prosperous relatively being that from 1880 to 1890. In 1900 the number of establishments was 7504, an increase of 75.1% over the number in 1890; the capital invested was $89,789,656, an increase of 57.7%, and the value of products ($106,654,527) was 54.8% more than in 1890. Of the 7504 establishments in 1900, 3015 were conducted under the “factory system,” and had a capital of $79,303,316 and products valued at $94,532,368. In 1905 there were 3219 factories, with a capital of $135,211,551 (an increase of 70.5% over 1900), and a gross product valued at $151,040,455 (59.8% greater than the value of the factory product in 1900).

The most important manufacturing industries are those that depend upon cotton for raw material, with a gross product in 1900 valued at $26,521,757. In that year[2] there were 67 mills engaged in the manufacture of cotton goods, with a capital of $24,158,159, and they yielded a gross product valued at $18,457,645; the increase between 1900 and 1905 was actually much larger (and proportionately very much larger) than between 1890 and 1900; the number of factories in 1905 was 103 (an increase of 53.7% over 1900); their capital was $42,349,618 (75.3% more than in 1900); and their gross product was valued at $35,174,248 (an increase of 90.6% since 1900). The rank of Georgia among the cotton manufacturing states was seventh in 1900 and fourth in 1905. Cotton-seed oil and cake factories increased in number from 17 to 43 from 1890 to 1900, and to 112 in 1905, and the value of their product increased from $1,670,196 to $8,064,112, or 382.8% in 1890-1900, and to $13,539,899 in 1905, or an increase of 67.9% over 1900, and in 1900 and in 1905 the state ranked second (to Texas) in this industry in the United States. This growth in cotton manufactures is due to various causes, among them being the proximity of raw material, convenient water-power, municipal exemption from taxation and the cheapness of labour. The relation between employer and employee is in the main far more personal and kindly than in the mills of the Northern States.

The forests of Georgia, next to the fields, furnish the largest amount of raw material for manufactures. The yellow pines of the southern part of the state, which have a stand of approximately 13,778,000 ft., yielded in 1900 rosin and turpentine valued at $8,110,468 (more than the product of any other state in the Union) and in 1905 valued at $7,705,643 (second only to the product of Florida). From the same source was derived most of the lumber product valued[3] in 1900 at $13,341,160 (more than double what it was in 1890) and in 1905 at $16,716,594. The other important woods are cypress, oak and poplar.

Fourth in value in 1905 (first, cotton goods; second, lumber and timber; third, cotton-seed oil and cake) were fertilizers, the value of which increased from $3,367,353 in 1900 to $9,461,415 in 1905, when the state ranked first of the United States in this industry; in 1900 it had ranked sixth.

Communications.—Means of transportation for these products are furnished by the rivers, which are generally navigable as far north as the “fall line” passing through Augusta, Milledgeville, Macon and Columbus; by ocean steamship lines which have piers at St Mary’s, Brunswick, Darien and Savannah; and by railways whose mileage in January 1909 was 6,871.8 m. The most important of the railways are the Central of Georgia, the Southern, the Atlantic Coast Line, the Seaboard Air Line, the Georgia and the Georgia Southern & Florida. In 1878 a state railway commission was established which has mandatory power for the settlement of all traffic problems and makes annual reports.

Population.—The population of Georgia in 1880 was 1,542,180; in 1890 1,837,353, an increase of 19.1%; in 1900 2,216,331, a further increase of 20.6%[4]; in 1910, 2,609,121. Of the 1900 population, 53.3% were whites and 46.7% were negroes,[5] the centre of the black population being a little south of the “fall line.” Here the negroes increased, from 1890 to 1900, faster than the whites in eighteen counties, but in northern Georgia, where the whites are in the majority, the negro population declined in twelve counties. Also the percentage of negro illiteracy is higher in northern Georgia than in other parts of the state, the percentage of negro male illiterates of voting age being 38.3% in Atlanta in 1900, and in Savannah only 30.7%. The population of Georgia has a very slight foreign-born element (.6% in 1900) and a small percentage (1.7% in 1900) of people of foreign parentage. The urban population (i.e. the population in places of 2500 inhabitants and over) was 15.6% of the total in 1900, and the number of incorporated cities, towns and villages was 372. Of these only forty had a population exceeding 2000, and thirteen exceeding 5000. The largest city in 1900 was Atlanta, the capital since 1868 (Louisville, Jefferson county, was the capital in 1795-1804, and Milledgeville in 1804-1868), with 89,872 inhabitants. Savannah ranked second with 54,244, and Augusta third with 39,441. In 1900 the other cities in the state with a population of more than 5000 were: Macon (23,272), Columbus (17,614), Athens (10,245), Brunswick (9081), Americus (7674), Rome (7291), Griffin (6857), Waycross (5919), Valdosta (5613), and Thomasville (5322).

The total membership of the churches in 1906 was about 1,029,037, of whom 596,319 were Baptists, 349,079 were Methodists, 24,040 were Presbyterians, 19,273 were Roman Catholics, 12,703 were Disciples of Christ, 9790 were Protestant Episcopalians, and 5581 were Congregationalists.

Government.—The present constitution, which was adopted in 1877,[6] provides for a system of government similar in general to that of the other states (see [United States]). The executive officials are elected for a term of two years, and the judges of the Supreme Court and of the court of appeals for six years, while those of the superior court and of the ordinaries and the justices of the peace are chosen every four years. Before 1909 all male citizens of the United States at least twenty-one years of age (except those mentioned below), who had lived in the state for one year immediately preceding an election and in the county six months, and had paid their taxes, were entitled to vote. From the suffrage and the holding of office are excluded idiots and insane persons and all those who have been convicted of treason, embezzlement, malfeasance in office, bribery or larceny, or any crime involving moral turpitude and punishable under the laws of the state by imprisonment in the penitentiary—this last disqualification, however, is removable by a pardon for the offence. Before 1909 there was no constitutional discrimination aimed against the exercise of the suffrage by the negro, but in fact the negro vote had in various ways been greatly reduced. By a constitutional amendment adopted by a large majority at a special election in October 1908, new requirements for suffrage, designed primarily to exclude negroes, especially illiterate negroes, were imposed (supplementary to the requirements mentioned above concerning age, residence and the payment of taxes), the amendment coming into effect on the 1st of January 1909: in brief this amendment requires that the voter shall have served in land or naval forces of the United States or of the Confederate States or of the state of Georgia in time of war, or be lawfully descended from some one who did so serve; or that he be a person of good character who proves to the satisfaction of the registrars of elections that he understands the duties and obligations of a citizen; or that he read correctly in English and (unless physically disabled) write any paragraph of the Federal or state constitution; or that he own 40 acres of land or property valued at $500 and assessed for taxation. After the 1st of January 1915 no one may qualify as a voter under the first or second of these clauses (the “grandfather” and “understanding” clauses); but those who shall have registered under their requirements before the 1st of January 1915 thus become voters for life.

The governor, who receives a salary of $5000, must be at least thirty years old, must at the time of his election have been a citizen of the United States for fifteen years and of the state for six years, and “shall not be eligible to re-election after the expiration of a second term, for the period of four years.” In case of his “death, removal or disability,” the duties of his office devolve in the first instance upon the president of the Senate, and in the second upon the speaker of the House of Representatives. The governor’s power of veto extends to separate items in appropriation bills, but in every case his veto may be overridden by a two-thirds vote of the legislature. An amendment to the constitution may be proposed by a two-thirds vote of the legislature, and comes into effect on receiving a majority of the popular vote. Members of the Senate must be at least twenty-five years old, must be citizens of the United States, and must, at the time of their election, have been citizens of the state for four years, and of the senatorial district for one year; representatives must be at least twenty-one years old, and must, at the time of their election, have been citizens of the state for two years. By law, in Georgia, lobbying is a felony.

Habitual intoxication, wilful desertion for three years, cruel treatment, and conviction for an offence the commission of which involved moral turpitude and for which the offender has been sentenced to imprisonment for at least two years, are recognized as causes for divorce. All petitions for divorce must be approved by two successive juries, and a woman holds in her own name all property acquired before and after marriage. Marriage between the members of the white and negro races is prohibited by law.

As the result of the general campaign against child labour, an act was passed in 1906 providing that no child under 10 shall be employed or allowed to labour in or about any factory, under any circumstances; after the 1st of January 1907 no child under 12 shall be so employed, unless an orphan with no other means of support, or unless a widowed mother or disabled or aged father is dependent on the child’s labour, in which case a certificate to the facts, holding good for one year only, is required; after the 1st of January 1908 no child under 14 shall be employed in a factory between the hours of 7 P.M. and 6 A.M.; after the same date no child under 14 shall be employed in any factory without a certificate of school attendance for 12 weeks (of which 6 weeks must be consecutive) of the preceding year; no child shall be employed without the filing of an affidavit as to age. Making a false affidavit as to age or as to other facts required by the act, and the violation of the act by any agent or representative of a factory or by any parent or guardian of a child are misdemeanours.

In 1907 a state law was passed prohibiting after the 1st of January 1908 the manufacture or sale of intoxicating liquors; nine-tenths of the counties of the state, under local option laws, were already “dry” at the passage of this bill. The law permits druggists to keep for sale no other form of alcoholic drink than pure alcohol; physicians prescribing alcohol must fill out a blank, specifying the patient’s ailment, and certifying that alcohol is necessary; the prescription must be filled the day it is dated, must be served directly to the physician or to the patient, must not call for more than a pint, and may not be refilled.[7]

The state supports four benevolent institutions: a lunatic asylum for the whites and a similar institution for the negroes, both at Milledgeville, an institute for the deaf and dumb at Cave Spring, and an academy for the blind at Macon. There are also a number of private charitable institutions, the oldest being the Bethesda orphan asylum, near Savannah, founded by George Whitefield in 1739. The Methodist, Baptist, Roman Catholic and Protestant Episcopal Churches, and the Hebrews of the state also support homes for orphans. A penitentiary was established in 1817 at Milledgeville. In 1866 the lease system was introduced, by which the convicts were leased for a term of years to private individuals. In 1897 this was supplanted by the contract system, by which a prison commission accepted contracts for convict labour, but the prisoners were cared for by state officials. But the contract system for convicts and the peonage system (under which immigrants were held in practical slavery while they “worked out” advances made for passage-money, &c.) were still sources of much injustice. State laws made liable to prosecution for misdemeanour any contract labourer who, having received advances, failed for any but good cause to fulfil the contract; or any contract labourer who made a second contract without giving notice to his second employer of a prior and unfulfilled contract; or any employer of a labourer who had not completed the term of a prior contract. In September 1908, after an investigation which showed that many wardens had been in the pay of convict lessees and that terrible cruelty had been practised in convict camps, an extra session of the legislature practically put an end to the convict lease or contract system; the act then passed provided that after the 31st of March 1909, the date of expiration of leases in force, no convicts may be leased for more than twelve months and none may be leased at all unless there are enough convicts to supply all demands for convict labour on roads made by counties, each county to receive its pro rata share on a population basis, and to satisfy all demands made by municipalities which thus secure labour for $100 per annum (per man) paid into the state treasury, and all demands made by the state prison farm and factory established by this law.

Education.—Georgia’s system of public instruction was not instituted until 1870, but as early as 1817 the legislature provided a fund for the education in the private schools of the state of children of indigent parents. The constitution of 1868 authorized “a thorough system of general education, to be for ever free to all children of the State,” and in 1870 the first public school law was enacted. Education, however, has never been made compulsory. The constitution, as amended in 1905, provides that elections on the question of local school taxes for counties or for school districts may be called upon a petition signed by one-fourth of the qualified voters of the county, or district, in question; under this provision several counties and a large number of school districts are supplementing the general fund. But the principal source of the annual school revenue is a state tax; the fund derived from this tax, however, is not large enough. In 1908 the common school fund approximated $3,786,830, of which amount the state paid $2,163,200 and about $1,010,680 was raised by local taxation. In 1908 69% of the school population (79% of whites; 58% of negroes) were enrolled in the schools; in 1902 it was estimated that the negroes, 52.3% of whom (10 years of age and over) were illiterates (i.e. could not write or could neither read nor write) in 1900 (81.6% of them were illiterate in 1880), received the benefit of only about a fifth of the school fund. Of the total population, 10 years of age and over, 30.5% were illiterates in 1900—49.9% were illiterates in 1880—and as regards the whites of native birth alone, Georgia ranked ninth in illiteracy, in 1900, among the states and territories of the Union. Of the illiterates about four-fifths were negroes in 1900. In addition to the public schools, the state also supports the University of Georgia; and in 1906 $235,000 was expended for the support of higher education. In 1906-1907 eleven agricultural and mechanical arts colleges were established, one in each congressional district of the state. Of the colleges of the university, Franklin was the first state college chartered in America (1785); the Medical College of Georgia, at Augusta, was opened in 1829; the State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts was established at Athens in 1872; the North Georgia Agricultural College, at Dahlonega, was opened in 1873; the Georgia School of Technology, at Atlanta, in 1888; the Georgia Normal and Industrial College (for women), in Milledgeville, in 1899; the Georgia State Normal School, at Athens, in 1895; the Georgia State Industrial College for Coloured Youth, near Savannah, in 1890; the School of Pharmacy, at Athens, in 1903; and the School of Forestry, and the Georgia State College of Agriculture, at Athens, in 1906. Affiliated with the university, but not receiving state funds, are three preparatory schools, the South Georgia Military and Agricultural College at Thomasville, the Middle Georgia Military and Agricultural College at Milledgeville, and the West Georgia Agricultural and Mechanical College at Hamilton. Among the institutions generally grouped as denominational are—Baptist: Mercer University, at Macon (Penfield, 1837; Macon, 1871), Shorter College (1877) at Rome, Spelman Seminary (1881) in Atlanta for negro women and girls, and Bessie Tift College, formerly Monroe College (1849) for women, at Forsyth; Methodist Episcopal: Emory College (1836), at Oxford, and Wesleyan Female College (1836) at Macon, both largely endowed by George Ingraham Seney (1837-1893), and the latter one of the earliest colleges for women in the country; Methodist Episcopal Church, South: Young Harris College (1855) at Young Harris, Andrew Female College (1854) at Cuthbert, and Dalton Female College (1872) at Dalton; Presbyterian: Agnes Scott College at Decatur; and African Methodist Episcopal: Morris Brown College (1885) at Atlanta. A famous school for negroes is the non-sectarian Atlanta University (incorporated in 1867, opened in 1869), which has trained many negroes for teaching and other professions. Non-sectarian colleges for women are: Lucy Cobb Institute (1858) at Athens, Cox College (1843) at College Park, near Atlanta, and Brenau College Conservatory (1878) at Gainesville.

Finance.—The assessed value of taxable property in 1910 was about $735,000,000. A general property tax, which furnishes about four-fifths of the public revenue, worked so inequitably that a Board of Equalization was appointed in 1901. By the Constitution the tax rate is limited to $5 on the thousand, and, as the rate of taxation has increased faster than the taxable property, the state has been forced to contract several temporary loans since 1901, none of which has exceeded $200,000, the limit for each year set by the Constitution. On the 1st of January 1910 the bonded debt was $6,944,000, mainly incurred by the extravagance of the Reconstruction administration (see History, below). Each year $100,000 of this debt is paid off, and there are annual appropriations for the payment of interest (about $303,260 in 1910). The state owns the Western & Atlantic railway (137 m. long) from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta, which has valuable terminal facilities in both cities, and which in 1910 was estimated to be worth $8,400,240 (more than the amount of the bonded debt); this railway the state built in 1841-1850, and in 1890 leased for 29 years, at an annual rental of $420,012, to the Nashville, Chattanooga & St Louis railway.

Banking in Georgia is in a prosperous condition. The largest class of depositors are the farmers, who more and more look to the banks for credit, instead of to the merchants and cotton speculators. Hence the number of banks in agricultural districts is increasing. The state treasurer is the bank examiner, and to him all banks must make a quarterly statement and submit their books for examination twice a year. The legal rate of interest is 7%, but by contract it may be 8%.

History.—Georgia derives its name from King George II. of Great Britain. It was the last to be established of the English colonies in America. Its formation was due to a desire of the British government to protect South Carolina from invasion by the Spaniards from Florida and by the French from Louisiana, as well as to the desire of James Edward Oglethorpe (q.v.) to found a refuge for the persecuted Protestant sects and the unfortunate but worthy indigent classes of Europe. A charter was granted in 1732 to “the Trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in America,” and parliament gave £10,000 to the enterprise. The first settlement was made at Savannah in 1733 under the personal supervision of Oglethorpe. The early colonists were German Lutherans (Salzburgers), Piedmontese, Scottish Highlanders, Swiss, Portuguese Jews and Englishmen; but the main tide of immigration, from Virginia and the Carolinas, did not set in until 1752. As a bulwark against the Spanish, the colony was successful, but as an economic experiment it was a failure. The trustees desired that there should be grown in the colony wine grapes, hemp, silk and medical plants (barilla, kali, cubeb, caper, madder, &c.) for which England was dependent upon foreign countries; they required the settlers to plant mulberry trees, and forbade the sale of rum, the chief commercial staple of the colonies. They also forbade the introduction of negro slaves. Land was leased by military tenure, and until 1739 grants were made only in male tail and alienations were forbidden. The industries planned for the colony did not thrive, and as sufficient labour could not be obtained, the importation of slaves was permitted under certain conditions in 1749. About the same time the House of Commons directed the trustees to remove the prohibition on the sale of rum. In 1753 the charter of the trustees expired and Georgia became a royal province.

Under the new regime the colony was so prosperous that Sir James Wright (1716-1785), the last of the royal governors, declared Georgia to be “the most flourishing colony on the continent.” The people were led to revolt against the mother country through sympathy with the other colonies rather than through any grievance of their own. The centre of revolutionary ideas was St John’s Parish, settled by New Englanders (chiefly from Dorchester, Massachusetts). The Loyalist sentiment was so strong that only five of the twelve parishes sent representatives to the First Provincial Congress, which met on the 18th of January 1775, and its delegates to the Continental Congress therefore did not claim seats in that assembly. But six months later all the parishes sent representatives to another Provincial Congress which met on the 4th of July 1775. Soon afterward the royal government collapsed and the administration of the colony was assumed by a council of safety.

The war that followed was really a severe civil conflict, the Loyalist and Revolutionary parties being almost equal in numbers. In 1778 the British seized Savannah, which they held until 1782, meanwhile reviving the British civil administration, and in 1779 they captured Augusta and Sunbury; but after 1780 the Revolutionary forces were generally successful. Civil affairs also fell into confusion. In 1777 a state constitution was adopted, but two factions soon appeared in the government, led by the governor and the executive council respectively, and harmony was not secured until 1781.

Georgia’s policy in the formation of the United States government was strongly national. In the constitutional convention of 1787 its delegates almost invariably gave their support to measures designed to strengthen the central government. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify (January 2, 1788), and one of the three that ratified unanimously, the Federal Constitution. But a series of conflicts between the Federal government and the state government caused a decline of this national sentiment and the growth of States Rights theories.

First of these was the friction involved in the case, before the Supreme Court of the United States, of Chisolm v. Georgia, by which the plaintiff, one Alexander Chisolm, a citizen of South Carolina, secured judgment in 1793 against the state of Georgia (see 2 Dallas Reports 419). In protest, the Georgia House of Representatives, holding that the United States Supreme Court had no constitutional power to try suits against a sovereign state, resolved that any Federal marshal who should attempt to execute the court’s decision would be “guilty of felony, and shall suffer death, without benefit of clergy, by being hanged.” No effort was made to execute the decision, and in 1798 the Eleventh Amendment to the Federal Constitution was adopted, taking from Federal courts all jurisdiction over any suit brought “against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.”

The position of Congress and of the Supreme Court with reference to Georgia’s policy in the Yazoo Frauds also aroused distrust of the Federal government. In 1795 the legislature granted for $500,000 the territory extending from the Alabama and Coosa rivers to the Mississippi river and between 35° and 31° N. lat. (almost all of the present state of Mississippi and more than half of the present state of Alabama) to four land companies, but in the following year a new legislature rescinded the contracts on the ground that they had been fraudulently and corruptly made, as was probably the case, and the rescindment was embodied in the Constitution of 1798., In the meantime the United States Senate had appointed a committee to inquire into Georgia’s claim to the land in question, and as this committee pronounced that claim invalid, Congress in 1800 established a Territorial government over the region. The legislature of Georgia remonstrated but expressed a willingness to cede the land to the United States, and in 1802 the cession was ratified, it being stipulated among other things that the United States should pay to the state $1,250,000, and should extinguish “at their own expense, for the use of Georgia, as soon as the same can be peaceably obtained on reasonable terms,” the Indian title to all lands within the state of Georgia. Eight years later the Supreme Court of the United States decided in the case of Fletcher v. Peck (6 Cranch 87) that such a rescindment as that in the new state constitution was illegal, on the ground that a state cannot pass a law impairing the obligation of contracts; and at an expense of more than four millions of dollars the Federal government ultimately extinguished all claims to the lands.

This decision greatly irritated the political leaders of Georgia, and the question of extinguishing the Indian titles, on which there had long been a disagreement, caused further and even more serious friction between the Federal and state authorities. The National government, until the administration of President Jackson, regarded the Indian tribes as sovereign nations with whom it alone had the power to treat, while Georgia held that the tribes were dependent communities with no other right to the soil than that of tenants at will. In 1785 Georgia made treaties with the Creeks by which those Indians ceded to the state their lands S. and W. of the Altamaha river and E. of the Oconee river, but after a remonstrance of one of their half-breed chiefs Congress decided that the cessions were invalid, and the National government negotiated, in 1790, a new treaty which ceded only the lands E. of the Oconee. The state appealed to the National government to endeavour to secure further cessions, but none had been made when, in 1802, the United States assumed its obligation to extinguish all Indian titles within the state. Several cessions were made between 1802 and 1824, but the state in the latter year remonstrated in vigorous terms against the dilatory manner in which the National government was discharging its obligation, and the effect of this was that in 1825 a treaty was negotiated at Indian Springs by which nearly all the Lower Creeks agreed to exchange their remaining lands in Georgia for equal territory beyond the Mississippi. But President J.Q. Adams, learning that this treaty was not approved by the entire Creek nation, authorized a new one, signed at Washington in 1826, by which the treaty of 1825 was abrogated and the Creeks kept certain lands W. of the Chattahoochee. The Georgia government, under the leadership of Governor George M. Troup (1780-1856), had proceeded to execute the first treaty, and the legislature declared the second treaty illegal and unconstitutional. In reply to a communication of President Adams early in 1827 that the United States would take strong measures to enforce its policy, Governor Troup declared that he felt it his duty to resist to the utmost any military attack which the government of the United States should think proper to make, and ordered the military companies to prepare to resist “any hostile invasion of the territory of this state.” But the strain produced by these conditions was relieved by information that new negotiations had been begun for the cession of all Creek lands in Georgia. These negotiations were completed late in the year.

There was similar conflict in the relation of the United States and Georgia with the Cherokees. In 1785 the Cherokees of Georgia placed themselves under the protection of the Federal government, and in 1823 their chiefs, who were mostly half-breeds, declared: “It is the fixed and unalterable determination of this nation never again to cede one foot more of land,” and that they could not “recognize the sovereignty of any state within the limits of their territory”; in 1827 they framed a constitution and organized a representative government. President Monroe and President J.Q. Adams treated the Cherokees with the courtesy due to a sovereign nation, and held that the United States had done all that was required to meet the obligation assumed in 1802. The Georgia legislature, however, contended that the United States had not acted in good faith, declared that all land within the boundaries of the state belonged to Georgia, and in 1828 extended the jurisdiction of Georgia law to the Cherokee lands. Then President Jackson, holding that Georgia was in the right on the Indian question, informed the Cherokees that their only alternative to submission to Georgia was emigration. Thereupon the chiefs resorted to the United States Supreme Court, which in 1832 declared that the Cherokees formed a distinct community “in which the laws of Georgia have no force,” and annulled the decision of a Georgia court that had extended its jurisdiction into the Cherokee country (Worcester v. Georgia). But the governor of Georgia declared that the decision was an attempt at usurpation which would meet with determined resistance, and President Jackson refused to enforce the decree. The President did, however, work for the removal of the Indians, which was effected in 1838.

On account of these conflicts a majority of Georgians adopted the principles of the Democratic-Republican party, and early in the 19th century the people were virtually unanimous in their political ideas. Local partisanship centred in two factions: one, led by George M. Troup, which represented the interests of the aristocratic and slave-holding communities; the other, formed by John Clarke (1766-1832) and his brother Elijah, found support among the non-slave-holders and the frontiersmen. The cleavage of these factions was at first purely personal; but by 1832 it had become one of principle. Then the Troup faction under the name of States Rights party, endorsed the nullification policy of South Carolina, while the Clarke faction, calling itself a Union party, opposed South Carolina’s conduct, but on the grounds of expediency rather than of principle. On account, however, of its opposition to President Jackson’s attitude toward nullification, the States Rights party affiliated with the new Whig party, which represented the national feeling in the South, while the Union party was merged into the Democratic party, which emphasized the sovereignty of the states.

The activity of Georgia in the slavery controversy was important. As early as 1835 the legislature adopted a resolution which asserted the legality of slavery in the Territories, a principle adopted by Congress in the Kansas Bill in 1854, and in 1847 ex-Governor Wilson Lumpkin (1783-1870) advocated the organization of the Southern states to resist the aggression of the North. Popular opinion at first opposed the Compromise of 1850, and some politicians demanded immediate secession from the Union; and the legislature had approved the Alabama Platform of 1848. But Congressmen Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, Whigs, and Howell Cobb, a Democrat, upon their return from Washington, contended that the Compromise was a great victory for the South, and in a campaign on this issue secured the election of such delegates to the state convention (at Milledgeville) of 1850 that that body adopted on the 10th of December, by a vote of 237 to 19, a series of conciliatory resolutions, since known as the “Georgia Platform,” which declared in substance: (1) that, although the state did not wholly approve of the Compromise, it would “abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this sectional controversy,” to preserve the Union, as the thirteen original colonies had found compromise necessary for its formation; (2) that the state “will and ought to resist, even (as a last resort) to the disruption of every tie that binds her to the Union,” any attempt to prohibit slavery in the Territories or a refusal to admit a slave state. The adoption of this platform was accompanied by a party reorganization, those who approved it organizing the Constitutional Union party, and those who disapproved, mostly Democrats, organizing the Southern Rights party; the approval in other states of the Georgia Platform in preference to the Alabama Platform (see [Alabama]) caused a reaction in the South against secession. The reaction was followed for a short interval by a return to approximately the former party alignment, but in 1854 the rank and file of the Whigs joined the American or Know-Nothing party while most of the Whig leaders went over to the Democrats. The Know-Nothing party was nearly destroyed by its crushing defeat in 1856 and in the next year the Democrats by a large majority elected for governor Joseph Emerson Brown (1821-1894) who by three successive re-elections was continued in that office until the close of the Civil War. Although Governor Brown represented the poorer class of white citizens he had taken a course in law at Yale College, had practised law, and at the time of his election was judge of a superior court; although he had never held slaves he believed that the abolition of slavery would soon result in the ruin of the South, and he was a man of strong convictions. The Kansas question and the attitude of the North toward the decision in the Dred Scott case were arousing the South when he was inaugurated the first time, and in his inaugural address he clearly indicated that he would favour secession in the event of any further encroachment on the part of the North. In July 1859 Senator Alfred Iverson (1798-1874) declared that in the event of the election of a Free-Soil resident in 1860 he would favour the establishment of an independent confederacy; later in the same year Governor Brown expressed himself to a similar effect and urged the improvement of the military service. On the 7th of November following the election of President Lincoln the governor, in a special message to the legislature, recommended the calling of a convention to decide the question of secession, and Alexander H. Stephens was about the only prominent political leader who contended that Lincoln’s election was insufficient ground for such action. On the 17th of November the legislature passed an act directing the governor to order an election of delegates on the 2nd of January 1861 and their meeting in a convention on the 16th. On the 19th this body passed an ordinance of secession by a vote of 208 to 89. Already the first regiment of Georgia Volunteers, under Colonel Alexander Lawton (1818-1896) had seized Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah river and now Governor Brown proceeded to Augusta and seized the Federal arsenal there. Toward the close of the same year, however, Federal warships blockaded Georgia’s ports, and early in 1862 Federal forces captured Tybee Island, Fort Pulaski, St Mary’s, Brunswick and St Simon Island. Georgia had responded freely to the call for volunteers, but when the Confederate Congress had passed, in April 1862, the Conscript Law which required all white men (except those legally exempted from service) between the ages of 18 and 35 to enter the Confederate service, Governor Brown, in a correspondence with President Davis which was continued for several months, offered serious objections, his leading contentions being that the measure was unnecessary as to Georgia, unconstitutional, subversive of the state’s sovereignty, and therefore “at war with the principles for the support of which Georgia entered into this revolution.”

In 1863 north-west Georgia was involved in the Chattanooga campaign. In the following spring Georgia was invaded from Tennessee by a Federal army under General William T. Sherman; the resistance of General Joseph E. Johnston and General J.B. Hood proved ineffectual; and on the 1st of September Atlanta was taken. Then Sherman began his famous “march to the sea,” from Atlanta to Savannah, which revealed the weakness of the Confederacy. In the spring of 1865, General J.H. Wilson with a body of cavalry entered the state from Alabama, seized Columbus and West Point on the 16th of April, and on the 10th of May captured Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, at Irwinville in Irwin county.

In accord with President Andrew Johnson’s plan for reorganizing the Southern States, a provisional governor, James Johnson, was appointed on the 17th of June 1865, and a state convention reformed the constitution to meet the new conditions, rescinding the ordinance of secession, abolishing slavery and formally repudiating the state debt incurred in the prosecution of the war. A governor and legislature were elected in November 1865, the legislature ratified the Thirteenth Amendment on the 9th of December and five days later the governor-elect was inaugurated. But both the convention and legislature incurred the suspicion and ill-will of Congress; the convention had congratulated the president on his policy, memorialized him on behalf of Jefferson Davis, and provided pensions for disabled Confederate soldiers and the widows of those who had lost their lives during the war, while the legislature passed apprenticeship, labour and vagrancy laws to protect and regulate the negroes, and rejected the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the civil rights were conferred upon the freedmen, Congress would not tolerate the political incapacity and social inferiority which the legislature had assigned to them, and therefore Georgia was placed under military government, as part of the third military district, by the Reconstruction Act of the 2nd of March 1867. Under the auspices of the military authorities registration of electors for a new state convention was begun and 95,168 negroes and 96,333 whites were registered. The acceptance of the proposition to call the convention and the election of many conscientious and intelligent delegates were largely due to the influence of ex-Governor Brown, who was strongly convinced that the wisest course for the South was to accept quickly what Congress had offered. The convention met in Atlanta on the 9th of December 1867 and by March 1868 had revised the constitution to meet the requirements of the Reconstruction Acts. The constitution was duly adopted by popular vote, and elections were held for the choice of a governor and legislature. Rufus Brown Bullock (b. 1834), Republican, was chosen governor, the Senate had a majority of Republicans, but in the House of Representatives a tie vote was cast for the election of a speaker. On the 21st of July the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and a section of the state constitution (which denied the power of state courts to entertain against any resident of the state suits founded on contracts existing on the 15th of June 1865) was repealed by the legislature in pursuance of the congressional “Omnibus Bill” of the 25th of June 1868, and as evidence of the restoration of Georgia to the Union the congressmen were seated on the 25th of July in that year.

But in September of the same year the Democrats in the state legislature, being assisted by some of the white Republicans, expelled the 27 negro members and seated their defeated white contestants, relying upon the legal theory that the right to hold office belonged only to those citizens designated by statute, the common law or custom. In retaliation the 41st Congress excluded the state’s representatives on a technicality, and, on the theory that the government of Georgia was a provisional organization, passed an act requiring the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment before the admission of Georgia’s senators and representatives. The war department now concluded that the state was still subject to military authority, and placed General A.H. Terry in command. With his aid, and that of Congressional requirements that all members of the legislature must take the Test Oath and none be excluded on account of colour, a Republican majority was secured for both houses, and the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. Georgia was now finally admitted to the Union by Act of Congress, on the 15th of July 1870.

The Reconstruction period in Georgia is remarkable for its comparative moderation. Although there was great political excitement, there was not as much extravagance in public administration as there was in other Southern States, the state debt increasing approximately from $6,600,000 to $16,000,000. The explanation lies in the fact that there were comparatively few “carpet-baggers” or adventurers in the state, and that a large number of conservative citizens, under the leadership of ex-Governor Brown, supported the Reconstruction policy of Congress and joined the Republican party.

The election of 1871 gave the Democrats a majority in the legislature; Governor Bullock, fearing impeachment, resigned, and at a special election James M. Smith was chosen to fill the unexpired term. After that the control of the Democrats was complete. In 1891 the Populist party was organized, but it never succeeded in securing a majority of the votes in the state.

List of Governors

A brief bibliography, chiefly of historical materials, is given by U.B. Phillips in his monograph “Georgia and State Rights,” in vol. ii. of the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1901 (Washington, 1902). Valuable information concerning the resources and products of the state is given in the publications of the Department of Agriculture, which include weekly and monthly Bulletins, biennial Reports and a volume entitled Georgia, Historical and Industrial (Atlanta, 1901). The Reports of the United States Census (especially the Twelfth Census for 1900 and the special census of manufactures for 1905) should be consulted, and Memoirs of Georgia (2 vols., Atlanta, Ga., 1895) contains chapters on industrial conditions.

The principal sources for public administration are the annual reports of the state officers, philanthropic institutions, the prison commission and the railroad commission, and the revised Code of Georgia (Atlanta, 1896), adopted in 1895; see also L.F. Schmeckebier’s “Taxation in Georgia” (Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. xviii.) and “Banking in Georgia” (Banker’s Magazine, vol. xlviii.). Education and social conditions are treated in C.E. Jones’s History of Education in Georgia (Washington, 1890), the Annual Reports of the School Commissioner, and various magazine articles, such as “Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mill” (Century Magazine, vol. xix.) and “A Plea for Light” (South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. iii.). The view of slavery given in Frances A. Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839 (New York, 1863) should be compared with R.Q. Mallard’s Plantation Life before Emancipation (Richmond, Va., 1897), and with F.L. Olmsted’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York, 1856).

The best book for the entire field of Georgia history is Lawton B. Evans’s A Student’s History of Georgia (New York, 1898), a textbook for schools. This should be supplemented by C.C. Jones’s Antiquities of the Southern Indians, particularly of the Georgia Tribes (New York, 1873), for the aborigines; W.B. Stevens’s History of Georgia to 1798 (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1847-1859) and C.C. Jones, jun., History of Georgia (2 vols., Boston, 1883) for the Colonial and Revolutionary periods; C.H. Haskins’s The Yazoo Land Companies (Washington, 1891); the excellent monograph (mentioned above) by U.B. Phillips for politics prior to 1860; Miss Annie H. Abel’s monograph “The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi,” in vol. i. of the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1906 (Washington, 1908) for a good account of the removal of the Indians from Georgia; the judicious monograph by E.C. Woolley, Reconstruction in Georgia (New York, 1901); and I.W. Avery’s History of Georgia from 1850 to 1881 (New York, 1881), which is marred by prejudice but contains material of value. The Confederate Records of the State of Georgia were published at Atlanta in 1909. See also: E.J. Harden’s Life of George M. Troup (Savannah, 1840); R.M. Johnston and W.H. Browne, Life of Alexander H. Stephens (Philadelphia, 1878), and Louis Pendleton, Life of Alexander H. Stephens (Philadelphia, 1907); P.A. Stovall’s Robert Toombs (New York, 1892); H. Fielder’s Life, Times and Speeches of Joseph E. Brown (Springfield, Mass., 1883) and C.C. Jones, jun., Biographical Sketches of Delegates from Georgia to the Continental Congress (New York, 1891). There is much valuable material, also, in the publications (beginning with 1840) of the Georgia Historical Society (see the list in vol. ii. of the Report of the American Historical Association for 1905).

[1] According to the usual nomenclature, the branch flowing S.W. is called the Chattooga; this unites with the Tallulah to form the Tugaloo, which in turn unites with the Kiowee to form the Savannah proper.

[2] The manufacturing statistics for 1900 which follow are not those given in the Twelfth Census, but are taken from the Census of Manufactures, 1905, the 1900 figures here given being only for “establishments on a factory basis,” and thus being comparable with those of 1905. In 1890 there were 53 mills with a capital of $17,664,675 and a product valued at $12,035,629.

[3] In these valuations for 1900 and for 1905 the rough lumber dressed or remanufactured in planing mills enters twice into the value of the product.

[4] The population of the state was 82,548 in 1790, 162,686 in 1800, 252,433 in 1810, 340,989 in 1820, 516,823 in 1830, 691,392 in 1840, 906,185 in 1850, 1,057,286 in 1860, and 1,184,100 in 1870.

[5] This negro percentage includes 211 Chinese, Japanese and Indians.

[6] The state has had four other constitutions—those of 1777, 1789, 1798 and 1868.

[7] Owing to the custom which holds in Georgia of choosing state senators in rotation from each of the counties making up a senatorial district, it happened in 1907 that few cities were represented directly by senators chosen from municipalities. It is believed that this fact contributed to the passage of the prohibition law.

[8] De facto.

[9] President of the Colony.

[10] President of the Council of Safety.

[11] President of Georgia.

[12] First Governor under a State Constitution.

[13] President Executive Council and de facto Governor.

[14] President of Senate.

[15] Provisional.

GEORGIA, a former kingdom of Transcaucasia, which existed historically for more than 2000 years. Its earliest name was Karthli or Karthveli; the Persians knew it as Gurjistan, the Romans and Greeks as Iberia, though the latter placed Colchis also in the west of Georgia. Vrastan is the Armenian name and Gruzia the Russian. Georgia proper, which included Karthli and Kakhetia, was bounded on the N. by Ossetia and Daghestan, on the S. by the principalities of Erivan and Kars, and on the W. by Guria and Imeretia; but the kingdom also included at different times Guria, Mingrelia, Abkhasia, Imeretia and Daghestan, and extended from the Caucasus range on the N. to the Aras or Araxes on the S. It is now divided between the Russian governments of Tiflis and Kutais, under which headings further geographical particulars are given. (See also [Caucasia].)

History.—According to traditional accounts, the Georgian (Karthlian), Kakhetian, Lesghian, Mingrelian and other races of Transcaucasia are the descendants of Thargamos, great-grandson of Japheth, son of Noah, though Gen. x. 3 makes Togarmah to be the son of Gomer, who was the son of Japheth. These various races were subsequently known under the general name of Thargamosides. Karthlos, the second son of Thargamos, is the eponymous king of his race, their country being called Karthli after him. Mtskhethos, son of Karthlos, founded the city of Mtskhetha (the modern Mtskhet) and made it the capital of his kingdom. We come, however, to firmer historic ground when we read that Georgia was conquered by Alexander the Great, or rather by one of his generals. The Macedonian yoke was shaken off by Pharnavaz or Pharnabazus, a prince of the royal race, who ruled from 302 to 237 B.C. All through its history Georgia, being on the outskirts of Armenia and Persia, both of them more powerful neighbours than itself, was at times more or less closely affected by their destinies. In this way it was sometimes opposed to Rome, sometimes on terms of friendship with Byzantium, according as these were successively friendly or hostile to the Armenians and the Persians. In the end of the 2nd century B.C. the last Pharnavazian prince was dethroned by his own subjects and the crown given to Arsaces, king of Armenia, whose son Arshag, ascending the throne of Georgia in 93 B.C., established there the Arsacid dynasty. This close association with Armenia brought upon the country an invasion (65 B.C.) by the Roman general Pompey, who was then at war with Mithradates, king of Pontus and Armenia; but Pompey did not establish his power permanently over Iberia. A hundred and eighty years later the Emperor Trajan penetrated (A.D. 114) into the heart of the country, and chastised the Georgians; yet his conquest was only a little more permanent than Pompey’s. During one of the internecine quarrels, which were not infrequent in Georgia, the throne fell to Mirhan or Mirian (265-342), a son of the Persian king, who had married a daughter of Asphagor, the last sovereign of the Arsacid dynasty.

With Mirian begins the Sassanian dynasty. He and his subjects were converted to Christianity by a nun Nuno (Nino), who had escaped from the religious persecutions of Tiridates, king of Armenia. Mirian erected the first Christian church in Georgia on the site now occupied by the cathedral of Mtskhet. In or about the year 371 Georgia was overrun by the Persian king Shapur or Sapor II., and in 379 a Persian general built the stronghold of Tphilis (afterwards Tiflis) as a counterpoise to Mtskhet. The Persian grasp upon Georgia was loosened by Tiridates, who reigned from 393 to 405. One of Mirian’s successors, Vakhtang (446-499), surnamed Gurgaslan or Gurgasal, the Wolf-Lion, established a patriarchate at Mtskhet and made Tphilis his capital. This sovereign, having conquered Mingrelia and Abkhasia, and subdued the Ossetes, made himself master of a large part of Armenia. Then, co-operating for once with the king of Persia, he led an army into India; but towards the end of his reign there was enmity between him and the Persians, against whom he warred unsuccessfully. His son Dachi or Darchil (499-514) upon ascending the throne transferred the seat of government permanently from Mtskhet to Tphilis (Tiflis). Again Persia stretched out her hand over Georgia, and proved a formidable menace to the existence of the kingdom, until, owing to the severe pressure of the Turks on the one side and of the Byzantine Greeks on the other, she found it expedient to relax her grasp. The Georgians, seizing the opportunity, appealed (571) to the Byzantine emperor, Justin II. who gave them a king in the person of Guaram, a prince of the Bagratid family of Armenia, conferring upon him the title, not of king, but of viceroy. Thus began the dynasty of the Bagratids, who ruled until 1803.

This was not, however, the first time that Byzantine influence had been effectively exercised in Georgia. As early as the reign of Mirian, in the 3rd century, the organizers of the early Georgian church had looked to Byzantium, the leading Christian power in the East, for both instruction and guidance, and the connexion thus begun had been strengthened as time went on. From this period until the Arab (i.e. Mahommedan) invasions began, the authority of Byzantium was supreme in Georgia. Some seventy years after the Bagratids began to rule in Georgia the all-conquering Arabs appeared on the frontiers of the country, and for the next one hundred and eighty years they frequently devastated the land, compelling its inhabitants again and again to accept Islam at the sword’s point. But it was not until the death of the Georgian king Ashod (787-826) that they completely subdued the Caucasian state and imposed their will upon it. Nevertheless they were too much occupied elsewhere or too indifferent to its welfare to defend it against alien aggressors, for in 842 Bogha, a Turkish chief, invaded the country, and early in the 10th century the Persians again overran it. But a period of relief from these hostile incursions was afforded by the reign of Bagrat III. (980-1014). During his father’s lifetime he had been made king of Abkhasia, his mother belonging to the royal house of that land, and after ascending the Georgian throne he made his power felt far beyond the frontiers of his hereditary dominions, until his kingdom extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, while Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kirman all paid him tribute. Not only did he encourage learning and patronize the fine arts, but he built, in 1003, the cathedral at Kutais, one of the finest examples extant of Georgian architecture. During the reign of Bagrat IV. (1027-1072) the Seljuk Turks more than once burst, after 1048, into the country from Asia Minor, but they were on the whole successfully repulsed, although they plundered Tiflis. During the reign of the next king, George II., they again devastated Tiflis. But once more fortune changed after the accession of David II. (1089-1125), surnamed the Renovator, one of the greatest of Georgian kings. With the help of the Kipchaks, a Mongol or Turkish race, from the steppe lands to the north of the Caucasus, whom he admitted into his country, David drove the Seljuks out of his domains and forced them back over the Armenian mountains. Under George III. (1156-1184), a grandson of David II., Armenia was in part conquered, and Ani, one of its capitals, taken. George’s daughter Thamar or Tamara, who succeeded him, reigned over the kingdom as left by David II. and further extended her power over Trebizond, Erzerum, Tovin (in Armenia) and Kars. These successes were continued by her son George IV. (1212-1223), who conquered Ganja (now Elisavetpol) and repulsed the attacks of the Persians; but in the last years of his reign there appeared (1220 and 1222) the people who were to prove the ruin of Georgia, namely the Mongol hosts of Jenghiz Khan, led by his sons. George IV. was succeeded by his sister Rusudan, whose capital was twice captured by the Persians and her kingdom overrun and fearfully devastated by the Mongols in 1236. Then, after a period of wonderful recovery under George V. (1318-1346), who conquered Imeretia and reunited it to his crown, Georgia was again twice (1386 and 1393-1394) desolated by the Mongols under Timur (Tamerlane), prince of Samarkand, who on the second occasion laid waste the entire country with fire and sword, and crushed it under his relentless heel until the year 1403. Alexander I. (1413-1442) freed his country from the last of the Mongols, but at the end of his reign divided his territory between his three sons, whom he made sovereigns of Imeretia, Kakhetia and Karthli (Georgia) respectively. The first mentioned remained a separate state until its annexation to Russia in 1810; the other two were soon reunited.

Political relations between Russia and Georgia began in the end of the same century, namely in 1492, when the king of Kakhetia sought the protection of Ivan III. during a war between the Turks and the Persians. In the 17th century the two states were brought into still closer relationship. In 1619, when Georgia was harried by Shah Abbas of Persia, Theimuraz (1629-1634), king of Georgia, appealed for help to Michael, the first of the Romanov tsars of Russia, and his example was followed later in the century by the rulers of other petty Thargamosid or Caucasian states, namely Imeretia and Guria. In 1638 the prince of Mingrelia took the oath of allegiance to the Russian tsar, and in 1650 the same step was taken by the prince of Imeretia. Vakhtang VI. of Georgia put himself under the protection of Peter the Great early in the 18th century. When Persia fell into the grip of the Afghans early in the 18th century the Turks seized the opportunity, and, ousting the Persians from Georgia, captured Tiflis and compelled Vakhtang to abdicate. But in 1735 they renounced all claim to supremacy over the Caucasian states. This left Persia with the predominating influence, for though Peter the Great extorted from Persia (1722) her prosperous provinces beside the Caspian, he left the mountaineers to their own dynastic quarrels. Heraclius II. of Georgia declared himself the vassal of Russia in 1783, and when, twelve years later, he was hard pressed by Agha Mahommed, shah of Persia, who seized Tiflis and laid it in ruins, he appealed to Russia for help. The appeal was again renewed by the next king of Georgia, George XIII., in 1798, and in the following year he renounced his crown in favour of the tsar, and in 1801 Georgia was converted into a Russian province. The state of Guria submitted to Russia in 1829.

(J. T. Be.)

Ethnology.—Of the three main groups into which the Caucasian races are now usually divided, the Georgian is in every respect the most important and interesting. It has accordingly largely occupied the attention of Orientalists almost incessantly from the days of Klaproth. Yet such are the difficulties connected with the origin and mutual relations of the Caucasian peoples that its affinities are still far from being clearly established. Anton von Schiefner and P.V. Uslar, however, arrived at some negative conclusions valuable as starting-points for further research. In their papers, published in the Memoirs of the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences and elsewhere (1859 et seq.), they finally disposed of the views of Bopp and Brosset (1836), who attempted on linguistic grounds to connect the Georgians with the Indo-European family. They also clearly show that Max Müller’s “Turanian” theory is untenable, and they go a long way towards proving that the Georgian, with all the other Caucasian languages except the Ossetian, forms a distinct linguistic family absolutely independent of all others. This had already been suspected by Klaproth, and the same conclusion was arrived at by Fr. Müller and Zagarelli.

Uslar’s “Caucasian Family” comprises the following three great divisions:

1. Western Group. Typical races: Circassians and Abkhasians.

2. Eastern Group. Typical races: Chechens and Lesghians.

3. Southern Group. Typical race: Georgians.

Here the term “family” must be taken in a far more elastic sense than when applied, for instance, to the Indo-European, Semitic or Eastern Polynesian divisions of mankind. Indeed the three groups present at least as wide divergences as are found to exist between the Semitic and Hamitic linguistic families. Thus, while the Abkhasian of group 1 is still at the agglutinating, the Lesghian of group 2 has fairly reached the inflecting stage, and the Georgian seems still to waver between the two. In consequence of these different stages of development, Uslar hesitated finally to fix the position of Georgian in the family, regarding it as possibly a connecting link between groups 1 and 2, but possibly also radically distinct from both.

Including all its numerous ramifications, the Georgian or southern group occupies the greater part of Transcaucasia, reaching from about the neighbourhood of Batum on the Black Sea eastwards to the Caspian, and merging southwards with the Armenians of Aryan stock. It comprises altogether nine subdivisions, as in the subjoined table:

The representative branch of the race has always been the Karthlians. It is now pretty well established that the Georgians are the descendants of the aborigines of the Pambak highlands, and that they found their way to their present homes from the south-east some four or five thousand years ago, possibly under pressure from the great waves of Aryan migration flowing from the Iranian tableland westwards to Asia Minor and Europe. The Georgians proper are limited on the east by the Alazan, on the north by the Caucasus, on the west by the Meskes hills, separating them from the Imeretians, and on the south by the Kura river and Kara-dagh and Pambak mountains. Southwards, however, no hard and fast ethnical line can be drawn, for even immediately south of Tiflis, Georgians, Armenians and Tatars are found intermingled confusedly together.

The Georgian race, which represents the oldest elements of civilization in the Caucasus, is distinguished by some excellent mental qualities, and is especially noted for personal courage and a passionate love of music. The people, however, are described as fierce and cruel, and addicted to intemperance, though Max von Thielmann (Journey in the Caucasus, &c., 1875) speaks of them as “rather hard drinkers than drunkards.” Physically they are a fine athletic race of pure Caucasian type; hence during the Moslem ascendancy Georgia supplied, next to Circassia, the largest number of female slaves for the Turkish harems and of recruits for the Osmanli armies, more especially for the select corps of the famous Mamelukes.

The social organization rested on a highly aristocratic basis, and the lowest classes were separated by several grades of vassalage from the highest. But since their incorporation with the Russian empire, these relations have become greatly modified, and a more sharply defined middle class of merchants, traders and artisans has been developed. The power of life and death, formerly claimed and freely exercised by the nobles over their serfs, has also been expressly abolished. The Georgians are altogether at present in a fairly well-to-do condition, and under Russian administration they have become industrious, and have made considerable moral and material progress.

Missionaries sent by Constantine the Great introduced Christianity about the beginning of the 4th century. Since that time the people have, notwithstanding severe pressure from surrounding Mahommedan communities, remained faithful to the principles of Christianity, and are still amongst the most devoted adherents of the Orthodox Greek Church. Indeed it was their attachment to the national religion that caused them to call in the aid of the Christian Muscovites against the proselytizing attempts of the Shiite Persians—a step which ultimately brought about their political extinction.

As already stated, the Karthli language is not only fundamentally distinct from the Indo-European linguistic family, but cannot be shown to possess any clearly ascertained affinities with either of the two northern Caucasian groups. It resembles them chiefly in its phonetic system, so that according to Rosen (Sprache der Lazen) all the languages of central and western Caucasus might be adequately rendered by the Georgian alphabet. Though certainly not so harsh as the Avar, Lesghian and other Daghestan languages, it is very far from being euphonious, and the frequent recurrence of such sounds as ts, ds, thz, kh, khh, gh (Arab. غ), q (Arab. ق), for all of which there are distinct characters, renders its articulation rather more energetic and rugged than is agreeable to ears accustomed to the softer tones of the Iranian and western Indo-European tongues. It presents great facilities for composition, the laws of which are very regular. Its peculiar morphology, standing midway between agglutination and true inflexion, is well illustrated by its simple declension common to noun, adjective and pronoun, and its more intricate verbal conjugation, with its personal endings, seven tenses and incorporation of pronominal subject and object, all showing decided progress towards the inflecting structure of the Indo-European and Semitic tongues.

Georgian is written in a native alphabet obviously based on the Armenian, and like it attributed to St Mesropius (Mesrop), who flourished in the 5th century. Of this alphabet there are two forms, differing so greatly in outline and even in the number of the letters that they might almost be regarded as two distinct alphabetic systems. The first and oldest, used exclusively in the Bible and liturgical works, is the square or monumental Khutsuri, i.e. “sacerdotal,” consisting of 38 letters, and approaching the Armenian in appearance. The second is the Mkhedrūli khēli, i.e. “soldier’s hand,” used in ordinary writing, and consisting of 40 letters, neatly shaped and full of curves, hence at first sight not unlike the modern Burmese form of the Pali.

Of the Karthli language there are several varieties; and, besides those comprised in the above table, mention should be made of the Kakhetian current in the historic province of Kakhetia. A distinction is sometimes drawn between the Karthlians proper and the Kakhetians, but it rests on a purely political basis, having originated with the partition in 1424 of the ancient Iberian estates into the three new kingdoms of Karthlinia, Kakhetia and Imeretia. On the other hand, both the Laz of Lazistan and the Svanetian present such serious structural and verbal differences from the common type that they seem to stand rather in the relation of sister tongues than of dialects to the Georgian proper. All derive obviously from a common source, but have been developed independently of each other. The Tush or Mosok appears to be fundamentally a Kistinian or Chechen idiom affected by Georgian influences.

The Bible is said to have been translated into Georgian as early as the 5th century. The extant version, however, dates only from the 8th century, and is attributed to St Euthymius. But even so, it is far the most ancient work known to exist in the language. Next in importance is, perhaps, the curious poem entitled The Amours of Turiel and Nestan Darejan, or The man clothed in the panther’s skin, attributed to Rustevel, who lived during the prosperous reign of Queen Thamar (11th century). Other noteworthy compositions are the national epics of the Baramiani and the Rostomiani, and the prose romances of Visramiani and Darejaniani, the former by Sarg of Thmogvi, the latter by Mosi of Khoni. Apart from these, the great bulk of Georgian literature consists of ecclesiastical writings, hymns sacred and profane, national codes and chronicles.

Bibliography.—The standard authority on the history is M.F. Brosset’s translation of the Georgian chronicles under the title of Histoire de la Géorgie (5 vols., St Petersburg, 1849-1858); but compare also Khakanov, Histoire de Géorgie (Paris, 1900). See further A. Leist, Das georgische Volk (Dresden, 1903); M. de Villeneuve, La Géorgie (Paris, 1870); O. Wardrop, The Kingdom of Georgia (London, 1888); and Langlois, Numismatique géorgienne (Paris, 1860). For the philology see Zagarelli, Examen de la littérature relative à la grammaire géorgienne (1873); Friedrich Müller, Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1887), iii. 2; Leist, Georgische Dichter (1887); Erskert, Sprachen des kaukasischen Stammes (1895). For other points as to anthropology, Michel Smirnow’s paper in Revue d’anthropologie (April 15, 1878); Chantre, Recherches anthropologiques dans le Caucase (1885-1887); and Erckert, Der Kaukasus und seine Völker (1887).

GEORGIAN BAY, the N.E. section of Lake Huron, separated from it by Manitoulin Island and the peninsula comprising the counties of Grey and Bruce, Ontario. It is about 100 m. long and 50 m. wide, and is said to contain 30,000 islands. It receives numerous rivers draining a large extent of country; of these the chief are the French river draining Lake Nipissing, the Maganatawan draining a number of small lakes, the Muskoka draining the Muskoka chain of lakes (Muskoka, Rosseau, Joseph, &c.) and the Severn draining Lake Simcoe. Into its southern extremity, known as Nottawasaga Bay, flows the river of the same name. The Trent valley canal connects Georgian Bay with the Bay of Quinte and Lake Ontario, and a canal system has long been projected to Montreal by way of the French and Ottawa rivers and Lake Nipissing.

GEORGSWALDE, a town of Bohemia, Austria, 115 m. N.E. of Prague by rail. Pop. (1900) 8131, including Neu-Georgswalde, Wiesenthal and Philippsdorf, which form together a single commune. Georgswalde is one of the oldest industrial places of Bohemia, and together with the neighbouring town of Rumburg is the principal centre of the linen industry. The village of Philippsdorf, now incorporated with Georgswalde, has become since 1866 a famous place of pilgrimage, owing to the miracles attributed to an image of the Virgin, placed now in a magnificent new church (1885).

GEPHYREA, the name used for several groups of worm-like animals with certain resemblances but of doubtful affinity. In the article “Annelida” in the 9th edition of this Encyclopaedia, W.C. McIntosh followed the accepted view in associating in this group the Echiuridae, Sipunculidae and Priapulidae. E. Ray Lankester, in the preface to the English translation of C. Gegenbaur’s Comparative Anatomy (1878), added the Phoronidae to these forms. Afterwards the same author (article “Zoology,” Ency. Brit., 9th ed.) recognized that the Phoronidae had other affinities, and placed the other “gephyreans” in association with the Polyzoa as the two classes of a phylum Podaxonia. In the present state of knowledge the old group Gephyrea is broken up into Echiuroidea (q.v.) or Gephyrea armata, which are certainly Annelids; the Sipunculoidea (q.v.) or Gephyrea achaeta, an independent group, certainly coelomate, but of doubtful affinity; the Priapuloidea (q.v.), equally of doubtful affinity; and the Phoronidea (q.v.), which are almost certainly Hemichordata.

GERA, a town of Germany, capital of the principality of Reuss-Schleiz (called also Reuss younger line), situated in a valley on the banks of the White Elster, 45 m. S.S.W. of Leipzig on the railway to Probstzella. Pop. (1885) 34,152; (1905) 47,455. It has been mostly rebuilt since a great fire in 1780, and the streets are in general wide and straight, and contain many handsome houses. There are three Evangelical churches and one Roman Catholic. Among other noteworthy buildings are the handsome town-hall (1576, afterwards restored) and the theatre (1902). Its educational establishments include a gymnasium, a commercial and a weaving school. The castle of Osterstein, the residence of the princes of Reuss, dates from the 9th century, but has been almost entirely rebuilt in modern times. Gera is noted for its industrial activity. Its industries include wool-weaving and spinning, dyeing, iron-founding, the manufacture of cotton and silk goods, machinery, sewing machines and machine oil, leather and tobacco, and printing (books and maps) and flower gardening.

Gera (in ancient chronicles Geraha) was raised to the rank of a town in the 11th century, at which time it belonged to the counts of Groitch. In the 12th century it came into the possession of the lords of Reuss. It was stormed and sacked by the Bohemians in 1450, was two-thirds burned down by the Swedes in 1639 during the Thirty Years’ War, and suffered afterwards from great conflagrations in 1686 and 1780, being in the latter year almost completely destroyed.

GERALDTON, a town in the district of Victoria, West Australia, on Champion Bay, 306 m. by rail N.W. of Perth. Pop. (1901) 2593. It is the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop, an important seaport carrying on a considerable trade with the surrounding gold-fields and agricultural districts, the centre of a considerable railway system and an increasingly popular seaside resort. The harbour is safe and extensive, having a pier affording accommodation for large steamers. The chief exports are gold, copper, lead, wool and sandalwood.

GÉRANDO, MARIE JOSEPH DE (1772-1842), French philosopher, was born at Lyons on the 29th of February 1772. When the city was besieged in 1793 by the armies of the Republic, de Gérando took up arms, was made prisoner and with difficulty escaped with his life. He took refuge in Switzerland, whence he afterwards fled to Naples. In 1796 the establishment of the Directory allowed him to return to France. At the age of twenty-five he enlisted as a private in a cavalry regiment. About this time the Institute proposed as a subject for an essay this question,—“What is the influence of symbols on the faculty of thought?” De Gérando gained the prize, and heard of his success after the battle of Zürich, in which he had distinguished himself. This literary triumph was the first step in his upward career. In 1799 he was attached to the ministry of the interior by Lucien Bonaparte; in 1804 he became general secretary under Champagny; in 1805 he accompanied Napoleon into Italy; in 1808 he was nominated master of requests; in 1811 he received the title of councillor of state; and in the following year he was appointed governor of Catalonia. On the overthrow of the empire, de Gérando was allowed to retain this office; but having been sent during the hundred days into the department of the Moselle to organize the defence of that district, he was punished at the second Restoration by a few months of neglect. He was soon after, however, readmitted into the council of state, where he distinguished himself by the prudence and conciliatory tendency of his views. In 1819 he opened at the law-school of Paris a class of public and administrative law, which in 1822 was suppressed by government, but was reopened six years later under the Martignac ministry. In 1837 he was made a baron. He died at Paris on the 9th of November 1842.

De Gérando’s best-known work is his Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie relativement aux principes des connaissances humaines (Paris, 1804, 3 vols.). The germ of this work had already appeared in the author’s Mémoire de la génération des connaissances humaines (Berlin, 1802), which was crowned by the Academy of Berlin. In it de Gérando, after a rapid review of ancient and modern speculations on the origin of our ideas, singles out the theory of primary ideas, which he endeavours to combat under all its forms. The latter half of the work, devoted to the analysis of the intellectual faculties, is intended to show how all human knowledge is the result of experience; and reflection is assumed as the source of our ideas of substance, of unity and of identity. It is divided into two parts, the first of which is purely historical, and devoted to an exposition of various philosophical systems; in the second, which comprises fourteen chapters of the entire work, the distinctive characters and value of these systems are compared and discussed. In spite of the disadvantage that it is impossible to separate advantageously the history and critical examination of any doctrine in the arbitrary manner which de Gérando chose, the work has great merits. In correctness of detail and comprehensiveness of view it was greatly superior to every work of the same kind that had hitherto appeared in France. During the Empire and the first years of the Restoration, de Gérando found time to prepare a second edition (Paris, 1822, 4 vols.), which is enriched with so many additions that it may pass for an entirely new work. The last chapter of the part published during the author’s lifetime ends with the revival of letters and the philosophy of the 15th century. The second part, carrying the work down to the close of the 18th century, was published posthumously by his son in 4 vols. (Paris, 1847). Twenty-three chapters of this were left complete by the author in manuscript; the remaining three were supplied from other sources, chiefly printed but unpublished memoirs.

His essay Du perfectionnement moral et de l’éducation de soi-même was crowned by the French Academy in 1825. The fundamental idea of this work is that human life is in reality only a great education, of which perfection is the aim.

Besides the works already mentioned, de Gérando left many others, of which we may indicate the following:—Considérations sur diverses méthodes d’observation des peuples sauvages (Paris, 1801); Éloge de Dumarsais,—discours qui a remporté le prix proposé par la seconde classe de l’Institut National (Paris, 1805); Le Visiteur de pauvre (Paris, 1820); Instituts du droit administratif (4 vols., Paris, 1830); Cours normal des instituteurs primaires ou directions relatives à l’éducation physique, morale, et intellectuelle dans les écoles primaires (Paris, 1832); De l’éducation des sourds-muets (2 vols., Paris, 1832); De la bienfaisance publique (4 vols., 1838). A detailed analysis of the Histoire comparée des systèmes will be found in the Fragments philosophiques of M. Cousin. In connexion with his psychological studies, it is interesting that in 1884 the French Anthropological Society reproduced his instructions for the observation of primitive peoples, and modern students of the beginnings of speech in children and the cases of deaf-mutes have found useful matter in his works. See also J.P. Damiron, Essai sur la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle.

GERANIACEAE, in botany, a small but very widely distributed natural order of Dicotyledons belonging to the subclass Polypetalae, containing about 360 species in 11 genera. It is represented in Britain by two genera, Geranium (crane’s-bill) and Erodium (stork’s-bill), to which belong nearly two-thirds of the total number of species. The plants are mostly herbs, rarely becoming shrubby, with generally simple glandular hairs on the stem and leaves. The opposite or alternate leaves have a pair of small stipules at the base of the stalk and a palminerved blade. The flowers, which are generally arranged in a cymose inflorescence, are hermaphrodite, hypogynous, and, except in Pelargonium, regular. The parts are arranged in fives. There are five free sepals, overlapping in the bud, and, alternating with these, five free petals. In Pelargonium the flower is zygomorphic with a spurred posterior sepal and the petals differing in size or shape. In Geranium the stamens are obdiplostemonous, i.e. an outer whorl of five opposite the petals alternates with an inner whorl of five opposite the sepals; at the base of each of the antisepalous stamens is a honey-gland. In Erodium the members of the outer whorl are reduced to scale-like structures (staminodes), and in Pelargonium from two to seven only are fertile. There is no satisfactory explanation of this break in the regular alternation of successive whorls; the outer whorl of stamens arises in course of development before the inner, so that there is no question of subsequent displacement. There are five, or sometimes fewer, carpels, which unite to form an ovary with as many chambers, in each of which are one or two, rarely more, pendulous anatropous ovules, attached to the central column in such a way that the micropyle points outwards and the raphe is turned towards the placenta. The long beak-like style divides at the top into a corresponding number of slender stigmas.

Meadow Crane’s-bill, Geranium pratense. (After Curtis,Flora Londinensis.
1, Flower after removal of petals. 2, Fruit after splitting. 1 and 2about natural size.	3, Floral diagram, the dotsopposite the inner stamensrepresent honey-glands.

The larger-flowered species of Geranium are markedly protandrous, the outer stamens, inner stamens and stigmas becoming functional in succession. For instance, in meadow crane’s-bill G. pratense, each whorl of stamens ripens in turn, becoming erect and shedding their pollen; as the anthers wither the filaments bend outwards, and when all the anthers have diverged the stigmas become mature and ready for pollination. By this arrangement self-pollination is prevented and cross-pollination ensured by the visits of bees which come for the honey secreted by the glands at the base of the inner stamens.

In species with smaller and less conspicuous flowers, such as G. molle, the flowers of which are only 1⁄3 to ½ in. in diameter, self-pollination is rendered possible, since the divisions of the stigma begin to separate before the outer stamens have shed all their pollen; the nearness of the stigmas to the dehiscing anthers favours self-pollination.

In the ripe fruit the carpels separate into five one-seeded portions (cocci), which break away from the central column, either rolling elastically outwards and upwards or becoming spirally twisted. In most species of Geranium the cocci split open on the inside and the seeds are shot out by the elastic uptwisting (fig. 1); in Erodium and Pelargonium each coccus remains closed, and the long twisted upper portion separates from the central column, forming an awn, the distribution of which is favoured by the presence of bristles or hairs. The embryo generally fills the seed, and the cotyledons are rolled or folded on each other.

Geranium is the most widely distributed genus; it has 160 species and is spread over all temperate regions with a few species in the tropics. Three British species—G. sylvaticum, G. pratense and G. Robertianum (herb-Robert)—reach the arctic zone, while G. patagonicum and G. magellanicum are found in the antarctic. Erodium contains 50 species (three are British), most of which are confined to the Mediterranean region and west Asia, though others occur in America, in South Africa and West Australia. Pelargonium, with 175 species, has its centre in South Africa; the well-known garden and greenhouse “geraniums” are species of Pelargonium (see [Geranium]).

GERANIUM, the name of a genus of plants, which is taken by botanists as the type of the natural order Geraniaceae. The name, as a scientific appellation, has a much more restricted application than when taken in its popular sense. Formerly the genus Geranium was almost conterminous with the order Geraniaceae. Then as now the geranium was very popular as a garden plant, and the species included in the original genus became widely known under that name, which has more or less clung to them ever since, in spite of scientific changes which have removed the large number of them to the genus Pelargonium. This result has been probably brought about in some degree by an error of the nurserymen, who seem in many cases to have acted on the conclusion that the group commonly known as Scarlet Geraniums were really geraniums and not pelargoniums, and were in consequence inserted under the former name in their trade catalogues. In fact it may be said that, from a popular point of view, the pelargoniums of the botanist are still better known as geraniums than are the geraniums themselves, but the term “zonal Pelargonium” is gradually making its way amongst the masses.

The species of Geranium consist mostly of herbs, of annual or perennial duration, dispersed throughout the temperate regions of the world. They number about 160, and bear a considerable family resemblance. The leaves are for the most part palmately-lobed, and the flowers are regular, consisting of five sepals, five imbricating petals, alternating with five glandules at their base, ten stamens and a beaked ovary. Eleven species are natives of the British Isles and are popularly known as crane’s-bill. G. Robertianum is herb-Robert, a common plant in hedgebanks. G. sanguineum, with flowers a deep rose colour, is often grown in borders, as are also the double-flowered varieties of G. pratense. Many others of exotic origin form handsome border plants in our gardens of hardy perennials; amongst these G. armenum, G. Endressi, G. ibericum and its variety platypetalum are conspicuous.

From these regular-flowered herbs, with which they had been mixed up by the earlier botanists, the French botanist L’Heritier in 1787 separated those plants which have since borne the name of Pelargonium, and which, though agreeing with them in certain points of structure, differ in others which are admitted to be of generic value. One obvious distinction of Pelargonium is that the flowers are irregular, the two petals which stand uppermost being different—larger, smaller or differently marked—from the other three, which latter are occasionally wanting. This difference of irregularity the modern florist has done very much to annul, for the increased size given to the flowers by high breeding has usually been accompanied by the enlargement of the smaller petals, so that a very near approach to regularity has been in some cases attained. Another well-marked difference, however, remains in Pelargonium: the back or dorsal sepal has a hollow spur, which spur is adnate, i.e. joined for its whole length with the flower-stalk; while in Geranium there is no spur. This peculiarity is best seen by cutting clean through the flower-stalk just behind the flower, when in Pelargonium there will be seen the hollow tube of the spur, which in the case of Geranium will not be found, but the stalk will appear as a solid mass. There are other characters which support those already pointed out, such as the absence of the glandules, and the declination of the stamens; but the features already described offer the most ready and obvious distinctions.

To recapitulate, the geraniums properly so-called are regular-flowered herbs with the flower-stalks solid, while many geraniums falsely so-called in popular language are really pelargoniums, and may be distinguished by their irregular flowers and hollow flower-stalks. In a great majority of cases too, the pelargoniums so commonly met with in greenhouses and summer parterres are of shrubby or sub-shrubby habit.

The various races of pelargoniums have sprung from the intermixture of some of the species obtained from the Cape. The older show-flowered varieties have been gradually acquired through a long series of years. The fancy varieties, as well as the French spotted varieties and the market type, have been evolved from them. The zonal or bedding race, on the other hand, has been more recently perfected; they are supposed to have arisen from hybrids between Pelargonium inquinans and P. zonale. In all the sections the varieties are of a highly ornamental character, but for general cultivation the market type is preferable for indoor purposes, while the zonals are effective either in the greenhouse or flower garden. Some of the Cape species are still in cultivation—the leaves of many of them being beautifully subdivided, almost fern-like in character, and some of them are deliciously scented; P. quercifolium is the oak-leaf geranium. The ivy-leaf geranium, derived from P. peltatum, has given rise to an important class of both double- and single-flowered forms adapted especially for pot culture, hanging baskets, window boxes and the greenhouse. Of late years the ivy-leaf “geraniums” have been crossed with the “zonals,” and a new race is being gradually evolved from these two distinct groups.

The best soil for pelargoniums is a mellow fibrous loam with good well-rotted stable manure or leaf-mould in about the proportion of one-fifth; when used it should not be sifted, but pulled to pieces by the hand, and as much sand should be added as will allow the water to pass freely through it. The large-flowered and fancy kinds cannot bear so much water as most soft-wooded plants, and the latter should have a rather lighter soil.

All the pelargoniums are readily increased by cuttings made from the shoots when the plants are headed down after flowering, or in the spring, when they will root freely in a temperature of 65° to 70°. They must not be kept too close, and must be very moderately watered. When rooted they may be moved into well-drained 3-in. pots, and when from 6 to 8 in. high, should have the points pinched out in order to induce them to push out several shoots nearer the base. These shoots are, when long enough, to be trained in a horizontal direction; and when they have made three joints they should have the points again pinched out. These early-struck plants will be ready for shifting into 6-in. pots by the autumn, and should still be trained outwards. The show varieties after flowering should be set out of doors in a sunny spot to ripen their wood, and should only get water enough to keep them from flagging. In the course of two or three weeks they will be ready to cut back within two joints of where these were last stopped, when they should be placed in a frame or pit, and kept close and dry until they have broken. When they have pushed an inch or so, turn them out of their pots, shake off the old soil, trim the straggling roots, and repot them firmly in smaller pots if practicable; keep them near the light, and as the shoots grow continue to train them outwardly. They require to be kept in a light house, and to be set well up to the glass; the night temperature should range about 45°; and air should be given on all mild days, but no cold currents allowed, nor more water than is necessary to keep the soil from getting parched. The young shoots should be topped about the end of October, and when they have grown an inch or two beyond this, they may be shifted into 7-in. pots for flowering. The shoots must be kept tied out so as to be fully exposed to the light. If required to flower early they should not be stopped again; if not until June they may be stopped in February.

The zonal varieties, which are almost continuous bloomers, are of much value as decorative subjects; they seldom require much pruning after the first stopping. For winter flowering, young plants should be raised from cuttings about March, and grown on during the summer, but should not be allowed to flower. When blossoms are required, they should be placed close up to the glass in a light house with a temperature of 65°, only just as much water being given as will keep them growing. For bedding purposes the zonal varieties are best struck towards the middle of August in the open air, taken up and potted or planted in boxes as soon as struck, and preserved in frames or in the greenhouse during winter.

The fancy varieties root best early in spring from the half-ripened shoots; they are slower growers, and rather more delicate in constitution than the zonal varieties, and very impatient of excess of water at the root.

GERARD (d. 1108), archbishop of York under Henry I., began his career as a chancery clerk in the service of William Rufus. He was one of the two royal envoys who, in 1095, persuaded Urban II. to send a legate and Anselm’s pallium to England. Although the legate disappointed the king’s expectations, Gerard was rewarded for his services with the see of Hereford (1096). On the death of Rufus he at once declared for Henry I., by whom he was nominated to the see of York. He made difficulties when required to give Anselm the usual profession of obedience; and it was perhaps to assert the importance of his see that he took the king’s side on the question of investitures. He pleaded Henry’s cause at Rome with great ability, and claimed that he had obtained a promise, on the pope’s part, to condone the existing practice of lay investiture. But this statement was contradicted by Paschal, and Gerard incurred the suspicion of perjury. About 1103 he wrote or inspired a series of tracts which defended the king’s prerogative and attacked the oecumenical pretensions of the papacy with great freedom of language. He changed sides in 1105, becoming a stanch friend and supporter of Anselm. Gerard was a man of considerable learning and ability; but the chroniclers accuse him of being lax in his morals, an astrologer and a worshipper of the devil.

See the Tractatus Eboracenses edited by H. Bochmer in Libelli de lite Sacerdotii et Imperii, vol. iii. (in the Monumenta hist. Germaniae, quarto series), and the same author’s Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie (Leipzig, 1899).

(H. W. C. D.)

GERARD (c. 1040-1120), variously surnamed Tum, Tunc, Tenque or Thom, founder of the order of the knights of St John of Jerusalem (q.v.), was born at Amalfi about the year 1040. According to other accounts Martigues in Provence was his birthplace, while one authority even names the Château d’Avesnes in Hainaut. Either as a soldier or a merchant, he found his way to Jerusalem, where a hospice had for some time existed for the convenience of those who wished to visit the holy places. Of this institution Gerard became guardian or provost at a date not later than 1100; and here he organized that religious order of St John which received papal recognition from Paschal II. in 1113, by a bull which was renewed and confirmed by Calixtus II. shortly before the death of Gerard in 1120.

GERARD OF CREMONA (c. 1114-1187), the medieval translator of Ptolemy’s Astronomy, was born at Cremona, Lombardy, in or about 1114. Dissatisfied with the meagre philosophies of his Italian teachers, he went to Toledo to study in Spanish Moslem schools, then so famous as depositories and interpreters of ancient wisdom; and, having thus acquired a knowledge of the Arabic language, he appears to have devoted the remainder of his life to the business of making Latin translations from its literature. The date of his return to his native town is uncertain, but he is known to have died there in 1187. His most celebrated work is the Latin version by which alone Ptolemy’s Almagest was known to Europe until the discovery of the original Μεγάλη Σύνταξις. In addition to this, he translated various other treatises, to the number, it is said, of sixty-six; among these were the Tables of “Arzakhel,” or Al Zarkala of Toledo, Al Farabi On the Sciences (De scientiis), Euclid’s Geometry, Al Farghani’s Elements of Astronomy, and treatises on algebra, arithmetic and astrology. In the last-named latitudes are reckoned from Cremona and Toledo. Some of the works, however, with which he has been credited (including the Theoria or Theorica planetarum, and the versions of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine—the basis of the numerous subsequent Latin editions of that well-known work—and of the Almansorius of Abu Bakr Razi) are probably due to a later Gerard, of the 13th century, also called Cremonensis but more precisely de Sabloneta (Sabbionetta). This writer undertook the task of interpreting to the Latin world some of the best work of Arabic physicians, and his translation of Avicenna is said to have been made by order of the emperor Frederic II.

See Pipini, “Cronica,” in Muratori, Script. rer. Ital. vol. ix.; Nicol. Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana vetus, vol. ii.; Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura Italiana, vols. iii. (333) and iv.; Arisi, Cremona literata; Jourdain, Recherches sur ... l’origine des traductions latines d’Aristote; Chasles, Aperçu historique des méthodes en géométrie, and in Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, vol. xiii. p. 506; J.T. Reinaud, Géographie d’Aboulféda, introduction, vol. i. pp. ccxlvi.-ccxlviii.; Boncompagni, Della vita e delle opere di Gherardo Cremonese e di Gherardo da Sabbionetta (Rome, 1851). Much of the work of both the Gerards remains in manuscript, as in Paris, National Library, MSS. Lat. 7400, 7421; MSS. Suppl. Lat. 49; Rome, Vatican library, 4083, and Ottobon, 1826; Oxford, Bodleian library, Digby, 47, 61. The Vatican MS. 2392 is stated to contain a eulogy of “Gerard of Cremona” and a list of “his” translations, apparently confusing the two scholars. The former’s most valuable work was in astronomy; the latter’s in medicine.

(C. R. B.)

GÉRARD, ÉTIENNE MAURICE, Count (1773-1852), French general, was born at Damvilliers (Meuse), on the 4th of April 1773. He joined a battalion of volunteers in 1791, and served in the campaigns of 1792-1793 under Generals Dumouriez and Jourdan. In 1795 he accompanied Bernadotte as aide-de-camp. In 1799 he was promoted chef d’escadron, and in 1800 colonel. He distinguished himself at the battles of Austerlitz and Jena, and was made general of brigade in November 1806, and for his conduct in the battle of Wagram he was created a baron. In the Spanish campaign of 1810 and 1811 he gained special distinction at the battle of Fuentes d’Onor; and in the expedition to Russia he was present at Smolensk and Valutina, and displayed such bravery and ability in the battle of Borodino that he was made general of division. He won further distinction in the disastrous retreat from Moscow. In the campaign of 1813, in command of a division, he took part in the battles of Lützen and Bautzen and the operations of Marshal Macdonald, and at the battle of Leipzig (in which he commanded the XI. corps) he was dangerously wounded. After the battle of Bautzen he was created by Napoleon a count of the empire. In the campaign of France of 1814, and especially at La Rothière and Montereau, he won still greater distinction. After the first restoration he was named by Louis XVIII. grand cross of the Legion of Honour and chevalier of St Louis. In the Hundred Days Napoleon made Gérard a peer of France and placed him in command of the IV. corps of the Army of the North. In this capacity Gérard took a brilliant part in the battle of Ligny (see [Waterloo Campaign]), and on the morning of the 18th of June he was foremost in advising Marshal Grouchy to march to the sound of the guns. Gérard retired to Brussels after the fall of Napoleon, and did not return to France till 1817. He sat as a member of the chamber of deputies in 1822-1824, and was re-elected in 1827. He took part in the revolution of 1830, after which he was appointed minister of war and named a marshal of France. On account of his health he resigned the office of war minister in the October following, but in 1831 he took the command of the northern army, and was successful in thirteen days in driving the army of Holland out of Belgium. In 1832 he commanded the besieging army in the famous scientific siege of the citadel of Antwerp. He was again chosen war minister in July 1834, but resigned in the October following. In 1836 he was named grand chancellor of the Legion of Honour in succession to Marshal Mortier, and in 1838 commander of the National Guards of the Seine, an office which he held till 1842. He became a senator under the empire in 1852, and died on the 17th of April in the same year.

GÉRARD, FRANÇOIS, Baron (1770-1837), French painter, was born on the 4th of May 1770, at Rome, where his father occupied a post in the house of the French ambassador. At the age of twelve Gérard obtained admission into the Pension du Roi at Paris. From the Pension he passed to the studio of Pajou (sculptor), which he left at the end of two years for that of the painter Brenet, whom he quitted almost immediately to place himself under David. In 1789 he competed for the Prix de Rome, which was carried off by his comrade Girodet. In the following year (1790) he again presented himself, but the death of his father prevented the completion of his work, and obliged him to accompany his mother to Rome. In 1791 he returned to Paris; but his poverty was so great that he was forced to forgo his studies in favour of employment which should bring in immediate profit. David at once availed himself of his help, and one of that master’s most celebrated pictures—Le Pelletier de St Fargeau—may owe much to the hand of Gérard. This painting was executed early in 1793, the year in which Gérard, at the request of David, was named a member of the revolutionary tribunal, from the fatal decisions of which he, however, invariably absented himself. In 1794 he obtained the first prize in a competition, the subject of which was “The Tenth of August,” and, further stimulated by the successes of his rival and friend Girodet in the Salons of 1793 and 1794, Gérard (nobly aided by Isabey the miniaturist) produced in 1795 his famous “Bélisaire.” In 1796 a portrait of his generous friend (in the Louvre) obtained undisputed success, and the money received from Isabey for these two works enabled Gérard to execute in 1797 his “Psyché et l’Amour.” At last, in 1799, his portrait of Madame Bonaparte established his position as one of the first portrait-painters of the day. In 1808 as many as eight, in 1810 no less than fourteen portraits by him, were exhibited at the Salon, and these figures afford only an indication of the enormous numbers which he executed yearly; all the leading figures of the empire and of the restoration, all the most celebrated men and women of Europe, sat to Gérard. This extraordinary vogue was due partly to the charm of his manner and conversation, for his salon was as much frequented as his studio; Madame de Staël, Canning, Talleyrand, the duke of Wellington, have all borne witness to the attraction of his society. Rich and famous, Gérard was stung by remorse for earlier ambitions abandoned; at intervals he had indeed striven to prove his strength with Girodet and other rivals, and his “Bataille d’Austerlitz” (1810) showed a breadth of invention and style which are even more conspicuous in “L’Entrée d’Henri IV” (Versailles)—the work with which in 1817 he did homage to the Bourbons. After this date Gérard declined, watching with impotent grief the progress of the Romantic school. Loaded with honours—baron of the empire, member of the Institute, officer of the legion of honour, first painter to the king—he worked on sad and discouraged; the revolution of 1830 added to his disquiet; and on the 11th of January 1837, after three days of fever, he died. By his portraits Gérard is best remembered; the colour of his paintings has suffered, but his drawings show in uninjured delicacy the purity of his line; and those of women are specially remarkable for a virginal simplicity and frankness of expression.

M. Ch. Lenormant published in 1846 Essai de biographie et de critique sur François Gérard, a second edition of which appeared in 1847; and M. Delécluze devoted several pages to the same subject in his work Louis David, son école et son temps.

GÉRARD, JEAN IGNACE ISIDORE (1803-1847), French caricaturist, generally known by the pseudonym of Grandville—the professional name of his grandparents, who were actors—was born at Nancy on the 13th of September 1803. He received his first instruction in drawing from his father, a miniature painter, and at the age of twenty-one came to Paris, where he soon afterwards published a collection of lithographs entitled Les Tribulations de la petite propriété. He followed this by Les Plaisirs de toutâge and La Sibylle des salons; but the work which first established his fame was Métamorphoses du jour, published in 1828, a series of seventy scenes in which individuals with the bodies of men and faces of animals are made to play a human comedy. These drawings are remarkable for the extraordinary skill with which human characteristics are represented in animal features. The success of this work led to his being engaged as artistic contributor to various periodicals, such as La Silhouette, L’Artiste, La Caricature, Le Charivari; and his political caricatures, which were characterized by marvellous fertility of satirical humour, soon came to enjoy a general popularity. Besides supplying illustrations for various standard works, such as the songs of Béranger, the fables of La Fontaine, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, he also continued the issue of various lithographic collections, among which may be mentioned La Vie privée et publique des animaux, Les Cent Proverbes, L’Autre Monde and Les Fleurs animées. Though the designs of Gérard are occasionally unnatural and absurd, they usually display keen analysis of character and marvellous inventive ingenuity, and his humour is always tempered and refined by delicacy of sentiment and a vein of sober thoughtfulness. He died of mental disease on the 17th of March 1847.

A short notice of Gérard, under the name of Grandville, is contained in Théophile Gautier’s Portraits contemporains. See also Charles Blanc, Grandville (Paris, 1855).

GERARD, JOHN (1545-1612), English herbalist and surgeon, was born towards the end of 1545 at Nantwich in Cheshire. He was educated at Wisterson, or Willaston, 2 m. from Nantwich, and eventually, after spending some time in travelling, took up his abode in London, where he exercised his profession. For more than twenty years he also acted as superintendent of the gardens in London and at Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. In 1596 he published a catalogue of plants cultivated in his own garden in Holborn, London, 1039 in number, inclusive of varieties of the same species. Their English as well as their Latin names are given in a revised edition of the catalogue issued in 1599. In 1597 appeared Gerard’s well-known Herball, described by him in its preface as “the first fruits of these mine own labours,” but more truly an adaptation of the Stirpium historiae pemptades of Rembert Dodoens (1518-1585), published in 1583, or rather of a translation of the whole or part of the same by Dr Priest, with M. Lobel’s arrangement. Of the numerous illustrations of the Herball sixteen appear to be original, the remainder are mostly impressions from the wood blocks employed by Jacob Theodorus Tabernaemontanus in his Icones stirpium, published at Frankfort in 1590. A second edition of the Herball, with considerable improvements and additions, was brought out by Thomas Johnson in 1633, and reprinted in 1636. Gerard was elected a member of the court of assistants of the barber-surgeons in 1595, by which company he was appointed an examiner in 1598, junior warden in 1605, and master in 1608. He died in February 1612, and was buried at St Andrews, Holborn.

See Johnson’s preface to his edition of the Herball; and A Catalogue of Plants cultivated in the Garden of John Gerard in the years 1596-1599, edited with Notes, References to Gerard’s Herball, the Addition of modern Names, and a Life of the Author, by Benjamin Daydon Jackson, F.L.S., privately printed (London, 1876, 4to).

GÉRARDMER, a town of north-eastern France, in the department of Vosges, 33 m. E.S.E. of Epinal by rail. Pop. (1906) of the town, 3993; of the commune, 10,041. Gérardmer is beautifully situated at a height of 2200 ft. at the eastern end of the small Lake of Gérardmer (285 acres in extent) among forest-clad mountains. It is the chief summer-resort of the French Vosges and is a centre for excursions, among which may be mentioned those to the Höhneck (4481 ft.), the second highest summit in the Vosges, the Schlucht, the mountain pass from France to Germany, and, nearer the town, the picturesque defile of Granges, watered by the Vologne, which at one point forms the cascade known as the Saut des Cuves. The town itself, in which the chief object of interest is the huge lime-tree in the market-place, carries on cloth-weaving, bleaching, wood-sawing and the manufacture of wooden goods; there is trade in the cheeses (géromés) manufactured in the neighbourhood. Gérardmer is said to owe its name to Gerard of Alsace, 1st duke of Lorraine, who in the 11th century built a tower on the bank of the lake or mer, near which, in 1285, a new town was founded.

GERASA (mod. Gerash or Jerash), a city of Palestine, and a member of the league known as the Decapolis (q.v.), situated amid the mountains of Gilead, about 1757 ft. above the sea, 20 m. from the Jordan and 21 m. N. of Philadelphia. Of its origin nothing is known; it has been suggested that it represents the biblical Ramoth Gilead. From Josephus we learn that it was captured by Alexander Jannaeus (c. 83 B.C.), rebuilt by the Romans (c. A.D. 65), burned by the Jews in revenge for the massacre at Caesarea, and again plundered and depopulated by Annius, the general of Vespasian; but, in spite of these disasters, it was still in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Christian era one of the wealthiest and most flourishing cities of Palestine. It was a centre of Greek civilization, devoted especially to the worship of Artemis, and producing famous teachers, of whom Stephen the Byzantine mentions Ariston, Kerykos and Plato. As late as 1121 the soldiers of Baldwin II. found it defended by a castle built by a king of Damascus; but at the beginning of the following century the Arabian geographer Yaqut speaks of it as deserted and overthrown. The ruins of Jerash, discovered about 1806, and since then frequently visited and described, still attest the splendour of the Roman city. They are distributed along both banks of the Kerwan, a brook which flows south through the Wadi-ed-Dēr to join the Zerka or Jabbok; but all the principal buildings are situated on the level ground to the right of the stream. The town walls, which can still be traced and indeed are partly standing, had a circuit of not more than 2 m., and the main street was less than half a mile in length; but remains of buildings on the road for fully a mile beyond the south gate, show that the town had outgrown the limit of its fortifications. The most striking feature of the ruins is the profusion of columns, no fewer than 230 being even now in position; the main street is a continuous colonnade, a large part of which is still entire, and it terminates to the south in a forum of similar formation. Among the public buildings still recognizable are a theatre capable of accommodating 6000 spectators, a naumachia (circus for naval combats) and several temples, of which the largest was probably the grandest structure in the city, possessing a portico of Corinthian pillars 38 ft. high. The desolation of the city is probably due to earthquake; and the absence of Moslem erections or restorations seems to show that the disaster took place before the Mahommedan period.

The town is now occupied by a colony of Circassians, whose houses have been built with materials from the earlier buildings, and there has been much destruction of the interesting ruins. “The country of the Gerasenes” (Matt. viii. 28 and parallels; other readings, Gadarenes, Gergesenes) must be looked for in another quarter—on the E. coast of the Sea of Galilee, probably in the neighbourhood of the modern Khersa (C.W. Wilson in Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 369).