Note 8 — Chapter II
Reading edition
The origin of North Carolina is, perhaps, debatable. Nearly all historians have represented it as settled by Dissenting refugees; but Mr. S.B. Weeks, a Carolina historian, has written an essay to prove that this was not the case ("Religious Development in the Province of North Carolina," Baltimore, 1892). The Charter contained a clause for liberty of conscience on the instructive ground that, "by reason of the remote distance of those places, toleration would be no breach of the unity and conformity established in this realm."