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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume I
+(of 2), by Wiliam Cabell Bruce
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume I (of 2)
+       A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings
+
+Author: Wiliam Cabell Bruce
+
+Release Date: August 15, 2011 [EBook #36896]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BENJAMIN FRANKLIN; SELF-REVEALED, VOL I ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Josephine Paolucc and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
+
+SELF-REVEALED
+
+A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY BASED MAINLY ON HIS OWN WRITINGS
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM CABELL BRUCE
+
+IN TWO VOLUMES
+
+VOLUME I
+
+G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
+NEW YORK AND LONDON
+_The Knickerbocker Press_
+1917
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1917
+BY
+W. CABELL BRUCE
+
+_The Knickerbocker Press, New York_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                        PAGE
+
+INTRODUCTION                                               1
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I.--FRANKLIN'S MORAL STANDING AND SYSTEM                  12
+
+II.--FRANKLIN'S RELIGIOUS BELIEFS                         51
+
+III.--FRANKLIN, THE PHILANTHROPIST AND CITIZEN           102
+
+IV.--FRANKLIN'S FAMILY RELATIONS                         198
+
+V.--FRANKLIN'S AMERICAN FRIENDS                          310
+
+VI.--FRANKLIN'S BRITISH FRIENDS                          372
+
+VII.--FRANKLIN'S FRENCH FRIENDS                          473
+
+
+
+
+Benjamin Franklin
+
+Self-Revealed
+
+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+
+In reading the life of Benjamin Franklin, the most lasting impressions left
+upon the mind are those of versatility and abundance. His varied genius
+lent itself without effort to the minutest details of such commonplace
+things as the heating and ventilation of rooms, the correction of smoky
+chimneys and naval architecture and economy. His severely practical turn of
+mind was disclosed even in the devices with which he is pictured in his old
+age as relieving the irksomeness of physical effort--the rolling press with
+which he copied his letters, the fan which he worked with his foot in warm
+weather as he sat reading, the artificial hand with which he reached the
+books on the upper shelves of his library. But, sober as Franklin's genius
+on this side was, it proved itself equal to some of the most exacting
+demands of physical science; and above all to the sublime task, which
+created such a world-wide stir, of reducing the wild and mysterious
+lightning of the heavens to captivity, and bringing it down in fluttering
+helplessness to the earth. It was a rare mind indeed which could give happy
+expression to homely maxims of plodding thrift, and yet entertain noble
+visions of universal philanthropy. The stretch between Franklin's weighty
+observations on Population, for instance, and the bright, graceful
+bagatelles, with which his pen occasionally trifled, was not a short one;
+but it was compassed by his intellect without the slightest evidence of
+halting facility. It is no exaggeration to say that this intellect was an
+organ lacking in no element of power except that which can be supplied by a
+profound spiritual insight and a kindling imagination alone. _The
+Many-Sided Franklin_, the title of the essay by Paul Leicester Ford, is a
+felicitous touch of description. The life, the mind, the character of the
+man were all manifold, composite, marked by spacious breadth and freedom.
+It is astonishing into how many different provinces his career can be
+divided. Franklin, the Man of Business, Franklin, the Philosopher,
+Franklin, the Writer, Franklin, the Statesman, Franklin, the Diplomatist,
+have all been the subjects of separate literary treatment. As a man of
+business, he achieved enough, when the limitations of his time and
+environment are considered, to make him a notable precursor of the strong
+race of self-created men, bred by the later material expansion of America.
+As a scientist, his brilliant electrical discoveries gave him for a while,
+as contemporary literature so strikingly evinces, a position of
+extraordinary pre-eminence. As a writer, he can claim the distinction of
+having composed two productions, _The Autobiography_ and _The Way to
+Wealth_, which are read the world over. Of his reputation as a statesman it
+is enough to remark that his signature is attached to the Declaration of
+Independence, the Treaty of Alliance between the United States and France,
+the Treaty of Peace between Great Britain and the United States, and the
+Federal Constitution. Of his labors as a diplomatist it may be said that,
+if it is true that, without the continuous assistance of France, our
+independence would not have been secured, it is perhaps equally true that,
+without his wisdom, tact and European prestige, we should never have
+retained this assistance, so often imperilled by the jealousy and vanity of
+his colleagues as well as by the usual accidents of international
+intercourse. His life was like a full five-act play--prophetic prologue and
+stately epilogue, and swelling scene imposed upon swelling scene, until the
+tallow chandler's son, rising from the humblest levels of human fortune to
+the highest by uninterrupted gradations of invincible success, finally
+becomes the recipient of such a degree of impressive homage as has rarely
+been paid to anyone by the admiration and curiosity of mankind.
+
+To such a diversified career as this the element of mere longevity was, of
+course, indispensable. Renown so solid and enduring as that of Franklin and
+acquired in so many different fields was not a thing to be achieved by a
+few fortunate strokes. He did not awake one morning, as did Byron, to find
+himself famous; though his fame in the province of electrical science
+travelled fast when it once got under way. Such a full-orbed renown could
+be produced only by the long gestation of many years of physical vigor and
+untiring activity. With the meagre opportunities afforded by colonial
+conditions for the accumulation of wealth, there had to be an extended
+period of unflagging attention to Poor Richard's saying: "Many a little
+makes a mickle." To this period belong some things that the self-revelation
+of the _Autobiography_, unselfish as it is, cannot dignify, or even redeem
+from moral squalor, and other things which even the frankness itself of the
+_Autobiography_ is not frank enough to disclose. Then there is the unique
+story, imprinted upon the face of Philadelphia to this day, of his fruitful
+exertions as Town Oracle and City Builder. Then there is the episode of
+scientific inquiry, all too brief, when the prosperous printer and
+tradesman, appraising wealth at its true value, turns away from his
+printing press and stock of merchandise to give himself up with
+enthusiastic ardor to the study of electrical phenomena. Then there is the
+long term of public employment, beginning with the Clerkship of the
+Pennsylvania Assembly and not ending until, after many years of illustrious
+public service as legislator, administrator, diplomatic agent and foreign
+minister, Franklin complains in a letter to Dr. and Mrs. John Bard that the
+public, not content with eating his flesh, seems resolved to pick his
+bones.
+
+The amount of work that he did, the mass of results that he accomplished,
+during the long tract of time covered by his life, is simply prodigious.
+Primarily, Franklin was a man of action. The reputation that he coveted
+most was, as he declared, in a letter to Samuel Mather, that of a doer of
+good. Utility was the standard set by him for all his activities, and even
+his system of ethics did not escape the hard, griping pressure of this
+standard. What he aimed at from first to last, whether in the domain of
+science, literature or government, was practical results, and men, as they
+are known to experienced and shrewd, though kindly, observers of men, were
+the agencies with which he sought to accomplish such results. He never lost
+sight of the sound working principle, which the mere academician or closet
+philosopher is so prone to forget, that the game cannot be played except
+with the chess-men upon the board. But happily for the world few men of
+action have ever bequeathed to posterity such abundant written records of
+their lives. When Franklin desired to promote any project or to carry any
+point, he invariably, or all but invariably, invoked the aid of his pen to
+attain his end. To write for money, or for the mere pleasure of writing, or
+even for literary fame was totally alien to the purposes for which he
+wrote. A pen was to him merely another practical instrument for forwarding
+some private aim of his or some definite public or political object, to
+which his sympathies and powers were committed, or else but an aid to
+social amusement. As the result of this secondary kind of literary
+activity, he left behind him a body of writings of one kind or another
+which enables us to measure far more accurately than we should otherwise
+have been able to do the amount of thought and performance crowded into
+those eventful years of lusty and prolific existence. In the Library of
+Congress, in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, in the
+Library of the University of Pennsylvania, in numerous other collections in
+both hemispheres are found the outflowings of a brain to which exuberance
+of production was as natural as rank vegetation to a fat soil. Nor should
+it be forgotten that many of his papers have perished, which, if still
+extant, would furnish additional proofs of the fertility of his genius and
+swell the sum of pleasure and instruction which we derive from his works.
+With the sigh that we breathe over the lost productions of antiquity might
+well be mingled another over the papers and letters which were confided by
+Franklin, on the eve of his mission to France, to the care of Joseph
+Galloway, only to fall a prey to ruthless spoliation and dispersion. To
+look forward to a long winter evening enlivened by the missing letters that
+he wrote to his close friends, Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph's,
+"the good Bishop," as he called him, Sir Edward Newenham, of the Irish
+Parliament, and Jan Ingenhousz, physician to Maria Theresa, would alone, to
+one familiar with his correspondence, be as inviting a prospect as could be
+held out to any reader with a relish for the intimate letters of a wise,
+witty and humorous letter-writer.
+
+The length of time during which the subtle and powerful mind of Franklin
+was at work is, we repeat, a fact that must be duly taken into account in
+exploring the foundations of his celebrity. "By living twelve years beyond
+David's period," he said in one of his letters to George Whatley, "I seem
+to have intruded myself into the company of posterity, when I ought to have
+been abed and asleep." He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 6
+(old style), 1706, and died in the City of Philadelphia on April 17, 1790.
+At the time of his birth, Anne was in the fourth year of her reign as Queen
+of England, and Louis XIV. was King of France. Only eighty-five years had
+elapsed since the landing at Plymouth. More than three years were to elapse
+before the battle of Malplaquet, more than five years before the
+publication of the first _Spectator_, twenty years before the publication
+of _Gulliver's Travels_. Franklin's name was an honored one not only in his
+native land but beyond seas before any of the other great men who signed
+the Declaration of Independence had emerged from provincial obscurity. His
+birth preceded that of Washington by twenty-six years, that of John Adams
+by thirty years, that of Jefferson by thirty-seven years. Coming into the
+world only fifteen years after the outbreak of the witchcraft delusion at
+Salem, he lived to be a member of the Federal Convention and to pass down
+to us as modern in spirit and purpose as the American House of
+Representatives or the American Patent Office. He, at least, is a standing
+refutation of the claim that all the energetic tasks of human life are
+performed by young men. He was seventy years of age when he arrived in
+France to enter upon the laborious diplomatic career which so signally
+increased the lustre of his fame and so gloriously prospered our national
+fortunes; and he was seventy-nine years of age when his mission ended. But
+even then, weighed down though he was by the strong hand of time and vexed
+by diseases which left him little peace, there was no danger that he would
+be classed by anyone with the old townsmen of whom Lord Bacon speaks "that
+will be still sitting at their Street doore though thereby they offer Age
+to Scorne." After his return from France, he lived long enough to be thrice
+elected President of the State of Pennsylvania and to be a useful member of
+the Convention that framed the Federal Constitution; and only twenty-four
+days before his death he wrote the speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the
+petition of the Erika, or Purists for the abolition of piracy and slavery
+which is one of the happiest effusions of his satirical genius.
+
+_Multos da annos_ is a prayer, we may readily believe, that is often
+granted by the Gods with a scornful smile. In the case of Franklin, even
+without such a protracted term of life as was his portion, he would still
+have enjoyed a distinguished place in the memory of men, but not that
+broad, branching, full-crowned fame which makes him one of the most
+conspicuous landmarks of the eighteenth century.
+
+And fully in keeping with the extent of this fame was the extent of his
+relationship to the social and intellectual world of his time. The main
+background of his life, of course, was American--Lake Champlain, the St.
+Lawrence, the Charles, the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Delaware and the
+Ohio rivers; the long western reaches of the Atlantic; the dark curtain of
+firs and hemlocks and primeval masses of rock which separated the two
+powers that ceaselessly struggled for the mastery of the continent, and
+rarely lifted except to reveal some appalling tragedy, chargeable to the
+French and their dread ally, the Red Indian; Boston, New York,
+Philadelphia, Fort Duquesne--all the internal features and surroundings in
+a word of the long, narrow strip of English territory between Boston and
+Philadelphia with which he was so familiar, and over which his influence
+was asserted in so many ways. With the exception of his brief sojourn in
+London in his youth, his whole life was passed in the Colonies until he was
+fifty-one years of age. Before he sailed for England in 1757, upon his
+first foreign mission, the circumstances of his career had been such as to
+make him generally known to the people of the Colonies. His _Almanac_, his
+_Gazette_, his pithy sayings, his humorous stories, his visits to Boston,
+attended by the formation of so many wayside friendships, his postal
+expeditions, the printing presses set up by him at many different points,
+his private fortune, his public services, his electrical experiments were
+all breath for the trump of his fame. He knew Colonial America as few
+Colonial Americans knew it. He was born and reared in Boston, and, after
+his removal to Philadelphia, he revisited his native city at regular
+intervals. "The Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even tone of voice, and
+accent in pronunciation, all please, and seem to refresh and revive me," he
+said in his old age in a letter to the Rev. John Lathrop. Philadelphia, the
+most populous and opulent of the colonial towns, was his lifelong place of
+residence. In the _Autobiography_ he refers to it as "A city I love, having
+lived many years in it very happily." He appears to have been quite
+frequently in New York. His postal duties took him as far south as
+Williamsburg, and the Albany Congress drew him as far north of New York as
+Albany. He was in the camp of Braddock at Frederick, Maryland, just before
+that rash and ill-starred general set out upon his long, dolorous march
+through the wilderness where disaster and death awaited him. Facts like
+these signify but little now when transit from one distant point to another
+in the United States is effected with such amazing rapidity, but they
+signified much under the crude conditions of colonial life. Once at least
+did Franklin have his shoulder dislocated by an accident on the atrocious
+roads of Colonial New England. Once he was thrown into the water from an
+upset canoe near Staten Island. His masterly answers, when examined before
+the House of Commons, showed how searchingly conversant he was with
+everything that related to America. For some of our most penetrating
+glances into colonial life we are indebted to his writings; particularly
+instructive being his observations upon population in the Colonies, the
+economic condition and political temper of their people and the
+characteristics and habits of the Indians. It was a broad experience which
+touched at one extreme the giddy and artificial life of Paris, on the eve
+of the French Revolution, and at the other the drunken Indian orgies at the
+conclusion of the treaty at Carlisle which Franklin has depicted in the
+_Autobiography_ with a brush worthy of Rembrandt in these words: "Their
+dark-colour'd bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the
+bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied
+by their horrid yellings, form'd a scene the most resembling our ideas of
+hell that could well be imagin'd."
+
+But the peculiar distinction of Franklin is that his life stands out
+vividly upon an European as well as an American background. It is
+interesting to contrast the scene at Carlisle with the opera in honor of
+the Comte du Nord, at which he was present, during the French mission. "The
+House," he says in his _Journal of the Negotiation for Peace with Great
+Britain_, "being richly finish'd with abundance of Carving and Gilding,
+well Illuminated with Wax Tapers, and the Company all superbly drest, many
+of the Men in Cloth of Tissue, and the Ladies sparkling with Diamonds,
+form'd altogether the most splendid Spectacle my Eyes ever beheld." Until
+the august figure of Washington filled the eye of mankind, Franklin was the
+only American who had ever won a solid and splendid European reputation.
+The opportunity had not yet arisen for the lively French imagination to
+declare that he had snatched the sceptre from tyrants, but the first half
+of Turgot's tremendous epigram had been realized; for the lightning he had
+snatched, or rather filched, from the sky. It may well be doubted whether
+any one private individual with such limited pecuniary resources ever did
+as much for the moral and intellectual welfare of any one community as
+Franklin did for pre-revolutionary Philadelphia; but it was impossible that
+such aspirations and powers as his should be confined within the pale of
+colonial provincialism. His widespread fame, his tolerant disposition, his
+early residence in England, his later residence there for long periods, his
+excursions into Scotland and Ireland and Continental countries, the society
+of men of the world in London and other great cities combined to endow him
+with a character truly cosmopolitan which was to be still further
+liberalized by French influence. During his life, he crossed the Atlantic
+no less than eight times. After 1757 the greater part of his life was spent
+abroad. Of the eighty-four years, of which his existence was made up, some
+twenty-six were passed in England and France. He was as much at home on The
+Strand as on Market Street in Philadelphia. The friendships that he formed
+in England and France were almost as close as those that he had formed in
+Pennsylvania with his cronies, Hugh Roberts and John Bartram. He became so
+thoroughly domesticated in England during his periods of sojourn in that
+country that he thought of remaining there for the rest of his life, and
+yet, if the Brillons had only been willing to confer the hand of their
+daughter upon his grandson, William Temple Franklin, he would contentedly
+have died in France. If there ever was an American, if there ever was a
+citizen of the world, if there ever was a true child of the eighteenth
+century, it was he. His humanitarian sympathies, his catholic temper, his
+generous, unobstructed outlook enabled him without difficulty to adjust
+himself with ease to the genius of every people with whom he was brought
+into familiar contact. In America he was such a thorough American in every
+respect that Carlyle is said to have termed him on one occasion, "The
+Father of all the Yankees." In England he was English enough to feel the
+full glow of her greatness and to see her true interests far more clearly
+than she saw them herself. He had too many Anglo-Saxon traits to become
+wholly a Frenchman when he lived in France, but he became French enough to
+truly love France and her people and to be truly beloved by them. In the
+opinion of Sainte-Beuve he is the most French of all Americans.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Franklin's Moral Standing and System
+
+
+Until a comparatively recent period totally false conceptions in some
+respects of Franklin's character were not uncommon. To many he was merely
+the father of a penurious, cheese-paring philosophy, and to no little
+extent the idea prevailed that his own nature and conduct corresponded with
+its precepts. There could be no greater error. Of the whole science of
+prudential economy a master indeed he was. His observations upon human
+life, in its pecuniary relations, and upon the methods, by which affluence
+and ease are to be wrested from the reluctant grasp of poverty, are always
+sagacious in the highest degree. Poor Richard is quite as consummate a
+master of the science of rising in the world as Aristotle is of the Science
+of Politics or Mill of the Science of Political Economy. Given health and
+strength, a man, who faithfully complied with his shrewd injunctions and
+yet did not prosper, would be as much a freak of nature as a man who thrust
+his hand into the fire and yet received no physical hurt. The ready and
+universal assent given to their full truth and force by human experience is
+attested by the fact that _The Way to Wealth_, or _The Speech of Father
+Abraham_, "the plain, clean old Man with white Locks" in which Franklin,
+when writing one of the prefaces of _Poor Richard's Almanac_, condensed the
+wit and wisdom, original and second hand, of that incomparable manual of
+_The Art of Material Success_, has, through innumerable editions and
+reprints, and translations into every written tongue from the French to the
+Russian and Chinese, become almost as well known to the entire civilized
+globe as the unbroken strain of the martial airs of England. So well
+calculated, it was thought, was it to promote sound principles of diligence
+and frugality that it was, we are told by Franklin, reprinted in England,
+to be set up in the form of a broadside in houses, and, when translated
+into French, was bought by the clergy and gentry of France for distribution
+among their poor parishioners and tenants. But so far from being the slave
+of a parsimonious spirit was Franklin that it would be difficult to single
+out any self-made man who ever formed a saner estimate of the value of
+money than he did or lived up to it more fearlessly. In seeking money, he
+was actuated, as his early retirement from business proved, only by the
+high-minded motive to self-enrichment which is so pointedly expressed in
+the lines of Burns:
+
+    "Not for to hide it in a hedge,
+      Nor for a train attendant,
+    But for the glorious privilege
+      Of being independent."
+
+No sooner did he accumulate a sufficient fortune to provide for the
+reasonable wants of his family and himself than he proceeded to make this
+fortune the handmaid of some of the higher things of life--wholesome
+reading, scientific research, public usefulness, schemes of beneficence. In
+1748, when he was in the full flush of business success and but forty-two
+years of age, he deliberately, for the sake of such things, retired from
+all active connection with business pursuits. In a letter to Abiah
+Franklin, his mother, shortly after he found himself free forever from the
+cares of his shop, he speaks of himself in these words: "I enjoy, thro'
+Mercy, a tolerable Share of Health. I read a great deal, ride a little, do
+a little Business for myself, more for others, retire when I can, and go
+into Company when I please; so the Years roll round, and the last will
+come; when I would rather have it said, _He lived Usefully_, than _He died
+Rich_." About the same time, he wrote to William Strahan, a business
+correspondent, that the very notion of _dying worth_ a great sum was to him
+absurd, and just the same as if a man should run in debt for one thousand
+superfluities, to the end that, when he should be stripped of all, and
+imprisoned by his creditors, it might be said, he _broke worth_ a great
+sum. On more than one occasion, when there was a call upon his public zeal,
+his response was generous to the point of imprudence. The bond that he gave
+to indemnify against loss the owners of the wagons and horses procured by
+his energy and address for Braddock's expedition led to claims against him
+to the amount of nearly twenty thousand pounds, which would have ruined
+him, if the British Government had not rescued him after long delay from
+his dreadful situation. Without hesitation he entered during his first
+mission to England into a personal engagement that an act taxing the estate
+of the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania in common with the estates of the
+People of Pennsylvania would not result in any injustice to the
+Proprietaries. On a later occasion, in order to prevent war between Great
+Britain and her Colonies, he was willing to bind himself, to the whole
+extent of his private fortune, to make pecuniary reparation for the
+destruction of the tea cast into Boston harbor, if the Province of
+Massachusetts did not do so. One of his last acts before leaving America
+for his mission to France was to place the sum of three or four thousand
+pounds, which was a large part of this fortune, and all the ready money at
+his command, at the disposal of Congress. His salary as President of
+Pennsylvania was all given or bequeathed by him to public objects. The
+small sums, to which he became entitled as one of the next of kin of his
+father and his cousin, Mrs. Fisher, of Wellingborough, England, he
+relinquished to members of the family connection who needed them more than
+he did. Once, though a commercial panic was prevailing, he pledged his
+credit to the extent of five thousand pounds for the purpose of supporting
+that of a London friend. His correspondence nowhere indicates any degree of
+pecuniary caution in excess of the proper demands of good sense. On the
+contrary, it furnishes repeated testimony to his promptitude in honoring
+the solicitations of private distress or subscribing to public purposes.
+Conspicuously unselfish was he when the appeal was to his public spirit or
+to his interest in the general welfare of mankind. Among his innumerable
+benefactions was a gift of one thousand pounds to Franklin College,
+Pennsylvania. When he invented his open stove for the better warming of
+rooms, he gave the model to his friend, Robert Grace, who found, Franklin
+tells us in the _Autobiography_, the casting of the plates for the stove at
+his furnace near Philadelphia a profitable thing. So far from begrudging
+this profit to his friend, he wrote his interesting _Account of the
+New-invented Pennsylvanian Fireplaces_ to promote the public demand for the
+invention. A London ironmonger made some small changes in the stove, which
+were worse than of no value to it, and reaped, Franklin was told, a little
+fortune by it. "And this," he says in the _Autobiography_, "is not the only
+instance of patents taken out for my inventions by others, tho' not always
+with the same success, which I never contested, as having no desire of
+profiting by patents myself, and hating disputes." When he was actually
+engaged in the business of printing, a similar motive, so far as public
+spirit went, led him to offer to print a treatise by Cadwallader Colden on
+the _Cause of Gravitation_ at his own expense and risk. If he could be the
+means of communicating anything valuable to the world, he wrote to Colden,
+he did not always think of gaining nor even of saving by his business.
+
+That the character of Franklin should ever have been deemed so meanly
+covetous is due to _Poor Richard's Almanac_ and the _Autobiography_. The
+former, with its hard, bare homilies upon the Gospel of Getting on in Life
+and its unceasing accent upon the duty of scrimping and saving, circulated
+so long and so widely throughout the Colonies that the real Franklin came
+to be confused in many minds with the fictitious Poor Richard. Being
+intended mainly for the instruction and amusement of the common people,
+whose chief hope of bettering their condition lay in rigid self-denial, it
+is naturally keyed to unison with the ruder and austerer principles of
+human thrift. As to the _Autobiography_, with its host of readers, the only
+Franklin known to the great majority of persons, who have any familiarity
+with Franklin at all, is its Franklin, and this Franklin is the one who had
+to "make the night joint-laborer with the day," breakfast on bread and milk
+eaten out of a two-penny earthen porringer with a pewter spoon, and closely
+heed all the sage counsels of _Poor Richard's Almanac_ before he could even
+become the possessor of a china bowl and a silver spoon. It is in the
+_Autobiography_ that the story of Franklin's struggle, first for the naked
+means of subsistence, and then for pecuniary competency, is told; and the
+harsh self-restraint, the keen eye to every opportunity for self-promotion,
+and the grossly mechanical theory of morals disclosed by it readily give
+color to the notion that Franklin was nothing more than a sordid
+materialist. It should be remembered that it is from the _Autobiography_
+that we obtain the greatest part of our knowledge of the exertions through
+which he acquired his fortune, and that the successive ascending stages, by
+which he climbed the steep slopes that lead up from poverty and obscurity,
+are indelibly set forth in this lifelike book with a pen as coarse but at
+the same time as vivid and powerful as the pencil with which Hogarth
+depicts the descending stages of the Rake's Progress. And along with these
+facts it should also be remembered that the didactic purpose by which the
+_Autobiography_ was largely inspired should be duly allowed for before we
+draw too disparaging inferences about Franklin from anything that he says
+in that book with respect to his career.
+
+It is a curious fact that almost every reproach attaching to the reputation
+of Franklin is attributable to the candor of the _Autobiography_. It is
+true that in the political contests between the Proprietary and Popular
+Parties in Colonial Pennsylvania he was often visited with virulent abuse
+by the retainers of the Proprietaries. This was merely the dirty froth
+brought to the surface by every boiling pot. It is also true that, after
+the transmission of the Hutchinson letters to New England, he was the
+object of much savage censure at the hands of British Tories. But this
+censure, for the most part, was as empty as the ravings of the particular
+bigot who indorsed on the first page of a volume of letters in the Public
+Record Office, in London, a statement that the thirteen letters of Doctor
+Franklin in the volume were perhaps then "only precious or Important so far
+as they prove and discover the Duplicity, Ingratitude, and Guilt of this
+Arch Traitor whom they unveil and really unmask Displaying him as an
+accomplish'd Proficient in the blacker Arts of Dissimulation and Guile."
+Not less hollow was the invective with which the distempered mind of Arthur
+Lee assailed the character of Franklin when they were together in France.
+Nor can it be denied that in such Rabelaisian _jeux d'esprit_ as Polly
+Baker's Speech, the Letter on the Choice of a Mistress, and the Essay on
+Perfumes, dedicated to the Royal Academy of Brussels, in the _naivete_
+which marked Franklin's relations to his natural son, William Franklin,
+and to his natural son's natural son, William Temple Franklin, and in the
+ease with which he adopted in his old age the tone, if not the practices,
+of French gallantry, we cannot but recognize a nature too deficient in the
+refinements of early social training, too physically ripe for sensual
+enjoyment and too unfettered in its intellectual movements to be keenly
+mindful of some of the nicer obligations of scrupulous conduct. In moral
+dignity, Franklin was not George Washington, though there was no one held
+in higher honor by him. "If it were a Sceptre, he has merited it, and would
+become it," he said in bequeathing a fine crab-tree walking stick to
+Washington, whom he termed "My friend, and the friend of mankind." If for
+no other reason, Franklin was not Washington because he lacked the family
+traditions and early social advantages of Washington, and perhaps
+Washington might have been more like Franklin, if he had had some of
+Franklin's humor. While the resemblance is limited, Franklin does resemble
+in some respects Jefferson who was too scientific in spirit and too liberal
+in his opinions not to be a little of a skeptic and a heretic himself. But
+nothing can be more certain than the fact that Franklin was esteemed by his
+contemporaries not only a great but a good man. We pass by the French
+extravagance which made him out a paragon of all the virtues as well as the
+_plus grand philosophe du siecle_; for the French were but mad idolaters
+where he was concerned. It is sufficient for our purposes to limit
+ourselves to his English and American panegyrists. Referring to Franklin's
+humble birth, Benjamin Vaughan, a dull but good man, wrote to him that he
+proved "how little necessary all origin is to happiness, virtue, or
+greatness." In another place, Vaughan speaks of the "affection, gratitude
+and veneration" he bears to Franklin. To the sober Quaker, Abel James, the
+author of the _Autobiography_ was the "kind, humane, and benevolent Ben.
+Franklin" whose work almost insensibly led the youth "into the resolution
+of endeavoring to become as good and eminent" as himself. In urging
+Franklin to complete the story of his life, he added: "I know of no
+character living, nor many of them put together, who has so much in his
+power as thyself to promote a greater spirit of industry and early
+attention to business, frugality, and temperance with the American youth."
+As Franklin's letters bring to our knowledge friend after friend of his,
+among the wisest and best men of his day, on both sides of the Atlantic, we
+begin to ask ourselves whether anyone ever did have such a genius for
+exciting the sentiment of true, honest friendship in virtuous and useful
+men. His correspondence with Catherine Ray, Polly Stevenson, and Georgiana
+Shipley, though several of his letters to the first of the three are
+blemished by the freedom of the times and vulgar pleasantry, demonstrates
+that his capacity for awakening this sentiment was not confined to his own
+sex. Inclined as he was in his earlier and later years, to use Madame
+Brillon's phrase, to permit his wisdom to be broken upon the rocks of
+femininity, unbecoming his advanced age and high position as was the
+salacious strain which ran through his letters to this beautiful and
+brilliant woman, as we shall see hereafter, nothing could illustrate better
+than his relations to Polly Stevenson how essentially incorrupt his heart
+was when his association was with any member of the other sex who really
+had modesty to lose. Such was the pure affection entertained for him by
+this fine woman that, after the death of her celebrated husband, Dr.
+William Hewson, she removed from London to Philadelphia with her children
+to be near the friend, little less than a father, who had lavished upon her
+all that was best in both his mind and heart. There is much in the life of
+Franklin to make us believe that his standards of sexual morality were
+entirely too lax, but there is everything in it, too, to make us believe
+that he would not only have been incapable of seducing female innocence but
+would have been slow to withhold in any regard the full meed of deferential
+respect due to a chaste girl or a virtuous matron. It is hard to repress a
+smile when we read under the head of "Humility" in his _Table of Virtues_,
+just below the words, in which, under the head of "Chastity," he deprecates
+the use of "venery" to the injury of one's own or another's peace or
+reputation, the injunction for his own guidance, "imitate Jesus and
+Socrates." All the same, it is a fact that one person, at any rate, Jane
+Mecom, his sister, even thought him not unworthy to be compared with our
+Saviour. "I think," she said, "it is not profanity to compare you to our
+Blessed Saviour who employed much of his time while here on earth in doing
+good to the body as well as souls of men." Elizabeth Hubbard, the
+stepdaughter of his brother John, even warned him that, if he was not less
+zealous in doing good, he would find himself alone in heaven. Through all
+the observations of his contemporaries vibrates the note that he was too
+wise and benevolent to belong to anything less than the entire human race.
+Jonathan Shipley, "The Good Bishop," suggested as a motto suitable to his
+character, "his country's friend, but more of human kind." Burke called him
+"the lover of his species." By Sir Samuel Romilly he was pronounced "one of
+the best and most eminent men of the present age." Chatham eulogized him in
+the House of Lords as one "whom all Europe held in high Estimation for his
+Knowledge and Wisdom, and rank'd with our Boyles and Newtons; who was an
+Honour, not to the English Nation only, but to Human Nature." In one of his
+works, Lord Kames spoke of him as "a man who makes a great figure in the
+learned world; and who would make a still greater figure for benevolence
+and candor, were virtue as much regarded in this declining age as
+knowledge." Less formal was the heartfelt tribute of Dr. Samuel Cooper, of
+Massachusetts, after many years of intercourse: "Your friendship has united
+two things in my bosom that seldom meet, pride and consolation: it has been
+the honor and the balm of my life." And when towards the close of
+Franklin's life he wrote to George Washington, "In whatever State of
+Existence I am plac'd hereafter, if I retain any Memory of what has pass'd
+here, I shall with it retain the Esteem, Respect, and Affection, with which
+I have long been, my dear Friend, yours most sincerely," he received a
+reply, which was not only a reply, but the stately, measured judgment of a
+man who never spoke any language except that of perfect sincerity. "If,"
+said Washington, "to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for
+talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for
+philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing
+consolation to know, that you have not lived in vain." "And I flatter
+myself," he continued, "that it will not be ranked among the least grateful
+occurrences of your life to be assured that, so long as I retain my memory,
+you will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your
+sincere friend." These were credentials indeed for the old printer to take
+with him on his journey to the bright orbs which it was a part of his early
+religious fantasies to believe were swayed by Gods intermediate in the
+scale of intelligent existence between ourselves and the "one Supreme, most
+Perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves."[1]
+
+It is, we repeat, the _Autobiography_ which is mainly responsible for the
+unfavorable impressions that have been formed about the character of
+Franklin. It is there that we learn what heady liquor his sprightly mind
+and free spirit quaffed from the cup of boyhood and what errata blurred the
+fair, fresh page of his early manhood. It is there that he has told us how,
+as the result of his written attacks upon the Established Order, Puritan
+Boston began to consider him in an unfavorable light "as a young genius
+that had a turn for libelling and satyr"; how his indiscreet disputations
+about religion caused him to be pointed at with horror by good people in
+the same starch town as an infidel or atheist; how he availed himself of a
+fraud in the second indentures of apprenticeship between his brother and
+himself to claim his freedom before his time was up; how, in distant
+London, he forgot the troth that he had plighted to Deborah Read; how he
+attempted familiarities with the mistress of his friend Ralph which she
+repulsed with a proper resentment; how he broke into the money which Mr.
+Vernon had authorized him to collect; how he brought over Collins and Ralph
+to his own free-thinking ways; how he became involved in some foolish
+intrigues with low women which from the expense were rather more
+prejudicial to him than to them. It is in the _Autobiography_ also that we
+learn from him how he thought that the daughter of Mrs. Godfrey's relation
+should bring him as his wife enough money to discharge the remainder of the
+debt on his printing house even if her parents had to mortgage their house
+in the loan office; how partly by sheer force and pinching economy and
+partly by dexterity and finesse, sometimes verging upon cunning, he pushed
+himself further and further along the road to fortune, and finally how he
+was so successful with the help of his _Art of Virtue_, despite occasional
+stumblings and slips, in realizing his dream of moral perfection as to be
+able to write complacently upon the margin of the _Autobiography_, "nothing
+so likely to make a man's fortune as virtue." It is things like these in
+the _Autobiography_ that have tended to create in minds, which know
+Franklin only in this narrative, the idea that he was a niggard, a squalid
+utilitarian, and even a little of a rogue; though the same _Autobiography_
+witnesses also that he was not so engrossed with his own selfish interests
+as not to find time for the enlarged projects of public utility which to
+this day render it almost impossible for us to think of Philadelphia
+without recalling the figure of Franklin. _Si monumentum requiris
+circumspice_, was the proud inscription placed over the grave of Sir
+Christopher Wren in the city where his genius had designed so many
+edifices. The same inscription might be aptly placed over the grave of
+Franklin in Christ Church yard in the city where his public spirit and
+wisdom laid the foundations of so much that has proved enduring.
+
+There is unquestionably a shabby side to the _Autobiography_, despite the
+inspiring sacrifice of his physical wants which Franklin made in his
+boyhood to gratify his intellectual cravings, the high promptings which the
+appetites and unregulated impulses of his unguarded youth were powerless to
+stifle, the dauntless resolution and singleness of purpose with which he
+defied and conquered his adverse star, the wise moderation of his hour of
+victory, the disinterested and splendid forms of social service to which he
+devoted his sagacious and fruitful mind, his manly hatred of injustice and
+cruelty, his fidelity to the popular cause which neither flattery could
+cajole nor power overawe. In its mixture of what is noble with what is
+ignoble the _Autobiography_ reminds us of the merchandise sold at the new
+printing-office near the Market in Philadelphia, where Franklin conducted
+his business as a printer and a merchant, where his wife, Deborah, assisted
+him by folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop and purchasing old
+linen rags, and where his mother-in-law, Mrs. Read, compounded her
+sovereign remedy against the itch and lice. Now it was a translation of
+Cato's _Moral Distichs_ or a pamphlet against slavery fresh from his own
+press, now it was a copy of some devotional or useful work which the last
+packet had brought over from London, now it was a lot of goose feathers, or
+old rags, or a likely young negro wench. But on the whole we cannot help
+thinking that the calm view, which Franklin himself, in the cool of the
+evening of his life, takes of the early part of his existence, was, with
+some qualifications, not far wrong. Notwithstanding the dangerous season of
+youth and the hazardous situations, in which he was sometimes placed among
+strangers, when he was remote from the eye and advice of his sterling
+father, Josiah Franklin, he believed, as we know from the _Autobiography_,
+that he had not fallen into any "willful gross immorality or injustice";
+and, start as the student of Franklin may at times at things which might
+chill for the moment the enthusiasm of even such a Boswellian as the late
+John Bigelow, to whose editorial services the reputation of Franklin is so
+deeply indebted, he is likely in his final estimate to find himself in very
+much the same mood as that which impelled Franklin in the _Autobiography_
+to make the famous declaration, so true to his normal and intensely vital
+nature, that, were it offered to his choice, he "should have no objection
+to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the
+advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the
+first." Be this as it may, it is at least safe to say that it is very
+unfair to judge the character of Franklin by the _Autobiography_ without
+bearing in mind one of the leading motives by which he was induced to write
+his own life. To his great honor it can be said that to do good in the
+higher social sense, to promote the lasting interests of humanity, to free
+the march of the race from every handicap, every impediment, whether
+arising in or outside of ourselves, to instruct, to enlighten, were the
+dominant incentives, the mellow, yet commanding passions of his existence.
+Like many another philosopher before and since, in his zeal to subserve the
+general interest he forgot himself. If other young men treading in his
+footsteps could be deterred by the warnings of his errors from becoming
+involved in the mistakes and moral lapses in which his youth and
+inexperience were involved, he was willing, though not without some
+misgivings, to lay before them and the whole world all the details of these
+errors. In composing the _Autobiography_, he was influenced to no little
+degree by the spirit of a man who bequeaths his own body to the surgeons
+for the advancement of science. If his reputation suffered by his tender of
+himself as a _corpus vile_ for the benefit of future generations, he was
+prepared to take this risk, as he was prepared to take the risks of the two
+electric shocks, which nearly cost him his life, in the promotion of human
+knowledge. It is impossible for anyone, who is not familiar with the
+perfect lack of selfish reserve brought by Franklin to the pursuit of truth
+or the universal interests of mankind, to understand the extent to which,
+in composing the _Autobiography_, he was moved by generous considerations
+of this sort. In no other production of his did he show the same
+disposition to turn the seamier side of his existence to the light for the
+simple reason that no other production of his was written with the same
+homiletic purpose as the _Autobiography_. And, if this purpose had not been
+so strong upon him, how easy it would have been for him by a little
+judicious suppression here and a few softening touches there to have
+altered the whole face of the _Autobiography_, and to have rendered it as
+faithless a transcript of the slips and blots of his life as are most
+autobiographies of human beings--even those of men who have enjoyed a high
+repute for moral excellence--in their relations to the indiscretions, the
+follies and the transgressions of their immaturer years! At any rate, of
+the offences of Franklin, mentioned in the _Autobiography_, may be said
+what cannot be said of the similar offences of many men. He handsomely
+atoned for them all so far as the opportunity to atone for them arose. It
+was undoubtedly a serious breach of the moral law for him to have begotten
+William Franklin out of lawful wedlock, and in the impartial affection,
+which he publicly bestowed upon his illegitimate son and his legitimate
+daughter, we see another illustration of his insensibility to the finer
+inflections of human scruples. But when we see him accept this illegitimate
+son as if he had come to him over his right shoulder instead of his left,
+take him under his family roof, give him every advantage that education and
+travel could confer, seek an honorable alliance for him, put him in the way
+to become the Governor of Colonial New Jersey, even affectionately
+recognize his illegitimate son as a grandson, we almost feel as if such
+ingenuous naturalism had a kind of bastard moral value of its own.
+
+The _Autobiography_ is interesting in every respect but in none more so
+than in relation to the System of Morals adopted by Franklin for his
+self-government in early life, when, to use his own words in that work, he
+"conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection."
+This project once formed, he went about its execution in a manner as
+strictly mechanical as if he had been rectifying a smoky chimney or
+devising a helpful pair of glasses for his defective eyesight. The virtues
+were classified by him under thirteen heads: Temperance, Silence, Order,
+Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation,
+Cleanliness, Tranquillity, Chastity and Humility. These terms were all
+tabulated by him in a little pocketbook kept for that especial purpose, and
+to each virtue the close attention of a week was successively given by him.
+If an offence was committed by him on a certain day, it was entered by a
+little black mark under that date opposite the affronted virtue. The object
+was to so concentrate his vigilance upon each virtue in turn and to so
+strengthen his capacity to resist every temptation to violate it as to
+finally render its practice habitual and instinctive. The plan in spirit
+was not unlike the system of prudential algebra to which he told Joseph
+Priestley, many years afterwards, that he resorted when his judgment was in
+a state of uncertainty about some problem. In one column he would jot down
+on a piece of paper all the _pros_ of the case, and in another all the
+_cons_, and then, by appraising the relative value of each _pro_ and _con_
+set down before his eye, and cancelling equivalent considerations, decide
+upon which side the preponderance of the argument lay. Even Franklin
+himself admits that his plan for making an automatic machine of virtue did
+not work in every respect. Order he experienced extreme difficulty in
+acquiring. Indeed, this virtue was so much against his grain that he felt
+inclined to content himself with only a partial measure of fidelity to it,
+like the man, he said in the _Autobiography_, who, though at first desirous
+of having his whole ax bright, grew so tired of turning the grindstone on
+which it was being polished that when the smith, who was holding it,
+remarked that it was only speckled, and asked him to turn on, he replied,
+"But I think I like a speckled ax best." The Humility, too, which Franklin
+acquired, he was disposed to think was more specious than real. Pride, he
+moralizes in the _Autobiography_, is perhaps the hardest of our natural
+passions to subdue, and even, if he could conceive that he had completely
+overcome it, he would probably, he thought, be proud of his humility. This
+reminds us of his other observation in the _Autobiography_ that he gave
+vanity fair quarter wherever he met with it, and that, in many cases, it
+would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity
+among the other comforts of life. In the effort, however, to acquire
+Humility, Franklin did, he informs us in the same work, acquire, as time
+wore on, the habit of expressing his opinions in such conciliatory forms
+that no one perhaps for fifty years past had ever heard a dogmatic
+expression escape him. "And to this habit (after my character of
+integrity)," he declares, "I think it principally owing that I had early so
+much weight with my fellow citizens when I proposed new institutions, or
+alterations in the old, and so much influence in public councils when I
+became a member; for I was but a bad speaker, never eloquent, subject to
+much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in language, and yet
+I generally carried my points." On the whole, even though Franklin did find
+Order and Humility not easy of attainment, he was very well satisfied with
+the results of his plan for imparting the force of habit to virtue. In his
+seventy-ninth year the former tradesman sat down to count deliberately his
+moral gains. To his "little artifice" with the blessing of God he owed, he
+felt, the constant felicity of his life until that time. To Temperance he
+ascribed his long-continued health and what was still left to him of a good
+constitution; to Industry and Frugality the early easiness of his
+circumstances and the acquisition of his fortune with all that knowledge
+that enabled him to be a useful citizen and obtained for him some degree
+of reputation among the learned; to Sincerity and Justice the confidence of
+his country and the honorable employs it conferred upon him; and to the
+joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues, even in the imperfect
+state that he was able to acquire them, all that evenness of temper and
+that cheerfulness in conversation which made his company still sought for
+and agreeable even to his younger acquaintance. From other expressions of
+his in the _Autobiography_ we are left to infer that he believed that
+Frugality and Industry, by freeing him from the residue of the debt on his
+printing house and producing affluence and independence, had made more easy
+the practice of sincerity and justice and the like by him.
+
+So highly did Franklin esteem his method that he intended to follow it up
+with a treatise, to be known as the _Art of Virtue_, containing a practical
+commentary upon each of the virtues inserted in his little book, and
+showing just how anyone could make himself virtuous, if he only had a mind
+to. In this treatise, it was his desire, he says in the _Autobiography_, to
+expound the doctrine that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are
+forbidden but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone
+considered, and that it is therefore to the interest of everyone to be
+virtuous who wishes to be happy even in this world. "I should from this
+circumstance," he said, "(there being always in the world a number of rich
+merchants, nobility, states, and princes, who have need of honest
+instruments for the management of their affairs, and such being so rare),
+have endeavoured to convince young persons that no qualities were so likely
+to make a poor man's fortune as those of probity and integrity." The
+thought was more fully developed in a letter to Lord Kames, dated May 3,
+1760.
+
+     I purpose likewise [he said], a little work for the
+     benefit of youth, to be called the _Art of Virtue_.
+     From the title I think you will hardly conjecture what
+     the nature of such a book may be. I must therefore
+     explain it a little. Many people lead bad lives that
+     would gladly lead good ones, but know not _how_ to make
+     the change. They have frequently _resolved_ and
+     _endeavoured_ it; but in vain, because their endeavours
+     have not been properly conducted. To expect people to
+     be good, to be just, to be temperate, &c., without
+     _shewing_ them _how_ they should _become_ so, seems
+     like the ineffectual charity mentioned by the Apostle,
+     which consisted in saying to the hungry, the cold, and
+     the naked, "Be ye fed, be ye warmed, be ye clothed,"
+     without shewing them how they should get food, fire, or
+     clothing.
+
+     Most people have naturally _some_ virtues, but none
+     have naturally _all_ the virtues. To _acquire_ those
+     that are wanting, and secure what we acquire, as well
+     as those we have naturally, is the subject of _an art_.
+     It is as properly an art as painting, navigation, or
+     architecture. If a man would become a painter,
+     navigator, or architect, it is not enough that he is
+     _advised_ to be one, that he is _convinced_ by the
+     arguments of his adviser, that it would be for his
+     advantage to be one, and that he resolves to be one,
+     but he must also be taught the principles of the art,
+     be shewn all the methods of working, and how to acquire
+     the habits of using properly all the instruments; and
+     thus regularly and gradually he arrives, by practice,
+     at some perfection in the art.
+
+The virtue, which this new art was to fabricate, was obviously too much in
+keeping with the national tendency to turn over tasks of every sort to
+self-directed machinery. The _Art of Virtue_, however, was never actually
+penned, owing to the demands of private and public business upon Franklin's
+time, and the world was consequently left to get along as it best could
+with virtue of the old impulsive and untutored type. We are also apprised
+in the _Autobiography_ that the _Art of Virtue_ itself was to be but an
+incident of a great and extensive project which likewise never reached
+maturity for the same reasons that arrested the completion of that work.
+This project was the formation of a United Party for Virtue, to be
+composed of virtuous men of all nations under the government of suitable
+good and wise rules. The conditions of initiation into this body, which was
+to move on sin and debt throughout the world with embattled ranks and
+flying banners, were to be the acceptance of Franklin's final religious
+creed, of which we shall have something to say presently, and the
+continuous practice for thirteen weeks of Franklin's moral regimen; and the
+members were to engage to afford their advice, assistance and support to
+each other in promoting one another's interests, business and advancement
+in life. For distinction, the association was to be called The Society of
+the Free and Easy, "free, as being, by the general practice and habit of
+the virtues, free from the dominion of vice; and particularly by the
+practice of industry and frugality, free from debt, which exposes a man to
+confinement, and a species of slavery to his creditors." It is in the
+_Autobiography_ also that Franklin states that he filled the spaces between
+the remarkable days in the calendar in his _Poor Richard's Almanac_ with
+proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality,
+"as the means," he declared, "of procuring wealth, and thereby securing
+virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want, to act always honestly,
+as, to use here one of those proverbs, _it is hard for an empty sack to
+stand upright_."[2]
+
+This prudential view of morality also found utterance in other forms in the
+writings of Franklin. In the first of the two graceful dialogues between
+Philocles, the Man of Reason and Virtue, and Horatio, the Man of Pleasure,
+which appeared in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, the former warns the latter
+in honeyed words that he would lose even as a man of pleasure, if, in the
+pursuit of pleasure, he did not practice self-denial, by taking as much
+care of his future as his present happiness, and not building one upon the
+ruins of the other; all of which, of course, was more epigrammatically
+embodied in that other injunction of Poor Richard, "Deny self for self's
+sake." No wonder that Horatio was so delighted with a theory of
+self-denial, which left him still such a comfortable margin for sensual
+enjoyment, that, when Philocles bids him good night, he replies: "Adieu!
+thou enchanting Reasoner!"
+
+"Money makes men virtuous, Virtue makes them happy"; this is perhaps an
+unfair way of summarizing Franklin's moral precepts, but it is not remote
+from fairness. "Truth and Sincerity," he had written in his _Journal of a
+Voyage from London to Philadelphia_, when he was but twenty years of age,
+"have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them, which cannot be
+perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be
+painted." It would have been well for the moralist of later years to have
+remembered this statement when he made up his mind to contract the habit of
+moral perfection. His Milton, from which he borrowed the _Hymn to the
+Creator_ that is a part of his _Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion_,
+might have told him,
+
+    "Virtue could see to do what Virtue would
+    By her own radiant light, though sun and moon
+    Were in the flat sea sunk,"
+
+or in those other words from the same strains of supernal melody,
+
+      "If Virtue feeble were
+    Heaven itself would stoop to her."
+
+In teaching and pursuing a system of morals, which was nothing but a scheme
+of enlightened selfishness, dependent for its aliment upon pecuniary ease
+and habit, he was simply faithful to a general conception of life and
+character entirely too earthbound and grovelling to satisfy those higher
+intuitions and ideals which, be the hard laws of our material being what
+they may, not only never permit our grosser natures to be at peace, but
+reject with utter disdain the suggestion that they and our vices and
+infirmities are but offshoots of the same parent stock of selfishness. It
+cannot be denied that, as a general rule, a man with some money is less
+urgently solicited to commit certain breaches of the moral law than a man
+with none, or that we should be in a bad way, indeed, if we did not have
+the ply of habit as well as the whisper of conscience to assist us in the
+struggle between good and evil that is ever going on in our own breasts.
+But the limited freedom from temptation, secured by the possession of
+money, and the additional capacity for resisting temptation, bred by good
+habits, are, it is hardly necessary to say, foundations too frail to
+support alone the moral order of the universe. Beyond money, however
+conducive it may be in some respects to diminished temptation, there must
+be something to sweeten the corrupting influence of money. Beyond good
+habits, however desirable as aids to virtue, there must be something to
+create and sustain good habits. This thing no merely politic sense of
+moral necessity can ever be. Franklin's idea of supplying our languid moral
+energies with a system of moral practice as material as a go-cart or a
+swimming bladder is one, it is safe to say, upon which neither he nor
+anyone else could build a character that would, as Charles Townsend might
+have said, be anything but "a habit of lute string--a mere thing for summer
+wear." His _Art of Virtue_ was a spurious, pinchbeck, shoddy substitute for
+the real virtue which has its home in our uninstructed as well as our
+instructed moral impulses; and for one man, who would be made virtuous by
+it, ten, we dare say, would be likely to be made shallow formalists or
+canting scamps. It is a pity that Poor Richard did not make more of that
+other time-honored maxim, "Virtue is its own reward."
+
+Indeed, we shrewdly suspect that even Franklin's idea that he was such a
+debtor to his factitious system of moral practice was not much better than
+a conceit. The improvement in his moral character, after he first began to
+carry the virtues around in his pocket, is, we think, far more likely to
+have been due to the natural decline of youthful waywardness and dissent,
+the discipline of steady labor, the settling and sober effects of domestic
+life and the wider vision in every respect in our relations to the world
+which comes to us with our older years. It is but just to Franklin to say
+that, even before he adopted his "little artifice," his character as
+respects the virtues, which he specifically names as having had a hand in
+producing the constant felicity of his life, namely, Temperance, Industry,
+Frugality, Sincerity and Justice was, so far as Temperance, Industry and
+Frugality were concerned, exceptionally good, and, so far as Sincerity and
+Justice were concerned, not subject to any ineffaceable reproach. In truth,
+even he, we imagine, would have admitted with a laugh, accompanied perhaps
+by a humorous story, that the period of his life, before his dream of
+moral perfection was formed, when he was so temperate as to be known to his
+fellow printers in London as the "Water American," and to be able to turn
+from the common diet to the vegetarian, and back again, without the
+slightest inconvenience, would compare quite favorably with the period of
+his life, after his dream of moral perfection had been formed, when he had
+to confess on one occasion to Polly Stevenson that he had drunk more at a
+venison feast than became a philosopher, and on another to his friend, John
+Bartram that, if he could find in any Italian travels a recipe for making
+Parmesan cheese, it would give him more satisfaction than a transcript of
+any inscription from any old stone whatever. How far the effect of his
+moral regimen was to strengthen the virtues of Silence, Resolution,
+Moderation, Cleanliness and Tranquillity we lack sufficient materials for a
+judgment. These, assuming that Cleanliness must have gone along with such
+an eager propensity for swimming as his, were all native virtues of his
+anyhow we should say. But as to Chastity the invigorating quality of the
+regimen is certainly open to the most serious doubt. There is only too much
+in the correspondence which has survived him to give color to the statement
+of John Adams that even at the age of seventy-odd he had neither lost his
+love of beauty nor his taste for it. When we bear this in mind and recall
+what he had to say in the _Autobiography_ about the "hard-to-be-governed
+passion of youth," which frequently hurried him into intrigues with low
+women that fell in his way before he resolved to acquire the habit of
+chastity with the aid of his book, we realize that the artificial
+scaffolding, which he proposed to build up around his character, reasonably
+enough broke down at just the point where the natural vigor of his
+character was the weakest.
+
+In point of sexual morality, Franklin was no better than the Europe of the
+eighteenth century; distinctly worse than the America of that century. His
+domestic affections were uncommonly strong, but the notable peculiarity
+about his domestic life is that he was not a whit less soberly dutiful in
+his irregular than in his regular family connections, and always acted as
+if the nuptial ceremony was a wholly superfluous form, so far as a proper
+sense of marital or paternal obligation, or the existence of deep,
+unreserved affection, upon the part of a husband or father, went. His lack
+of scruples in this respect almost reminds us of the question put by his
+own Polly Baker, when she was prosecuted the fifth time for giving birth to
+a bastard: "Can it be a crime (in the nature of things, I mean) to add to
+the king's subjects, in a new country, that really wants people?"
+Apparently no ceremony of any kind ever preceded his union with Deborah,
+though accompanied by circumstances of cohabitation and acknowledgment
+which unquestionably rendered it a valid, binding marriage, in every
+respect, under the liberal laws of Pennsylvania. He simply remarks in the
+_Autobiography_, "I took her to wife, September 1, 1730." The artlessness
+with which he extended the full measure of a father's recognition to
+William Franklin excited comment abroad as well as at home, and, together
+with the political wounds inflicted by him upon the official arrogance and
+social pride of the Proprietary Party in Pennsylvania, was mainly
+responsible for the opprobrium in which his memory was held in the higher
+social circles of Philadelphia long after his death. So far as we know,
+there is nothing in his utterances or writings to indicate that the birth
+of William Franklin ever caused him the slightest shame or embarrassment.
+His dignity of character, in its way, it has been truly said by Sydney
+George Fisher, was as natural and instinctive as that of Washington, and,
+in its relations to illegitimacy, for which he was answerable, seems to
+have felt the lack of conventional support as little as our first parents,
+in their pristine state, did the lack of fig leaves. He accepted his
+natural son and William Temple Franklin, William's natural son, exactly as
+if both had come recommended to his outspoken affection by betrothal,
+honest wedding ring and all. The idea that any stigma attached to either,
+or that they stood upon any different footing from his legitimate daughter,
+Sarah Bache and her children, was something that his mind does not appear
+to have harbored at all. His attitude towards them was as unblushingly
+natural and demonstrative, to get back to the Garden of Eden, as the mutual
+caresses of Adam and Eve before the Fall of Man. William was born a few
+months after the marriage of Franklin and Deborah, and his father, so far
+as we can see, took him under his roof with as little constraint as if his
+introduction had been duly provided for in the marriage contract. Indeed,
+John Bigelow, who is always disposed, in the spirit of Franklin's own
+limping lines on Deborah, to deem all his Joan's faults "exceedingly
+small," rather ludicrously observes: "William may therefore be said to have
+been born in wedlock, though he was not reputed to be the son of Mrs.
+Franklin." So identified did he become with all the other members of
+Franklin's household that Franklin in his letters not only frequently
+conveyed "Billy's" duty to his "mother" and "Billy's" love to his "sister"
+but on one occasion at least even "Billy's" duty to his "grandmother," Mrs.
+Read, the mother of Mrs. Franklin. As the boy outgrew his pony, of which we
+obtain a pleasant glimpse in a "lost" notice in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_,
+we find Franklin in a letter to his own mother, Abiah Franklin, in which he
+couples the name of "Billy" in the most natural way with that of his
+daughter Sally, saying: "Will is now nineteen years of age, a tall proper
+Youth, and much of a Beau." It was with William Franklin, when Governor of
+New Jersey, that Sally took refuge at the time that her father's house in
+Philadelphia was threatened with destruction by a Stamp Act mob; and it was
+to him shortly afterwards, when the tide of popular approval was again
+running in favor of Franklin, then the agent of Pennsylvania at London,
+that she dispatched these joyful words: "Dear Brother:--_The Old Ticket
+forever! We have it by 34 votes! God bless our worthy and noble agent, and
+all his family!_" Through the influence of his father the son obtained a
+provincial commission which brought him some military experience, and also
+filled the office of Postmaster at Philadelphia, and afterwards the office
+of Clerk of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania. He was with Franklin when
+the latter sent his kite on its memorable flight into the skies; when he
+visited Braddock's camp; and when he conducted his military expedition
+against the murderous Indians. When Franklin sailed for England in 1757,
+William accompanied him with the view of obtaining a license from the Inns
+of Court, in which he had already been entered by the former, to practice
+as a barrister. Abroad, he still remained his father's inseparable
+companion, living with him, accompanying him in his travelling excursions,
+attending him, when he was so signally honored at Cambridge and Oxford,
+even poring with him over the parish records and gravestones at Ecton from
+which Franklin sought to rescue such information as he could about his
+humble ancestors, who could not have excited his curiosity more keenly, if
+they had all been Princes of the Blood. What the two learned at Ecton of
+the abilities and public spirit of Thomas, an uncle of Franklin, and a man
+of no little local prominence, suggested such a close resemblance between
+the uncle and nephew that William Franklin remarked: "Had he died on the
+same day, one might have supposed a transmigration." Alexander Carlyle in
+his _Autobiography_ has something to say about an occasion at Doctor
+Robertson's house in Edinburgh when the pair as well as Hume, Dr. Cullen,
+Adam Smith and others were present. The son, Carlyle tells us, "was open
+and communicative, and pleased the company better than his father; and some
+of us observed indications of that decided difference of opinion between
+father and son which in the American War alienated them altogether." The
+favorable impression made by William Franklin on this company at this
+period of his life, he also made on William Strahan, of whom we shall have
+much more to say. "Your son," Strahan wrote to Franklin's wife, "I really
+think one of the prettiest young gentlemen I ever knew from America."
+Indeed, even in extreme old age the handsome presence, courtly manners and
+quick intelligence of William Franklin won their way at any social
+gathering. Speaking of an occasion on which he had met him, Crabbe Robinson
+says in his _Diary_, "Old General Franklin, son of the celebrated Benjamin
+was of the party. He is eighty-four years of age, has a courtier-like mien,
+and must have been a very fine man. He is now very animated and
+interesting, but does not at all answer to the idea one would naturally
+form of the son of the great Franklin."[3] A few days after the departure
+of Franklin from England in August, 1762, the son was married to Miss
+Elizabeth Downes, of St. James Street, "a very agreeable West India lady,"
+if her father-in-law may be believed. Before the marriage took place, he
+had been appointed, in the thirty-second year of his age, Governor of New
+Jersey. If the appointment was made, as has been supposed, to detach
+Franklin from the Colonial cause, it failed, of course, to produce any such
+result, but it did have the effect of completely bringing over William
+Franklin to the Loyalist side, when the storm finally broke, and Franklin
+pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to the patriot cause. As
+the Revolution drew on, William Franklin became a partisan of the British
+Government, and, when he still held fast to his own office, in spite of the
+dismissal of his father from his office as Deputy Postmaster-General for
+the Colonies, Franklin wrote to him bluntly: "But you, who are a thorough
+Courtier, see everything with Government Eyes." The son even disregarded
+what was practically a request from the father that he should give up an
+office, which was becoming more and more complicated with the arbitrary
+measures of the English Ministry, and had been year after year a drain upon
+the purse of the father. Then followed his ignominious arrest as a Tory by
+the New Jersey Assembly, his defiant vaunt "_Pro Rege_ and Patria was the
+motto I assumed, when I first commenced my political life, and I am
+resolved to retain it till death shall put an end to my mortal existence,"
+his breach with his father, his rancorous activity as the President of the
+Board of Associated Loyalists, which drew down on him the suspicion of
+having abetted at least one murderous outrage, and his subsequent
+abandonment of America for England, where he died long after the war, a
+pensioner of the British Crown. With the breach between father and son,
+ended forever the visits that the members of the Franklin family in
+Philadelphia had been in the habit of paying from time to time to the
+Colonial Governor, the personal intercourse between the two, which, upon
+the part of the father, we are told by William Strahan, was at once that of
+a friend, a brother and an intimate and easy companion, and such filial
+letters as the one, for example, in which William Franklin wrote to
+Franklin that he was extremely obliged to him for his care in supplying him
+with money, and should ever have a grateful sense of that with the other
+numberless indulgences that he had received from his parental affection.
+After the restoration of peace between the two waning countries, overtures
+of reconciliation were made by William Franklin. "I ... am glad," his
+father wrote, "to find that you desire to revive the affectionate
+Intercourse, that formerly existed between us. It will be very agreeable to
+me; indeed nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen
+Sensations, as to find myself deserted in my old Age by my only Son; and
+not only deserted, but to find him taking up Arms against me, in a Cause,
+wherein my good Fame, Fortune and Life were all at Stake." Then with an
+uncertain touch of the native sense of justice, which was so deeply seated
+in his breast, he continued: "I ought not to blame you for differing in
+Sentiment with me in Public Affairs. We are Men, all subject to Errors. Our
+Opinions are not in our own Power; they are form'd and govern'd much by
+Circumstances, that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible.
+Your Situation was such that few would have censured your remaining Neuter,
+_tho' there are Natural Duties which precede political ones, and cannot be
+extinguish'd by them_." Responding to a statement in this same letter that
+the writer would be glad to see him when convenient, but would not have
+him come to Paris at that time, William Franklin had a brief interview with
+his father at Southampton, when the latter was returning, after the
+restoration of peace between Great Britain and the United States, full of
+gratified patriotism, as well as of years and infirmities, to the land from
+which the son was an outcast. That immedicable wound, however, was not to
+be healed by one or even by many interviews, and, while Franklin did
+subsequently devise his lands in Nova Scotia to William Franklin and
+release him from certain debts, he could not refrain from a bitter fling in
+doing so. "The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public
+notoriety," the will ran, "will account for my leaving him no more of an
+estate he endeavoured to deprive me of."
+
+Again that remorseless moral system, in comparison with which the flimsy
+moral system of the _Autobiography_ is, to use Bismarck's figure, but a
+lath painted to look like iron, had reminded one, who had had the temerity
+to violate its ordinances, that what is now as luscious as locusts may
+shortly be as bitter as coloquintida.
+
+Surely there are few things in history more pathetic than that the
+relationship, for which the father had set aside the world and the world's
+law, and to which the incalculable workings of human love had almost
+communicated the genuineness and dignity of moral legitimacy, should have
+been the one thing to turn to ashes upon the lips of a life blessed with
+prosperity and happiness almost beyond the measure of any that the past has
+brought home to us![4]
+
+It has been suggested that Franklin had another natural child in the wife
+of John Foxcroft. In a letter to the former, Foxcroft acquaints him that
+"his daughter" had been safely brought to bed, and had presented the writer
+with a sweet little girl, and in several letters to Foxcroft Franklin
+speaks of Mrs. Foxcroft as "my daughter." "God send my Daughter a good
+time, and you a Good Boy," are the words of one of them. The suggestion has
+been rejected by Albert Henry Smyth, the accomplished editor of Franklin's
+writings, on chronological grounds which, it seems to us, are by no means
+conclusive. The term, "daughter," however, standing alone, would certainly,
+under any circumstances, be largely deprived of its significance by the
+fact that Franklin, in his intercourse with other women than Mrs. Foxcroft,
+seems in the course of his life to have been addressed, in both English and
+French, by every paternal appellation from Pappy to _Tres cher Papa_ known
+to the language of endearment.[5] Moreover, so singularly free from
+self-consciousness was he in relation to his own sexual vagaries, so urgent
+were his affectionate impulses, that it is hard to believe that he could
+have been the father of such an illegitimate daughter when there is no
+evidence to show that, aside from a little concession to the jealousy of
+Mrs. Franklin, he treated her exactly as he did his acknowledged daughter,
+Sally.
+
+The unsophisticated relations of Franklin to William Franklin were also his
+relations to William Temple Franklin, who was born in England, when his
+father was in that country with Franklin during the latter's first mission
+abroad. The mother of his father is unknown, and so is his own. Silence was
+one of the virtues enjoined on Franklin by his little book, and was an
+innate attribute of his strong character besides. The case was certainly
+one, in which, if he had been reproached by his father, William Franklin
+could have found an extenuating example very near at hand, even if not very
+readily available for the purposes of recrimination. But there is nothing
+to lead us to believe that Franklin was more concerned about the second bar
+sinister in his coat of arms than the first. On the contrary, his affection
+appropriated his little grandson with a promptitude which reminds us of the
+story told in one of his letters to his wife about the boy who asked
+another boy, when the latter was crying over a pennyworth of spilt vinegar,
+for fear that his mother would whip him, "Have you then got ne'er a
+Grandmother?" Almost, if not, from the very beginning, Franklin, and not
+William, was Temple's real father, and, after William became estranged from
+Franklin, the grandson thenceforth occupied the place in the heart of the
+latter which the son had previously occupied, or one, if anything, even
+warmer. When William was appointed Governor of New Jersey, and sailed away
+with his bride to his province, Temple, then about two years old, was left
+in London. As he grew older, he was placed by his grandfather, after the
+return of the grandfather to England in 1764, in a school near London from
+which he often came to visit the latter at Mrs. Stevenson's house at No. 7
+Craven Street. After one of these visits, Franklin writes to William,
+"Temple has been at home with us during the Christmas Vacation from School.
+He improves continually, and more and more engages the Regard of all that
+are acquainted with him, by his pleasing, sensible, manly Behaviour." On
+another occasion, in settling an account with William Franklin he says
+proudly, after referring to outlays required by the maintenance and
+education of Temple, "But that his Friends will not grudge when they see
+him." For a time, Temple was an inmate of the Craven Street House. When
+Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1775, he took him with him, and turned
+him over to William Franklin, whose family name the youth, until then known
+as William Temple, assumed for the future. Temple, however, after spending
+some happy months in New Jersey, was soon again with his grandfather at
+Philadelphia for the purpose of attending the College of Philadelphia, and
+here he was when Franklin was on the point of setting out on his mission to
+France. When he did sail, Temple, then sixteen or seventeen years of age,
+and Benjamin Franklin Bache, the oldest son of Franklin's daughter, Sally,
+a boy of seven, accompanied him; it being the purpose of Franklin to place
+Temple at some foreign university, with the design of ultimately making a
+lawyer of him, and Benjamin at some school in Paris.[6] Governor Franklin,
+who was a prisoner in Connecticut, did not hear of the departure of his
+father until several weeks after the three had sailed. "If," he wrote to
+his wife, "the old gentleman has taken the boy with him, I hope it is only
+to put him into some foreign university."
+
+Abroad, the idea of giving Temple a legal education was first deferred, and
+then finally dismissed. His grandfather, with an infinite amount to do, and
+with no clerical help provided by Congress to assist him in doing it, was
+constrained to employ him as his private secretary, without any aid except
+that of a French clerk, who was paid a salary of fifty louis per annum.
+Engaging in person, endowed to some degree with the vivacity of his
+grandfather and father, speaking French much better than his grandfather,
+possessed of fair abilities and attentive to his duties, he appears to have
+filled the post of secretary creditably, though Congress, for one reason or
+another, could never be induced to recognize his appointment officially.
+Later on, when John Adams, John Jay, Henry Laurens and Franklin were
+appointed with Jefferson, who declined to serve, Commissioners to negotiate
+peace with Great Britain, he became their Secretary at an annual salary of
+one thousand pounds, but the vain, pathetic efforts of the grandfather,
+both before and after his return to America from France, when too much time
+had been lost for Temple to resume the thought of taking up the study of
+law, to obtain some secondary diplomatic, or other, position in the public
+service for the grandson, make up one of the despicable chapters in the
+history of Congress. Remarkable as it now seems, at one time there was even
+an effort on foot in America to oust Temple from his position as the
+private secretary of Franklin. It called forth a remonstrance in a letter
+from the latter to Richard Bache, his son-in-law, which is not only deeply
+interesting because of its stirring, measured force of expression, but also
+because of the tenderness for Temple which it manifests.
+
+     I am surprised to hear [he said] that my grandson,
+     Temple Franklin, being with me, should be an objection
+     against me, and that there is a cabal for removing him.
+     Methinks it is rather some merit, that I have rescued a
+     valuable young man from the danger of being a Tory, and
+     fixed him in honest republican Whig principles; as I
+     think, from the integrity of his disposition, his
+     industry, his early sagacity, and uncommon abilities
+     for business, he may in time become of great service to
+     his country. It is enough that I have lost my _son_;
+     would they add my _grandson_? An old man of seventy, I
+     undertook a winter voyage at the command of the
+     Congress, and for the public service, with no other
+     attendant to take care of me. I am continued here in a
+     foreign country, where, if I am sick, his filial
+     attention comforts me, and, if I die, I have a child to
+     close my eyes and take care of my remains. His dutiful
+     behaviour towards me, and his diligence and fidelity in
+     business, are both pleasing and useful to me.
+
+The same indulgent estimate of Temple's capacity is also indicated in a
+letter to Samuel Huntington in which Franklin requested Congress to take
+his grandson under his protection. After stating that Temple seemed to be
+qualified for public foreign affairs "by a sagacity and judgment above his
+years, and great diligence and activity, exact probity, a genteel address,
+a facility in speaking well the French tongue, and all the knowledge of
+business to be obtained by a four years' constant employment in the
+secretary's office," he added: "After all the allowance I am capable of
+making for the partiality of a parent to his offspring, I cannot but think
+he may in time make a very able foreign minister for Congress, in whose
+service his fidelity may be relied on."
+
+A thing most earnestly desired by Franklin was the marriage of Temple to a
+daughter of Madame Brillon, who sometimes referred to Temple as "M.
+Franklinet." So ardent was the chase upon his part that he even assured the
+mother that he was ready to spend the rest of his life in France if the
+only obstacle to the union was the fear that Temple would return to America
+with him. Mademoiselle Brillon does not seem to have been inclined to let
+Temple despair but her parents were unwilling to give their consent. Madame
+Brillon declared that it would have been sweet to her heart and most
+agreeable to M. Brillon to have been able to form a union which would have
+made but one family of the Brillons and the Franklins, and that they liked
+Temple, and believed that he had everything requisite to make a man
+distinguished, and to render a woman happy, but they must have, she said, a
+son-in-law who would be in a situation to succeed her husband in his
+office, and who was also a man of their religion. This was in reply to a
+letter from Franklin in which he proposed the match, and had said of
+Temple, "He is still young, and perhaps the partiality of a father has made
+me think too highly of him, but it seems to me that he has the stuff in him
+to make in time a distinguished man." After reading the letters from
+Franklin about his grandson, we can readily believe that Lafayette did not
+exaggerate when he wrote to Washington that Franklin loved his grandchild
+better than anything else in the world. Even when Temple was some
+twenty-four years of age, Franklin in one of his letters addresses him as
+"My Dear Child" and signs himself, "Your loving Grandfather." While the two
+remained in France, the old man improved every opportunity to advance the
+fortunes of the younger one, matrimonial or otherwise. When his legs grew
+too gouty to enable him to keep pace in mounting the stairways at
+Versailles with the other foreign ministers, it was by Temple that he was
+represented at Court _levees_. By him Temple was also introduced to
+Voltaire, and enjoyed the unusual honor of having that great man with an
+expressive gesture say to him: "My child, God and Liberty! Recollect those
+two words." To Temple, too, was delegated by our envoys the office of
+handing to Vergennes the memorial proposing an alliance between France,
+Spain and the United States, and it was he who actually delivered to
+Lafayette, on behalf of his grandfather, the handsome sword with which
+Congress had honored the former. When the olive branch extended by William
+Franklin to Franklin was accepted by him, Temple was sent over by him to
+William in England for a season as the best peace-offering in the gift of
+the sender. "I send your Son over to pay his Duty to you," he wrote to
+William. "You will find him much improv'd. He is greatly esteem'd and
+belov'd in this Country, and will make his Way anywhere." A letter written
+to Temple, during his absence on this occasion, by his grandfather, in
+which his grandfather pathetically complains of his silence, is another
+minor proof of the devotion felt by Franklin for Temple. And there is every
+reason to believe that the feeling was fully returned; for even the
+prospect of being united to the daughter of Madame Brillon, with the full
+sanction of his grandfather, was not sufficient to reconcile Temple to the
+thought of being left behind in France by him. So far from being heeded by
+Congress was the request of Franklin that some public office be conferred
+upon Temple that the latter was even displaced in his secretaryship by
+another person without a line of notice from Congress to his grandfather.
+And when the two arrived in America, after they had lingered long enough at
+Southampton for William Franklin to transfer to his son a farm of some six
+hundred acres at Rancocas, in the State of New Jersey, purchased for Temple
+by Franklin, Temple fared no better at the hands of the American Government
+than in France. His efforts, first, to secure the Secretaryship of the
+Federal Convention of 1787, and, afterwards, to obtain some appointment
+under the administration of Washington, met with no success, despite all
+that his grandfather could do for him. For a while he lived on his _Terre_,
+as Franklin called it, at Rancocas, but, after the death of Franklin, who
+did not forget him in his will, he became restless, and wandered back to
+the Old World, where he delayed so long the publication of his
+grandfather's writings, bequeathed to him by the latter, that he was
+strongly but unjustly suspected for a time of having been bribed by the
+British Government to suppress them. His slender literary qualifications
+for giving the proper perspective to such a mass of material had simply
+stood appalled at the magnitude of their task.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The superlative eulogy of Franklin is that of Josiah Quincy, Junior,
+who expressed his conviction in his journal that Franklin was one of the
+wisest and best of men upon earth; one, of whom it might be said that this
+world was not worthy. Of course, no man capable of creating such a
+conviction as this was safe from "the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass'
+hoof." Capefigue in his _Memoirs of Louis XVI._ called Franklin "one of the
+great charlatans" of his age. This is the language of a man who finds a
+phrase and thinks he has found a fact. Arthur Lee said on one occasion that
+Franklin was "the meanest of all mean men, the most corrupt of all corrupt
+men"; but this was merely the froth of a rabid mental condition. Stephen
+Sayre wrote to Capellen that Franklin was a "great villain," but Sayre had
+unsuccessfully solicited office from Franklin. Besides, this extraordinary
+character seems to have nearly, if not quite, answered Franklin's
+description of a man who has neither good sense enough to be an honest man
+nor wit enough for a rogue. The only one of Franklin's slanderers whose
+arrow hit anywhere near the mark was an anonymous French poet who termed
+him "Cameleon Octogenaire."
+
+[2] Franklin was as fearless in applying his ethical principles to himself
+as to others. After telling his sister Jane in a letter, dated Dec. 30,
+1770, that he trusted that no apprehension of removal from his office as
+Postmaster would make the least alteration in his political conduct, he
+uses these striking words: "My rule, in which I have always found
+satisfaction, is, never to turn aside in public affairs through views of
+private interest; but to go straight forward in doing what appears to me
+right at the time, leaving the consequences with Providence. What in my
+younger days enabled me more easily to walk upright, was, that I had a
+trade, and that I knew I could live upon little; and thence (never having
+had views of making a fortune) I was free from avarice, and contented with
+the plentiful supplies my business afforded me. And now it is still more
+easy for me to preserve my freedom and integrity, when I consider that I am
+almost at the end of my journey, and therefore need less to complete the
+expense of it; and that what I now possess, through the blessing of God,
+may, with tolerable economy, be sufficient for me (great misfortunes
+excepted), though I should add nothing more to it by any office or
+employment whatsoever."
+
+[3] In a paper on William Franklin, read before the New Jersey Historical
+Society on Sept. 27, 1848, William A. Whitehead sketches him in this
+manner: "He was of a cheerful, facetious disposition; could narrate well
+entertaining stories to please his friends; was engaging in his manners,
+and possessed good conversational powers. He lived in the recollection of
+those who saw him in New Jersey as a man of strong passions, fond of
+convivial pleasures, well versed in the ways of the world, and, at one
+period of his life not a stranger to the gallantries which so frequently
+marred the character of the man of that age. He was above the common size,
+remarkably handsome, strong and athletic, though subject to gout towards
+the close of his life." His writings, Whitehead thought, though perhaps
+less remarkable than might be expected from his advantages of education and
+association, gave evidence of literary attainments which compared favorably
+with those of most of the prominent men of that day in the Colonies. If
+_The Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania
+from its Origin_ is one of them, as has been supposed, we can only say that
+it at least hardly deserves such praise. The unassimilated material
+scattered through its pages reminds us of nothing so much as feather
+pellets and fragments of bone that have passed unchanged through the
+gastric tract of a hawk.
+
+[4] The judgment of Franklin himself as to how far his life had been a
+fortunate one was freely expressed in a letter to his friend John Sargent,
+dated Jan. 27, 1783. "Mrs. Sargent and the good Lady, her Mother," he said,
+"are very kind in wishing me more happy Years. I ought to be satisfy'd with
+those Providence has already been pleas'd to afford me, being now in my
+seventy-eighth; a long Life to pass without any uncommon Misfortune, the
+greater part of it in Health and Vigor of Mind and Body, near Fifty Years
+of it in continu'd Possession of the Confidence of my Country, in public
+Employments, and enjoying the Esteem and affectionate, friendly Regard of
+many wise and good Men and Women, in every Country where I have resided.
+For these Mercies and Blessings I desire to be thankful to God, whose
+Protection I have hitherto had, and I hope for its Continuance to the End,
+which now cannot be far distant."
+
+[5] For instance, in a letter to Elizabeth Partridge Franklin signs himself
+"Your affectionate Papah," and in a letter to Madam Conway, "Your
+affectionate Father (as you do me the Honor to call me)," and in a letter
+to Miss Flainville, "Your loving Papa."
+
+[6] In a letter from Paris to Jan Ingenhousz, dated Apr. 26, 1777, Franklin
+told Ingenhousz that he had brought Temple with him from America "partly to
+finish his Education, having a great Affection for him, and partly to have
+his Assistance as a Secretary."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Franklin's Religious Beliefs
+
+
+Closely akin to Franklin's system of morals were his views about Religion.
+Scattered through his writings are sentences full of gratitude to God for
+His favor in lifting him up from such a low to such a high estate, in
+bringing him substantially unscathed through the graver dangers and baser
+temptations of human life, and in affording him the assurance that the
+divine goodness, of which he had received such signal proofs in his career,
+would not cease with his death. In the _Autobiography_, after alluding in
+modest terms to the poverty and obscurity, in which he was born and bred,
+and the affluence and reputation subsequently won by him, he says:
+
+     And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all
+     humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned
+     happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which
+     lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My
+     belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not
+     _presume_, that the same goodness will still be
+     exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or
+     enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may
+     experience as others have done; the complexion of my
+     future fortune being known to Him only in whose power
+     it is to bless to us even our afflictions.
+
+These words, though they occur in the work which Franklin tells us was
+written when he was not dressed for a ball, he well knew would be read by
+other eyes than those of the son for whom they were primarily intended; but
+one of his familiar letters to his wife, written some years before the
+_Autobiography_ was begun, contains expressions equally devout; associated
+on this occasion, however, with the aspirations for the welfare of his
+fellow creatures which constituted the real religion of his life.
+
+     God is very good to us both in many Respects [he
+     wrote]. Let us enjoy his Favours with a thankful &
+     chearful Heart; and, as we can make no direct Return to
+     him, show our Sense of his Goodness to us, by
+     continuing to do Good to our Fellow Creatures, without
+     Regarding the Returns they make us, whether Good or
+     Bad. For they are all his Children, tho' they may
+     sometimes be our Enemies. The Friendships of this World
+     are changeable, uncertain, transitory Things; but his
+     Favour, if we can secure it, is an Inheritance forever.
+
+With respect to the successful issue, to which a manifest Providence had,
+after so many vicissitudes and perils, conducted the American Revolution,
+he wrote to Josiah Quincy in words as solemn as a _Te Deum_:
+
+     Considering all our Mistakes and Mismanagements, it is
+     wonderful we have finished our Affair so well, and so
+     soon. Indeed, I am wrong in using that Expression, "_We
+     have finished our Affair so well_". Our Blunders have
+     been many, and they serve to manifest the Hand of
+     Providence more clearly in our Favour; so that we may
+     much more properly say, _These are Thy Doings, O Lord,
+     and they are marvellous in our Eyes_.
+
+Franklin might well have seen the hand of Providence in the momentous
+result for which he had dared so much and labored so long, and which meant
+so much to human history, but its shaping power over the destiny of even
+such a Murad the Unlucky as his hapless nephew, Benny Mecom, is recognized
+by him in a letter to his beloved sister, Jane Mecom, and her husband when
+Benny had gone off to seek his fortune as a printer in Antigua. "After
+all," he concludes, "having taken care to do _what appears to be for the
+best_, we must submit to God's providence, which orders all things really
+for the best." On another occasion, in an ingenious paper on Water Spouts,
+the sage philosopher, seeing in the benign manner in which the waters of
+the ocean rid themselves of salt, in the process of evaporation, the same
+God that the poor Indian sees in the clouds or hears in the wind,
+impressively exclaims: "He who hath proportioned and given proper Qualities
+to all Things, was not unmindful of this. Let us adore Him with Praise and
+Thanksgiving." There are certain human feelings which rise in moments of
+uncommon stress or fervor from the profoundest depths of our being to our
+lips and take on the form and rhythm of sonorous religious utterance, if
+for no better reason, because no other language is lofty or musical enough
+to serve aptly the purposes of such supreme occasions; and this is true
+even of an individuality so meagrely spiritual as that of Franklin.
+
+Other expressions of the same character furnish a religious or
+quasi-religious setting to Franklin's thoughts upon his own dissolution. To
+his brave and cheerful spirit, which experienced so little difficulty in
+accommodating its normal philosophy to all the fixed facts and laws of
+existence, death was as natural as life--a thing not to be invited before
+its time but to be accepted with unmurmuring serenity when it came. The
+only certain things in this world, he said in his home-spun way, are death
+and taxes.
+
+     It is the will of God and nature [he wrote in his
+     fifty-first year to Elizabeth Hubbard, after the death
+     of his brother John] that these mortal bodies be laid
+     aside, when the soul is to enter into real life. This
+     is rather an embryo state, a preparation for living. A
+     man is not completely born until he be dead. Why then
+     should we grieve, that a new child is born among the
+     immortals, a new member added to their happy society?
+
+     We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while
+     they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring
+     knowledge, or in doing good to our fellow creatures, is
+     a kind and benevolent act of God. When they become
+     unfit for these purposes, and afford us pain instead of
+     pleasure, instead of an aid become an incumbrance, and
+     answer none of the intentions for which they were
+     given, it is equally kind and benevolent, that a way is
+     provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that
+     way. We ourselves, in some cases, prudently choose a
+     partial death. A mangled painful limb, which cannot be
+     restored, we willingly cut off. He who plucks out a
+     tooth, parts with it freely, since the pain goes with
+     it; and he, who quits the whole body, parts at once
+     with all pains and possibilities of pains and diseases
+     which it was liable to, or capable of making him
+     suffer.
+
+     Our friend and we were invited abroad on a party of
+     pleasure, which is to last forever. His chair was ready
+     first, and he is gone before us. We could not all
+     conveniently start together; and why should you and I
+     be grieved at this, since we are soon to follow, and
+     know where to find him? Adieu.
+
+It was a sane, bright conception of human destiny indeed which could
+convert the grim ferryman of the Styx into little more than an obsequious
+chairman, waiting at the portals of life until it suited the convenience of
+his fare to issue from them.
+
+     That Being [he wrote to George Whitefield] who gave me
+     Existence, and thro' almost three-score Years has been
+     continually showering his Favours upon me, whose very
+     Chastisements have been Blessings to me; can I doubt
+     that he loves me? And, if he loves me, can I doubt that
+     he will go on to take care of me, not only here but
+     hereafter? This to some may seem Presumption; to me it
+     appears the best grounded Hope; Hope of the Future,
+     built on Experience of the Past.
+
+The same thought is repeated in a letter to William Strahan, followed,
+however, by the dig which he rarely failed to give to his Tory friend,
+"Straney," when he had the chance:
+
+     God has been very good to you, from whence I think you
+     may be _assured_ that he loves you, and that he will
+     take at least as good care of your future Happiness as
+     he has done of your present. What Assurance of the
+     _Future_ can be better founded than that which is built
+     on Experience of the _Past_? Thank me for giving you
+     this Hint, by the Help of which you may die as
+     chearfully as you live. If you had Christian Faith,
+     _quantum suff._, this might not be necessary; but as
+     matters are it may be of Use.
+
+This hopeful outlook continued until the end. In a letter to his "dear old
+friend," George Whatley, which was written about five years before the
+writer's death, he adds a resource borrowed from his scientific knowledge
+to the other resources of his tranquil optimism.
+
+     You see [he said] I have some reason to wish, that, in
+     a future State, I may not only be _as well as I was_,
+     but a little better. And I hope it; for I, too, with
+     your Poet, _trust in God_. And when I observe, that
+     there is great Frugality, as well as Wisdom, in his
+     Works, since he has been evidently sparing both of
+     Labour and Materials; for by the various wonderful
+     Inventions of Propagation, he has provided for the
+     continual peopling his World with Plants and Animals,
+     without being at the Trouble of repeated new Creations;
+     and by the natural Reduction of compound Substances to
+     their original Elements, capable of being employ'd in
+     new Compositions, he has prevented the Necessity of
+     creating new Matter; so that the Earth, Water, Air, and
+     perhaps Fire, which being compounded form Wood, do,
+     when the Wood is dissolved, return, and again become
+     Air, Earth, Fire, and Water; I say that, when I see
+     nothing annihilated, and not even a Drop of Water
+     wasted, I cannot suspect the Annihilation of Souls, or
+     believe, that he will suffer the daily Waste of
+     Millions of Minds ready made that now exist, and put
+     himself to the continual Trouble of making new ones.
+     Thus finding myself to exist in the World, I believe I
+     shall, in some Shape or other, always exist.
+
+In a letter to M. Montaudouin in 1779, in reply to one from that friend
+applying to him the prayer of Horace for Augustus, he remarked: "Tho' the
+Form is heathen, there is good Christian Spirit in it, and I feel myself
+very well disposed to be content with this World, which I have found
+hitherto a tolerable good one, & to wait for Heaven (which will not be the
+worse for keeping) as long as God pleases." But later on, when seven more
+years of waning strength had passed, he wrote to his friend Jonathan
+Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph's:
+
+     I still have Enjoyment in the Company of my Friends;
+     and, being easy in my Circumstances, have many Reasons
+     to like living. But the Course of Nature must soon put
+     a period to my present Mode of Existence. This I shall
+     submit to with less Regret, as, having seen during a
+     long Life a good deal of this World, I feel a growing
+     Curiosity to be acquainted with some other; and can
+     chearfully, with filial Confidence, resign my Spirit to
+     the conduct of that great and good Parent of Mankind,
+     who created it, and who has so graciously protected and
+     prospered me from my Birth to the present Hour.
+
+At times, his unfailing humor or graceful fancy even plays lambently over
+the same stern prospect. In a letter to Mrs. Hewson, written four years
+before his death, he mentions cards among his amusements, and then adds:
+
+     I have indeed now and then a little compunction in
+     reflecting that I spend time so idly; but another
+     reflection comes to relieve me, whispering, "_You know
+     that the soul is immortal; why then should you be such
+     a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole
+     eternity before you?_" So, being easily convinced, and,
+     like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small
+     reason, when it is in favour of doing what I have a
+     mind to do, I shuffle the cards again and begin another
+     game.
+
+"We were long fellow labourers in the best of all works, the work of
+Peace," he wrote to David Hartley, when the writer was on the point of
+returning to America from France. "I leave you still in the field, but
+having finished my day's task, I am going home _to go to bed_! Wish me a
+good night's rest, as I do you a pleasant evening." This was but another
+way of expressing the thought of an earlier letter of his to George
+Whatley, "I look upon Death to be as necessary to our Constitution as
+Sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the Morning."
+
+     Your letter [he said to another friend, Thomas Jordan]
+     reminds me of many happy days we have passed together,
+     and the dear friends with whom we passed them; some of
+     whom, alas! have left us, and we must regret their
+     loss, although our Hawkesworth (the compiler of the
+     South Sea discoveries of Capt. Cook) is become an
+     _Adventurer_ in more happy regions; and our Stanley
+     (the eminent musician and composer) gone, "where only
+     his own _harmony_ can be exceeded."
+
+Many of these letters, so full of peace and unflinching courage, it should
+be recollected, were written during hours of physical debility or grievous
+pain.
+
+Every sheet of water takes the hue of the sky above it, and intermixed with
+these observations of Franklin, which were themselves, to say the least,
+fully as much the natural fruit of a remarkably equable and sanguine
+temperament as of religious confidence, are other observations of his upon
+religious subjects which were deeply colored by his practical genius,
+tolerant disposition and shrewd insight into the imperfections of human
+institutions and the shortcomings of human character. With the purely
+theological and sectarian side of Religion he had no sympathy whatever. It
+was a source of regret to him that, at a time in his boyhood, when he was
+consuming books as insatiably as the human lungs consume oxygen, he should
+have read most of the treatises "in polemic divinity," of which his
+father's little library chiefly consisted. In a letter to Strahan, when he
+was in his thirty-ninth year, he said that he had long wanted a judicious
+friend in London to send him from time to time such new pamphlets as were
+worth reading on any subject, "religious controversy excepted." To Richard
+Price he imparted his belief that religious tests were invented not so much
+to secure Religion itself as its emoluments, and that, if Christian
+preachers had continued to teach as Christ and His Apostles did, without
+salaries, and as the Quakers did even in his day, such tests would never
+have existed. "When a Religion is good," he asserted, "I conceive that it
+will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not
+take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the
+help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad
+one." A favorite saying of his was the saying of Richard Steele that the
+difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England is that the
+one pretends to be infallible and the other to be never in the wrong.
+"Orthodoxy is my doxy and Heterodoxy your doxy," is a saying which has been
+attributed to him as his own. His heart went out at once to the Dunkers,
+when Michael Welfare, one of the founders of that sect, gave, as his reason
+for its unwillingness to publish the articles of its belief, the fact that
+it was not satisfied that this belief would not undergo some future changes
+for the better with further light from Heaven.
+
+     This modesty in a sect [he remarks in the
+     _Autobiography_] is perhaps a singular instance in the
+     history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself
+     in possession of all truth, and that those who differ
+     are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy
+     weather, those at some distance before him on the road
+     he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind
+     him, and also the people in the fields on each side,
+     but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as
+     much in the fog as any of them.
+
+The great meeting-house built at Philadelphia, when George Whitefield had
+worked its people into a state of religious ecstasy by his evangelistic
+appeals, and the circumstances, under which Franklin was elected to fill a
+vacancy among the Trustees, appointed to hold this building, were two
+things of which he speaks with obvious pleasure in the _Autobiography_. The
+design in erecting the edifice, he declares, was not to accommodate any
+particular sect but the inhabitants of Philadelphia in general, "so that
+even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach
+Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service." The Trustees
+to hold this building were each the member of some Protestant sect. In
+process of time, the Moravian died, and then there was opposition to the
+election of any other Moravian as his successor. "The difficulty then was,"
+Franklin tells us, "how to avoid having two of some other sect, by means of
+the new choice.
+
+"Several persons were named, and for that reason not agreed to. At length
+one mention'd me, with the observation that I was merely an honest man, and
+of no sect at all, which prevail'd with them to chuse me."
+
+The manner in which Franklin came to occupy this position of sectarian
+detachment is also set forth in the _Autobiography_. On his father's side,
+he was descended from sturdy pietists, to whom the difference between one
+sect and another did not mean merely polemical warmth, as in Franklin's
+time, but the heat of the stake. In the reign of Bloody Mary, Franklin's
+great-great-grandfather kept his English Bible open and suspended by tapes,
+under the concealing cover of a joint-stool, and, when he inverted the
+stool to read from the pages of the book to his family, one of his children
+stood at the door to give timely warning of the approach of the dreaded
+apparitor. In the reign of Charles the Second, the religious scruples of
+Franklin's father and his Uncle Benjamin, before they crossed the sea to
+Boston, had been strong enough to induce them to desert the soft lap of the
+Church of England for the harried conventicles of the despised and
+persecuted Non-Conformists. To the earlier Franklins Religion meant either
+all or much that it meant to men in the ages when not Calculating Skill,
+but, as Emerson tells us, Love and Terror laid the tiles of cathedrals. But
+Benjamin Franklin was not a scion of the sixteenth century, nor even of the
+seventeenth, but of the searching and skeptical eighteenth. Some of the
+dogmas of the creed, in which he was religiously educated by his father,
+such as the eternal decrees of God, election, reprobation and the like
+appeared to him unintelligible, others doubtful, he declares in the
+_Autobiography_. The consequence was that he early absented himself from
+the public assemblies of the Presbyterian sect in Philadelphia, Sunday
+being his "studying day," though he never was, he says, without some
+religious principles.
+
+     I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the
+     Deity; that he made the world, and govern'd it by his
+     Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was
+     the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and
+     that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded,
+     either here or hereafter. These I esteem'd the
+     essentials of every religion; and, being to be found in
+     all the religions we had in our country, I respected
+     them all, tho' with different degrees of respect, as I
+     found them more or less mix'd with other articles,
+     which, without any tendency to inspire, promote, or
+     confirm morality, serv'd principally to divide us, and
+     make us unfriendly to one another.
+
+And then he goes on to inform us that, as Pennsylvania increased in people,
+and new places of worship were continually wanted, and were generally
+erected by voluntary contributions, his mite for such purposes, whatever
+might be the sect, was never refused. This impartial attitude towards the
+different religious sects he maintained in every particular throughout his
+life, and from his point of view he had no reason to be dissatisfied with
+the result, if we may believe John Adams, who tells us: "The Catholics
+thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of
+them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends
+believed him a wet Quaker." "Mr. Franklin had no--" was as far as Adams
+himself got in stating his own personal opinion about Franklin's religious
+views. To have been regarded as an adherent of every sect was a compliment
+that Franklin would have esteemed as second only to the declaration that he
+was merely an honest man and of no sect at all. It is certainly one of the
+most amusing facts narrated in the _Autobiography_ that such a man, only a
+few years after religious bigotry had compelled him to fly from New
+England, the land for which Poor Richard, on one occasion, safely predicted
+a year of "_dry_ Fish and _dry_ Doctrine," should have been invited by
+Keimer, the knavish eccentric of the _Autobiography_, to become "his
+colleague in a project he had of setting up a new sect."
+
+George Whitefield appears to have come nearer than anyone else to the honor
+of reducing Franklin to a definite religious status. For this celebrated
+man he seems to have felt an even warmer regard than that which he usually
+entertained for every clergyman who was a faithful exponent of sound
+morals. He begins one of his letters to his brother, John Franklin, with a
+reference to Whitefield, and then he laconically adds: "He is a good Man
+and I love him." In the _Autobiography_ he certifies that, in his opinion,
+Whitefield was in all his conduct "a perfectly _honest man_." But even
+Whitefield's call to the unconverted, which awakened the conscience of
+Philadelphia to such a degree "that one could not walk thro' the town in an
+evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street,"
+failed to bring Franklin within the great preacher's fold. "He us'd,
+indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction
+of believing that his prayers were heard. Ours was a mere civil friendship,
+sincere on both sides, and lasted to his death." These are the statements
+of the _Autobiography_. And a mere civil friendship Franklin was inflexibly
+determined to keep it; for we learn from the same source that, when
+Whitefield answered an invitation to Franklin's house by saying that, if
+Franklin made that kind offer for Christ's sake, he would not miss of a
+reward, the reply promptly came back: "_Don't let me be mistaken; it was
+not for Christ's sake, but for your sake._" "One of our common
+acquaintance," says Franklin, "jocosely remark'd, that, knowing it to be
+the custom of the saints, when they received any favour, to shift the
+burden of the obligation from off their own shoulders, and place it in
+heaven, I had contriv'd to fix it on earth." It may truly be said, however,
+that nothing is recorded of the persuasive eloquence of Whitefield more
+amazing than the fact that it once swept Franklin for a moment off the feet
+on which he stood so firmly. He had made up his mind not to contribute to
+one of Whitefield's charitable projects which did not meet with his
+approval--but let AEsop tell the story in his own characteristic way:
+
+     I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in
+     the course of which I perceived he intended to finish
+     with a collection, and I silently resolved he should
+     get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of
+     copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five
+     pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften,
+     and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of
+     his oratory made me asham'd of that, and determin'd me
+     to give the silver; and he finish'd so admirably, that
+     I empty'd my pocket wholly into the collector's dish,
+     gold and all.
+
+But Franklin was not long in recovering his equipoise and in again
+wondering why Whitefield's auditors should so admire and respect him
+notwithstanding "his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were
+naturally _half beasts and half devils_." Whitefield, he thought, made a
+great mistake in publishing his sermons; for _litera scripta manet_ and
+affords a full opportunity for criticism and censure. If the sermons had
+not been published, Whitefield's proselytes would have been left, Franklin
+believed, to feign for him as great a variety of excellences as their
+enthusiastic admiration might wish him to have possessed. A Deist, if
+anything, Franklin was when Whitefield first came to Philadelphia, and a
+Deist, if anything, he was when Whitefield left it for the last time. When
+the latter wrote in his _Journal, "M. B. was a deist, I had almost said an
+atheist_," Franklin, indisposed to be deprived of all religious standing,
+dryly commented: "That is _chalk_, I had almost said _charcoal_." A man, he
+tells us in the _Autobiography_, is sometimes more generous when he has but
+a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being
+thought to have but little, and it is possible that religious faith may
+sometimes be influenced by the same kind of sensitiveness. The truth of the
+matter was that as respects theological tenets and sectarian distinctions
+Franklin was an incurable heretic, if such a term is appropriate to the
+listless indifference to all dogmas and sects rarely broken except by some
+merry jest or gentle parable, like his Parable against Persecution or his
+Parable of Brotherly Love, with which he regarded every sour fermentation
+of the _odium theologicum_. When he heard that a New Englander, John
+Thayer, had become a Catholic, the worst that he could find it in his heart
+to say was: "Our ancestors from Catholic became first Church-of-England
+men, and then refined into Presbyterians. To change now from
+Presbyterianism to Popery seems to me refining backwards, from white sugar
+to brown." In commenting in a letter to Elizabeth Partridge, formerly
+Hubbard, a year or so before his own death on the death of a friend of
+theirs, he uses these words:
+
+     You tell me our poor Friend Ben Kent is gone; I hope to
+     the Regions of the Blessed, or at least to some Place
+     where Souls are prepared for those Regions. I found my
+     Hope on this, that tho' not so orthodox as you and I,
+     he was an honest Man, and had his Virtues. If he had
+     any Hypocrisy it was of that inverted kind, with which
+     a Man is not so bad as he seems to be. And with regard
+     to future Bliss I cannot help imagining, that
+     Multitudes of the zealously Orthodox of different
+     Sects, who at the last Day may flock together, in hopes
+     of seeing (mutilated) damn'd, will be disappointed, and
+     oblig'd to rest content with their own Salvation.
+
+Franklin's Kingdom of Heaven was one into which there was such an abundant
+entrance that even his poor friend, Ben Kent, could hope to arrive there
+thoroughly disinfected after a brief quarantine on the road.[7] But it is
+in his _Conte_ that the spirit of religious charity, by which this letter
+is animated, is given the sparkling, graceful form with which his fancy
+readily clothed its creations when form and finish were what the
+workmanship of the occasion required. Montresor who is very sick, tells his
+cure that he has had a vision during the night which has set his mind
+entirely at rest as to his future. "What was your vision?" said the good
+priest. "I was," replied Montresor, "at the gate of Paradise, with a crowd
+of people who wished to enter. And St. Peter asked each one what his
+religion was. One answered, 'I am a Roman Catholic.' 'Ah, well,' said St.
+Peter, 'enter, and take your place there among the Catholics.' Another
+said, that he belonged to the Anglican Church. 'Ah, well,' said St. Peter,
+'enter and take your place there among the Anglicans.' Another said that he
+was a Quaker. 'Enter,' said St. Peter, 'and take your place among the
+Quakers.' Finally, my turn being come, he asked me what my religion was.
+'Alas!' replied I, 'unfortunately poor Jacques Montresor has none.' 'That
+is a pity,' said the Saint, 'I do not know where to place you; but enter
+all the same; and place yourself where you can.'"
+
+Perhaps, however, in none of Franklin's writings is his mental attitude
+towards religious sects and their varied creeds and organizations disclosed
+with such bland _insouciance_ and delicate raillery as in his letter to
+Mason Weems and Edward Gantt. Weems was the famous parson Weems whose
+legendary story of the cherry tree and the hatchet made for many years such
+a sublime _enfant terrible_ of Washington, and Gantt was a native of
+Maryland who was destined in the course of time to become a chaplain of the
+United States Senate. In this letter, after acknowledging a letter from
+Weems and Gantt telling him that the Archbishop of Canterbury would not
+permit them to be ordained, unless they took the oath of allegiance, he
+says that he had obtained an opinion from a clergyman of his acquaintance
+in Paris that they could not be ordained there, or that, if they were, they
+would be required to vow obedience to the Archbishop of Paris. He next
+inquired of the Pope's Nuncio whether they might not be ordained by the
+Catholic Bishop in America, but received the answer that the thing was
+impossible unless the gentlemen became Catholics. Then, after a deprecatory
+statement that the affair was one of which he knew very little, and that he
+might therefore ask questions or propose means that were improper or
+impracticable, he pointedly adds: "But what is the necessity of your being
+connected with the Church of England? Would it not be as well, if you were
+of the Church of Ireland?" The religion was the same, though there was a
+different set of Bishops and Archbishops and perhaps the Bishop of Derry,
+who was a man of liberal sentiments, might give them orders as of the Irish
+Church. If both Britain and Ireland refused them (and he was not sure that
+the Bishops of Denmark or Sweden would ordain them unless they became
+Lutherans), then, in his humble opinion, next to becoming Presbyterians,
+the Episcopal Clergy of America could not do better than follow the example
+of the first Clergy of Scotland, who, when a similar difficulty arose,
+assembled in the Cathedral, and the Mitre, Crosier and Robes of a Bishop
+being laid upon the Altar, after earnest prayers for direction in their
+choice, elected one of their own number; when the King said to him:
+"_Arise, go to the Altar, and receive your Office at the Hand of God._" If
+the British Isles were sunk in the sea, he continued (and the surface of
+the Globe had suffered greater changes), his correspondents would probably
+take some such method as this, and persistence in the denial of ordination
+to them by the English Church came to the same thing. A hundred years
+later, when people were more enlightened, it would be wondered at that men
+in America, qualified by their learning and piety to pray for, and
+instruct, their neighbors, should not be permitted to do it until they had
+made a voyage of six thousand miles out and home to ask leave of a cross
+old gentleman at Canterbury who seemed, by the account of his
+correspondents, to have as little regard for the souls of the People of
+Maryland as King William's Attorney-General Seymour had for those of the
+People of Virginia, when, in reply to the reminder of the Reverend
+Commissary Blair of William and Mary College that the latter had souls to
+be saved as well as the People of England, he exclaimed: "_Souls!_ damn
+your Souls. Make Tobacco."
+
+Here we have Franklin absolutely _in puris naturalibus_ as respects the
+sacerdotal side of Religion, lavishing upon his correspondents in a single
+letter a series of half-serious, half-mocking sentiments flavored with some
+of his best intellectual qualities, and doubtless leaving them in a teasing
+state of uncertainty as to whether he intended to ridicule them or not. In
+the light of such a letter as this, the reader will hardly be surprised to
+learn that he did not quit the world until he had put on record his high
+opinion of heretics. After asking Benjamin Vaughan in one of his letters
+about a year and a half before his death, to remember him affectionately to
+the "honest" heretic, Doctor Priestley, he said:
+
+     I do not call him _honest_ by way of distinction; for I
+     think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous
+     men. They have the virtue of fortitude, or they would
+     not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford
+     to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that
+     would give advantage to their many enemies; and they
+     have not, like orthodox sinners, such a number of
+     friends to excuse or justify them.
+
+Holding these views about heretics, it is natural that Franklin should at
+times have stigmatized religious bigotry as it deserved. In his _Remarks on
+a Late Protest_, when he was being assailed for one of the most creditable
+acts of his life, his unsparing denunciation of the murder of hapless
+Indians by the Paxton Boys, he had a fearless word to say about "those
+religious Bigots, who are of all Savages the most brutish." And it would be
+difficult to find a terser or more graphic picture of religious discord
+than this in one of his letters to Jane Mecom:
+
+     Each party abuses the other; the profane and the
+     infidel believe both sides, and enjoy the fray; the
+     reputation of religion in general suffers, and its
+     enemies are ready to say, not what was said in the
+     primitive times, Behold how these Christians love one
+     another,--but, Mark how these Christians hate one
+     another! Indeed, when religious people quarrel about
+     religion or hungry people about their victuals, it
+     looks as if they had not much of either among them.
+
+Not only did Franklin have no sympathy with sects and their jarring
+pretensions but he had little patience with either doctrinal theology or
+ecclesiastical rites and forms of any sort. Even after he decided to keep
+away from public worship on Sundays, he still retained [he said], a sense
+of its utility, when rightly conducted, and continued to pay regularly his
+annual subscription to the Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia which he had
+attended. Later, he was induced by its pastor to sit now and then under his
+ministrations; once he states, as if with a slight elevation of the
+eyebrows, for five Sundays successively, but it all proved unedifying,
+since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced; the aim of
+the preacher seeming to be rather to make them good Presbyterians than good
+citizens. At length the devout man took for his text the following verse
+from the fourth chapter of the Philippians: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever
+things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely or of good report, if there be
+any virtue, or any praise, think on these things." Now, thought Franklin,
+in a sermon on such a text we cannot miss of having some of the "morality"
+which was to him the entire meat of religion. But the text, promising as it
+was, had been subjected to such merciless dessication that it resolved
+itself into five points only "as meant by the apostle, viz.: 1. Keeping
+holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the holy Scriptures. 3.
+Attending duly the publick worship. 4. Partaking of the Sacrament. 5.
+Paying a due respect to God's ministers." Franklin was disgusted, gave this
+preacher up entirely, and returned to the use of the _Articles of Belief
+and Acts of Religion_ which he had previously composed for his own private
+devotions. Subsequently, however, he was again enticed to church by the
+arrival in Philadelphia from Ireland of a young Presbyterian minister,
+named Hemphill, who preached good works rather than dogma in excellent
+discourses, apparently extemporaneous, and set off with an attractive
+voice. This minister was soon formally arraigned for heterodoxy by the old
+orthodox clergy who were in the habit of paying more attention to
+Presbyterian doctrine than Franklin was, and found a powerful champion in
+Franklin, who, seeing that Hemphill, while an "elegant preacher," was, for
+reasons that afterwards became only too patent, a poor writer, wrote
+several pamphlets and an article in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ in his
+behalf. Unfortunately, when the war of words was at its height, Hemphill,
+who afterwards confessed to Franklin that none of the sermons that he
+preached were of his own composition, was proved to have purloined a part,
+at any rate, of one of his sermons from Dr. Foster, of whom Pope had
+written,
+
+    "Let modest Foster, if he will excel
+    Ten metropolitans in preaching well."
+
+The Synod found against him, but so agreeable to Franklin was the all
+too-brief taste that he had enjoyed of good works that he adhered to
+Hemphill to the last. "I stuck by him, however," he says, "as I rather
+approv'd his giving us good sermons compos'd by others, than bad ones of
+his own manufacture, tho' the latter was the practice of our common
+teachers"; among whom he doubtless included the dreary shepherd who had
+made so little out of the verse in the fourth chapter of Philippians.
+Everything found its practical level in that mind at last. It might be
+added that Franklin's stand on this occasion was but in keeping with a
+final word of counsel which he wrote many years afterwards to his daughter
+Sally, when he was descending the Delaware on his way to England. After
+enjoining upon her especial attention her Book of Common Prayer, he
+continued: "Yet I do not mean you should despise sermons, even of the
+preachers you dislike, for the discourse is often much better than the man,
+as sweet and clear waters come through very dirty earth."
+
+After the Hemphill disappointment, he ceased to attend the church in which
+his _protege_ had come to grief, though he continued to subscribe to the
+support of its minister for many years. He took a pew in an Episcopal
+Church, Christ Church, and here he was careful that his family should
+regularly worship every Sunday, notwithstanding the fact that he was too
+busy again with his studies on that day to worship there himself, or placed
+too much confidence in his _Art of Virtue and Articles of Belief and Acts
+of Religion_ to feel the need for doing so. Here too his daughter and his
+son Francis who died in childhood were baptized, and here his wife and
+himself were buried. While he rarely attended the services at this church,
+he was one of its mainstays in every pecuniary sense.
+
+In more than one particular, Franklin was lax in France where he was only
+liberal in America. At any rate he was even less of a Sabbatarian in the
+former country than he was in the latter. As respects observance of the
+Sabbath, he fully fell in with French usages and was in the habit of
+setting apart the day as a day for attending the play or opera,
+entertaining his friends, or amusing himself with chess or cards. One of
+Poor Richard's maxim's was: "Work as if you were to live a hundred years,
+pray as if you were to die to-morrow," and, while Franklin was not the
+person to pray in just that rapt fashion, he seems to have thought rather
+better of prayer than of other religious ceremonies. In the letter of
+caution to his daughter Sally, from which we have already quoted, he tells
+her, "Go constantly to church, whoever preaches. The act of devotion in the
+Common Prayer Book is your principal business there, and if properly
+attended to, will do more towards amending the heart than sermons generally
+can do. For they were composed by men of much greater piety and wisdom,
+than our common composers of sermons can pretend to be." He promptly
+repelled an intimation of his sister Jane that he was opposed to divine
+worship with the statement that, so far from thinking that God was not to
+be worshipped, he had composed and written a whole book of devotions for
+his own use; meaning his _Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion_. This
+statement always brings back to us the reply of Charles Sumner, when he was
+very sick, and was asked whether he was prepared to die, viz. that he had
+read the Old Testament in the Greek version. A glance at the "First
+Principles," with which the book begins, would hardly, we fear, have
+allayed the fears of Jane. That Franklin should ever, even at the age of
+twenty-two, have composed anything in the way of a creed so fanciful, not
+to say fantastic, is nothing short of an enormity, even more startlingly
+out of harmony with his usually sound and sure-footed intelligence than the
+whimsical letter to General Charles Lee, in which, on the eve of the
+American Revolution, he advised a return to bows and arrows as efficient
+instruments of modern warfare. "I believe," commences the creed, "there is
+one supreme, most perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves.
+For I believe that Man is not the most perfect Being but one, rather that
+as there are many Degrees of Beings his Inferiors, so there are many
+Degrees of Beings superior to him." Then, after quite a lengthy preamble,
+follows this Confession of Faith:
+
+     Therefore I think it seems required of me, and my Duty
+     as a Man, to pay Divine Regards to SOMETHING.
+
+     I conceive then, that The INFINITE has created many
+     beings or Gods, vastly superior to Man, who can better
+     conceive his Perfections than we, and return him a more
+     rational and glorious Praise.
+
+     As, among Men, the Praise of the Ignorant or of
+     Children, is not regarded by the ingenious Painter or
+     Architect, who is rather honour'd and pleas'd with the
+     approbation of Wise Men & Artists.
+
+     It may be that these created Gods are immortal; or it
+     may be that after many Ages, they are changed, and
+     others Supply their Places.
+
+     Howbeit, I conceive that each of these is exceeding
+     wise and good, and very powerful; and that Each has
+     made for himself one glorious Sun, attended with a
+     beautiful and admirable System of Planets.
+
+     It is that particular Wise and Good God, who is the
+     author and owner of our System, that I propose for the
+     object of my praise and adoration.
+
+Under the same head of "First Principles," there is a slight flavor of the
+_Art of Virtue:_ "Since without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this
+World, I firmly believe he delights to see me Virtuous, because he is
+pleased when he sees Me Happy."
+
+That one of the sanest, wisest, and most terrene of great men, and a man,
+too, who was not supposed in his time to have any very firm belief in the
+existence of even one God, should, young as he was, have peopled the
+stellar spaces with such a hierarchy, half pantheistic, half feudal as
+this, is, we take it, one of the most surprising phenomena in the history
+of the human intellect. James Parton surmises that the idea probably
+filtered to Franklin, when he was a youth in London, through Dr. Pemberton,
+the editor of the third edition of the _Principia_, from a conjecture
+thrown out in conversation by Sir Isaac Newton. It reappears in Franklin's
+_Arabian Tale_. "Men in general," says Belubel, the Strong, "do not know,
+but thou knowest, that in ascending from an elephant to the infinitely
+Great, Good, and Wise, there is also a long gradation of beings, who
+possess powers and faculties of which thou canst yet have no conception."
+
+The next head in the book of devotions is "Adoration," under which is
+arranged a series of liturgical statements, accompanied by a recurrent note
+of praise, and preceded by an invocation and the following prelude in the
+nature of a stage direction:
+
+     Being mindful that before I address the Deity, my soul
+     ought to be calm and serene, free from Passion and
+     Perturbation, or otherwise elevated with Rational Joy
+     and Pleasure, I ought to use a Countenance that
+     expresses a filial Respect, mixed with a kind of
+     Smiling, that Signifies inward Joy, and Satisfaction,
+     and Admiration.[8]
+
+The liturgical statements are followed by another direction that it will
+not be improper now to read part of some such book as Ray's _Wisdom of God
+in the Creation_, or _Blackmore on the Creation_, or the Archbishop of
+Cambray's _Demonstration of the Being of a God_, etc., or else to spend
+some minutes in a serious silence contemplating on those subjects. Then
+follows another direction calling for Milton's glorious _Hymn to the
+Creator_; then still another calling for the reading of some book, or part
+of a book, discoursing on, and inciting to, Moral Virtue; then a succession
+of resonant supplications, adjuring the aid of the particular Wise and Good
+God, who is the author and _owner_ (or subfeudatory) of our System, in
+Franklin's efforts to shun certain vices and infirmities, and to practice
+certain virtues; all of the vices, infirmities and virtues being set forth
+in the most specific terms with the limpidity which marked everything that
+Franklin ever wrote, sacred or profane. One of the supplications was that
+he might be loyal to his Prince and faithful to his country. This he was
+until it became impossible for him to be loyal to both. Another was that he
+might avoid lasciviousness. The prayer was not answered; for William
+Franklin, on account of whose birth he should have received twenty-one
+lashes under the laws of Pennsylvania, was born about two years after it
+was framed. Creed and liturgy end with a series of thanks for the benefits
+which the author had already received. Both creed and liturgy, we are told
+by James Parton, were recorded with the utmost care and elegance in a
+little pocket prayer-book, and the liturgy Franklin practiced for many
+years. For a large part of his life, he bore his book of devotions and his
+book of moral practice about on his person wherever he went, as if they
+were amulets to ward off every evil inclination upon his part to yield to
+what he calls in the _Autobiography_ "the unremitting attraction of ancient
+habits."
+
+It is likewise a fact that, notwithstanding the high opinion that he
+expressed to his daughter Sally of the Book of Common Prayer, he undertook
+at one time to assist Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Le Despencer in reforming
+it. The delicious incongruity of the thing is very much enhanced when we
+remember that a part of Sir Francis' religious training for the task
+consisted in the circumstance that, in his wilder days, he had been the
+Abbot of Medmenham Abbey, which numbered among its godless monks--named the
+Franciscans after himself--the Earl of Sandwich, Paul Whitehead, Budd
+Doddington and John Wilkes. Over the portals of this infamous retreat was
+written "Do what you please," and within it the licentious invitation was
+duly carried into practice by perhaps the most graceless group of
+blasphemers and libertines that England had ever known. However, when Sir
+Francis and Franklin became collaborators, the former had, with advancing
+years, apparently reached the conclusion that this world was one where a
+decent regard should be paid to something higher than ourselves in
+preference to giving ourselves up unreservedly to doing what we please, and
+intercourse, bred by the fact that Sir Francis was a Joint
+Postmaster-General of Great Britain at the same time that Franklin was
+Deputy Postmaster-General for America, led naturally to a co-operative
+venture on their part. Of Sir Francis, when the dregs of his life were
+settling down into the bottom of the glass, leaving nothing but the better
+elements of his existence to be drawn off, Franklin gives us a genial
+picture. Speaking of West Wycombe, Sir Francis' country seat, he says: "But
+a pleasanter Thing is the kind Countenance, the facetious and very
+intelligent Conversation of mine Host, who having been for many Years
+engaged in publick Affairs, seen all Parts of Europe, and kept the best
+Company in the World, is himself the best existing." High praise this,
+indeed, from a man who usually had a social equivalent for whatever he
+received from an agreeable host! Franklin took as his share of the revision
+the Catechism and the Psalms. Of the Catechism, he retained only two
+questions (with the answers), "What is your duty to God?" and "What is your
+duty to your neighbor?" The Psalms he very much shortened by omitting the
+repetitions (of which he found, he said, in a letter to Granville Sharp,
+more than he could have imagined) and the imprecations, which appeared, he
+said, in the same letter, not to suit well the Christian doctrine of
+forgiveness of injuries and doing good to enemies. As revised by the two
+friends, the book was shorn of all references to the Sacraments and to the
+divinity of Our Lord, and the commandments in the Catechism, the Nicene and
+the Athanasian Creeds, and even the Canticle, "All ye Works of the Lord,"
+so close to the heart of nature, were ruthlessly deleted. All of the
+Apostle's Creed, too, went, except, to use Franklin's words, "the parts
+that are most intelligible and most essential." The _Te Deum_ and the
+_Venite_ were also pared down to very small proportions. Some of the other
+changes assumed the form of abridgments of the services provided for
+Communion, Infant Baptism, Confirmation, the Visitation of the Sick and the
+Burial of the Dead. Franklin loved his species too much, we may be sure,
+not to approve unqualifiedly the resolution of Sir Francis to omit wholly
+"the Commination, and all cursing of mankind." Nor was a man, whose own
+happy marriage had begun with such little ceremony, likely to object
+strongly to the abbreviation of the service for the solemnization of
+Matrimony upon which Sir Francis also decided. In fine, the whole of the
+Book of Common Prayer was reduced to nearly one half its original compass.
+The preface was written by Franklin. Judging from its terms, the principal
+motive of the new version was to do away with the physical inconvenience
+and discomfort caused in one way or another by long services. If the
+services were abridged, the clergy would be saved a great deal of fatigue,
+many pious and devout persons, unable from age or infirmities to remain for
+hours in a cold church, would then attend divine worship and be
+comfortable, the younger people would probably attend oftener and more
+cheerfully, the sick would not find the prayer for the visitation of the
+sick such a burden in their weak and distressed state, and persons,
+standing around an open grave, could put their hats on again after a much
+briefer period of exposure. Other reasons are given for the revision, but
+the idea of holding out brevity as a kind of bait to worship is the
+dominant one that runs through the Preface. It is written exactly as if
+there was no such thing in the world as hallowed religious traditions,
+associations or sentiments, deep as Human Love, strong as Death, to which
+an almost sacrilegious shock would be given by even moderate innovations.
+"The book," Franklin says in his letter to Granville Sharp, "was printed
+for Wilkie, in St. Paul's Church Yard, but never much noticed. Some were
+given away, very few sold, and I suppose the bulk became waste paper. In
+the prayers so much was retrenched that approbation could hardly be
+expected." In America, the Abridgment was known as "Franklin's Prayer
+Book," and, worthless as it is, in a religious sense, since it became rare,
+Franklin's fame has been known to give a single copy of it a pecuniary
+value of not less than one thousand dollars. The literary relations of
+Franklin to devotion began with a Creed as eccentric as the Oriental notion
+that the whole world is upheld by a cow with blue horns and ended with
+partial responsibility for a Prayer Book almost as devoid of a true
+religious spirit as one of his dissertations on chimneys. He was slow,
+however, to renounce a practical aim, when once formed. The abridged Prayer
+Book was printed in 1773, and some fourteen years afterwards in a letter to
+Alexander Small he expressed his pleasure at hearing that it had met with
+the approbation of Small and "good Mrs. Baldwin." "It is not yet, that I
+know of," he said, "received in public Practice anywhere; but, as it is
+said that Good Motions never die, perhaps in time it may be found useful."
+
+Another incident in the relations of Franklin to Prayer was the suggestion
+made by him in the Federal Convention of 1787 that thenceforth prayers,
+imploring the assistance of Heaven and its blessing on the deliberations of
+the Convention, should be held every morning before the Convention
+proceeded to business. "In this Situation of this Assembly, groping, as it
+were, in the dark to find Political Truth, and scarce able to distinguish
+it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir," he asked, "that we have
+not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to
+illuminate our Understandings?" The question was a timely one, and was part
+of an eloquent and impressive speech, but resulted in nothing more fruitful
+than an exclamatory memorandum of Franklin, indignant or humorous we do not
+know which, "The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers
+unnecessary!"
+
+It is only when insisting upon the charitable and fruitful side of religion
+that Franklin has any wholesome or winning message to deliver touching it;
+but, when doing this, his utterances are often edifying in the highest
+degree. In an early letter to his father, who believed that the son had
+imbibed some erroneous opinions with regard to religion, after respectfully
+reminding his father that it is no more in a man's power to think than to
+look like another, he used these words:
+
+     My mother grieves that one of her sons is an Arian,
+     another an Arminian. What an Arminian or an Arian is, I
+     cannot say that I very well know. The truth is, I make
+     such distinctions very little my study. I think vital
+     religion has always suffered, when orthodoxy is more
+     regarded than virtue; and the Scriptures assure me,
+     that at the last day we shall not be examined what we
+     _thought_, but what we _did_; and our recommendation
+     will not be, that we said, _Lord! Lord!_ but that we
+     did good to our fellow creatures. (See Matt. xxv.)
+
+These convictions he was destined to reaffirm over and over again in the
+course of his life. They were most elaborately stated in his forty-eighth
+year in a letter to Joseph Huey. He had received, he said, much kindness
+from men, to whom he would never have any opportunity of making the least
+direct return, and numberless mercies from God who was infinitely above
+being benefited by our services. Those kindnesses from men he could
+therefore only return on their fellow men, and he could only show his
+gratitude for these mercies from God by a readiness to help God's other
+children and his brethren. For he did not think that thanks and
+compliments, though repeated weekly, could discharge our real obligations
+to each other and much less those to our Creator. He that for giving a
+draught of water to a thirsty person should expect to be paid with a good
+plantation, would be modest in his demands compared with those who think
+they deserve Heaven for the little good they do on earth. The faith Huey
+mentioned, he said, had doubtless its use in the world; but he wished it
+were more productive of good works than he had generally seen it; he meant
+real good works, works of kindness, charity, mercy and public spirit; not
+holiday keeping, sermon reading or hearing, performing church ceremonies,
+or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments, despised
+even by wise men and much less capable of pleasing the Deity. The worship
+of God was a duty; the hearing reading of sermons might be useful, but if
+men rested in hearing and praying, as too many did, it was as if a tree
+should value itself on being watered and putting forth leaves though it
+never produced any fruit.
+
+     Your great Master [he continued] tho't much less of
+     these outward Appearances and Professions than many of
+     his modern Disciples. He prefer'd the _Doers_ of the
+     Word, to the meer _Hearers_; the Son that seemingly
+     refus'd to obey his Father, and yet perform'd his
+     Commands, to him that profess'd his Readiness, but
+     neglected the Work, the heretical but charitable
+     Samaritan, to the uncharitable tho' orthodox Priest and
+     sanctified Levite; & those who gave Food to the hungry,
+     Drink to the Thirsty, Raiment to the Naked,
+     Entertainment to the Stranger, and Relief to the Sick,
+     tho' they never heard of his Name, he declares shall in
+     the last Day be accepted, when those who cry Lord!
+     Lord! who value themselves on their Faith, tho' great
+     enough to perform Miracles, but have neglected good
+     Works, shall be rejected.
+
+And then, after a word about the modesty of Christ, he breaks out into
+something as much like a puff of anger as anything that his perfect mental
+balance would allow; "But now-a-days we have scarce a little Parson, that
+does not think it the Duty of every Man within his Reach to sit under his
+petty Ministrations." Altogether, the Rev. Mr. Hemphill never stole, and
+few clergymen ever composed, a more striking sermon on good works than this
+letter. And this was because the doctrines that it preached belonged fully
+as much to the province of Human Benevolence as of Religion.
+
+A pretty sermon also was the letter of Franklin to his sister Jane on
+Faith, Hope and Charity. After quoting a homely acrostic, in which his
+uncle Benjamin, who, humble as his place on Parnassus was, fumbled poetry
+with distinctly better success than the nephew, had advised Jane to "raise
+_faith_ and _hope_ three stories higher," he went on to read her a lecture
+which is too closely knit to admit of compression:
+
+     You are to understand, then, that _faith_, _hope_, and
+     _charity_ have been called the three steps of Jacob's
+     ladder, reaching from earth to heaven; our author calls
+     them _stories_, likening religion to a building, and
+     these are the three stories of the Christian edifice.
+     Thus improvement in religion is called _building up_
+     and _edification_. _Faith_ is then the ground floor,
+     _hope_ is up one pair of stairs. My dear beloved Jenny,
+     don't delight so much to dwell in those lower rooms,
+     but get as fast as you can into the garret, for in
+     truth the best room in the house is _charity_. For my
+     part, I wish the house was turned upside down; 'tis so
+     difficult (when one is fat) to go up stairs; and not
+     only so, but I imagine _hope_ and _faith_ may be more
+     firmly built upon _charity_, than _charity_ upon
+     _faith_ and _hope_. However that may be, I think it the
+     better reading to say--
+
+         "Raise faith and hope one story higher."
+
+     Correct it boldly, and I'll support the alteration;
+     for, when you are up two stories already, if you raise
+     your building three stories higher you will make five
+     in all, which is two more than there should be, you
+     expose your upper rooms more to the winds and storms;
+     and, besides, I am afraid the foundation will hardly
+     bear them, unless indeed you build with such light
+     stuff as straw and stubble, and that, you know, won't
+     stand fire. Again, where the author says,
+
+         "Kindness of heart by words express,"
+
+     strike out _words_ and put in _deeds_. The world is too
+     full of compliments already. They are the rank growth
+     of every soil, and choak the good plants of
+     benevolence, and beneficence; nor do I pretend to be
+     the first in this comparison of words and actions to
+     plants; you may remember an ancient poet, whose works
+     we have all studied and copied at school long ago.
+
+         "A man of words and not of deeds
+          Is like a garden full of weeds."
+
+     'Tis a pity that good works, among some sorts of
+     people, are so little valued, and good words admired in
+     their stead: I mean seemingly pious discourses, instead
+     of humane benevolent actions.
+
+To the Rev. Thomas Coombe Franklin expressed the opinion that, unless
+pulpit eloquence turned men to righteousness, the preacher or the priest
+was not merely sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, which were innocent
+things, but rather like the cunning man in the Old Baily who conjured and
+told fools their fortunes to cheat them out of their money.
+
+The general spirit of these various utterances of Franklin on vital
+religion were sarcastically condensed in a remark of Poor Richard: "Serving
+God is doing good to Man, but praying is thought an easier serving, and
+therefore most generally chosen."
+
+In forming an accurate conception of the influences by which the mind of
+Franklin was brought into its posture of antagonism or indifference to the
+doctrinal side of religion, it is necessary to take into consideration not
+only the innate attributes of his intellect and character but also the
+external pressure to which his opinions were subjected in his early life.
+It was the religious intolerance and proscriptive spirit of the Puritan
+society, in which he was born and reared, which drove him, first, into
+dissent, and then, into disbelief. Borne the day he was born, if tradition
+may be believed, though the ground was covered with snow, to the Old South
+Church in Boston, and baptized there, so that he might escape every chance
+of dying an unregenerate and doomed infant, he grew into boyhood to find
+himself surrounded by conditions which tended to either reduce the free
+impulses of his nature to supine or sullen submission or to force him into
+active revolt. It is hard to suppress a smile when he tells us in the
+_Autobiography_ that his father, who doubtless knew the difference between
+an Arian and an Arminian even better than his mother, intended to devote
+him as the tithe of his sons to the service of the Church. He smiles
+himself when he adds with a trace of his former commercial calling that his
+uncle Benjamin approved of the idea and proposed to give him all his
+shorthand volumes of sermons "as a stock" Franklin supposed, "to set up
+with." The intention of Josiah was soon abandoned, and Benjamin became the
+apprentice of his brother James, the owner and publisher of the Boston
+_Courant_, the fourth newspaper published in America. During the course of
+this apprenticeship, first, as a contributor to the _Courant_, under the
+_nom de plume_ of Silence Dogood, and, then, as its publisher in the place
+of his brother, who had incurred the censure of the Puritan Lord Brethren,
+he was drawn into the bitter attack made by it upon the religious
+intolerance and narrowness of the times. During its career, the paper plied
+the ruling dignitaries of the Boston of that day with so many clever little
+pasquinades that the Rev. Increase Mather was compelled to signify to the
+printer that he would have no more of their wicked Courants.
+
+     I that have known what New England was from the
+     Beginning [he said] can not but be troubled to see the
+     Degeneracy of this Place. I can well remember when the
+     Civil Government would have taken an effectual Course
+     to suppress such a _Cursed Libel!_ which if it be not
+     done I am afraid that some _Awful Judgment_ will come
+     upon this Land, and the _Wrath of God will arise, and
+     there will be no Remedy_.
+
+Undaunted, the wicked _Courant_ took pains to let the public know that,
+while the angry minister was no longer one of its subscribers, he sent his
+grandson for the paper every week, and by paying a higher price for it in
+that way was a more valuable patron than ever. The indignation of another
+writer, supposed to be Cotton Mather, lashed itself into such fury that it
+seemed as if the vile sheet would be buried beneath a pyramid of
+vituperative words. "The _Courant_," he declared, was "a notorious,
+scandalous" newspaper, "full freighted with nonsense, unmannerliness,
+railery, prophaneness, immorality, arrogance, calumnies, lies,
+contradictions, and what not, all tending to quarrels and divisions, and to
+debauch and corrupt the minds and manners of New England." For a time, the
+Church was too much for the scoffers. James Franklin was not haled for his
+sins before the Judgment seat of God, as Increase Mather said he might be,
+speedily, though a young man, but he was, as we shall hereafter see more in
+detail, reduced to such a plight by the hand of civil authority that he had
+to turn over the management of the _Courant_ to Benjamin, whose tart wit
+and literary skill made it more of a cursed libel than ever to arbitrary
+power and clerical bigotry.
+
+The daring state of license, into which the sprightly boy fell, during his
+connection with the _Courant_, is clearly revealed in the letter
+contributed by Silence Dogood to it on the subject of Harvard College. In
+this letter, she tells how the greater part of the rout that left Harvard
+College "went along a large beaten Path, which led to a Temple at the
+further End of the Plain, call'd, _The Temple of Theology_." "The Business
+of those who were employed in this Temple being laborious and painful, I
+wonder'd exceedingly," she said, "to see so many go towards it; but while I
+was pondering this Matter in my Mind, I spy'd _Pecunia_ behind a Curtain,
+beckoning to them with her Hand, which Sight immediately satisfy'd me for
+whose Sake it was, that a great Part of them (I will not say all) travel'd
+that Road." While the _Courant_ was running its lively course, young
+Franklin was shunning church on Sundays, reading Shaftesbury and Anthony
+Collins, and drifting further and further away from all the fixed
+shore-lights of religious faith.
+
+Then came the hegira, which ended, as all the world knows, at Philadelphia.
+The first place curiously enough, in which the fugitive slept after
+reaching that city, was the great Quaker Meeting House, whither he had been
+swept by the concourse of clean-dressed people, that he had seen walking
+towards it, when he was sauntering aimlessly about the streets of his new
+home, shortly after his arrival. "I sat down among them," he says in the
+_Autobiography_, "and, after looking round awhile and hearing nothing said,
+being very drowsy thro' labour and want of rest the preceding night, I fell
+fast asleep, and continu'd so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind
+enough to rouse me." The halcyon calm of this meeting offers a strange
+enough contrast to the "disputatious turn" which had been engendered in him
+as he tells us by his father's "books of dispute about religion" before he
+left Boston.
+
+The state of mind with respect to religion that he brought with him to
+Philadelphia is thus described by him in the _Autobiography_:
+
+     My parents had early given me religious impressions,
+     and brought me through my childhood piously in the
+     Dissenting way. But I was scarce fifteen, when, after
+     doubting by turns of several points, as I found them
+     disputed in the different books I read, I began to
+     doubt of Revelation itself. Some books against Deism
+     fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance
+     of sermons preached at Boyle's lectures. It happened
+     that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to
+     what was intended by them; for the arguments of the
+     Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me
+     much stronger than the refutations.
+
+Before the inevitable reaction set in, we obtain from the _Autobiography_ a
+few other items of religious or semi-religious interest. A passing
+reference has already been made to Keimer's invitation to Franklin to unite
+with him in founding another sect. He had been so often trepanned by
+Franklin's Socratic method of argument that he had finally come to
+entertain a great respect for it. He was to preach the doctrines, and his
+co-laborer was to confound all opponents. As he was in the habit of wearing
+his beard at full length, because somewhere in the Mosaic Law it was said,
+"Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard"; and was also in the habit of
+keeping the seventh day as his Sabbath, he insisted that these two habits
+of his should be enjoined as essential points of discipline upon the
+adherents of the new creed. Franklin agreed to acquiesce in this upon the
+condition that Keimer would confine himself to a vegetable diet. The latter
+consented, and, though a great glutton, ate no animal food for three
+months. During this period, their victuals were dressed and brought to them
+by a woman in their neighborhood who had been given by Franklin a list of
+forty dishes, to be prepared for them at different times, in all which
+there was neither fish, flesh nor fowl. "The whim," he declared, "suited me
+the better at this time from the cheapness of it, not costing us above
+eighteen pence sterling each per week." At the termination of three months,
+however, Keimer could live up to his Pythagorean vow no longer, invited two
+of his women friends and Franklin to dine with him, and ordered a roast pig
+for the occasion. Unfortunately for his guests, the pig was placed a little
+prematurely upon the table, and was all consumed by him before they
+arrived. With the disappearance of the pig, the new sect came to an end
+too.
+
+As sharp as the contrast between Franklin's spirit and the dove-like peace
+that brooded over the Great Quaker Meeting House, was the contrast between
+it and that of the self-devoted nun, whom he was once permitted to visit in
+the garret, in which she had immured herself, of his lodging house in Duke
+Street, London, opposite the Romish Chapel. As there was no nunnery in
+England, she had resolved to lead the life of a nun as nearly as possible
+under the circumstances. Accordingly she had donated all her estate to
+charitable uses, reserving only twelve pounds a year to live on, and out of
+this sum she still gave a great deal to charity, subsisting herself on
+water gruel only, and using no fire but to boil it. For many years, she had
+been allowed to live in her garret free of charge by successive Catholic
+tenants of the house, as they deemed it a blessing to have her there. A
+priest visited her to confess her every day. When asked how she could
+possibly find so much employment for a confessor, she replied: "Oh! It is
+impossible to avoid _vain thoughts_." Franklin found her cheerful and
+polite and of pleasant conversation. Her room was clean, but had no other
+furniture than a mattress, a table with a crucifix and book, a stool, which
+she gave him to sit on, and a picture over the chimney of Saint Veronica,
+displaying her handkerchief, with the miraculous figure of Christ's
+bleeding face on it, which she explained to Franklin, of all the persons in
+the world, with great seriousness. She looked pale, but was never sick. "I
+give it," says Franklin in the _Autobiography_, "as another instance on how
+small an income, life and health may be supported." At no period of his
+existence, was he less likely to be in sympathy with the ascetic side of
+religion than at this. Indeed, while in London at this time, believing that
+some of the reasonings of Wollaston's _Religion of Nature_, which he was
+engaged in composing at Palmer's Printing House in Bartholomew Close, where
+he was employed as a printer, were not well founded, he wrote _A
+Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_, and dedicated it
+to his rapscallion friend, James Ralph, whose own ideas about Liberty may
+be inferred from the fact that he had deserted his family in Philadelphia
+to seek his fortune in England. This pamphlet Franklin afterwards came to
+regard as one of the _errata_ of his life, and, of the one hundred copies
+of it that were printed, he then burnt all that he could lay his hands on
+except one with marginal notes by Lyons, the author of _The Infallibility
+of Human Judgment_. The argument of the pamphlet, as Franklin states it in
+the _Autobiography_, was that, as both virtue and vice owed their origin to
+an infinitely wise, good and powerful God, "nothing could possibly be wrong
+in the world," and vice and virtue were empty distinctions. Franklin's
+efforts to suppress the piece were, naturally enough, ineffectual, for
+there was an inextinguishable spark of vitality in almost everything that
+he ever wrote.
+
+These utterances make it apparent enough that the religious character of
+Franklin was subject to too many serious limitations to justify even early
+American patriotism in holding him up as an exemplar of religious
+orthodoxy, although our incredulity is not necessarily overtaxed by the
+statement of Parson Weems that, when Franklin was on his death-bed, he had
+a picture of Christ on the Cross placed in such a situation that he could
+conveniently rest his eyes upon it, and declared: "That's the picture of
+Him who came into the world to teach men to love one another." This kind of
+a teacher, divine or human, could not fail to awaken in him something as
+nearly akin to religious reverence as his nature was capable of
+entertaining. But his mental and moral constitution was one to which it was
+impossible that the supernatural or miraculous element in Religion could
+address a persuasive appeal. "In the Affairs of this World, Men are saved,
+not by Faith, but by Want of it," said Poor Richard, and it was with the
+affairs of this World that Franklin was exclusively concerned. When he
+visited the recluse in her Duke Street garret, it was not the crucifix and
+book, nor the picture over the chimney of Saint Veronica and her
+handkerchief that arrested his attention, nor was it the self-sacrificing
+fidelity of the lonely figure under harsh restrictions to a pure and
+unselfish purpose. It was rather the small income, with its salutary lesson
+of frugality for the struggling world outside, on which she contrived to
+support life and health. If he deemed a set of sectarian principles to be
+whimsical, as he did some of those professed by the Quakers, he humored
+them in the spirit of his wife who, he reminded his daughter in one of his
+letters, was in the habit of saying: "_If People can be pleased with small
+Matters, it is a Pity but they should have them._" Few men have ever been
+more familiar with the Scriptures than he. Some of his happiest
+illustrations were derived from its pictured narratives and rich imagery,
+but the idea that God had revealed His purposes to His children in its
+pages was one not congenial with his sober and inquisitive mental outlook;
+and equally uncongenial was the idea, which of all others has exercised the
+profoundest degree of religious influence upon the human heart, that
+Christ, the only begotten son of our Lord, was sent into the world to
+redeem us from our sins with His most precious blood. Even his belief in
+the existence of a superintending Providence and a system of rewards and
+punishments here or hereafter for our moral conduct was a more or less
+vague, floating belief, such as few thoroughly wise, well-balanced and
+fair-minded men, who have given any real thought to the universe, in which
+they lived, have ever failed to form to a greater or less degree. In a
+word, of that real, vital religion, which vivifies even the common, dull
+details of our daily lives, and irradiates with cheerful hope even the dark
+abyss, to which our feet are hourly tending, which purifies our hearts,
+refines our natures, quickens our sympathies, exalts our ideals, and is
+capable unassisted of inspiring even the humblest life with a subdued but
+noble enthusiasm, equal to all the shocks of existence--of this religion
+Franklin had none, or next to none. He went about the alteration of the
+Book of Common Prayer exactly as if he were framing a constitution for the
+Albany Congress or for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. That the
+alterations were to be shaped by any but purely practical considerations,
+that deep religious feeling has unreasoning reservations which intuitively
+resent the mere suggestion of change, he does not seem to have realized at
+all. Religion to him was like any other apparatus, essential to the
+well-being of organized society, a thing to be fashioned and adapted to
+its uses without reference to anything but the ordinary principles of
+utility. "If men are so wicked as we now see them _with religion_, what
+would they be _if without it_?" was a question addressed by him in his old
+age to a correspondent whom he was advising to burn a skeptical manuscript
+written by the former.
+
+At the age of twenty, Franklin came back from London to Philadelphia, and
+it was then that the reaction in his infidel tendencies took place. From
+extreme dissent he was brought by a process of reasoning, as purely
+inductive as any that he ever pursued as a philosopher, to believe that he
+had wandered off into the paths of error, and should make his way back to
+the narrow but safer road. Under his perverting influence, his friend
+Collins had become a free-thinker, and Collins had soon acquired a habit of
+sotting with brandy, and had never repaid to him the portion of Mr.
+Vernon's money which he had borrowed from him. Under the same influence,
+his friend, Ralph had become a free-thinker, and Ralph had been equally
+faithless in the discharge of his pecuniary obligations to him. Sir William
+Keith, the Colonial Governor of Pennsylvania, whose fair promises, as we
+shall see, had led him on a fool's errand to London, was a free-thinker,
+and Sir William had proved an unprincipled cozener. Benjamin Franklin
+himself was a free-thinker, and Benjamin Franklin had forgotten the faith
+that he plighted to Deborah Read, and had converted Mr. Vernon's money to
+his own use. The final result, Franklin tells us, was that his pamphlet on
+_Liberty and Necessity_ appeared now not so clever a performance as he once
+thought it, and he doubted whether some error had not insinuated itself
+unperceived into his argument, so as to infect all that followed, as was
+common with metaphysical reasonings. From this point, the drift to the
+_Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion_, the little book of moral
+practice, the _Art of Virtue_, the Rev. Mr. Hemphill and Christ Church was
+natural enough.
+
+We might add that the views upon which Franklin's mind finally settled down
+after its recoil from his pamphlet on _Liberty and Necessity_ persisted
+until his last day. In a letter to Ezra Stiles, written but a little over a
+month before his death, he made the following statement of his faith:
+
+     You desire to know something of my Religion. It is the
+     first time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot
+     take your Curiosity amiss, and shall endeavour in a few
+     Words to gratify it. Here is my Creed. I believe in one
+     God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his
+     Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the
+     most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good
+     to his other Children. That the soul of Man is
+     immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another
+     Life respecting its Conduct in this. These I take to be
+     the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion, and I
+     regard them as you do in whatever Sect I meet with
+     them.
+
+     As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you
+     particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and
+     his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World
+     ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has
+     received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with
+     most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts
+     as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not
+     dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it
+     needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon
+     an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.
+     I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that
+     Belief has the good Consequence, as probably it has, of
+     making his Doctrines more respected and better
+     observed; especially as I do not perceive, that the
+     Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the
+     Unbelievers in his Government of the World with any
+     peculiar Marks of his Displeasure.
+
+     I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having
+     experienced the Goodness of that Being in conducting me
+     prosperously thro' a long life, I have no doubt of its
+     Continuance in the next, though without the smallest
+     conceit of meriting such Goodness.
+
+It is amusing to compare this letter written in America to the President of
+Yale College with what Franklin had previously written to Madame Brillon,
+when she objected to the marriage of her daughter to William Temple
+Franklin partly on the score of religious incompatibility: "These are my
+ideas. In each Religion, there are certain essential things, and there are
+others that are only Forms and Modes; just as a loaf of Sugar may happen to
+be wrapped up in either brown, or white or blue Paper, tied up with either
+red or yellow hempen or worsted twine. In every instance the essential
+thing is the sugar itself. Now the essentials of a good Religion consist,
+it seems to me, in these 5 Articles viz." Then ensues a statement of
+practically the same fundamental tenets as those that he afterwards laid
+before Ezra Stiles; except that, when he wrote to Madame Brillon, he was
+not certain whether we should be rewarded or punished according to our
+deserts in this life or in the life to come. He then adds: "These
+Essentials are found in both your Religion and ours, the differences are
+only Paper and Twine."
+
+Dr. Priestley, in his _Autobiography_, laments that a man of Dr. Franklin's
+general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever
+in Christianity, and should also have done as much as he did to make others
+unbelievers. Franklin acknowledged to this friend that he had not given as
+much attention as he ought to have done to the evidences of Christianity,
+and, at his request, Priestley recommended to him several books on the
+subject, which he does not seem to have read. As Priestley himself rejected
+the doctrines of the Trinity, the Atonement, Original Sin and Miraculous
+Inspiration, and considered Christ to be "a mere man," though divinely
+commissioned and assisted, his fitness for the office of winning Franklin
+over to Christianity might well have been questioned. He belonged to the
+same category as Dr. Richard Price, that other warm friend of Franklin, who
+came into Franklin's mind when Sir John Pringle asked him whether he knew
+where he could go to hear a preacher of _rational_ Christianity.
+
+Franklin, it passes without saying, had his laugh at Religion as he had at
+everything else at times. "Some have observed," he says of the clergy in
+his _Apology for Printers_, "that 'tis a fruitful Topic, and the easiest to
+be witty upon of all others." For the earliest outbreak of his humor on the
+subject, we are indebted to William Temple Franklin. Young Benjamin found
+the long graces uttered by his father before and after meals rather
+tedious. "I think, father," said he one day after the provisions for the
+winter had been salted, "if you were to say grace over the whole cask, once
+for all, it would be a vast saving of time." Some of his later jests, at
+the expense of Religion, read as if they were conceived at the period, upon
+which his vow of silence called a halt, when, according to the
+_Autobiography_, he was getting into the habit of prattling, punning and
+joking, which only made him acceptable to trifling company. Others,
+however, have the earmarks of his humorous spirit in its more noteworthy
+manifestations. When he was off on his military excursion against the
+Indians, his command had for its chaplain a zealous Presbyterian minister,
+Mr. Beatty, who complained to him that the men did not generally attend his
+prayers and exhortations. When they enlisted, they were promised, besides
+pay and provisions, a gill of rum a day, which was punctually served out to
+them, half in the morning, and the other half in the evening.
+
+     I observ'd [says Franklin in the _Autobiography_] they
+     were as punctual in attending to receive it; upon which
+     I said to Mr. Beatty, "It is, perhaps, below the
+     dignity of your profession to act as steward of the
+     rum, but if you were to deal it out and only just after
+     prayers, you would have them all about you." He liked
+     the tho't, undertook the office, and, with the help of
+     a few hands to measure out the liquor, executed it to
+     satisfaction, and never were prayers more generally and
+     more punctually attended; so that I thought this method
+     preferable to the punishment inflicted by some military
+     laws for non-attendance on divine service.
+
+The efficacy itself of prayer also elicited some bantering comments from
+him. Alluding to the prayers offered up in New England for the reduction of
+Louisburg, he wrote to John Franklin:
+
+     Some seem to think forts are as easy taken as snuff.
+     Father Moody's prayers look tolerably modest. You have
+     a fast and prayer day for that purpose; in which I
+     compute five hundred thousand petitions were offered up
+     to the same effect in New England, which added to the
+     petitions of every family morning and evening,
+     multiplied by the number of days since January 25th,
+     make forty-five millions of prayers; which, set against
+     the prayers of a few priests in the garrison, to the
+     Virgin Mary, give a vast balance in your favour.
+
+     If you do not succeed, I fear I shall have but an
+     indifferent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such
+     cases, as long as I live. Indeed, in attacking strong
+     towns I should have more dependence on _works_, than on
+     _faith_; for, like the kingdom of heaven, they are to
+     be taken by force and violence; and in a French
+     garrison I suppose there are devils of that kind, that
+     they are not to be cast out by prayers and fasting,
+     unless it be by their own fasting for want of
+     provisions.
+
+We can readily imagine that more than one mirth-provoking letter like this
+from the pen of Franklin passed into the general circulation of Colonial
+humor.
+
+As for the humorist, he did not fail to return to the subject a little
+later on, when Louisburg, after being bandied about between English and
+French control, was again in the hands of the English. "I congratulate
+you," he said to Jane Mecom, "on the conquest of Cape Breton, and hope as
+your people took it by praying, the first time, you will now pray that it
+may never be given up again, which you then forgot."
+
+In his _A Letter from China_, he makes the sailor, who is supposed to be
+narrating his experiences in China, say that he asked his Chinese master
+why they did not go to church to pray, as was done in Europe, and was
+answered that they paid the priests to pray for them that they might stay
+at home, and mind their business, and that it would be a folly to pay
+others for praying, and then go and do the praying themselves, and that the
+more work they did, while the priests prayed, the better able they were to
+pay them well for praying.
+
+After expressing his regret in a letter from New York to Colonel Henry
+Bouquet, the hero of the battle of Bushy Run, that because of business he
+could enjoy so little of the conversation of that gallant officer at
+Philadelphia, he exclaimed: "How happy are the Folks in Heaven, who, 'tis
+said, have nothing to do, but to talk with one another, except now and then
+a little Singing & Drinking of Aqua Vitae."
+
+His leniency in relation to the Sabbath also vented itself in a jocose
+letter to Jared Ingersoll:
+
+     I should be glad to know what it is that distinguishes
+     Connecticut religion from common religion. Communicate,
+     if you please, some of these particulars that you think
+     will amuse me as a virtuoso. When I travelled in
+     Flanders, I thought of our excessively strict
+     observation of Sunday; and that a man could hardly
+     travel on that day among you upon his lawful occasions
+     without hazard of punishment; while, where I was, every
+     one travelled, if he pleased, or diverted himself in
+     any other way; and in the afternoon both high and low
+     went to the play or the opera, where there was plenty
+     of singing, fiddling and dancing. I looked around for
+     God's judgments, but saw no signs of them. The cities
+     were well built and full of inhabitants, the markets
+     filled with plenty, the people well-favoured and well
+     clothed, the fields well tilled, the cattle fat and
+     strong, the fences, houses, and windows all in repair,
+     and no Old Tenor (paper money) anywhere in the country;
+     which would almost make one suspect that the Deity is
+     not so angry at that offence as a New England Justice.
+
+The joke sometimes turns up when we are least expecting it, if it can be
+said that there is ever a time when a flash of wit or humor from Franklin
+surprises us. In a letter to Richard Price, asking him for a list of good
+books, such as were most proper to inculcate principles of sound religion
+and just government, he informs Price that, a new town in Massachusetts
+having done him the honor to name itself after him, and proposing to build
+a steeple to their meeting-house, if he would give them a bell, he had
+advised the sparing themselves the expense of a steeple for the present and
+that they would accept of books instead of a bell; "sense being preferable
+to sound." There is a gleam of the same sort in his revised version of the
+Lord's Prayer; for, almost incredible as the fact is, his irreverent hand
+tinkered even with this most sacred of human petitions. "Our Liturgy," he
+said, "uses neither the _Debtors_ of Matthew, nor the _indebted_ of Luke,
+but instead of them speaks of _those that trespass against us_. Perhaps the
+Considering it as a Christian Duty to forgive Debtors, was by the Compilers
+thought an inconvenient Idea in a trading Nation." Sometimes his humor is
+so delicate and subtle that even acute intellects, without a keen sense of
+the ludicrous, mistake it all for labored gravity. This is true of his
+modernized version of part of the first chapter of Job, where, for
+illustration, for the words, "But put forth thine hand now, and touch all
+that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face," he suggests the
+following: "Try him;--only withdraw your favor, turn him out of his places,
+and withhold his pensions, and you will soon find him in the opposition."
+It is a remarkable fact that more than one celebrated man of letters has
+accepted this exquisite parody as a serious intrusion by Franklin into a
+reformatory field for which he was unfitted. We dare say that, if Franklin
+could have anticipated such a result, he would have experienced a degree of
+pleasure in excess of even that which he was in the habit of feeling when
+he had successfully passed off his Parable against Persecution on some one
+as an extract from the Bible.
+
+There is undeniably a lack of reality, a certain sort of hollowness about
+his religious views. When we tap them, a sound, as of an empty cask, comes
+back to us. They are distinguished by very much the same want of
+spontaneous, instinctive feeling, the same artificial cast, the same
+falsetto note as his system of moral practice and his _Art of Virtue_.
+Indeed, to a very great degree they are but features of his system of
+morals. That he ever gave any sincere credence to the written creed of his
+youth, with its graded Pantheon of Gods, is, of course, inconceivable. This
+was a mere academic and transitional conceit, inspired by the first
+youthful impulses of his recession from extreme irreligion to lukewarm
+acquiescence in accepted religious conventions. Nor can we say that his
+belief in a single Deity was much more genuine or vital, confidently as he
+professed to commit himself to the wisdom and goodness of this Deity. There
+is nothing in his writings, full of well-rounded thanksgiving and praise as
+they sometimes are, to justify the conclusion that to him God was anything
+more than the personification, more or less abstract, of those cosmic
+forces, with which he was so conversant, and of those altruistic promptings
+of the human heart, of which he himself was such a beneficent example. The
+Fatherhood of God was a passive conception to which his mind was conducted
+almost solely by his active, ever-present sense of the Brotherhood of Man.
+
+But it is no greater misconception to think of Franklin as a Christian than
+to think of him as a scoffer. He was no scoffer. A laugh or a smile for
+some ceremonious or extravagant feature of religion he had at times, as we
+have seen, but no laugh or smile except such as can be reconciled with a
+substantial measure of genuine religious good-faith. It was never any part
+of his purpose to decry Religion, to undermine its influence, or to weaken
+its props. He was too full of the scientific spirit of speculation and
+distrust, he was too practical and worldly-wise to readily surrender the
+right of private judgment, or to give himself over to any form of truly
+devotional fervor, but he had entirely too keen an appreciation of the
+practical value of religion in restraining human vices and passions and
+promoting human benevolence to have any disposition to destroy or impair
+its sway. The motive of his existence was not to unsettle men, nor to cast
+them adrift, nor to hold out to them novel projects of self-improvement,
+not rooted in fixed human prepossessions and experience, but to discipline
+them, to free them from social selfishness, to keep them in subjection to
+all the salutary restraints, which the past had shown to be good for them.
+Of these restraints, he knew that those imposed by Religion were among the
+most potent, and to Religion, therefore, he adhered, if for no other
+reason, because it was the most helpful ally of human morality, and of the
+municipal ordinances by which human morality is enforced. From what he said
+to Lord Kames, it seems that he regarded his _Art of Virtue_ as a
+supplement to Religion, though really with more truth it might be asserted
+that it was Religion which was the supplement to his _Art of Virtue_.
+
+     Christians [he said] are directed to have faith in
+     Christ, as the effectual means of obtaining the change
+     they desire. It may, when sufficiently strong, be
+     effectual with many: for a full opinion, that a Teacher
+     is infinitely wise, good, and powerful, and that he
+     will certainly reward and punish the obedient and
+     disobedient, must give great weight to his precepts,
+     and make them much more attended to by his disciples.
+     But many have this faith in so weak a degree, that it
+     does not produce the effect. Our _Art of Virtue_ may,
+     therefore, be of great service to those whose faith is
+     unhappily not so strong, and may come in aid of its
+     weakness.
+
+How little Franklin was inclined to undervalue Religion as a support of
+good conduct is, among other things, shown by the concern which he
+occasionally expressed in his letters, when he was abroad, that his wife
+and daughter should not be slack in attending divine worship. One of his
+letters to Sally of this nature we have already quoted. Another to his wife
+expresses the hope that Sally "continues to love going to Church," and
+states that he would have her read over and over again the Whole Duty of
+Man and the Lady's Library. In another letter to his wife, he says: "You
+spent your Sunday very well, but I think you should go oftner to Church."
+Fortified as he was by his _Art of Virtue_, he felt that church attendance
+was but a matter of secondary importance for him, but he was eager that his
+wife and daughter, who had not acquired the habitude of the virtues as he
+had, should not neglect the old immemorial aids to rectitude.
+
+Even to the levity, with which religious topics might be handled, he set
+distinct limits. He had no objection to a good-humored joke at the expense
+of their superficial aspects even if it was a little broad, but with
+malignant or derisive attacks upon religion he had no sympathy whatever. In
+the _Autobiography_, he denounces with manifest sincerity, as a wicked
+travesty, the doggerel version of the Bible, composed by Dr. Brown, who
+kept the inn, eight or ten miles from Burlington, at which he lodged
+overnight, on his first journey from Boston to Philadelphia. Nothing that
+he ever wrote is wiser or sounder than the letter which he addressed to a
+friend, dissuading him from publishing a "piece," impugning the Doctrine of
+a Special Providence. In its utilitarian conceptions of religion and
+virtue, in the emphasis placed by it upon habit as the best security for
+righteous conduct, in the cautious respect that it manifests for the
+general sentiments of mankind on religious subjects, we have a concise
+revelation of his whole attitude towards Religion, when he was turning his
+face seriously towards it.
+
+     By the Argument it contains against the Doctrines of a
+     particular Providence [he said], tho' you allow a
+     general Providence, you strike at the Foundation of all
+     Religion. For without the Belief of a Providence, that
+     takes Cognizance of, guards, and guides, and may favour
+     particular Persons, there is no Motive to Worship a
+     Deity, to fear its Displeasure, or to pray for its
+     Protection. I will not enter into any Discussion of
+     your Principles, tho' you seem to desire it. At present
+     I shall only give you my Opinion, that, though your
+     Reasonings are subtile, and may prevail with some
+     Readers, you will not succeed so as to change the
+     general Sentiments of Mankind on that Subject, and the
+     Consequence of printing this Piece will be, a great
+     deal of Odium drawn upon yourself, Mischief to you, and
+     no Benefit to others. He that spits against the Wind,
+     spits in his own Face.
+
+     But, were you to succeed, do you imagine any Good would
+     be done by it? You yourself may find it easy to live a
+     virtuous Life, without the Assistance afforded by
+     Religion; you having a clear Perception of the
+     Advantages of Virtue, and the Disadvantages of Vice,
+     and possessing a Strength of Resolution sufficient to
+     enable you to resist common Temptations. But think how
+     great a Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and
+     ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc'd, and
+     inconsiderate Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the
+     Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to
+     support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice
+     of it till it becomes _habitual_, which is the great
+     Point for its Security. And perhaps you are indebted to
+     her originally, that is, to your Religious Education,
+     for the Habits of Virtue upon which you now justly
+     value yourself. You might easily display your excellent
+     Talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject, and
+     thereby obtain a Rank with our most distinguish'd
+     Authors. For among us it is not necessary, as among the
+     Hottentots, that a Youth, to be receiv'd into the
+     Company of men, should prove his Manhood by beating his
+     Mother.
+
+     I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt
+     unchaining the Tyger, but to burn this Piece before it
+     is seen by any other Person; whereby you will save
+     yourself a great deal of Mortification from the Enemies
+     it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of
+     Regret and Repentence.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] Kent was evidently something of a character. In a letter to his friend
+Mrs. Catherine Greene, in 1764, Franklin said: "Mr. Kent's compliment is a
+very extraordinary one, as he was obliged to kill himself and two others in
+order to make it; but, being killed in imagination only, they and he are
+all yet alive and well, thanks to God, and I hope will continue so as long
+as, dear Katy, your affectionate friend,   B. FRANKLIN."
+
+[8] We are informed by Franklin in the _Autobiography_ that he inserted on
+one page of his "little book" a "scheme of employment for the twenty-four
+hours of a natural day." The opening injunction of this plan of conduct
+brings the wash-basin and the altar into rather amusing juxtaposition:
+"Rise, wash, and address _Powerful Goodness_!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Franklin, the Philanthropist and Citizen
+
+
+It may be that, if Franklin had asked the angel, who made the room of Abou
+Ben Adhem rich, and like a lily in bloom, whether his name was among the
+names of those who loved the Lord, the angel might have replied: "Nay not
+so"; but there can be no question that like Ben Adhem Franklin could with
+good right have added,
+
+    "I pray thee then,
+    Write me as one that loves his fellow-men."
+
+As we have said, the desire to promote the welfare of his fellow-creatures
+was the real religion of his life--a zealous, constant religion which began
+with his early manhood and ceased only with his end. This fact reveals
+itself characteristically in a letter written by him to his wife just after
+he had narrowly escaped shipwreck off Falmouth Harbor on his second voyage
+to England. "Were I a Roman Catholic," he said, "perhaps I should on this
+occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint; but as I am not, if I were to
+vow at all, it should be to build a _light house_."
+
+The weaker side of human character was, in all its aspects, manifest enough
+to his humorous perceptions. In an amusing paragraph in the
+_Autobiography_, he tells us how once in his youth he irresolutely adhered
+to his vegetarian scruples, even when his nose was filled with the sweet
+savor of frying fish, until he recollected that he had seen some smaller
+fish removed from their stomachs. Then thought he, "If you eat one another,
+I don't see why we mayn't eat you." "So convenient a thing," he adds, "it
+is to be a _reasonable creature_, since it enables one to find or make a
+reason for everything one has a mind to do." On another occasion, he was so
+disgusted with the workings of human reason as to regret that we had not
+been furnished with a sound, sensible instinct instead. At intervals, the
+sly humor dies away into something like real, heartfelt censure of his
+kind, especially when he reflects upon the baleful state of eclipse into
+which human happiness passes when overcast by war. Among other reasons, he
+hated war, because he deprecated everything that tended to check the
+multiplication of the human species which he was almost ludicrously eager
+to encourage. No writer, not even Malthus, who was very deeply indebted to
+him, has ever had a keener insight into the philosophy of population, and
+no man has ever been a more enthusiastic advocate of the social
+arrangements which furnish the results for the application of this
+philosophy. In one of her letters to him, we find his daughter, Sally,
+saying: "As I know my dear Papa likes to hear of weddings, I will give him
+a list of my acquaintance that has entered the matrimonial state since his
+departure." And in one of his letters to his wife, when he was in England
+on his first mission, he wrote: "The Accounts you give me of the Marriages
+of our friends are very agreeable. I love to hear of everything that tends
+to increase the Number of good People."[9] The one thing in French customs
+that appears to have met with his disapproval was the inclination of French
+mothers to escape the burdens of maternity. In a letter to George Whatley,
+he ventured the conjecture that in the year 1785 only one out of every two
+infants born in Paris was being nursed by its own mother.
+
+     Is it right [he asked] to encourage this monstrous
+     Deficiency of natural Affection? A Surgeon I met with
+     here excused the Women of Paris, by saying, seriously,
+     that they _could not_ give suck; "_Car," dit il, "Elles
+     n'ont point de tetons._" ("For," said he, "They have no
+     teats.") He assur'd me it was a Fact, and bade me look
+     at them, and observe how flat they were on the Breast;
+     "they have nothing more there," said he, "than I have
+     upon the Back of my hand." I have since thought that
+     there might be some Truth in his Observation, and that,
+     possibly, Nature, finding they made no use of Bubbies,
+     has left off giving them any. I wish Success to the new
+     Project of assisting the Poor to keep their Children at
+     home [Franklin adds later in this letter] because I
+     think there is no Nurse like a Mother (or not many),
+     and that, if Parents did not immediately send their
+     Infants out of their Sight, they would in a few days
+     begin to love them, and thence be spurr'd to greater
+     Industry for their Maintenance.
+
+Among his most delightful observations are these on marriage in a letter to
+John Sargent:
+
+     The Account you give me of your Family is pleasing,
+     except that your eldest Son continues so long
+     unmarried. I hope he does not intend to live and die in
+     Celibacy. The Wheel of Life, that has roll'd down to
+     him from Adam without Interruption, should not stop
+     with him. I would not have one dead unbearing Branch in
+     the Genealogical Tree of the Sargents. The married
+     State is, after all our Jokes, the happiest, being
+     conformable to our natures. Man & Woman have each of
+     them Qualities & Tempers, in which the other is
+     deficient, and which in Union contribute to the common
+     Felicity. Single and separate, they are not the
+     compleat human Being; they are like the odd Halves of
+     Scissors; they cannot answer the End of their
+     Formation.
+
+Equally delightful are his observations upon the same subject in a letter
+to John Alleyne after Alleyne's marriage:
+
+     Had you consulted me, as a Friend, on the Occasion,
+     Youth on both sides I should not have thought any
+     Objection. Indeed, from the matches that have fallen
+     under my Observation, I am rather inclin'd to think,
+     that early ones stand the best Chance for Happiness.
+     The Tempers and habits of young People are not yet
+     become so stiff and uncomplying, as when more advanced
+     in Life; they form more easily to each other, and hence
+     many Occasions of Disgust are removed. And if Youth has
+     less of that Prudence, that is necessary to conduct a
+     Family, yet the Parents and elder Friends of young
+     married Persons are generally at hand to afford their
+     Advice, which amply supplies that Defect; and, by early
+     Marriage, Youth is sooner form'd to regular and useful
+     Life; and possibly some of those Accidents, Habits or
+     Connections, that might have injured either the
+     Constitution, or the Reputation, or both, are thereby
+     happily prevented.
+
+     Particular Circumstances of particular Persons may
+     possibly sometimes make it prudent to delay entering
+     into that State; but in general, when Nature has
+     render'd our Bodies fit for it, the Presumption is in
+     Nature's Favour, that she has not judg'd amiss in
+     making us desire it. Late Marriages are often attended,
+     too, with this further Inconvenience, that there is not
+     the same Chance the parents shall live to see their
+     offspring educated. "_Late Children_," says the Spanish
+     Proverb, "_are early Orphans._" A melancholy Reflection
+     to those, whose Case it may be! With us in America,
+     Marriages are generally in the Morning of Life; our
+     Children are therefore educated and settled in the
+     World by Noon, and thus, our Business being done, we
+     have an Afternoon and Evening of chearful Leisure to
+     ourselves; such as your Friend at present enjoys. By
+     these early Marriages we are blest with more Children;
+     and from the Mode among us, founded in Nature, of every
+     Mother suckling and nursing her own Child, more of them
+     are raised. Thence the swift Progress of Population
+     among us, unparallel'd in Europe.
+
+Then, after speaking of the fate of many in England who, having deferred
+marriage too long, find at length that it is too late to think of it, and
+so live all their lives in a situation that greatly lessens a man's value,
+he comes back to what seems to have been a favorite course of illustration
+of his in relation to marriage. "An odd Volume of a Set of Books you know
+is not worth its proportion of the Set, and what think you of the
+Usefulness of an odd Half of a Pair of Scissors? It can not well cut
+anything. It may possibly serve to scrape a Trencher." With these views
+about marriage, it is not surprising to find Franklin employing in a letter
+to Joseph Priestley such language about war as this:
+
+     Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly
+     constructed, as they are generally more easily provok'd
+     than reconcil'd, more disposed to do Mischief to each
+     other than to make Reparation, much more easily
+     deceiv'd than undeceiv'd, and having more Pride and
+     even Pleasure in killing than in begetting one another;
+     for without a Blush they assemble in great armies at
+     Noon-Day to destroy, and when they have kill'd as many
+     as they can, they exaggerate the Number to augment the
+     fancied Glory; but they creep into Corners, or cover
+     themselves with the Darkness of night, when they mean
+     to beget, as being asham'd of a virtuous Action. A
+     virtuous Action it would be, and a vicious one the
+     killing of them, if the Species were really worth
+     producing or preserving; but of this I begin to doubt.
+
+In the same letter, he suggests to the celebrated clergyman and philosopher
+to whom he was writing that perhaps as the latter grew older he might look
+upon the saving of souls as a hopeless project or an idle amusement, repent
+of having murdered in mephitic air so many honest, harmless mice, and wish
+that to prevent mischief he had used boys and girls instead of them.[10]
+
+Nor are these by any means the only sentences in Franklin's writings in
+which he expressed his disgust for the human passions which breed war. A
+frequently repeated saying of his was that there hardly ever existed such a
+thing as a bad peace or a good war. "All Wars," he declared to Mrs. Mary
+Hewson, after the establishment of peace between Great Britain and her
+revolted colonies, "are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones.
+When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their
+Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye,
+it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other."
+
+     I join with you most cordially [he wrote six months
+     later to Sir Joseph Banks] in rejoicing at the return
+     of Peace. I hope it will be lasting, and that Mankind
+     will at length, as they call themselves reasonable
+     Creatures, have Reason and Sense enough to settle their
+     Differences without cutting Throats; for, in my
+     opinion, _there never was a good War, or a bad Peace_.
+     What vast additions to the Conveniences and Comforts
+     of Living might Mankind have acquired, if the Money
+     spent in Wars had been employed in Works of public
+     utility! What an extension of Agriculture, even to the
+     Tops of our Mountains: what Rivers rendered navigable,
+     or joined by Canals: what Bridges, Aqueducts, new
+     Roads, and other public Works, Edifices, and
+     Improvements, rendering England a compleat Paradise,
+     might have been obtained by spending those Millions in
+     doing good, which in the last War have been spent in
+     doing Mischief; in bringing Misery into thousands of
+     Families, and destroying the Lives of so many thousands
+     of working people, who might have performed the useful
+     labor!
+
+The same sentiments are repeated in a letter to David Hartley:
+
+     What would you think of a proposition, if I sh'd make
+     it, of a family compact between England, France and
+     America? America wd be as happy as the Sabine Girls, if
+     she cd be the means of uniting in perpetual peace her
+     father and her husband. What repeated follies are these
+     repeated wars! You do not want to conquer & govern one
+     another. Why then sh'd you continually be employed in
+     injuring & destroying one another? How many excellent
+     things might have been done to promote the internal
+     welfare of each country; What Bridges, roads, canals
+     and other usefull public works & institutions, tending
+     to the common felicity, might have been made and
+     established with the money and men foolishly spent
+     during the last seven centuries by our mad wars in
+     doing one another mischief! You are near neighbors, and
+     each have very respectable qualities. Learn to be quiet
+     and to respect each other's rights. You are all
+     Christians. One is _The Most Christian King_, and the
+     other _Defender of the Faith_. Manifest the propriety
+     of these titles by your future conduct. "By this," says
+     Christ, "shall all men know that ye are my Disciples,
+     if ye love one another." "Seek peace, and ensue it."
+
+     We make daily great Improvements in _Natural_, there is
+     one I wish to see in _Moral_ Philosophy [he wrote to
+     Richard Price] the Discovery of a Plan, that would
+     induce & oblige Nations to settle their Disputes
+     without first Cutting one another's Throats. When will
+     human Reason be sufficiently improv'd to see the
+     Advantage of this!
+
+The aspiration is again voiced in a letter to Joseph Priestley:
+
+     The rapid Progress _true_ Science now makes, occasions
+     my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is
+     impossible to imagine the Height to which may be
+     carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over
+     Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of
+     their Gravity, and give them absolute Levity, for the
+     sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its
+     Labour and double its Produce; all Diseases may by sure
+     means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of
+     Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even
+     beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science
+     were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would
+     cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human
+     Beings would at length learn what they now improperly
+     call Humanity!
+
+Mixed with Franklin's other feelings about war, as we have seen, was a
+profound sense of its pecuniary wastefulness. It was the greediest of all
+rat-holes, an agency of impoverishment worse even than the four specified
+in Poor Richard's couplet,
+
+    "Women and Wine, Game and Deceit,
+    Make the Wealth small and the Wants great."
+
+     When [he asked Benjamin Vaughan] will princes learn
+     arithmetic enough to calculate, if they want pieces of
+     one another's territory, how much cheaper it would be
+     to buy them, than to make war for them, even though
+     they were to give a hundred year's purchase? But, if
+     glory cannot be valued, and therefore the wars for it
+     cannot be subject to arithmetical calculation so as to
+     show their advantage or disadvantage, at least wars for
+     trade, which have gain for their object, may be proper
+     subjects for such computation; and a trading nation, as
+     well as a single trader, ought to calculate the
+     probabilities of profit and loss, before engaging in
+     any considerable adventure. This however nations
+     seldom do, and we have had frequent instances of their
+     spending more money in wars for acquiring or securing
+     branches of commerce, than a hundred years' profit or
+     the full enjoyment of them can compensate.
+
+A celebrated philosophical writer, Franklin said in the _Propositions
+Relative to Privateering_, which he communicated to Richard Oswald, had
+remarked that, when he considered the destruction to human life, caused by
+the slave trade, so intimately connected with the industry of the sugar
+islands, he could scarce look on a morsel of sugar without conceiving it
+spotted with human blood. If this writer, Franklin added, had considered
+also the blood of one another which the white nations had shed in fighting
+for these islands, "he would have imagined his sugar not as spotted only,
+but as thoroughly dyed red." As for Franklin himself, he was satisfied that
+the subjects of the Emperor of Germany and the Empress of Russia, who had
+no sugar islands, consumed sugar cheaper at Vienna and Moscow, with all the
+charge of transporting it after its arrival in Europe, than the citizens of
+London or of Paris. "And I sincerely believe," he declared, "that if France
+and England were to decide, by throwing dice, which should have the whole
+of their sugar islands, the loser in the throw would be the gainer." The
+future expense of defending the islands would be saved, the sugar would be
+bought cheaper by all Europe, if the inhabitants of the islands might make
+it without interruption, and, whoever imported it, the same revenue might
+be raised by duties on it at the custom houses of the nation that consumed
+it. "You know," Franklin observed in his famous letter to his daughter
+Sally on the Order of the Cincinnati, "everything makes me recollect some
+Story." As respects war, the inevitable story turned up in one of his
+letters to Priestley:
+
+     In what Light [he said] we are viewed by superior
+     Beings, may be gathered from a Piece of late West India
+     News, which possibly has not yet reached you. A young
+     Angel of Distinction being sent down to this world on
+     some Business, for the first time, had an old
+     courier-spirit assigned him as a Guide. They arriv'd
+     over the Seas of Martinico, in the middle of the long
+     Day of obstinate Fight between the Fleets of Rodney and
+     De Grasse. When, thro' the Clouds of smoke, he saw the
+     Fire of the Guns, the Decks covered with mangled Limbs,
+     and Bodies dead or dying; the ships sinking, burning,
+     or blown into the Air; and the Quantity of Pain,
+     Misery, and Destruction, the Crews yet alive were thus
+     with so much Eagerness dealing round to one another; he
+     turn'd angrily to his Guide, and said: "You blundering
+     Blockhead, you are ignorant of your Business; you
+     undertook to conduct me to the Earth, and you have
+     brought me into Hell!" "No, sir," says the Guide, "I
+     have made no mistake; this is really the Earth, and
+     these are men. Devils never treat one another in this
+     cruel manner; they have more Sense, and more of what
+     Men (vainly) call _Humanity_."
+
+But how little acrid misanthropy there was in this lurid story or in any of
+the indignant utterances occasionally wrung from Franklin by the sanguinary
+tendencies of the human race is clearly seen in this very letter; for,
+after working up his story to its opprobrious climax, he falls back to the
+genial level of his ordinary disposition:
+
+     But to be serious, my dear old Friend [he adds], I love
+     you as much as ever, and I love all the honest Souls
+     that meet at the London Coffee-House. I only wonder how
+     it happen'd that they and my other Friends in England
+     came to be such good Creatures in the midst of so
+     perverse a Generation. I long to see them and you once
+     more, and I labour for Peace with more Earnestness,
+     that I may again be happy in your sweet society.
+
+The truth is that Franklin was no Timon of Athens, and no such thing as
+lasting misanthropy could find lodgment in that earth-born and
+earth-loving nature which fitted into the world as smoothly as its own
+grass, its running water, or its fruitful plains. If for many generations
+there has been any man, whose pronouncement, _Homo sum; humani nihil a me
+alienum puto_, was capable of clothing that trite phrase with its original
+freshness, this man was Franklin. The day, when the word went out in the
+humble Milk Street dwelling of his father that another man child was born,
+was a day that he never regretted; the long years of rational and useful
+existence which followed he was willing, as has been told, to live all over
+again, if he could only enjoy the author's privilege of correcting in the
+second edition the _errata_ of the first; in his declining years he could
+still find satisfaction in the fact that he was afflicted with only three
+mortal diseases; and during his last twelve months, when he was confined
+for the most part to his bed, and, in his paroxysms of pain, was obliged to
+take large doses of laudanum to mitigate his tortures, his fortitude was
+such as to elicit this striking tribute from his physician, Dr. John Jones:
+
+     In the intervals of pain, he not only amused himself
+     with reading and conversing cheerfully with his family,
+     and a few friends who visited him, but was often
+     employed in doing business of a public as well as
+     private nature, with various persons who waited on him
+     for that purpose; and, in every instance displayed, not
+     only that readiness and disposition of doing good,
+     which was the distinguishing characteristic of his
+     life, but the fullest and clearest possession of his
+     uncommon mental abilities; and not unfrequently
+     indulged himself in those _jeux d'esprit_ and
+     entertaining anecdotes, which were the delight of all
+     who heard him.
+
+To the very last his wholesome, sunny spirit was proof against every morbid
+trial. Dr. Jones tells us further that, even during his closing days, when
+the severity of his pain drew forth a groan of complaint, he would observe
+that he was afraid that he did not bear his sufferings as he ought,
+acknowledged his grateful sense of the many blessings he had received from
+that Supreme Being who had raised him from small and low beginnings to such
+high rank and consideration among men, and made no doubt but his present
+afflictions were kindly intended to wean him from a world, in which he was
+no longer fit to act the part assigned to him.
+
+It is plain enough that in practice as well as in precept to Franklin life
+was ever a welcome gift to be enjoyed so long as corporeal infirmities
+permit it to be enjoyed, and to be surrendered, when the ends of its
+institution can no longer be fulfilled, as naturally as we surrender
+consciousness when we turn into our warmer beds and give ourselves over to
+our shorter slumbers. The spirit in which he lived is reflected in the
+concluding paragraph of his _Articles of Belief_ in which, with the
+refrain, "Good God, I thank thee!" at the end of every paragraph except the
+last, and, with the words, "My Good God, I thank thee!" at the end of the
+last, he expresses his gratitude to this God for peace and liberty, for
+food and raiment, for corn and wine and milk and every kind of healthful
+nourishment, for the common benefits of air and light, for useful fire and
+delicious water, for knowledge and literature and every useful art, for his
+friends and _their_ prosperity, and for the fewness of his enemies, for all
+the innumerable benefits conferred on him by the Deity, for life and reason
+and the use of speech, for health and joy and every pleasant hour. Those
+thanks for his friends and _their_ prosperity was Franklin indeed at his
+best. On the other hand, the spirit in which he regarded and met the hour
+of his dissolution is vividly reflected in the lines written by him in his
+seventy-ninth year:
+
+    "If Life's compared to a Feast,
+    Near Four-score Years I've been a Guest;
+    I've been regaled with the best,
+    And feel quite satisfyd.
+    'Tis time that I retire to Rest;
+    Landlord, I thank ye!--Friends, Good Night."
+
+These lines, unsteady upon their poetic feet as they are like all of
+Franklin's lines, may perhaps be pronounced the best that he ever wrote,
+but they are not so good as his celebrated epitaph written many years
+before when the hour at the inn of existence was not so late:
+
+                  "The Body
+                      of
+              BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
+                    Printer,
+          (Like the cover of an old book,
+              Its contents torn out,
+    And stript of its lettering and gilding,)
+             Lies here, food for worms.
+    Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
+  For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
+                    In a new
+            And more beautiful edition,
+              Corrected and amended
+                       By
+                   The Author."
+
+So far as we can see, the only quarrel that Franklin had with existence was
+that he was born too soon to witness many important human achievements,
+which the future had in store. He was prepared to quit the world quietly
+when he was duly summoned to do so. The artist who was to paint his
+portrait for Yale College, he said a few days before his death to Ezra
+Stiles, must not delay about it, as his subject might slip through his
+fingers; but it was impossible for such an inquisitive man to repress the
+wish that, after his decease, he might be permitted to revisit the globe
+for the purpose of enjoying the inventions and improvements which had come
+into existence during his absence: the locomotive, the steamship, the Morse
+and Marconi telegraphs, the telephone, the autocar, the aeroplane, the
+abolition of American slavery, Twentieth Century London, Paris and New
+York.
+
+     I have been long impressed [he said in his eighty-third
+     year to the Rev. John Lathrop] with the same sentiments
+     you so well express, of the growing felicity of
+     mankind, from the improvements in philosophy, morals,
+     politics, and even the conveniences of common living,
+     by the invention and acquisition of new and useful
+     utensils and instruments, that I have sometimes almost
+     wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three
+     centuries hence. For invention and improvement are
+     prolific, and beget more of their kind. The present
+     progress is rapid. Many of great importance, now
+     unthought of, will before that period be produced; and
+     then I might not only enjoy their advantages, but have
+     my curiosity gratified in knowing what they are to be.
+     I see a little absurdity in what I have just written,
+     but it is to a friend, who will wink and let it pass,
+     while I mention one reason more for such a wish, which
+     is, that, if the art of physic shall be improved in
+     proportion with other arts, we may then be able to
+     avoid diseases, and live as long as the patriarchs in
+     Genesis; to which I suppose we should make little
+     objection.
+
+Such complete adjustment to all the conditions of human existence, even the
+harshest, as Franklin exhibited, would, under any circumstances, be an
+admirable and inspiring thing; but it becomes still more so when we
+recollect that he prized life mainly for the opportunity that it afforded
+him to do good. To his own country he rendered services of priceless
+importance, but it would be utterly misleading to think of him as anything
+less--to use a much abused term of his time--than a Friend of Man.
+
+    "Il est ...
+    Surtout pour sa philanthropie,
+    L'honneur de l'Amerique, et de l'humanite."
+
+That was what one of his French eulogists sang, and that is what his
+contemporaries generally felt, about him, and said of him with a thousand
+and one different variations. It was the general belief of his age that his
+enlightened intelligence and breadth of charity placed him upon a plateau
+from which his vision ranged over the wants, the struggles and the
+aberrations of his fellow beings everywhere, altogether unrefracted by
+self-interest or national prejudices. He might have scores to settle with
+Princes, Ministers, Parliaments or Priests, but for the race he had nothing
+but light and love and compassion. To the poor he was the strong, shrewd,
+wise man who had broken through the hard incrustations of his own poverty,
+and preached sound counsels of prudence and thrift as general in their
+application as the existence of human indigence and folly. To the liberal
+aspirations of his century, he represented, to use his own figure, the
+light which all the window-shutters of despotism and priest-craft were
+powerless to shut out longer. To men of all kinds his benevolent interest
+in so many different forms in the welfare and progress of human society,
+his efforts to assuage the ferocity of war, the very rod, with which he
+disarmed the fury of the storm-cloud, seemed to mark him as a benignant
+being, widely removed by his sagacity and goodness from the short-sighted
+and selfish princes and statesmen of his day whose thoughts and aims
+appeared to be wholly centred upon intrigue and blood.
+
+It was in perfect sincerity that Edmund Burke appealed to Franklin not only
+as a friend but as the "lover of his species" to assist him in protecting
+the parole of General Burgoyne. How well he knew the man may be inferred
+from his declaration, when it was suggested that selfish considerations of
+personal safety had brought Franklin to France. "I never can believe," he
+said, "that he is come thither as a fugitive from his cause in the hour of
+its distress, or that he is going to conclude a long life, which has
+brightened every hour it has continued, with so foul and dishonorable
+flight."
+
+If Franklin is not mistaken, his career as a lover of his species can be
+traced back to a very early circumstance. In one of his letters, in his old
+age, to Samuel Mather, the descendant of Increase and Cotton Mather, he
+states that a mutilated copy of Cotton Mather's _Essays to do Good_, which
+fell in his way when he was a boy, had influenced his conduct through life,
+and that, if he had been a useful citizen, the public was indebted for the
+fact to this book. "I have always set a greater value on the character of a
+_doer of good_, than on any other kind of reputation," he remarks in the
+letter. "The noblest question in the world," said Poor Richard, "is what
+good may I do in it." But, no matter how or when the chance seed was sown,
+it fell upon ground eager to receive it. It was an observation of Franklin
+that the quantity of good that may be done by one man, if he will make a
+business of doing good, is prodigious. The saying in its various forms
+presupposed the sacrifice of all studies, amusements and avocations. No
+such self-immolation, it is needless to affirm, marked his versatile and
+happy career, yet rarely has any single person, whose attention has been
+engaged by other urgent business besides that of mankind, ever furnished
+such a pointed example of the truth of the observation.
+
+The first project of a public nature organized by him was the Junto, a
+project of which he received the hint from the Neighborhood Benefit
+Societies, established by Cotton Mather, who, it would be an egregious
+error to suppose, did nothing in his life but hound hapless wretches to
+death for witchcraft. The Junto founded by Franklin, when he was a
+journeyman printer, about twenty-one years of age, was primarily an
+association for mutual improvement. It met every Friday evening, and its
+rules, which were drafted by him, required every member in turn to produce
+one or more queries on some point of morals, politics or natural
+philosophy, to be discussed by its members, and once every three months to
+produce and read an essay of his own writing on any subject he pleased.
+Under the regulations, the debates were to be conducted with a presiding
+officer in the chair, and in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth
+without fondness for dispute or desire for victory. Dogmatism and direct
+contradiction were made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary
+penalties. With a few rough strokes Franklin etches to the life in the
+_Autobiography_ all the first members of the association. We linger just
+now only on his portrait of Thomas Godfrey, "a self-taught mathematician,
+great in his way, and afterward inventor of what is now called Hadley's
+Quadrant. But he knew little out of his way, and was not a pleasing
+companion; as, like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected
+universal precision in everything said, or was forever denying or
+distinguishing upon trifles, to the disturbance of all conversation. He
+soon left us." All of the first members except Robert Grace, a young
+gentleman of some fortune, derived their livelihood from the simple
+pursuits of a small provincial town, but all in one way or another were
+under the spell exerted by a love of reading, or something else outside of
+the dull treadmill of daily necessity. From the number of journeymen
+mechanics in it the Junto came to be known in Philadelphia as the Leathern
+Apron Club. An applicant for initiation had to stand up and declare, with
+one hand laid upon his breast, that he had "no particular disrespect" for
+any member of the Junto; that he loved mankind in general, of whatsoever
+profession or religion; that he thought no person ought to be harmed in his
+body, name or goods for mere speculative opinion, or for his external way
+of worship, that he loved the truth for the truth's sake, and would
+endeavor impartially to find and receive it, and communicate it to others.
+In all this the spirit of Franklin is manifest enough.
+
+Quite as manifest, too, is the spirit of Franklin in the twenty-four
+standing queries which were read at every weekly meeting with "a pause
+between each while one might fill and drink a glass of wine," and which
+propounded the following interrogatories:
+
+     Have you read over these queries this morning, in order
+     to consider what you might have to offer the Junto
+     touching any one of them viz:?
+
+     1. Have you met with anything in the author you last
+     read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the
+     Junto, particularly in history, morality, poetry,
+     physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of
+     knowledge?
+
+     2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for
+     telling in conversation?
+
+     3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his
+     business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?
+
+     4. Have you lately heard of any citizen's thriving
+     well, and by what means?
+
+     5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here
+     or elsewhere, got his estate?
+
+     6. Do you know of a fellow-citizen, who has lately done
+     a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation; or who
+     has lately committed an error, proper for us to be
+     warned against and avoid?
+
+     7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately
+     observed or heard; of imprudence, of passion, or of any
+     other vice or folly?
+
+     8. What happy effects of temperance, prudence, of
+     moderation, or of any other virtue?
+
+     9. Have you or any of your acquaintance been lately
+     sick or wounded? if so, what remedies were used, and
+     what were their effects?
+
+     10. Whom do you know that are shortly going voyages or
+     journeys, if one should have occasion to send by them?
+
+     11. Do you think of anything at present, in which the
+     Junto may be serviceable to _mankind_, to their
+     country, to their friends, or to themselves?
+
+     12. Hath any deserving stranger arrived in town since
+     last meeting, that you have heard of?; and what have
+     you heard or observed of his character or merits?; and
+     whether, think you, it lies in the power of the Junto
+     to oblige him, or encourage him as he deserves?
+
+     13. Do you know of any deserving young beginner lately
+     set up, whom it lies in the power of the Junto anyway
+     to encourage?
+
+     14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of
+     your _country_, of which it would be proper to move the
+     legislature for an amendment?; or do you know of any
+     beneficial law that is wanting?
+
+     15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the
+     just liberties of the people?
+
+     16. Hath anybody attacked your reputation lately?; and
+     what can the Junto do towards securing it?
+
+     17. Is there any man whose friendship you want, and
+     which the Junto, or any of them, can procure for you?
+
+     18. Have you lately heard any member's character
+     attacked, and how have you defended it?
+
+     19. Hath any man injured you, from whom it is in the
+     power of the Junto to procure redress?
+
+     20. In what manner can the Junto or any of them, assist
+     you in any of your honorable designs?
+
+     21. Have you any weighty affair on hand in which you
+     think the advice of the Junto may be of service?
+
+     22. What benefits have you lately received from any man
+     not present?
+
+     23. Is there any difficulty in matters of opinion, of
+     justice, and injustice, which you would gladly have
+     discussed at this time?
+
+     24. Do you see anything amiss in the present customs or
+     proceedings of the Junto, which might be amended?
+
+These queries render it obvious that the Junto in actual operation far
+transcended the scope of a mere association for mutual improvement. Such a
+strong desire was entertained by its members to bring their friends into it
+that Franklin finally suggested that each member should organize a separate
+club, secretly subordinate to the parent body, and in this way help to
+extend the sphere of the Junto's usefulness; and this suggestion was
+followed by the formation of five or six such clubs with such names as the
+Vine, the Union and the Band, which, as time went on, became centres of
+agitation for the promotion of public aims.
+
+Cotton Mather would scarcely have regarded a club with such liberal
+principles as the Junto as an improvement upon its prototype, the
+Neighborhood Benefit Society. But, between the answers to the standing
+queries of the Junto, its essays, its debates, the declamations, which were
+also features of its exercises, the jolly songs sung at its annual meeting,
+and its monthly meetings during mild weather "across the river for bodily
+exercise," it must have been an agreeable and instructive club indeed. It
+lasted nearly forty years, and "was," Franklin claims in the
+_Autobiography_, "the best school of philosophy, morality and politics that
+then existed in the province." A book, in which he entered memoranda of
+various kinds in regard to it, shows that he followed its proceedings with
+the keenest interest.
+
+     Is self interest the rudder that steers mankind?; can a
+     man arrive at perfection in this life?; does it not, in
+     a general way, require great study and intense
+     application for a poor man to become rich and powerful,
+     if he would do it without the forfeiture of his
+     honesty?; why does the flame of a candle tend upward in
+     a spire?; whence comes the dew that stands on the
+     outside of a tankard that has cold water in it in the
+     summer time?
+
+--such are some of the questions, thoroughly racy of Franklin in his youth,
+which are shown by this book to have been framed by him for the Junto.
+After the association had been under way for a time, he suggested that all
+the books, owned by its members, should be assembled at the room, in which
+its meetings were held, for convenience of reference in discussion, and so
+that each member might have the benefit of the volumes belonging to every
+other member almost as fully as if they belonged to himself. The suggestion
+was assented to, and one end of the room was filled with such books as the
+members could spare; but the arrangement did not work well in practice and
+was soon abandoned.
+
+No sooner, however, did this idea die down than another shot up from its
+stump. This was the subscription library, now the Philadelphia City
+Library, founded by Franklin. In the _Autobiography_, he speaks of this
+library as his first project of a public nature; but it seems to us, as we
+have already said, that the distinction fairly belongs to the Junto. He
+brought the project to the attention of the public through formal articles
+of association, and, by earnest efforts in an unlettered community, which,
+moreover, had little money to spare for any such enterprise, induced fifty
+persons, mostly young tradesmen, to subscribe forty shillings each as a
+contribution to a foundation fund for the first purchase of books, and ten
+shillings more annually as a contribution for additional volumes. Later,
+the association was incorporated. It was while soliciting subscriptions at
+this time that Franklin was taught by the objections or reserve with which
+his approaches were met the "impropriety of presenting one's self as the
+proposer of any useful project, that might be suppos'd to raise one's
+reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's neighbors, when one
+has need of their assistance to accomplish that project." He, therefore,
+kept out of sight as much as possible, and represented the scheme as that
+of a number of friends who had requested him to submit it to such persons
+as they thought lovers of reading. This kind of self effacement was
+attended with such happy consequences that he never failed to adopt it
+subsequently upon similar occasions. From his successful experience, he
+says in the _Autobiography_, he could heartily recommend it. "The present
+little sacrifice of your vanity," to use his own words, "will afterwards be
+amply repaid. If it remains a while uncertain to whom the merit belongs,
+some one more vain than yourself will be encouraged to claim it, and then
+even envy will be disposed to do you justice by plucking those assumed
+feathers, and restoring them to their right owner." Alexander Wedderburn's
+famous philippic, of which we shall have something to say further on, did
+not consist altogether of misapplied adjectives. Franklin _was_ at times
+the "wily American," but usually for the purpose of improving the condition
+of his fellow creatures in spite of themselves.
+
+The library, once established, grew apace. From time to time, huge folios
+and quartos were added to it by purchase or donation, from which nobody
+profited more than Franklin himself with his insatiable avidity for
+knowledge. The first purchase of books for it was made by Peter Collinson
+of London, who threw in with the purchase as presents from himself Newton's
+_Principia_ and the _Gardener's Dictionary_, and continued for thirty years
+to act as the purchasing agent of the institution, accompanying each
+additional purchase with additional presents from himself. Evidence is not
+wanting that the first arrival of books was awaited with eager expectancy.
+Among Franklin's memoranda with regard to the Junto we find the following:
+"When the books of the library come, every member shall undertake some
+author, that he may not be without observations to communicate." When the
+books finally came, they were placed in the assembly room of the Junto; a
+librarian was selected, and the library was thrown open once a week for the
+distribution of books. The second year Franklin himself acted as librarian,
+and for printing a catalogue of the first books shortly after their
+arrival, and for other printing services, he was exempted from the payment
+of his annual ten shillings for two years.
+
+Among the numerous donations of money, books and curiosities made to the
+library, were gifts of books and electrical apparatus by Thomas Penn, and
+the gift of an electrical tube, with directions for its use, by Peter
+Collinson, which proved of incalculable value to science in the hands of
+Franklin who promptly turned it to experimental purposes. When Peter Kalm,
+the Swedish naturalist, was in Philadelphia in 1748, "many little
+libraries," organized on the same plan as the original library, had sprung
+from it. Non-subscribers were then allowed to take books out of it, subject
+to pledges of indemnity sufficient to cover their value, and to the payment
+for the use of a folio of eight pence a week, for the use of a quarto of
+six pence, and for the use of any other book of four pence. Kalm, as a
+distinguished stranger, was allowed the use of any book in the collection
+free of charge. In 1764, the shares of the library company were worth
+nearly twenty pounds, and its collections were then believed to have a
+value of seventeen hundred pounds. In 1785, the number of volumes was 5487;
+in 1807, 14,457; in 1861, 70,000; and in 1912, 237,677. After overflowing
+more contracted quarters, the contents of the library have finally found a
+home in a handsome building at the northwest corner of Locust and Juniper
+Streets and in the Ridgway Branch Building at the corner of Broad and
+Christian Streets. But, never, it is safe to say, will this library,
+enlarged and efficiently administered as it is, perform such an invaluable
+service as it did in its earlier years. "This," Franklin declares in the
+_Autobiography_, "was the mother of all the North American subscription
+libraries, now so numerous. It is become a great thing itself, and
+continually increasing. These libraries have improved the general
+conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as
+intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have
+contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the
+colonies in defence of their privileges."
+
+Franklin next turned his attention to the reform of the city watch. Under
+the existing system, it was supervised by the different constables of the
+different wards of Philadelphia in turn. The Dogberry in charge would warn
+a number of householders to attend him for the night. Such householders as
+desired to be wholly exempt from the service could secure exemption by
+paying him six shillings a year, which was supposed to be expended by him
+in hiring substitutes, but the fund accumulated in this way was much more
+than was necessary for the purpose and rendered the constableship a
+position of profit. Often the ragamuffins gathered up by a constable as his
+aids were quite willing to act as such for no reward except a little drink.
+The consequence was that his underlings were for the most part tippling
+when they should have been moving around on their beats. Altogether, they
+seem to have been men who would not have been slow to heed the older
+Dogberry's advice to his watchmen that, if one of them bid a vagrom man
+stand, and he did not stand, to take no note of him, but to let him go, and
+presently call the rest of the watch together and thank God that he was rid
+of a knave.
+
+To this situation Franklin addressed himself by writing a paper for the
+Junto, not only setting forth the abuses of the existing system but
+insisting upon its injustice in imposing the same six shilling tax upon a
+poor widow, whose whole property to be guarded by the watch did not perhaps
+exceed the value of fifty pounds, as upon the wealthiest merchant who had
+thousands of pounds' worth of goods in his stores. His proposal was the
+creation of a permanent paid police to be maintained by an equal,
+proportional property tax. The idea was duly approved by the Junto, and
+communicated to its affiliated clubs, as if it had arisen in each of them,
+and, though it was not immediately carried into execution, yet the popular
+agitation, which ensued over it, paved the way for a law providing for it
+which was enacted a few years afterwards, when the Junto and the other
+clubs had acquired more popular influence.
+
+About the same time, the same indefatigable propagandist wrote for the
+Junto a paper, which was subsequently published, on the different accidents
+and defaults by which houses were set on fire, with warnings against them,
+and suggestions as to how they might be averted. There was much public talk
+about it, and a company of thirty persons was soon formed, under the name
+of the Union Fire Company, for the purpose of more effectively
+extinguishing fires, and removing and protecting goods endangered by them.
+Under its articles of agreement, every member was obliged to keep always in
+good order, and fit for use, a certain number of leather buckets, with
+strong bags and baskets for transporting goods, which were to be brought to
+every fire; and it was further agreed that the members of the company were
+to meet once a month and spend a social evening together in the discussion
+and interchange of such useful ideas as occurred to them upon the subject
+of fires. The formation of this company led to the formation of one company
+after another until the associations became so numerous as to include most
+of the inhabitants of Philadelphia who were men of property. It was still
+flourishing more than fifty years after its establishment, when its history
+was narrated in the _Autobiography_, and Franklin and one other person, a
+year older than himself, were the only survivors of its original members.
+The small fines, paid by its members as penalties for absence from its
+monthly meetings, had been used to such advantage in the purchase of
+fire-engines, ladders, fire-hooks and other useful implements for the
+different companies that Franklin then questioned whether there was a city
+in the world better provided than Philadelphia with the means for
+repressing incipient conflagrations. Indeed, he said, since the
+establishment of these companies, the city had never lost by fire more than
+one or two houses at a time; and often flames were extinguished before the
+house they threatened had been half consumed.
+
+"Ideas will string themselves like Ropes of Onions," Franklin once
+declared. This was certainly true of the plans which his public spirit
+devised for the improvement of Philadelphia. The next thing to which his
+hand was turned was the creation of an academy. In 1743, he drew up a
+proposal for one, but, being disappointed in his efforts to persuade the
+Reverend Mr. Peters to act as its head, he let the project lie dormant for
+a time. While it remained so, remembering Poor Richard's maxim that leisure
+is time for doing something useful, he passed to the organization of a
+system of military defenses for the Province and the founding of a
+Philosophical Society. Of the former task we shall speak hereafter. The
+latter was initiated by a circular letter from him to his various learned
+friends in the Northern Colonies, proposing the formation of a society for
+the purpose of promoting a commerce of speculation, discovery and
+experimentation between its members with regard to scientific interests of
+every sort. A correspondence with the Royal Society of London and the
+Dublin Society and "all philosophical experiments that let light into the
+nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and
+multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life" were among the things held
+out in the proposal. Colonial America was far more favorable to practical
+activity than to philosophical investigation, but the society,
+nevertheless, performed an office of no little usefulness. When Franklin
+built a new wing to his residence in Philadelphia, after his return from
+Paris, he provided a large apartment on the first floor of this addition
+for the accommodation of the American Philosophical Society into which this
+Society had been merged. When he made his will, he was the President of the
+new society, and he bequeathed to it his _History of the Academy of
+Sciences_, in sixty or seventy volumes quarto; and, when he died, one of
+its members, Dr. William Smith, pronounced an eulogy upon his character and
+services. The wing of his house, in which space was set apart for the
+society, was itself, in its precautions against fire, one worthy of a
+vigilant and enlightened philosopher. None of the woodwork of one room, for
+instance, communicated with the woodwork of any other. Franklin thought,
+however, that the staircases should have been of stone, and the floors
+tiled as in Paris; and that the roof should have been either tiled or
+slated.[11]
+
+When the Philosophical Society of his early life had been founded, and the
+restoration of peace between Great Britain and her enemies had diverted his
+mind from his plans for the military protection of Philadelphia, he turned
+again to the slumbering Academy. His first step was to secure the
+assistance of a considerable number of active friends, of whom the Junto
+furnished a good part, and his next to write and publish a pamphlet
+entitled _Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania_. In
+this pamphlet he was careful, as usual, to bring his aim forward rather as
+that of a group of public-spirited gentlemen than of himself. It was
+distributed gratuitously among the most prominent citizens of Philadelphia,
+and, as soon as he thought that their minds had been reduced to a receptive
+condition by its appeal, he solicited subscriptions for the establishment
+and maintenance of the Academy, payable in five annual instalments. Four
+thousand pounds were subscribed, and Franklin and Tench Francis, the
+attorney-general of the province, and the uncle of Sir Philip Francis, of
+Junius fame, were appointed by the subscribers to draw up a constitution
+for the government of the foundation. This was drafted and signed; a house
+was hired, masters were engaged, and the institution was promptly opened.
+So fast did the scholars increase that need was soon felt for a larger
+school-edifice. This was happily found in the great building which had
+sprung up at the sound of Whitefield's voice as if at the sound of
+Amphion's lyre. By an arrangement between the Trustees for the building, of
+whom Franklin was one, and the Trustees for the Academy, of whom Franklin
+was also one, the building was deeded to the latter Trustees, upon the
+condition that they would discharge the indebtedness with which it was
+burdened, keep forever open in it a large hall for occasional preachers,
+according to the original intent of its builders, and maintain a free
+school for the instruction of poor children. With some internal changes,
+and the purchase of an addition to its site, the edifice was soon, under
+the superintendence of Franklin, made ready for the use of the Academy.
+Afterwards, the Trustees for the Academy were incorporated, and the
+institution received various donations from British friends, the
+Proprietaries and the Provincial Assembly, and, finally, grew into the
+University of Pennsylvania. Franklin was one of its Trustees for more than
+forty years, and had, he says in the _Autobiography_, the very great
+pleasure of seeing a number of the youth, who had received their education
+in it, distinguished by their improved abilities, serviceable in public
+stations and ornaments to their country.
+
+In none of his creations did Franklin display a keener interest than in the
+Academy. From its inception until he embarked upon his second voyage to
+England, his correspondence contains frequent references to it. One of his
+most earnest desires was to secure the celebrated Episcopal clergyman, Dr.
+Samuel Johnson, of Connecticut, afterwards the president of King's College,
+New York, as its Rector. A salary of one hundred pounds sterling per annum,
+the opportunity to deliver a lecture now and then in the large hall, set
+apart for what might in our day be called "tramp" preachers, until he could
+collect a congregation strong enough to build him a church, the usual
+marriage and christening fees, paid by persons of the best social standing,
+the occasional presents bestowed by wealthy individuals upon a minister of
+their liking, and the opening that, as time went on, the change of
+residence might afford to his son, who in the beginning might be employed
+as a tutor at a salary of sixty or seventy pounds per annum, were the
+allurements with which the reverend doctor was approached by Franklin. To
+the doctor's objection that another Episcopal church in Philadelphia might
+sap the strength of the existing one, the resourceful tempter replied with
+the illustration, which has been so much admired:
+
+     I had for several years nailed against the wall of my
+     house a pigeon-box, that would hold six pair; and,
+     though they bred as fast as my neighbours' pigeons, I
+     never had more than six pair, the old and strong
+     driving out the young and weak, and obliging them to
+     seek new habitations. At length I put up an additional
+     box with apartments for entertaining twelve pair more;
+     and it was soon filled with inhabitants, by the
+     overflowing of my first box, and of others in the
+     neighbourhood. This I take to be a parallel case with
+     the building a new church here.
+
+In spite of everything, however, Doctor Johnson proved obdurate to
+Franklin's coaxing pen.
+
+The Academy was opened in 1749. In a letter to Jared Eliot in 1751,
+Franklin informs us that the annual salaries paid by it were as follows:
+The Rector, who taught Latin and Greek, two hundred pounds, the English
+Master, one hundred and fifty pounds, the Mathematical Professor, one
+hundred and twenty-five pounds, and three assistant tutors each, sixty
+pounds. The annual fee paid by each pupil was four pounds. With one of the
+persons who did act as Rector, Franklin seems to have been on intimate
+terms. This was David Martin, who, after a brief incumbency, died suddenly
+of a quinsy, and was buried in much state. In a letter to William Strahan,
+Franklin speaks of him as "Honest David Martin,... my principal Antagonist
+at Chess." Vice-Provost at one time was Francis Alison, whom Franklin in a
+letter to Jared Eliot in 1755 introduced as his "particular friend," and
+twenty or more folio pages, large paper, well filled on the subjects of
+Agriculture, Philosophy, Eliot's own Catholic Divinity and various other
+points of learning equally useful and engaging. With still another Rector,
+Dr. William Smith, Franklin's relations were at first very friendly, but
+afterwards, when Smith espoused the cause of the Proprietary Party and
+began to abuse Franklin unstintedly, became so constrained that the two
+ceased to be on speaking terms. In an early letter to Smith, before Smith
+became Rector, Franklin said that he should be extremely glad to see and
+converse with him in Philadelphia, and to correspond with him after he
+settled in England; "for," he observed, "an acquaintance and communication
+with men of learning, virtue, and public spirit, is one of my greatest
+enjoyments." In the same letter, Franklin stated that the mathematical
+school was pretty well furnished with instruments, and that the English
+library was a good one, and included a middling apparatus for experimental
+philosophy, which they purposed to complete speedily. The library left by
+James Logan, the accomplished Quaker, to the public, "one of the best
+collections in America," in the opinion of Franklin, was also shortly to be
+opened. Indeed, Franklin was in hopes, he further declared, that in a few
+years they would see a perfect institution. In another letter to Smith,
+written a few days later, he said in reference to a paper on _The Ideal
+College of Mirania_ written by Smith, "For my part, I know not when I have
+read a piece that has more affected me; so noble and just are the
+sentiments, so warm and animated the language." He was too frank a man,
+however, not to express the wish that the author had omitted from this
+performance certain reflections upon the discipline and government of
+Oxford and Cambridge Universities and certain outbreaks of resentment
+against the author's adversaries. "In such cases," he remarked, "the
+noblest victory is obtained by neglect, and by shining on." He little knew
+how soon he would be called upon to reck his own rede. A few years later,
+Franklin thanks Whitefield for a generous benefaction to the German school.
+"They go on pretty well," he writes, "and will do better," he adds dryly,
+in terms which make it apparent enough that the honeymoon of early
+prepossession was over, "when Mr. Smith, who has at present the principal
+Care of them, shall learn to mind Party-writing and Party Politicks less,
+and his proper Business more; which I hope time will bring about." In the
+succeeding November he was not even on speaking terms with Smith. This fact
+was communicated by him to Peter Collinson in a letter with this statement
+about Smith: "He has scribbled himself into universal Dislike here; the
+Proprietary Faction alone countenances him a little; but the Academy
+dwindles, and will come to nothing if he is continued." A few weeks later
+in another letter to Collinson the case against Smith is stated more
+specifically: "Smith continues still in the Academy; but I imagine will not
+much longer, unless he mends his Manners greatly, for the Schools decline
+on his Account. The Number of Scholars, at present, that pay, not exceeding
+118, tho' they formerly were 200." From a letter to David Hall, written by
+Franklin during his second sojourn in England, it would appear that Smith
+was quicker to pay off debts of resentment than any other kind. In this
+letter the writer tells Hall that Osborne, the London bookseller, had asked
+him whether he would be safe in selling to Smith "a large Cargo of Books,"
+and that he had told Osborne that he believed that his "Townsmen who were
+Smith's Creditors would be glad to see him come back with a Cargo of any
+kind, as they might have some Chance of being paid out of it." Smith on his
+part did not fail to do all in his power to keep Franklin from shining on.
+In a letter to Caleb Whitefoord shortly after his second return from
+England in 1762, Franklin borrowed a phrase from a line in _The New
+Foundling Hospital for Wit_. "The Piece from your own Pencil," he said, "is
+acknowledg'd to bear a strong and striking Likeness, but it is otherwise
+such a picture of your Friend, as Dr. Smith would have drawn, _black, and
+all black_." But when it comes to what Franklin in the _Autobiography_
+calls "negrofying," he, though he had very little inclination for that kind
+of competition, was no mean artist himself, if it was an antagonist like
+Smith upon whose face the pigment was to be laid.
+
+     I do not wonder at the behaviour you mention of Dr.
+     Smith towards me [he wrote to Polly Stevenson], for I
+     have long since known him thoroughly. I made that Man
+     my Enemy by doing him too much Kindness. 'Tis the
+     honestest Way of acquiring an Enemy. And, since 'tis
+     convenient to have at least one Enemy, who by his
+     Readiness to revile one on all Occasions, may make one
+     careful of one's Conduct, I shall keep him an Enemy for
+     that purpose; and shall observe your good Mother's
+     Advice, never again to receive him as a Friend. She
+     once admir'd the benevolent Spirit breath'd in his
+     Sermons. She will now see the Justness of the Lines
+     your Laureate Whitehead addresses to his Poets, and
+     which I now address to her:
+
+    "Full many a peevish, envious, slanderous Elf
+    Is, in his Works, Benevolence itself.
+    For all Mankind, unknown, his Bosom heaves;
+    He only injures those, with whom he lives,
+    Read then the Man;--does _Truth_ his Actions guide,
+    Exempt from _Petulance_, exempt from _Pride_?
+    To social Duties does his Heart attend,
+    As Son, as Father, Husband, Brother, _Friend_?
+    _Do those, who know him, love him?_ If they do,
+    You've _my_ Permission: you may love him too."
+
+Several months later some observations upon the character of Doctor Smith,
+equally emphatic, found their way into a letter from Franklin to William
+Strahan. "Dr. Kelly in his Letter," he said in regard to a letter to
+Strahan in which Dr. Kelly, a fellow of the Royal Society, had indicated
+very plainly what he thought of Dr. Smith, "appears the same sensible,
+worthy, friendly Man I ever found him; and Smith, as usual, just his
+Reverse.--I have done with him: For I believe nobody here (Philadelphia)
+will prevail with me to give him another Meeting." In his preface to the
+speech of Joseph Galloway, Franklin even refers to Smith as "the Poisoner
+of other Characters." In one of his letters William Franklin referred to
+him as "that Miscreant Parson Smith." An obscure, or comparatively obscure,
+person, who is so unfortunate as to have a feud with a great man, is
+likely to experience some difficulty in obtaining justice at the hands of
+Posterity which is always ready to retain any number of clever brushes to
+whitewash the latter and to smear a black coat over the former. But it must
+be admitted that anyone who quarrelled with such a social, genial,
+well-balanced being as Franklin cannot hope to escape a very strong
+presumption that the fault was his own. There is evidence, at any rate,
+that, on one occasion, when Smith was in England, and had written a letter
+to Dr. Fry, the President of St. John's College, Oxford, in which Franklin
+was aspersed, the latter was induced to meet him at Strahan's house, and
+succeeded in drawing from him, after the letter to Dr. Fry had been read
+over, paragraph by paragraph, an acknowledgment that it contained many
+particulars in which the writer had been misled by wrong information, and
+that the whole was written with too much rancor and asperity. Indeed, Smith
+even promised that he would write to Dr. Fry admitting the respects in
+which his statements were false; but, when pressed by Strahan to write this
+letter on the spot, he declined to do so, though stating that he would call
+upon Strahan in a day or so and show it to him before it was sent; which he
+never did. On the contrary, when subsequently questioned at Oxford
+concerning his promise to write such a letter, he "denied the whole, & even
+treated the question as a Calumny." So wrote Dr. Kelly to Strahan in the
+letter already mentioned by us. "I make no other comment on this
+behaviour," said Dr. Kelly further, "than in considering him (Smith)
+extremely unworthy of the Honour, he has received, from our University."
+The fact that, despite all this, at Franklin's death, Dr. Smith, at the
+request of the American Philosophical Society, made Franklin's character
+and career the subject of an eulogistic address is certainly calculated to
+induce us all to unite in the prayer of Franklin in his _Articles of
+Belief_ to be delivered from "Anger (that momentary Madness)."
+
+Dr. Smith proved to be one fly in the Academy gallipot. The other was the
+extent to which the Latin School was pampered at the expense of the English
+School which was very close to the heart of Franklin. Its insidious
+encroachments steadily went on until finally the English School scarcely
+had a foothold in the institution at all. The result was that in 1769 it
+had been reduced from its first flourishing condition, when, if Franklin
+may be believed, the Academy was attended by some little boys under seven,
+who could deliver an oration with more propriety than most preachers, to a
+state of bare sufferance. The exercises in English reading and speaking,
+once the delight of the Trustees and of the parents and other relations of
+the boys, when these boys were trained by Mr. Dove, the English Master,
+with all the different modulations of voice required by sense and subject,
+languished after his resignation on account of his meagre salary, and at
+length, under the blighting neglect of the Trustees, were wholly
+discontinued. The English school, to use Franklin's forcible expression,
+was simply starved.
+
+All this was set forth in a long, dignified and able remonstrance which he
+wrote in nearly his best manner some ten months before his death when his
+body was racked at times by excruciating pains. In this paper, he narrated
+with uncommon clearness and skill the gradual succession of influences and
+events by which the English School had been reduced to a condition of
+atrophy, and contended that the intentions of the founders of the Academy
+had been ruthlessly and unconscionably abused. When we recall the circular
+letter in which he proposed the establishment of the Academy and the fact
+that it is by no means lacking in deference to the dead languages, which
+still held the human mind in bondage so firmly, we cannot but feel that the
+founders of the Academy were not quite so alive to the supreme importance
+of the English School as Franklin would make out. The truth was that a long
+time was yet to elapse before the minds of educated men could become
+emancipated enough to see that a living language, which they are using
+every day, is quite as worthy of consideration, to say the least, as one
+which fulfills its highest function in perfecting that use with its own
+rare discipline, strength and beauty. Franklin saw this before most men of
+his time, first, because his own lack of academic training saved him from
+many of the narrowing effects of tradition and routine, and, secondly,
+because it was idle to expect any but a severely practical view of the
+relative importance of the dead languages and English from a man who did
+not shrink from even testing the readiness of the public mind to give its
+assent to radical alterations in the Lord's Prayer and the Episcopal Prayer
+Book. Be this as it may, Franklin did not hesitate in this paper to express
+in the strongest terms his sense of the inutility of Latin and Greek as
+parts of the course of instruction at the Academy, and, of course, a
+picturesque illustration of his proposition was duly forthcoming.
+
+     At what Time [he said], Hats were first introduced we
+     know not, but in the last Century they were universally
+     worn thro'-out Europe. Gradually, however, as the
+     Wearing of Wigs, and Hair nicely dress'd prevailed, the
+     putting on of Hats was disused by genteel People, lest
+     the curious Arrangements of the Curls and Powdering
+     should be disordered; and Umbrellas began to supply
+     their Place; yet still our Considering the Hat as a
+     part of Dress continues so far to prevail, that a Man
+     of fashion is not thought dress'd without having one,
+     or something like one, about him, which he carries
+     under his Arm. So that there are a multitude of the
+     politer people in all the courts and capital cities of
+     Europe, who have never, nor their fathers before them,
+     worn a hat otherwise than as a _chapeau_ bras, though
+     the utility of such a mode of wearing it is by no means
+     apparent, and it is attended not only with some
+     expense, but with a degree of constant trouble.
+
+     The still prevailing custom of having schools for
+     teaching generally our children in these days, the
+     Latin and Greek languages, I consider therefore, in no
+     other light than as the _Chapeau bras_ of modern
+     Literature.
+
+Poor Richard had his word to say about the man who "was so learned, that he
+could name a horse in nine languages: so ignorant that he bought a cow to
+ride on."
+
+This, however, was not the spirit in which Franklin sought to recruit the
+deficiencies of his own education--an effort which proved so
+extraordinarily successful that we are inclined to think that in the
+pedagogic insight as well as extensive knowledge, disclosed in the circular
+letter proposing the establishment of the Academy, the "Idea of the English
+School Sketch'd Out For The Consideration Of The Trustees Of The
+Philadelphia Academy," and "The Observations Relative To The Intentions Of
+The Original Founders Of The Academy In Philadelphia" we have the most
+striking proofs after all of the natural power and assimilative capacity of
+a mind which, be it recollected, never had any teacher but itself after its
+possessor became ten years of age.
+
+In the _Autobiography_ we are told by Franklin that he was unable to
+remember when he could not read, that he was sent to the grammar school in
+Boston when he was eight years of age, that, after he had been at this
+school for not quite one year, though in that time he had become the head
+of his class, and had even been advanced to the next class above it,[12] he
+was shifted by his father to a school for writing and arithmetic in Boston,
+kept by a then famous man, Mr. George Brownell; that under Brownell he
+acquired fair writing pretty soon, but made no progress in arithmetic, and
+that, at ten years of age, he was taken home to assist his father in his
+business as a tallow chandler and soap boiler. Such was all the education
+except what was self-imparted that the founder of the University of
+Pennsylvania had to draw upon when he outlined the future courses of
+instruction of the Academy.
+
+But this self-imparted education was no mean one. Putting altogether out of
+sight the general reading to which during a large part of his youth
+Franklin devoted every moment left him by his duties, when he was about
+sixteen years of age, having been made ashamed on some occasion of his
+ignorance of figures, he went through the whole of Cocker's _Arithmetic_ by
+himself with the greatest ease, and followed the feat up by acquainting
+himself with such little geometry as was contained in Seller's and Shermy's
+books on Navigation. Some ten or eleven years later, he renewed the study
+of languages; for, short as was his connection with the Boston grammar
+school, he had obtained from it some knowledge of Latin. He quickly
+mastered French, so far as to be able to read French books with facility.
+Italian he learned by refusing to play chess with a friend who was also
+learning it, except upon the condition that the victor in every game was to
+have the right to impose upon his defeated adversary tasks in Italian which
+the latter was to be bound in point of honor to perform before the next
+bout. "As we play'd pretty equally," says Franklin, "we thus beat one
+another into that language." With a little painstaking, he afterwards
+acquired enough Spanish to read Spanish books too. Then it was that, after
+acquiring this knowledge of French, Italian and Spanish, he was surprised
+to find on looking over a Latin testament that he had so much more
+familiarity with Latin than he imagined. This encouraged him to apply
+himself to that language again, which he did with the more success, now
+that the three modern languages had smoothed his way.
+
+     From these circumstances [he observes in the
+     _Autobiography_], I have thought that there is some
+     inconsistency in our common mode of teaching languages.
+     We are told that it is proper to begin first with the
+     Latin, and, having acquir'd that, it will be more easy
+     to attain those modern languages which are deriv'd from
+     it; and yet we do not begin with the Greek, in order
+     more easily to acquire the Latin. It is true that, if
+     you can clamber and get to the top of a staircase
+     without using the steps, you will more easily gain them
+     in descending; but certainly, if you begin with the
+     lowest you will with more ease ascend to the top; and I
+     would, therefore offer it to the consideration of those
+     who superintend the education of our youth, whether
+     since many of those who begin with the Latin quit the
+     same after spending some years without having made any
+     great proficiency, and what they have learnt becomes
+     almost useless, so that their time has been lost, it
+     would not have been better to have begun with the
+     French, proceeding to the Italian, etc.; for, tho',
+     after spending the same time, they should quit the
+     study of languages and never arrive at the Latin, they
+     would, however, have acquired another tongue or two,
+     that, being in modern use, might be serviceable to them
+     in common life.
+
+Even if some design for the benefit of the public did not originate with
+Franklin, it was likely to fall back ultimately upon him for success. When
+Dr. Thomas Bond undertook to establish a hospital in Philadelphia, he was
+compelled by the chariness with which his requests for subscriptions were
+received, before it was known how Franklin felt about the project, to come
+to Franklin with the admission that he had found that to put any such
+public project through in Philadelphia it was necessary to enlist his
+support. The response was not only a subscription by Franklin but also the
+inevitable appeal from his hand, pointing out the need for the hospital.
+After a stroke from that wand, the rock began to yield water more
+abundantly, but not so copiously that Franklin did not see that legislative
+aid was necessary as well as private liberality. The country voters, as is
+usual still in such cases in America, were inclined to think that the
+townsfolk were enjoying more than their just share of the blessings of
+civil society. They alleged that the hospital would be of exclusive benefit
+to the city, and even doubted whether the movement met with the general
+approval of the townsfolk themselves. Franklin's claim that two thousand
+pounds would be raised by voluntary subscriptions they regarded as highly
+extravagant. This was cue enough for his quick wit. A bill was introduced
+by him into the General Assembly providing that, when the private
+contributors had organized under the charter granted by it, and had raised
+two thousand pounds by voluntary subscription, for the free maintenance of
+the sick poor in the hospital, then the Speaker, upon that fact being
+certified to his satisfaction, should draw his warrant on the Treasurer of
+the Province for the payment of two thousand pounds, in two yearly
+payments, to the treasurer of the hospital, to be applied to its
+establishment. With the lubricant supplied by this timely condition, the
+bill slid smoothly down all the legislative grooves. Even the sincerest
+support of a good legislative measure is not more ardent to all appearances
+than the specious support sometimes given to such a measure by a member of
+the Legislature who is opposed to it but sees, or thinks he sees, that it
+will never become a law, even though he should vote for it. The opponents
+of Franklin's bill, conceiving that they had a chance to acquire the credit
+of generosity without paying the pecuniary penalty, agreed to its
+enactment, and, on the other hand, the condition, by affording to private
+subscribers the prospect of having their contributions practically doubled
+from the public purse, furnished them with an additional motive to give.
+The private contributions even exceeded the sum fixed by the condition, and
+the credit with which the legislative adversaries of the bill had to
+content themselves was not that of deceitful but of real bounty. "I do not
+remember any of my political manoeuvres," Franklin complacently declares
+in the _Autobiography_, "the success of which gave me at the time more
+pleasure, or wherein, after thinking of it, I more easily excus'd myself
+for having made some use of cunning." We experience no difficulty in
+condoning this cunning when we realize that its fruit was the Pennsylvania
+Hospital, which, after many years of rare usefulness, is still one of the
+chief institutions of Philadelphia. It is gratifying to feel that its
+history has not been unworthy of the admirable inscription which Franklin
+wrote for its corner-stone:
+
+     In the year of Christ MDCCLV, George the Second happily
+     reigning (for he sought the happiness of his people),
+     Philadelphia flourishing (for its inhabitants were
+     public spirited), this building, by the bounty of the
+     government, and of many private persons, was piously
+     founded for the relief of the sick and miserable. May
+     the God of Mercies bless the undertaking.
+
+The Reverend Gilbert Tennent, one of whose sermons caused Whitefield to
+say, "Never before heard I such a searching sermon; he is a son of thunder,
+and does not regard the face of man," was not so fortunate as Dr. Bond when
+he asked Franklin to assist him in obtaining subscriptions for the erection
+of a new meeting-house in Philadelphia, for the use of a congregation drawn
+from among the Presbyterians, who were originally disciples of Whitefield.
+Franklin says that he absolutely refused to do so because he was unwilling
+to make himself disagreeable to his fellow-citizens by soliciting
+contributions from them too frequently. The truth in part, we suspect, was
+that his zealous interest was not easily excited in any meeting-house where
+even a missionary sent by the Mufti of Constantinople to preach
+Mohammedanism to the people of Philadelphia would not find a pulpit at his
+service. But, if this incident has any general significance, it may be
+accepted as evidence that, though Franklin might contribute nothing else
+upon such an occasion, he was prepared to contribute a good joke. When
+Tennent found that he could get no other kind of assistance from him, he
+asked him to give him at least his advice. What followed would suffer in
+telling if not told as the _Autobiography_ tells it:
+
+     That I will readily do [said Franklin], and, in the
+     first place, I advise you to apply to all those whom
+     you know will give something; next, to those whom you
+     are uncertain whether they will give anything or not,
+     and show them the list of those who have given; and,
+     lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give
+     nothing, for in some of them you may be mistaken. He
+     laugh'd and thank'd me, and said he would take my
+     advice. He did so, for he ask'd of _everybody_, and he
+     obtain'd a much larger sum than he expected, with which
+     he erected the capacious and very elegant meeting-house
+     that stands in Arch Street.
+
+Other services rendered by Franklin to Philadelphia related to the better
+paving and lighting of its streets. These streets were laid out with great
+regularity, but, being wholly unpaved, were mere quagmires in winter and
+stifling stretches of dust in summer. So bad was their condition as a rule
+that Philadelphia came to be known among the country people around it as
+"Filthy-dirty." Franklin, when he lived near the Jersey Market, witnessed
+with concern the miserable plight of its patrons as they waded about on
+either side of it in mire deep enough to have prompted the observation of
+Napoleon, based upon his campaigns in Poland, that mud should be accounted
+a fifth element. A step was taken when a stretch of ground down the middle
+of the market was paved with brick. This offered a firm footing, when once
+attained, but, before a pedestrian could attain it, he might be overshoes
+in wet clay. By tongue and pen, Franklin at length succeeded in having the
+spaces between the market and the foot pavements of the streets flanking it
+laid with stone. The result was that for a season a market woman could
+reach the market dry-shod, but, in the course of time, the pavements became
+loaded with mud shaken off the wheels of passing vehicles, and this mud,
+after being thus deposited, was allowed, for lack of street cleaners, to
+remain where it fell. Here was an inviting situation, indeed, for such a
+municipal housewife as Franklin. Having hunted up a poor, industrious man,
+who was willing to contract for the sum of sixpence per month, per house,
+to sweep up and carry away the dirt in front of the houses abutting on
+these pavements, he wrote and published a paper setting forth the marked
+advantages to the neighborhood that would result from such a small
+expenditure--the reduced amount of mud that people would carry around on
+their shoes, the readier access that customers would have to the shops near
+the market, freedom from wind-borne dust and other kindred benefits not
+likely to escape the attention of a man to whom even the dust of unpaved
+streets suggested the following reflections in the _Autobiography_:
+
+     Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces
+     of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little
+     advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a
+     poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in
+     order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his
+     life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money
+     may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having
+     foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he
+     escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers,
+     and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive
+     breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most
+     convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of
+     its being done with a good instrument.
+
+A copy of the paper was sent to each house affected by its proposals, every
+householder agreed to pay his sixpence, and the sense of comfort
+experienced by the entire population of Philadelphia in the more commodious
+use of the market prepared their minds for the bill which Franklin later
+introduced into the Assembly providing for the paving of the whole city. He
+was on the point of embarking on his second voyage to England when this was
+done, and the bill was not passed until after he was gone, and then with an
+alteration in his method of assessing the paving cost which his judgment
+did not deem an improvement; but the bill as passed contained a further
+provision for lighting as well as paving the streets of Philadelphia which
+he did deem a great improvement. The merit of first suggesting the hospital
+Franklin is studious to tell us, though ascribed to him, was due to Dr.
+Bond. So likewise he is quick to admit that the honor of giving the first
+impulse to municipal lighting in Philadelphia did not belong to him, as had
+been supposed, but to John Clifton, who had placed a private lamp at his
+own door. Franklin simply followed Clifton's example; but, when the city
+began to light its streets, his fertile mind did bring forward a novel idea
+which proved a highly useful one. Instead of the globes imported from
+London which became so black and opaque from smoke for lack of air, when
+the lamps were lighted, that they had to be cleaned every day, and which,
+moreover, were totally wrecked by a single blow, he suggested that the
+coverings for the city lamps should be composed of four flat panes, with a
+long funnel above and inlets below for the free circulation of air. The
+result was a covering that remained untarnished until morning and was not
+involved in complete ruin by a single fracture.
+
+Such were some of the principal achievements of Franklin for the benefit of
+Philadelphia. It is not easy to magnify unduly their significance when we
+bear in mind that they were all crowded into a period of some thirty years
+during the greater part of which he was faithfully heeding Poor Richard's
+maxim, "Keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee"; to say nothing of the
+claims upon his time of political duties and scientific studies and
+experiments. Franklin was not the Romulus of Philadelphia; nor was he its
+Augustus, who found it of brick and left it of marble. There was solid
+brick enough in the structure of American colonial life, but little marble.
+However, it can at least be said of him that rarely has any single private
+individual, with no great fortune, and with no control over the public
+purse except what is conferred by the favor of public opinion won by
+personal intelligence and public spirit, laid the foundations of so much
+that was of lasting and increasing utility to an infant community destined
+to become one of the populous and opulent cities of the world. In how many
+other respects his sympathy with human interests in their broader relations
+made its influence felt in Colonial America we can only conjecture, but in
+many ways, in addition to those already mentioned, its fructifying results
+have been brought home to us. It was at his instance that the merchants of
+Philadelphia sent the ship _Argo_ to the Arctics to discover a Northwest
+Passage. Kalm, the Swedish botanist, when he came to Pennsylvania, found in
+him a most helpful friend and patron. He labored untiringly to obtain for
+Bartram, the American naturalist, the recognition which he richly merited.
+One of the proudest days of his life was when his eager exertions in behalf
+of silk culture in Pennsylvania were rewarded by the knowledge that the
+Queen of England had not only graciously condescended to accept a sample of
+Pennsylvania silk tendered to her by him but proposed to wear it in the
+form of a dress. During his third sojourn in England, the hospital at home
+was frequently reminded of the strength of his concern for its welfare by
+gifts and suggestions more valuable than gifts. To him was entrusted the
+commission of purchasing a telescope and other instruments for the
+Astronomical School at Harvard College. To the library of Harvard he
+occasionally forwarded parcels of books, either his own gifts or gifts from
+his friends. In addition to his zealous efforts in the latter part of his
+life in behalf of negro emancipation and the relief of the free blacks, he
+was for several years one of the associates charged with the management of
+the Bray Fund for the conversion of negroes in the British plantations. He
+was also a trustee of the Society for the benefit of poor Germans, one of
+the objects of which was the establishment of English schools in the German
+communities which had become so numerous in Pennsylvania. It was high time
+that this object should receive the attention of the Englishry of the
+province as one of his letters indicates.
+
+     I remember [he said in 1753 in a letter to Richard
+     Jackson] when they [the Germans] modestly declined
+     intermeddling in our Elections, but now they come in
+     Droves and carry all before them, except in one or two
+     Counties.
+
+     Few of their Children in the Country learn English.
+     They import many Books from Germany; and of the six
+     Printing-Houses in the Province, two are entirely
+     German, two half German half English, and but two
+     entirely English. They have one German Newspaper, and
+     one half-German. Advertisements, intended to be
+     general, are now printed in Dutch and English. The
+     Signs in our Streets have Inscriptions in both
+     Languages, and in some places only German. They begin
+     of late to make all their Bonds and other legal
+     Instruments in their own Language, which (though I
+     think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our
+     Courts, where the German Business so increases, that
+     there is continued need of Interpreters; and I suppose
+     in a few Years they will also be necessary in the
+     Assembly to tell one half of our Legislators what the
+     other half say.[13]
+
+As we are said to be indebted to Jefferson for the introduction into
+America of the Lombardy poplar so it is said that we are indebted to
+Franklin for the domestication of the yellow willow so useful in the
+manufacture of wicker-work. The story is that his observant eye noted the
+sprouts, which a willow basket from abroad had put forth, when refreshed by
+the water of a creek into which it had been tossed, and that he was at
+pains to plant some of them on a lot in Philadelphia. Apparently, he was
+the first person, too, to introduce the rhubarb plant into America. He
+obtained seed of the broom-corn on one of his visits to Virginia, and took
+care to disseminate it in Pennsylvania and other Colonies. When the
+Pennsylvania farmers were skeptical about the value of plaster, he framed
+in that substance on the surface of a conspicuous field the words: "THIS
+HAS BEEN PLASTERED," which were soon rewritten in vegetation that rose
+legibly above the general level of its surroundings. One of his suggestions
+was an "office of insurance" on the mutual assessment plan against losses
+from storms, blights, insects, etc., suffered by farmers. Among his essays
+is a concise but highly instructive one on Maize, or Indian Corn, which was
+well calculated to make known to the world a plant now hardly less prized
+by the American for its general usefulness than the date-palm is by the
+Arab. John Adams informs us in his _Diary_ that, on one occasion, when in
+Massachusetts, Franklin mentioned that Rhenish grape-vines had been
+recently planted at Philadelphia, and had succeeded very well, whereupon
+his host, Edmund Quincy, expressed the wish that he could plant some in his
+own garden. A few weeks later Quincy received a bundle of the Rhenish slips
+by sea from Franklin, and a little later another by post.
+
+     Thus [diarizes Adams, at the time a young man of but
+     twenty-four, when the difficulty with which the slips
+     had been procured by Franklin came to his knowledge] he
+     took the trouble to hunt over the city (Philadelphia)
+     and not finding vines there, he sends seventy miles
+     into the country, and then sends one bundle by water,
+     and, lest they should miscarry, another by land, to a
+     gentleman whom he owed nothing, and was but little
+     acquainted with, purely for the sake of doing good in
+     the world by propagating the Rhenish vines through
+     these provinces. And Mr. Quincy has some of them now
+     growing in his garden. This is an instance, too, of his
+     amazing capacity for business, his memory and
+     resolution: amidst so much business as counselor,
+     postmaster, printer, so many private studies, and so
+     many public avocations too, to remember such a
+     transient hint and exert himself so in answer to it, is
+     surprising.
+
+If Adams had only known Franklin better at the time when these words were
+penned, which was long before his analysis of Franklin's motives could be
+jaundiced by jealousy or wounded self-love, he might have added that this
+incident was also an illustration of that unfailing good-nature which made
+the friendship of Franklin an ever-bubbling well-spring of kindly offices.
+"Accept my kind offices to thy other children as the only return in my
+power for thy continual favors to me," one of the petitions in the "little
+prayer," prefixed to Franklin's manual of self-discipline, expressed an
+aspiration which, in addition to more impressive forms of fulfilment, was
+realized many times over in the innumerable small offerings of good feeling
+that he was in the habit of laying from time to time upon the altar of
+friendship. In recounting the benefactions, which he bestowed upon his
+fellow-creatures by his public spirit and private benevolence, it is hard
+to refrain from speculating as to what he might have accomplished, if his
+wealth had only, like that of Andrew Carnegie, been commensurate with his
+wisdom and philanthropic zeal. Then, in truth, would have been united such
+agencies as have not often worked together for the amelioration of human
+society. But independent as Franklin was, according to the pecuniary
+standards of Colonial America, he was in no position to contribute money
+lavishly to any generous object. When he gave it, he had to give it in such
+a way as to make it keep itself going until it had gone far by its own mere
+cumulative energy. This is very interestingly brought out in a letter from
+him, when at Passy, to Benjamin Webb, a distressed correspondent, to whom
+he was sending a gift of ten louis d'ors.
+
+     I do not pretend [he said] to _give_ such a Sum; I only
+     _lend_ it to you. When you shall return to your Country
+     with a good Character, you cannot fail of getting into
+     some Business, that will in time enable you to pay all
+     your Debts. In that Case, when you meet with another
+     honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by
+     lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the
+     Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and
+     shall meet with such another opportunity. I hope it may
+     thus go thro' many hands, before it meets with a Knave
+     that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine
+     for doing a deal of good with a little money. I am not
+     rich enough to afford _much_ in good works, and so am
+     obliged to be cunning and make the most of a _little_.
+
+It is to be hoped that Webb was but the first link in the golden chain
+which this letter sought to fashion.
+
+It is a remarkable fact that Franklin also endeavored to give even
+posthumous efficacy to this same idea of economizing pecuniary force. By a
+codicil to his will, he created two funds of one thousand pounds each, one
+for the benefit of the inhabitants of the town of Boston, and the other for
+the benefit of the inhabitants of the town of Philadelphia. The selectmen
+and the ministers of the oldest Episcopalian, Congregational and
+Presbyterian churches in Boston were to be the trustees for the management
+of the Boston fund, and the City Corporation was to manage the Philadelphia
+fund. The amounts were to be respectively lent in sums not exceeding sixty
+pounds sterling, nor less than fifteen pounds, for any one person, in the
+discretion of the respective managers, to such young married artificers,
+under the age of twenty-five years, as should have served an apprenticeship
+in the respective towns and have faithfully fulfilled the duties stipulated
+for in their indentures, upon their producing certificates to their good
+moral character from at least two respectable citizens, and bonds executed
+by themselves and these citizens, as sureties, for the repayment of the
+loans in ten equal annual instalments, with interest at the rate of five
+per cent. per annum. If there were more applicants than money, the
+proportions, in which the sums would otherwise have been allotted, were to
+be ratably diminished in such a way that some assistance would be given to
+every applicant. As fast as the sums lent were repaid, they were again to
+be lent out to fresh borrowers. If the plan was faithfully carried out for
+one hundred years, the fond projector calculated that, at the end of that
+time, the Boston, as well as the Philadelphia, fund, would amount to one
+hundred and thirty-one thousand pounds, of which he would have the managers
+of the Boston fund lay out in their discretion one hundred thousand pounds
+in public improvements; the remaining thirty-one thousand pounds to be lent
+out as the original one thousand pounds was for another hundred years. At
+the end of the second term, Franklin calculated that, mishaps aside, the
+sum would be four million and sixty-one thousand pounds sterling, of which
+he bequeathed one million sixty-one thousand pounds to the inhabitants of
+Boston absolutely, and three million pounds to the Commonwealth of
+Massachusetts absolutely; not presuming, he said, to carry his views
+further. At the end of the first one hundred years, if the purpose was not
+already executed, the City Corporation was to use a part of the fund
+accumulated for the benefit of the inhabitants of Philadelphia in piping
+the water of Wissahickon Creek into that city, and the testator also
+recommended that the Schuylkill should be made completely navigable. In
+other respects the conditions of the two gifts were the same. An English
+lawyer characterized the famous will by which Peter Thellusson tried to
+circumvent the legal rule against perpetuities as "posthumous avarice." If
+Franklin, too, kept his hand clenched after he left the world, it was not
+in the vainglory of family pride nor from the mere sordid, uncalculating
+love of treasured wealth, but only that he might open it as "bounty's
+instrument," when overflowingly full, for the purpose of conferring upon
+men a far richer largess of beneficence than it had been capable of
+conferring in life. Changes in industrial conditions defeated his
+intentions with respect to artificers, and the Philadelphia fund proved far
+less crescive than the Boston one, but both have proved enough so to
+illustrate the procreative quality of money upon which Franklin was so fond
+of dilating. The Boston fund, including the sum applied at the end of the
+first one hundred years to the use of Franklin Union, amounted on January
+1, 1913, to $546,811.39, and the Philadelphia fund, including the amount
+applied to the use of Franklin Institute, amounted on January 1, 1913, to
+$186,807.06. Poor Richard certainly selected a most effective way this time
+for renewing the reminder with which he ended his _Hints for those that
+would be Rich_.
+
+    "A Penny sav'd is Twopence clear
+    A Pin a Day is a groat a year."
+
+With the expanding horizon, which came to Franklin in 1757, when he was
+drawn off into the world-currents of his time, came also larger
+opportunities for promoting the welfare of the race. There was a double
+reason why he should not be tardy in availing himself of these
+opportunities. He was both by nature and training at once a philosopher and
+a philanthropist. "God grant," he fervently exclaimed in a letter to David
+Hartley in 1789, "that not only the Love of Liberty, but a thorough
+Knowledge of the Rights of Man, may pervade all the Nations of the Earth,
+so that a Philosopher may set his Foot anywhere on its Surface, and say
+'This is my country,'" To Joseph Huey he wrote in the letter, from which we
+have already freely quoted, that the only thanks he desired for a kindness
+which he had shown the former was that he should always be equally ready to
+serve any other person who might need his assistance, and so let good
+offices go round; "for Mankind," Franklin added, "are all of a Family."
+During his third sojourn in England, he entered earnestly into a scheme for
+supplying the islands of Acpy-nomawee and Tovy-poennammoo, "called in the
+maps New Zealand," which contained no useful quadrupeds but dogs, with
+fowls, hogs, goats, cattle, corn, iron and other commodities of civilized
+life. The portion of the appeal for pecuniary aid for this purpose, which
+was borrowed from his pen, after beginning with the statement that Britain
+itself was said to have originally produced nothing but sloes, adapts
+itself, as all his writings of this kind usually did, to both the unselfish
+and selfish instincts of his readers. It was the obligation, he insisted,
+of those, who thought it their duty to ask bread and other blessings daily
+from Heaven, to show their gratitude to their great Benefactor by the only
+means in their power, and that was by promoting the happiness of his other
+children. _Communiter bona profundere_ Deum est. And then trade always
+throve better when carried on with a people possessed of the arts and
+conveniences of life than with naked savages.
+
+As events moved along apace, and Franklin found himself in a world, once
+again ravaged and ensanguined by war, the triple birth of human folly,
+greed and atrocity, his heart, irrevocably enlisted as it was in the
+American cause, went out into one generous effort after another to
+establish at least a few peaceful sanctuaries where the nobler impulses and
+aims of human nature might be safe from the destructive rage of its
+malignant passions. In 1779, when our Minister to France, he issued
+instructions to the captains of all armed ships holding commissions from
+Congress not to molest, in any manner, the famous English navigator,
+Captain Cook, on his return from the voyage of discovery into unknown seas
+upon which he had been dispatched before the Revolutionary War. This act
+was handsomely acknowledged by the British Government. One of the gold
+medals, struck in honor of Captain Cook, was presented to Franklin by the
+hand of Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, and the
+British Admiralty Board also sent him a copy of the Captain's book, with
+its "elegant collection of plates," and a very polite letter from Lord Howe
+stating that the gift was made with the express approval of the King. In
+the same year similar instructions were given by Franklin for the
+protection of the vessel that was that year to transport the supplies which
+were annually conveyed from Europe to the Moravian Mission on the coast of
+Labrador. And later the same aegis was likewise extended over the ship which
+was expected to bear provisions and clothing from the charitable citizens
+of Dublin for the relief of suffering in the West Indies. Of the rule that
+"free ships shall make free goods," Franklin said in a letter to J. Torris,
+an agent for American cruisers at Dunkirk, "This rule is itself so
+reasonable, and of a nature to be so beneficial to mankind, that I cannot
+but wish it may become general." Nor did he stop there. In this letter,
+such was his confidence that Congress would approve the new rule that he
+notified Torris that, until he had received its orders on the subject, he
+should condemn no more English goods found by American cruisers in Dutch
+vessels, unless contraband of war. How unqualifiedly he was disposed to
+recognize the neutrality of all such goods is evidenced by other letters of
+his, too, written when he was in France. But to him also belongs the
+peculiar glory of insisting that non-combatants should be exempt from the
+lamentable penalties of war.
+
+     I approve much [he said in a letter in 1780 to Charles
+     W. F. Dumas] of the Principles of the Confederacy of
+     the Neutral Powers, and am not only for respecting the
+     Ships as the House of a Friend, tho' containing the
+     Goods of an Enemy, but I even wish for the sake of
+     humanity that the Law of Nations may be further
+     improv'd, by determining, that, even in time of War,
+     all those kinds of People, who are employ'd in
+     procuring subsistence for the Species, or in exchanging
+     the Necessaries or Conveniences of Life, which are for
+     the common Benefit of Mankind, such as Husbandmen on
+     their lands, fishermen in their Barques, and traders in
+     unarm'd Vessels, shall be permitted to prosecute their
+     several innocent and useful Employments without
+     interruption or Molestation, and nothing taken from
+     them, even when wanted by an Enemy, but on paying a
+     fair Price for the same.
+
+This principle, as well as a stipulation against privateering, was actually
+made a part of the treaty of amity and commerce between Prussia and the
+United States, which was signed shortly before Franklin returned to America
+from the French Mission, and it was not for the lack of effort on his part
+that similar articles were not inserted in all the treaties between the
+United States and other European countries that were entered into about the
+same time.
+
+For the practice of privateering he cherished a feeling of intense
+abhorrence. It behoved merchants, he wrote to Benjamin Vaughan, "to
+consider well of the justice of a War, before they voluntarily engage a
+Gang of Ruffians to attack their Fellow Merchants of a neighbouring Nation,
+to plunder them of their Property, and perhaps ruin them and their
+Families, if they yield it; or to wound, maim, or murder them, if they
+endeavour to defend it. Yet these Things are done by Christian Merchants,
+whether a War be just or unjust; and it can hardly be just on both sides.
+They are done by English and American Merchants, who, nevertheless,
+complain of private Thefts, and hang by Dozens the Thieves they have taught
+by their own Example." Rarely have the injurious results of privateering
+been presented with more force than they were by Franklin in his
+_Propositions Relative to Privateering_, sent to Richard Oswald--the
+industrial loss involved in the withdrawal of so many men from honest
+labor, "who, besides, spend what they get in riot, drunkenness, and
+debauchery, lose their habits of industry, are rarely fit for any sober
+business after a peace, and serve only to increase the number of highwaymen
+and housebreakers"; and the pecuniary ruin into which their employers are
+drawn by inability, after the enjoyment of rapidly acquired wealth, to
+adjust the habits formed by it to normal conditions. "A just punishment,"
+Franklin adds, "for their having wantonly and unfeelingly ruined many
+honest, innocent traders and their families, whose subsistence was employed
+in serving the common interests of mankind." And after all, he further
+said, as in the case of other lotteries, while a few of the adventurers
+secured prizes, the mass, for reasons that he stated very clearly, were
+losers.
+
+We have already seen how strongly his mind leaned in the direction of
+arbitration as the proper method for settling international differences.
+
+But a grave error it would be to think of Franklin as merely a wise,
+placid, humane Quaker, or as simply a benignant, somewhat visionary Friend
+of Man. He knew what the world ought to be, and might be made to be, but he
+also knew what the world was, and was likely for some time to be. He
+resembled the Quaker in his shrewd capacity to take care of himself, in his
+love of thrift and of all that appertains to the rational and useful side
+of life, and especially in his broad, unreserved, human sympathies. It was
+for this reason that, though not a Quaker himself, he could usually count
+with more or less certainty upon the support of Quakers in his public
+undertakings and political struggles. But rigid, dogged scruples like those
+which made an effort in Franklin's time to coerce a Pennsylvania Quaker
+into taking up arms as impotent, as a rule, as blows upon an unresisting
+punch-bag were wholly out of keeping with such a character as Franklin's.
+For all that was best in the enthusiastic philanthropy of the French, too,
+he had no little affinity, but what Lecky has called his "pedestrian
+intellect" saved him from inane dreams of patriarchal innocence and
+simplicity in a world from which Roland was to hurry himself because it was
+too polluted with crime.
+
+It was a good story that Franklin's Quaker friend, James Logan, told of
+William Penn. He was coming over to Pennsylvania as the Secretary of Penn,
+when their ship was chased by an armed vessel. Their captain made ready for
+an engagement, but said to Penn that he did not expect his aid or that of
+his Quaker companions, and that they might retire to the cabin, which they
+all did except Logan, who remained on deck, and was quartered to a gun. The
+supposed enemy proved to be a friend, and, when this fact was announced by
+Logan to Penn and the other refugees below, Penn rebuked him for violating
+the Quaker principle of non-resistance. Nettled by being reproved before so
+many persons, Logan replied, "_I being thy servant, why did thee not order
+me to come down? But thee was willing enough that I should stay and help to
+fight the ship when thee thought there was danger._" Franklin abhorred the
+Medusa locks of war, and loved the fair, smiling face of peace as much as
+any Quaker, but, when there was peril to be braved, he could always be
+relied upon to incur his share.
+
+Both in point of physique and manliness of spirit he was well fitted for
+leadership and conflict. Josiah, the father of Franklin, we are told in the
+_Autobiography_, had "an excellent constitution of body, was of middle
+stature, but well set, and very strong." The description was true to
+Franklin himself. He is supposed to have been about five feet and ten
+inches high, was robustly built, and, when a printer at Watts' printing
+house in London, could carry up and down stairs in each hand a large form
+of types which one of his fellow printers could carry only with both hands.
+In his boyhood he was as eager as most healthy-minded boys are to go off to
+sea; but his father already had one runagate son, Josiah the younger, at
+sea, and had no mind to have another. However, living as he did near the
+water, Benjamin was much in and about it, and learnt early to swim well and
+to manage boats.
+
+     When in a boat or canoe with other boys [he says in the
+     _Autobiography_], I was commonly allowed to govern,
+     especially in any case of difficulty; and upon other
+     occasions I was generally a leader among the boys, and
+     sometimes led them into scrapes, of which I will
+     mention one instance, as it shows an early projecting
+     public spirit, tho' not then justly conducted.
+
+He then tells us how, under his direction, a band of his comrades, late in
+the afternoon, when no one was about, "like so many emmets," abstracted all
+the stones collected for the foundation of a new building and constructed
+with them a wharf on a quagmire for the convenience of the marauders when
+fishing. The authors of the mischief were discovered. "Several of us," says
+Franklin, "were corrected by our fathers; and, though I pleaded the
+usefulness of the work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was
+not honest."[14]
+
+Another incident in Franklin's youth, indicative of the way in which
+leadership was apt to be conceded in moments of perplexity to his
+hardihood, is narrated in the journal of his first voyage from England to
+America, and arose when he and two companions, after wandering about the
+Isle of Wight until dark, were anxiously endeavoring to make their way back
+across an intercepting creek to their ship, the _Berkshire_, which was only
+awaiting the first favoring breeze to be up and away. On this occasion, he
+stripped to his shirt, and waded through the waters of the creek, and at
+one time, through mud as well up to his middle, to a boat staked nearly
+fifty yards offshore; the wind all the while blowing very cold and very
+hard. When he reached the boat, it was only to find after an hour's
+exertions that he could not release it from its fastenings, and that there
+was nothing for him to do but to return as he came. Then, just as the
+unlucky trio were thinking of looking up some haystack in which to spend
+the night, one of them remembered that he had a horseshoe in his pocket.
+Again the indomitable Franklin waded back to the boat, and this time, by
+wrenching out with the shoe the staple by which it was chained to the
+stake, secured it, and brought it ashore to his friends. On its way to the
+other shore, it grounded in shoal water, and stuck so fast that one of its
+oars was broken in an effort to get it off. After striving and struggling
+for half an hour and more, the party gave up and sat down with their hands
+before them in despair. It looked as if after being exposed all night to
+wind and weather, which was bad, they would be exposed the next morning to
+the taunts of the owner of the boat and the amusement of the whole town of
+Yarmouth; which was worse. However, when their plight seemed utterly
+hopeless, a happy thought occurred to them, and Franklin and one of his
+companions, having got out into the creek and thus lightened the craft,
+contrived to draw it into deeper water.
+
+Still another incident brings into clear relief the resolute will of the
+youthful Franklin. It is told in the _Autobiography_. He was in a boat on
+the Delaware with his free-thinking and deep-drinking friend, Collins, who
+had acquired the habit of "sotting with brandy," and some other young men.
+Collins was in the state pictured by one or more of the cant phrases
+descriptive of an inebriate condition which were compiled with such
+painstaking thoroughness by Franklin in his "Drinker's Dictionary" for the
+_Pennsylvania Gazette_. It became Collins' turn to row, but he refused to
+do it. "I will be row'd home," said Collins. "We will not row you," said
+Franklin. "You must, or stay all night on the water just as you please,"
+said Collins. The others said: "Let us row; what signifies it?" But
+Franklin's mind was soured by Collins' past misconduct, and he refused to
+do so. Thereupon Collins swore that he would make him row or throw him
+overboard, and advanced towards him and struck at him. As he did so,
+Franklin clapped his hand under Collins' crotch, and, rising, pitched him
+headforemost into the river. Knowing that Collins was a good swimmer, he
+felt little concern about him; so the boat was rowed a short distance from
+Collins, and with a few timely strokes removed slightly out of his reach
+whenever he attempted to board it; he being asked each time whether he
+would consent to row.
+
+     He was ready to die with vexation [says Franklin], and
+     obstinately would not promise to row. However, seeing
+     him at last beginning to tire, we lifted him in and
+     brought him home dripping wet in the evening. We hardly
+     exchang'd a civil word afterwards, and a West India
+     captain, who had a commission to procure a tutor for
+     the sons of a gentleman at Barbadoes, happening to meet
+     with him, agreed to carry him thither. He left me then,
+     promising to remit me the first money he should receive
+     in order to discharge the debt; but I never heard of
+     him after.
+
+The debt was for money that Franklin had lent to Collins, when in straits
+produced by his dissipated habits, out of the vexatious sum collected by
+Franklin for Mr. Vernon, which cost him so much self-reproach until
+remitted to that gentleman.
+
+The firmness exhibited by Franklin on this occasion he never failed to
+exhibit in his later life whenever it was necessary for him to do so. Even
+John Adams, in 1778, though he had worked himself up to the point of
+charging Franklin with downright indolence and with the "constant policy
+never to say 'yes' or 'no' decidedly but when he could not avoid it,"
+admitted in the same breath that Franklin had "as determined a soul as any
+man." If anyone doubts it, let him read the letters written by Franklin
+upon the rare occasions when he felt that, as a matter of justice or sober
+self-respect, he could not escape the duty of holding up the mirror of
+candid speech to the face of misconduct. On these occasions, his rebuke was
+like a bitter draught administered in a measuring glass, not a drop too
+much, not a drop too little. Witness his letter of March 12, 1780, to
+Captain Peter Landais in reply to the demand of that captain that he should
+be again placed in command of the _Alliance_.
+
+     The demand, however [Franklin wrote], may perhaps be
+     made chiefly for the sake of obtaining a Refusal, of
+     which you seem the more earnestly desirous as the
+     having it to produce may be of service to you in
+     America. I will not therefore deny it to you, and it
+     shall be as positive and clear as you require it. No
+     one has ever learnt from me the Opinion I formed of you
+     from the Enquiry made into your conduct. I kept it
+     entirely to myself. I have not even hinted it in my
+     Letters to America, because I would not hazard giving
+     to any one a Bias to your Prejudice. By communicating a
+     Part of that Opinion privately to you it can do you no
+     harm for you may burn it. I should not give you the
+     pain of reading it if your Demand did not make it
+     necessary. I think you, then, so imprudent, so
+     litigious and quarrelsome a man, even with your best
+     friends, that Peace and good order and, consequently,
+     the quiet and regular Subordination so necessary to
+     Success, are, where you preside, impossible. These are
+     matters within my observation and comprehension, your
+     military Operations I leave to more capable Judges. If
+     therefore I had 20 Ships of War in my Disposition, I
+     should not give one of them to Captain Landais.
+
+All the higher forms of intellectual or moral power suggest the idea of
+reserve force, and of nothing is this truer than the self-controlled
+indignation of a really strong man like Franklin or Washington.
+
+What Franklin did for Philadelphia, when peace prevailed, we have already
+seen; what he did for it, when threatened by war, remains to be told. In
+1747, England was involved in a struggle with France and Spain, and the
+city lay at the mercy of French and Spanish privateers, all the efforts of
+Governor Thomas to induce the Quaker majority in the Assembly to pass a
+militia law and to make other provision for the security of the Province
+having proved wholly futile. Under these circumstances, Franklin wrote and
+published a pamphlet, entitled _Plain Truth_, for the purpose of arousing
+the people of the Province to a true sense of their perilous predicament.
+
+     The pamphlet [Franklin tells us in the
+     _Autobiography_], had a sudden and surprising effect,
+     and we can readily believe it, for rarely has an alarum
+     been more artfully sounded. In its pages is to be found
+     every artifice of persuasion that could be skillfully
+     used by an adroit pamphleteer for the purpose of
+     playing upon the fears of his readers and inciting them
+     to determined measures of self-defense. It began by
+     pointing out the causes which had brought about an
+     entire change in the former happy situation of the
+     Province, namely its increased wealth, its defenseless
+     condition, the familiarity acquired by its enemies with
+     its Bay and River through prisoners, bearers of flags
+     of truce, spies, and, perhaps, traitors, the ease with
+     which pilots could be employed by these enemies and the
+     known absence of ships of war, during the greatest part
+     of the year, ever since the war began, from both
+     Virginia and New York. That the enemies of the Province
+     might even then have some of their spies in the
+     Province could not be seriously doubted, it declared,
+     for to maintain such spies had been the practice of all
+     nations in all ages, as for example the five men sent
+     by the Children of Dan to spy out the land of the
+     Zidonians, and search it. (Book of Judges, Chap. XVIII,
+     V. 2). These men, while engaged in their enterprise,
+     met with a certain idolatrous priest of their own
+     persuasion (would to God no such priests were to be
+     found among the Pennsylvanians!) And, when they
+     questioned him as to whether their way would be
+     prosperous, he among other things said unto them, _Go
+     in Peace; before the Lord is your Way wherein you go_.
+     (It was well known that there were many priests in the
+     Province of the same religion as those who, of late,
+     encouraged the French to invade the mother country).
+     _And they came_, (Verse 7) _to Laish, and saw the
+     People that were therein, how they dwelt CARELESS,
+     after the Manner of the Zidonians_, QUIET AND SECURE.
+     They _thought_ themselves secure no doubt; and, as they
+     _never had been_ disturbed, vainly imagined they _never
+     should_. It was not unlikely that some saw the danger
+     they were exposed to by living in that careless manner;
+     but it was not unlikely, too, that if these publicly
+     expressed their apprehensions, the rest reproached them
+     as timorous persons, wanting courage or confidence in
+     their Gods, who (they perhaps said) had hitherto
+     protected them. But the spies (Verse 8) returned, and
+     among other things said to their countrymen (Verse 9),
+     _Arise that we may go up against them; for we have seen
+     the Land and behold it is very good! When ye go, ye
+     shall come unto a People SECURE_ (that is a people that
+     apprehend no danger, and therefore have made no
+     provision against it; great encouragement this), _and
+     to a large Land, and a Place where there is no Want of
+     any Thing_. What could they desire more? Accordingly we
+     find, continued _Plain Truth_, in the succeeding verses
+     that _six hundred Men_ only, _appointed with Weapons of
+     War_, undertook the conquest of this _large Land_;
+     knowing that 600 men, armed and disciplined, would be
+     an overmatch, perhaps, for 60,000 unarmed,
+     undisciplined, and off their guard. And when they went
+     against it, the idolatrous priest (Verse 17) _with his
+     graven Image, and his Ephod, and his Teraphim, and his
+     molten Image_ (plenty of superstitious trinkets) joined
+     with them, and, no doubt, gave them all the
+     intelligence and assistance in his power; his heart, as
+     the text assures us, _being glad_, perhaps, for reasons
+     more than one. And now what was the fate of poor Laish?
+     The 600 men, being arrived, found, as the spies had
+     reported, a people QUIET and SECURE. (Verses 20, 21).
+     _And they smote them with the Edge of the Sword, and
+     burnt the City with_ FIRE; _and there was no_
+     DELIVERER,_ because it was far from Zidon_--not so far
+     from _Zidon_, however, as _Pennsylvania_ was from
+     _Britain_; and yet we are, said _Plain Truth_, more
+     careless than the people of _Laish_!
+
+Having awakened in this clever fashion the slumbering strings of sectarian
+hatred and religious association, the author of _Plain Truth_ brings the
+same sure and compelling touch to the other points of his theme: the danger
+that the Iroquois might, from considerations set forth in the pamphlet with
+telling force, be wholly gained over by the French; which meant deserted
+plantations, ruin, bloodshed and confusion; the folly and selfishness of
+the view that Rural Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia did not owe
+each other mutual obligations of assistance; the ruin in which commerce,
+trade and industry were certain to be involved by the occlusion of the
+Delaware; the probability that the enemy, finding that he could come higher
+and higher up the river, seize vessels, land and plunder plantations and
+villages, and return with his booty unmolested, might finally be led to
+believe that all Pennsylvanians were Quakers, against all defence, from a
+principle of conscience, and thus be induced to strike one bold stroke for
+the city and for the whole plunder of the river.
+
+Then, after dispatching with a few practical observations the fallacy that
+the expense of a vessel to guard the trade of the Province would be greater
+than any loss that the enemy could inflict upon the Province at sea, and
+that it would be cheaper for the Government to open an insurance office and
+to pay every such loss, the pamphlet presents a harrowing description of
+the fate that would befall Philadelphia if it passed into the hands of the
+enemy. It is all limned with the minuteness of a Dutch painting; the
+confusion and disorder; the outcries and lamentations; the stream of
+outgoing fugitives (including citizens reputed to be rich and fearful of
+the torture), hurrying away with their effects; the wives and children
+hanging upon the necks of their husbands and fathers and imploring them to
+be gone; the helplessness of the few that would remain; the sack; the
+conflagration. But what, asked _Plain Truth_, would the condition of the
+Philadelphians be, if suddenly surprised without previous alarm, perhaps in
+the night? Confined to their houses, they would have nothing to trust to
+but the enemy's mercy. Their best fortune would be to fall under the power
+of commanders of King's ships, able to control the mariners; and not into
+the hands of licentious privateers. Who could without the utmost horror
+conceive the miseries of the latter, when their persons, fortunes, wives
+and daughters would be subject to the wanton and unbridled rage, rapine and
+lust of negroes, mulattoes and others, the vilest and most abandoned of
+mankind? And then in a timely marginal note _Plain Truth_ tells how poor
+Captain Brown, for bravely defending himself and his vessel longer than the
+ragged crew of a Spanish privateer expected, was barbarously stabbed and
+murdered, though on his knees begging quarter!
+
+It would not be so bad for the rich, said _Plain Truth_. The means of
+speedy flight were ready to their hands, and they could lay by money and
+effects in distant and safe places against the evil day. It was by the
+middling people, the tradesmen, shopkeepers and farmers of the Province and
+city that the brunt would have to be borne. They could not all fly with
+their families, and, if they could, how would they subsist? Upon them too
+the weight of the contributions exacted by the enemy (as was true of
+ordinary taxes) would rest. Though numerous, this class was quite
+defenceless as it had neither forts, arms, union nor discipline, and yet on
+whom could it fix its eyes with the least expectation that they would do
+anything for its security? Not on that wealthy and powerful body of people,
+the Quakers, who had ever since the war controlled the elections of the
+Province and filled almost every seat in the Assembly. Should the Quakers
+be conjured by all the ties of neighborhood, friendship, justice and
+humanity to consider the obligations that they owed to a very great part of
+the people who could have no confidence that God would protect those that
+neglected the use of rational means for protecting themselves, and the
+distraction, misery and confusion, desolation and distress which might
+possibly be the effect of their unreasonable predominancy and perseverance,
+yet all would be in vain; for the Quakers had already been by great numbers
+of the people petitioned in vain. The late Governor of the Province did for
+years solicit, request and even threaten them in vain. The council had
+twice remonstrated with them in vain. Their religious prepossessions were
+unchangeable, their obstinacy invincible.
+
+The manner in which Franklin makes his strictures on the Quakers in this
+pamphlet keen enough to shame them into letting the other elements of the
+population of the Province have the use of enough of the public money to
+enable them to protect both themselves and the Quakers and yet not keen
+enough to make the Quakers thoroughly incensed as well as obstinate is one
+of the notable features of _Plain Truth_.
+
+The prospect of the middling people of the Province, the pamphlet
+continues, was no better, if they turned their eyes to those great and rich
+men, merchants and others, who were ever railing at the Quakers, but took
+no one step themselves for the public safety. With their wealth and
+influence, they might easily promote military ardor and discipline in the
+Province and effect everything under God for its protection. But envy
+seemed to have taken possession of their hearts, and to have eaten out and
+destroyed every generous, noble, public-spirited sentiment, and rage at the
+disappointment of their little schemes for power gnawed their souls, and
+filled them with such cordial hatred to their opponents that any proposal,
+by the execution of which the latter might receive benefit as well as
+themselves, was rejected with indignation.
+
+However, if the city and Province were brought to destruction, it would not
+be for want of numerous inhabitants able to bear arms in their defence. It
+was computed that the Province had at least (exclusive of the Quakers)
+60,000 fighting men, acquainted with firearms, many of them hunters and
+marksmen, hardy and bold. All they lacked was order, discipline and a few
+cannon. At present they were like the separate filaments of flax before the
+thread is formed, without strength because without connection; but union
+would make them strong and even formidable. Many of the inhabitants of the
+Province were of the British race, and, though the fierce fighting animals
+of those happy islands were said to abate their natural fire and
+intrepidity, when removed to a foreign clime, yet, with their people this
+was not so. Among the inhabitants of the Province likewise were those brave
+men whose fathers in the last age made so glorious a stand for
+Protestantism and English liberty, when invaded by a powerful French Army,
+joined by Irish Catholics, under a bigoted Popish King; and also thousands
+of that warlike nation whose sons had ever since the time of Caesar
+maintained the character he gave their fathers of uniting the most
+obstinate courage to all the other military virtues--the brave and steady
+Germans.
+
+Poor Richard, of course, had to have his proverb in war as well as peace.
+Were the union formed, and the fighting men of the Province once united,
+thoroughly armed and disciplined, the very fame of strength and readiness,
+_Plain Truth_ thought, would be a means of discouraging the enemy, "for,"
+said Franklin, "'tis a wise and true Saying, that _One Sword often keeps
+another in the Scabbard_. The Way to secure Peace is to be prepared for
+War."
+
+After these weighty maxims, this remarkable pamphlet ends with the
+statement that, if its hints were so happy as to meet with a suitable
+disposition of mind from the countrymen and fellow citizens of the writer,
+he would, in a few days, lay before them a form of association for the
+purposes mentioned in the pamphlet, together with a practical scheme for
+raising the money necessary for the crisis without laying a burthen on any
+man.
+
+Like
+
+                      "The drum,
+    That makes the warrior's stomach come,"
+
+was _Plain Truth_ with its sudden and surprising effect. Agreeably with the
+popular response to it, Franklin drafted articles of association, after
+consulting with others, and issued a call for a citizen's rally in the
+Whitefield meeting-house. When the citizens assembled, printed copies of
+the articles had already been struck off, and pens and ink had been
+distributed throughout the hall. Franklin then harangued the gathering a
+little, read and explained the articles, and handed around the printed
+copies. They were so eagerly signed that, when the meeting broke up, there
+were more than twelve hundred signatures, and this number, when the country
+people were subsequently given an opportunity to sign, swelled to more than
+ten thousand. All the signers furnished themselves as soon as they could
+with arms, organized into companies and regiments, chose their own
+officers, and met every week for military training. The contagion spread
+even to the women, and, with money raised by their own subscriptions, they
+procured silk colors for the companies, set off with devices and mottoes
+furnished by Franklin himself, who had a peculiar turn for designing things
+of that sort. The next step was for the officers of the companies,
+constituting the Philadelphia regiment, to meet and choose a colonel. They
+did so, and selected the only man, or almost the only man, so far as we
+know, who has ever, in the history of the American Militia, conceived
+himself to be unfit for the office of colonel, and that is Benjamin
+Franklin. "Conceiving myself unfit," says Franklin in the _Autobiography_,
+"I declin'd that station, and recommended Mr. Lawrence, a fine person, and
+man of influence, who was accordingly appointed." But between building and
+equipping a battery on the river below Philadelphia, and manipulating
+Quaker scruples, Franklin had his hands quite as full as were those of
+Colonel Lawrence. At that time, whether the souls of men were to be saved
+by the erection of a church or their bodies to be destroyed by the erection
+of a battery, resort was had to a lottery. Franklin himself, for instance,
+was twice appointed by the vestry of Christ Church the manager of a lottery
+for the purpose of building a steeple and buying a chime of bells for that
+church. A lottery, therefore, was proposed by him to defray the expense of
+building and equipping the battery. The suggestion was eagerly acted upon,
+and, with the current of popular enthusiasm running so swiftly, the lottery
+soon filled, and a battery with merlons framed of logs and packed with
+earth was rapidly erected. The problem was how to get the necessary
+ordnance. Some old cannon were bought in Boston, a not over-sanguine
+request for some was made of the stingy Proprietaries, Richard and Thomas
+Penn, an order was given to other persons in England to purchase in case
+the request was not honored, and Colonel Lawrence, William Allen, Abram
+Taylor and Franklin were dispatched to New York by the association to
+borrow what cannon they could from Governor George Clinton. Fortunately for
+Pennsylvania, the cockles of that Governor's heart were of the kind that
+glow and expand with generous benevolence when warmed by the bottle. At
+first, he refused peremptorily to let the embassy have any cannon, but,
+later on when he sat at meat, or rather drink, with the members of his
+council, there was, we are told by Franklin in the _Autobiography_, great
+drinking of Madeira wine, as the custom of New York then was. With the
+progress of the dinner, he softened by degrees, and said that he would lend
+six. After a few more bumpers, he advanced to ten, and, at length, he very
+good-naturedly conceded eighteen. They were fine cannon, eighteen-pounders,
+with their carriages, and were soon transported and mounted on the battery
+in Pennsylvania, where the associators kept a nightly guard while the war
+lasted; and where, among the rest, Franklin regularly took his turn of duty
+as a common soldier.
+
+The activity of Franklin at this conjuncture not only won him a high degree
+of popularity with his fellow-citizens but also the good will of the
+Governor of Pennsylvania and his Council, who took him into their
+confidence, and consulted with him whenever it was felt that their
+concurrence was needed by the association. When they approved his
+suggestion that a fast should be proclaimed for the purpose of invoking the
+blessing of Heaven upon the association, and it was found that no such
+thing had ever been thought of in Pennsylvania before, he even fell back
+upon his New England training, and drew up a proclamation for the purpose
+in the usual form which was translated into German, printed in both English
+and German, and circulated throughout the Province. The fast day fixed by
+the paper gave the clergy of the different sects in Pennsylvania a
+favorable opportunity for urging the members of their flocks to enroll
+themselves as members of the association, and it was the belief of Franklin
+that, if peace had not soon been declared, all the religious congregations
+in the Province except those of the Quakers would have been enlisted in the
+movement for the defence of the Province.
+
+The most interesting thing, however, connected with this whole episode was
+the conduct of the Quakers. James Logan, true to his former principles,
+wrote a cogent address to his Fellow-Friends justifying defensive war, and
+placed sixty pounds in Franklin's hands with instructions to him to apply
+all the lottery prizes that they might win to the cost of the battery.
+Other Friends also, perhaps most of the younger ones, were in favor of
+defence, but many Friends preferred to keep up silently the semblance of
+conformity with their dogma about war, though ready enough to have it
+refined away by Franklin's astuteness, which had a gift for working around
+obstacles when it could not climb over or break through them. That the
+Quakers, as a body, even if they did not relish his new-born intimacy with
+the executive councillors, with whom they had had a feud of long standing,
+were not losing much of their placidity over the proposition to protect
+their throats and chattels against their will, an ambitious young
+gentleman, who wished to displace Franklin, as the Clerk of the Quaker
+Assembly, soon learnt. Like the generous Maori of New Zealand, who
+refrained from descending upon their English invaders until they had duly
+communicated to them the hour of their proposed onset, he advised Franklin
+(from good will he said) to resign as more consistent with his honor than
+being turned out. He little realized apparently that he was attempting to
+intimidate one of the grimmest antagonists that ever entertained the
+robuster American ideas about public office, the manner in which it is to
+be sought, and the prehensile tenacity, with which it is to be clung to,
+when secured. But for the fact that Franklin was always a highly faithful
+and efficient officeholder, and the further fact that he gave his entire
+salary, as President of Pennsylvania, to public objects, he would not fall
+far short of being a typical American officeholder of the better class, as
+that class was before the era of civil-service reform. On a later occasion,
+when his resignation as Deputy Postmaster-General for America was desired,
+he humorously observed in a letter to his sister, Jane, that he was
+deficient in the Christian virtue of resignation. "If they would have my
+Office," he said, "they must take it." And, on another later occasion, he
+strongly advised his son not to resign his office, as Governor of New
+Jersey, because, while much might be made of a removal, nothing could be
+made of a resignation. As long as there was a son, or a grandson of his
+own, with no fear of the inclination of political competitors to pry into
+skeleton closets, or a relative of any sort to enjoy the sweets of public
+office, Franklin appears to have acted consistently upon the principle that
+the persons whose qualifications we know best, through the accident of
+family intimacy, are the persons that are likely to confer the highest
+degree of credit upon us when we appoint them to public positions.
+
+With this general outlook upon the part of Franklin in regard to public
+office, the young man, who wished to be his successor, as clerk, soon found
+that there was nothing left for him to do except to go off sorrowfully like
+the young man in the Scriptures.
+
+     My answer to him [says Franklin in the _Autobiography_]
+     was, that I had read or heard of some public man who
+     made it a rule never to ask for an office, and never to
+     refuse one when offer'd to him. "I approve," says I,
+     "of his rule, and will practice it with a small
+     addition; I shall never _ask_, never _refuse_, nor ever
+     _resign_ an office." If they will have my office of
+     clerk to dispose of to another, they shall take it from
+     me. I will not, by giving it up, lose my right of some
+     time or other making reprisals on my adversaries.
+
+Franklin never actually refused an office except when its duties could be
+discharged only from what was virtually his death-bed, and he never
+resigned an office, though he was removed from one under circumstances
+which furnished a fine illustration, indeed, of how much can be made of a
+removal. On the other hand, he did not keep his vow of never asking for an
+office; for melancholy to relate, like a raven eying a sick horse, we find
+him fore-handed enough, when it was manifest that Mr. Elliot Benger, the
+Deputy Postmaster-General of America, was about to pay his last debt to
+nature, to apply for the reversion of his office before the debt was
+actually paid, and to offer, through Chief Justice Allen of Pennsylvania,
+the sum of three hundred pounds in perquisites and contingent fees and
+charges for it. Indeed, Benger, though "tho't to be near his end" by
+Franklin, when the latter first set to work to succeed him, did not die
+until more than two years afterwards.[15] As we shall see hereafter, to
+Franklin, as an officeholder, was honorably allotted even the state of
+supreme beatitude under the spoils system of politics which consists in
+holding more than one public office at one time.
+
+The young aspirant for Franklin's place had nothing but his generous
+motives to soothe his disappointment, for at the next election Franklin was
+unanimously elected clerk as usual. Indeed, Franklin had reason to believe
+that the measures taken for the protection of Pennsylvania were not
+disagreeable to any of the Quakers, provided that they were not required to
+participate actively in them. The proportion of Quakers sincerely opposed
+to resistance, he estimated, after having had a chance to look the field
+over, was as one to twenty-one only.
+
+His long contact with the Assembly, as its clerk, had afforded him
+excellent opportunities for observing how embarrassed its Quaker majority,
+which loved political power quite as much as it detested war and
+Presbyterians, was, whenever applications were made to the Assembly for
+military grants by order of the Crown, and to what subtle shifts this
+majority was compelled to resort on such occasions to save its face; ending
+finally in its voting money simply for the "King's use," and never
+inquiring how it was spent. Sometimes the demand was not directly from the
+Crown, and then the conflict, that is being perpetually renewed between
+eccentric human opinions and the inexorable order of the universe, became
+acute, indeed, as, for instance, when this majority was urged by Governor
+Thomas to appropriate a sum of money with which to buy powder for the
+military needs of New England. Money to buy powder nakedly the Quakers were
+not willing to vote, but they appropriated three thousand pounds to be put
+into the hands of the Governor for the purchase of bread, flour, wheat or
+other _grain_. Some members of the Governor's Council, desirous of still
+further embarrassing the Assembly, advised him not to accept provisions
+instead of powder, but he replied: "I shall take the money, for I
+understand very well their meaning; other grain is gunpowder." Gunpowder he
+accordingly bought, and the Quakers maintained a silence as profound as
+that which lulled Franklin to sleep in their great meeting-house when he
+first arrived in Philadelphia. The esoteric meaning of this kind of
+language was, of course, not likely to be lost upon a man so prompt as
+Franklin to take a wink for a nod. With his practical turn of mind, he was
+the last person in the world to boggle over delphic words when they were
+clear enough for him to see that they gave him all that he wanted. So,
+when it was doubtful whether the Quakers in the Union Fire Company would
+vote a fund of sixty pounds for the purchase of tickets in the lottery,
+remembering the incident, which has just been related, he said to his
+friend, Syng, one of its members, "If we fail, let us move the purchase of
+a fire-engine with the money; the Quakers can have no objection to that;
+and then, if you nominate me and I you as a committee for that purpose, we
+will buy a great gun, which is certainly a _fire engine_." But there was no
+real danger of the fund not being voted. The company consisted of thirty
+members, of whom twenty-two were Quakers. The remaining eight punctually
+attended the meeting, at which the vote was to be taken. Only one Quaker,
+Mr. James Morris, appeared to oppose the grant. The proposition, he said,
+with the confidence that usually marks statements in a democratic community
+about the preponderance of popular opinion, ought never to have been made,
+as Friends were all against it, and it would create such discord as might
+break up the company. At any rate, he thought that, though the hour for
+business had arrived, a little time should be allowed for the appearance of
+other members of the company, who, he knew, intended to come for the
+purpose of voting against the proposition. While this suggestion was being
+combated, who should appear but a waiter to tell Franklin that two
+gentlemen below desired to speak with him. These proved to be two of the
+Quaker members of the company. Eight of them, they said, were assembled at
+a tavern just by, who were ready to come and vote for the proposition, if
+they should be needed, but did not desire to be sent for, if their
+assistance could be dispensed with. Franklin then went back to Mr. Morris,
+and after a little seeming hesitation--for at times he had a way of piecing
+out the skin of the lion with the tail of the fox--agreed to a delay of
+another hour. This Mr. Morris admitted was extremely fair. Nobody else
+came, and, upon the expiration of the hour, the proposition was carried by
+a vote of eight to one. Franklin was a thoroughly normal man himself, but
+his wit, patience and rare capacity for self-transformation usually enabled
+him to deal successfully with any degree of abnormality in others, however
+pronounced. "Sensible people," he once said to his sister Jane, "will give
+a bucket or two of water to a dry pump, that they may afterwards get from
+it all they have occasion for."
+
+The next time that Franklin crosses the stage of war is when General
+Braddock and his men, in the buskins of high tragedy, are moving to their
+doom. It had been reported to the General that, not only had the
+Pennsylvania Assembly refused to vote money for the King's service, but
+that the Pennsylvanians themselves had sold provisions to the French,
+declined to aid in the construction of a road to the West, and withheld
+wagons and horses sorely needed by the expedition; and the General had just
+been compelled to settle down for a time in the temper of a chafed bull at
+Frederick, Maryland, for the want of wagons and horses to transport his
+army to Fort Duquesne, which he afterwards told Franklin could hardly
+detain him above three or four days on his triumphant progress to Niagara
+and Frontenac. Forts, he seemed to think, to recall Franklin's simile,
+could be taken as easily as snuff. Under these circumstances, the
+Pennsylvania Assembly decided to ask Franklin to visit Braddock's camp,
+ostensibly as Deputy Postmaster-General, for the purpose of arranging a
+plan, by which the General could effectively keep in postal touch with the
+Colonial Governors, but really for the purpose of removing the prejudices
+which the General had formed against Pennsylvania. And a pleasant April
+journey that must have been for the mounted Franklin through Pennsylvania
+and Delaware, and over "the green-walled hills of Maryland," with his son,
+and the Governors of New York and Massachusetts, also mounted, as his
+companions. That such a brave company, as it passed through the mild vernal
+air of that delightful season from stage to stage of its itinerary,
+experienced no dearth of hospitable offices, we may rest assured. One
+Maryland gentleman, the "amiable and worthy" Colonel Benjamin Tasker, who
+entertained Franklin and William Franklin on this journey with great
+hospitality and kindness at his country place, even pleasantly claimed that
+a whirlwind, which Franklin made the subject of a most graphic description
+in a letter to Peter Collinson, had been got up by him on purpose to treat
+Mr. Franklin.
+
+It was probably the energy and resource of Franklin that were really
+responsible for Braddock's defeat, paradoxical as this may sound. When that
+brave but rash and infatuated general and his officers found that only
+twenty-five wagons could be obtained in Virginia and Maryland for the
+expedition, they declared that it was at an end; not less than one hundred
+and fifty wagons being necessary for the purpose. Their hopes, however,
+were revived when Franklin remarked that it was a pity that the army had
+not landed in Pennsylvania, as almost every farmer in that Colony had his
+wagon. This observation was eagerly pounced upon by Braddock, and Franklin
+was duly commissioned to procure the needed wagons. With such consummate
+art did he, in an address published by him at Lancaster, partly by
+persuasion, and partly by threats, work upon the feelings of the prosperous
+farmers of York, Lancaster and Cumberland Counties that in two weeks the
+one hundred and fifty wagons, with two hundred and fifty-nine pack-horses,
+were on their way to Braddock's camp. Nay more; with the aid of William
+Franklin, who knew something of camp life and its wants, he drew up a list
+of provisions for Braddock's subaltern officers, whose means were too
+limited to enable them to victual themselves comfortably for the march,
+and induced the Pennsylvania Assembly to make a present of them to these
+officers. The twenty parcels, in which the provisions were packed, were
+each placed upon a horse and presented to a subaltern together with the
+horse itself. The twenty horses and their packs arrived in camp as soon as
+the wagons, and were very thankfully received. The kindness of Franklin in
+procuring them was acknowledged in letters to him from the colonels of the
+two regiments composing Braddock's army in the most grateful terms, and
+Braddock was so delighted with his services in furnishing the wagons and
+pack-horses that he not only thanked him repeatedly, craved his further
+assistance, and repaid him one thousand pounds of a sum amounting to some
+thirteen hundred pounds which he had advanced, but wrote home a letter in
+which, after inveighing against the "false dealings of all in this
+country," with whom he had been concerned, he commended Franklin's
+promptitude and fidelity, and declared that his conduct was almost the only
+instance of address and fidelity which he had seen in America. The balance
+of the amount that Franklin advanced he was never able to collect.
+
+It is foreign to the plan of this book to describe the horrors of the
+sylvan inferno in which the huddled soldiers of Braddock stood about as
+much chance of successfully retaliating upon their flitting assailants as
+if the latter had been invisible spirits. It is enough for our purpose to
+say that, as soon as the wagoners, whom Franklin had gathered together, saw
+how things were going, they each took a horse from his wagon, and scampered
+away as fast as his steed could carry him, leaving too many wagons,
+provisions, pieces of artillery, stores and scalps behind them to make it
+worth the while of the victors to pursue them. Franklin states in the
+_Autobiography_ that, when Braddock, with whom he dined daily at Frederick,
+spoke of passing from Fort Duquesne to Niagara, and from Niagara to
+Frontenac, as lightly as a traveller might speak of the successive inns at
+which he was to bait on a peaceful journey, he conceived some doubts and
+fears as to the event of the campaign. He might well have done so, for he
+knew, if Braddock did not, what a nimble, painted and befeathered Indian in
+the crepuscular shades of the primeval American forest was. We also learn
+from the _Autobiography_ that when the Doctors Bond came to Franklin to ask
+him to subscribe to fireworks, to be set off upon the fall of Fort
+Duquesne, he looked grave, and said that it would be time enough to prepare
+for the rejoicing when they knew that they had occasion to rejoice. All
+this was natural enough in a man whose temper was cautious, and who had
+dined daily for some time with Braddock. "The General presum'd too much,
+and was too secure. This the Event proves, but it was my Opinion from the
+time I saw him and convers'd with him." These were the words of Franklin in
+a letter to Peter Collinson shortly after the catastrophe. But, when we
+remember his written assurance in his Lancaster address to the Pennsylvania
+farmers that the service, to which their wagons and horses would be put,
+would be light and easy, and above all the individual promises of
+indemnity, tantamount to the pledge of his entire fortune, which he gave to
+these farmers, we cannot help feeling that Franklin's doubts and fears were
+not quite so strong as he afterwards honestly believed them to be, and that
+his second sight in this instance was, perhaps, somewhat like that of the
+clairvoyant, mentioned in the letter, contributed by his friend, Joseph
+Breintnal to one of his Busy-Body essays, who was "only able to discern
+Transactions about the Time, and for the most Part after their happening."
+Apart from the evidence afforded by the expedition that, if Braddock had
+been as able a general as Franklin was a commissary, its result would have
+been different, its chief interest to the biographer of Franklin consists
+in the light that it sheds upon the self-satisfied ignorance of American
+conditions and the complete want of sympathy with the Americans themselves
+which subsequently aided in rendering the efforts of Franklin to secure a
+fair hearing in London for his countrymen so difficult. When Franklin
+ventured to express apprehension that the slender line of Braddock's army,
+nearly four miles long, might be ambushed by the Indians, while winding its
+way through the woods, and be cut like a thread into several pieces,
+Braddock smiled at his simplicity and replied, "These savages may, indeed,
+be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the King's
+regular and disciplin'd troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any
+impression." He saw enough before he was fatally wounded to realize that
+the very discipline of his British soldiers was their undoing, when
+contending with such a mobile and wily foe as the Indian in the forest, and
+that a few hundred provincials, skulking behind trees, and giving their
+French and Indian antagonists a taste of their own tactics, were worth many
+thousands of such regulars even as his brave veterans. That he came to some
+conclusion of this kind before the close of his life we may infer from what
+Captain Orme told Franklin and what Franklin tells us in the
+_Autobiography_.
+
+     Captain Orme [says Franklin], who was one of the
+     general's aids-de-camp, and, being grievously wounded,
+     was brought off with him, and continu'd with him to his
+     death, which happen'd in a few days, told me that he
+     was totally silent all the first day, and at night only
+     said "_Who would have thought it?_" That he was silent
+     again the following day, saying only at last, "_We
+     shall better know how to deal with them another time_";
+     and dy'd in a few minutes after.
+
+There was not to be another time for this intrepid but reckless soldier,
+who, true to the broad, red banner of England, died like a bulldog with
+his iron jaws set to the last, but the first time might have sufficed for
+his task if he had only taken Franklin's hint, or freely consulted the
+advice of George Washington and the other provincial officers who
+accompanied him, or had not reduced his army merely to the condition of
+legs without eyes by treating the hundred Indians, invaluable as guides and
+scouts, whom George Croghan had brought to his aid, with such neglect and
+slights that they all, by successive defections, gradually dropped away
+from him.
+
+In the _Autobiography_ Franklin contrasts the conduct of the British on
+their way from the sea to the unbroken wilderness with the conduct of the
+French allies when making their way from Rhode Island to Yorktown. The
+former, he says, from their landing till they got beyond the settlements,
+plundered and stripped the inhabitants, totally ruining some poor families,
+besides insulting, abusing and confining such persons as remonstrated. This
+was enough, he adds, to put the Americans out of conceit of such defenders,
+if they had really wanted any. The French, on the other hand, though
+traversing the most inhabited part of America for a distance of nearly
+seven hundred miles, occasioned not the smallest complaint for the loss of
+a pig, a chicken, or even an apple. Perhaps this was partly because the
+people gratefully gave them everything that they wanted before there was
+any occasion to take it. But it was the pusillanimous misbehavior of
+Colonel Dunbar, left by Braddock in the rear of his army to bring along the
+heavier part of his stores, provisions and baggage which converted disaster
+into disgrace. As soon as the fugitives from the battle reached his camp,
+the panic that they brought with them was instantly imparted to him and his
+entire force. Though he had at his command more than a thousand men, he
+thought of nothing better to do than to turn his draft horses to the
+purposes of flight, and to give all his stores and ammunition to the
+flames. When he reached the settlements, he was met with requests from the
+Governors of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania that he would station his
+troops on the frontier of those states so as to protect them from the fury
+of the savages, but, so far from stopping to protect anybody else, not one
+jot of speed did he abate until, to use Franklin's words, "he arriv'd at
+Philadelphia, where the inhabitants could protect him." "This whole
+transaction," declares the _Autobiography_, "gave us Americans the first
+suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regulars had not
+been well founded."
+
+When Dunbar did abandon the shelter which he had found at Philadelphia, it
+was only to give the people of Pennsylvania a parting whiff of his quality.
+He promised Franklin that, if three poor farmers of Lancaster County would
+meet him at Trenton, where he expected to be in a few days on his march to
+New York, he would surrender to them certain indentured servants of theirs
+whom he had enlisted. Although they took him at his word, and met him at
+Trenton, at considerable sacrifice of time and money, he refused to perform
+his promise.
+
+The defeat of Braddock and its consequences left the province fully exposed
+to Indian incursions, and again its ablest and most public-spirited man was
+compelled to take the lead in providing for its defense. His first act was
+to draft and push through the Assembly a bill for organizing and
+disciplining a militia. Each company was to elect a captain, a lieutenant
+and an ensign, subject to the confirmation of the Governor, and the
+officers, so elected, of the companies forming each regiment, were to elect
+a colonel, a lieutenant-colonel and a major for the regiment, subject to
+the same confirmation. But nothing about the bill is so interesting as the
+further evidence that it affords of Franklin's finesse in the management of
+Quakers. The Articles of Association, provided for in the Act, were to be
+purely voluntary, and nothing in the Act was to be taken as authorizing the
+Governor or the military officers mentioned in it to prescribe any
+regulations that would in the least affect such of the inhabitants of the
+Province as were scrupulous about bearing arms, either in their liberties,
+persons or estates. There is almost a gleam of the true Franklin humor in
+the recital in the Act, which, though other parts of the Act safeguarded
+the Quaker crotchet as to fighting, made the Quaker majority in the
+Assembly admit that there were some persons in the Province who had been
+disciplined in the art of war, and even--strange as that might
+be--conscientiously thought it their duty to fight in defense of their
+country, their wives, their families and estates. The Militia Act was
+followed by Franklin's _Dialogue between X Y and Z_ explaining and
+defending it. This paper is garnished with apt references to the Bible,
+and, as a whole, is written with much vivacity and force. Its object was to
+convince the English, Scotch-Irish and German Pennsylvanians that they
+should fight to keep their own scalps on their heads even though they could
+not do this without accomplishing as much for the Quakers. "For my part,"
+says Z, "I am no coward, but hang me if I'll fight to save the _Quakers_."
+"That is to say," says X, "you won't pump ship because 'twill save the
+rats, as well as yourself." And to Z's suggestion that, if the Act was
+carried into execution, and proved a good one, they might have nothing to
+say against the Quakers at the next election, X, no unknown quantity, but
+Franklin himself, replies with this burst of eloquent exhortation which
+makes us half doubt Franklin when he says that he was not an orator:
+
+     O my friends, let us on this occasion cast from us all
+     these little party views, and consider ourselves as
+     _Englishmen_ and _Pennsylvanians_. Let us think only of
+     the service of our king, the honour and safety of our
+     country, and vengeance on its murdering enemies. If
+     good be done, what imports it by whom 'tis done? The
+     glory of serving and saving others is superior to the
+     advantage of being served or secured. Let us resolutely
+     and generously unite in our country's cause, (in which
+     to die is the sweetest of all deaths) and may the God
+     of Armies bless our honest endeavours.
+
+When the defeat of Braddock first became known to Governor Morris, he
+hastened to consult with Franklin about the proper measures for preventing
+the desertion of the back counties of Pennsylvania, and he even went so far
+as to offer to make him a general, if he would undertake to conduct a force
+of provincials against Fort Duquesne. Franklin had, or with his wise
+modesty affected to have, a suspicion that the offer was inspired not so
+much by the Governor's confidence in his military abilities as by the
+Governor's desire to utilize his great personal influence for the purpose
+of enlisting soldiers and securing money to pay them with; and that,
+perhaps, without the taxation of the Proprietary estates. The suspicion we
+should say was groundless. In the land of the blind the one-eyed mole is
+king, and the probability is that the Governor was actuated by nothing more
+than the belief that in a province, where there were no seasoned generals,
+a man with Franklin's talents, energy and resource would be likely to prove
+the best impromptu commander that he could find. If so, his calculations
+came to nothing, for Franklin, who always saw things as they were, could
+discern no reason why he should be unfit to be a colonel and yet fit to be
+a general. When, however, the Militia Act had been passed, and Z had been
+silenced by X, and military companies were springing up as rapidly as
+mushrooms in a Pennsylvania meadow, he did permit himself to be prevailed
+upon by the Governor to take charge of the northwestern frontier of the
+Province, and to bend his energies to the task of enlisting soldiers and
+erecting forts for its protection. He did not think himself qualified for
+even this quasi-military post, but posterity has taken the liberty of
+differing from him in this regard. Having speedily rallied five hundred and
+sixty men to his standard, and called his son, who had had some military
+training, to his side, as his aide-de-camp, he assembled his little army at
+Bethlehem, the chief seat of the Moravians, and divided it into three
+detachments. One he sent off towards the Minisink to build a fort in the
+upper part of the exposed territory, another he sent off to build a fort in
+the lower part of the same territory, and the third he conducted himself to
+Gnadenhutten, a Moravian village, recently reduced to blood and ashes by
+the Indians, for the purpose of erecting a third fort there.
+
+When he reached Bethlehem, he found that not only had the Moravian
+brethren, who, he had had reason to believe, were conscientiously averse to
+war, erected a stockade around the principal buildings of the town, and
+purchased a supply of arms and ammunition for themselves in New York, but
+that they had even placed a quantity of stones between the windows of their
+high houses, to be thrown down by their women upon the heads of any Indians
+by whom these buildings might be invested. "Common sense, aided by present
+danger, will sometimes be too strong for whimsical opinions," dryly
+comments Franklin in the _Autobiography_.
+
+How death kept his court in that tortured land may be inferred from an
+incident recorded by Franklin in the _Autobiography_. Just before he left
+Bethlehem for Gnadenhutten, eleven farmers who had been driven from their
+plantations by the Indians obtained from him each a gun with a suitable
+supply of ammunition, and returned to their homes to fetch away their
+cattle. Ten of the eleven were killed by the Indians. The one who escaped
+reported that they could not discharge their guns because the priming had
+become wet with rain--a mishap which the Indians were too dexterous to
+allow to befall their pieces. The same rain descended upon Franklin and his
+men on their march from Bethlehem to Gnadenhutten, and disabled their guns
+too, but fortunately, though at one point they had to pass through a gap in
+the mountains which their foes might well have turned to deadly account,
+they were not attacked on the march. Once arrived at Gnadenhutten, as soon
+as the detachment had sheltered itself under rude huts, and interred with
+more decent completeness the massacred victims, who had been only half
+buried by their demoralized neighbors, it proceeded to fell trees and to
+erect a fort, or rather stockade, with a circumference of four hundred and
+fifty-five feet. "How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke," was not
+more aptly written of the peasants whom Gray's _Elegy_ has immortalized,
+than it might have been of the seventy brawny axemen in Franklin's camp,
+two of whom could by Franklin's watch in six minutes cut down a pine
+fourteen inches in diameter. In a week, in spite of drenching rains, a
+stockade had been constructed of sufficient strength, flimsy as it was, to
+fend off cannonless Indians. It consisted of palisades eighteen feet long,
+planted in a trench three feet deep, loopholes, and a gallery, at an
+elevation of six feet around its interior, for its defenders to stand on
+and take aim through the loopholes. When it had been finished, a swivel gun
+was mounted at one of its angles and discharged to let the Indians know
+that the garrison was supplied with such pieces. They were not far off; for
+when Franklin began, after he had furnished himself with a place of refuge,
+in case of retreat, to throw out scouting parties over the adjacent
+country, he found that they had been watching his movements from the hills
+with their feet dangling in holes, in which, for warmth, fires, made of
+charcoal, had been kindled. With their fires going in this way, there was
+neither light, flame, sparks, nor even smoke, to betray their presence;
+but it would seem that they were too few in numbers to feel that they could
+hazard an attack upon the stockade-builders.
+
+The impression left upon the mind by this expedition is that it was managed
+by Franklin with no little good sense and efficiency, though it does seem
+to us that a man who never lacked the capacity to invent any mechanical
+device called for by his immediate needs ought to have been too provident
+to find himself in a narrow defile with guns as impotent as those of the
+ten poor farmers who had perished that very day. It was inexcusable in Poor
+Richard at any rate to forget his own saying, "For want of a Nail the Shoe
+was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse
+the Rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the Enemy; all for want of
+care about a Horse-shoe Nail." In his instructions, before he left
+Bethlehem, to Captain Vanetta, in relation to certain operations, which the
+latter was to undertake with a separate force against the Indians,
+Franklin, though he said nothing about trusting in God, took care to warn
+the captain to keep his powder dry. The expedition was cut short by a
+letter from the Governor and letters from Franklin's friends in the
+Assembly urging him to attend the sessions about to be held by that body.
+There was no reason why he should not do so; for the three forts were
+completed, and the country people, relying upon the protection afforded by
+them, were content to remain on their farms; and especially too as Colonel
+Clapham, a New England officer, conversant with Indian warfare, had
+accepted the command in the place of Franklin, and had been introduced by
+the latter to his men as a soldier much better fitted to lead them than
+himself. But Franklin, though he had never been engaged in battle, found on
+his return to Philadelphia that he had won a military prestige upon which
+he could not easily turn his back. He was elected colonel of the
+Philadelphia regiment under such circumstances that he was unable to again
+decline the honor of a colonelcy on the score of unfitness. His regiment
+consisted of about twelve hundred presentable men, with an artillery
+company, furnished with six brass field-pieces, which the company had
+become expert enough to fire off twelve times in a minute.
+
+     The first time [says Franklin in the _Autobiography] I
+     reviewed my regiment they accompanied me to my house,
+     and_ would salute me with some rounds fired before my
+     door, which shook down and broke several glasses of my
+     electrical apparatus. And my new honour proved not much
+     less brittle; for all our commissions were soon after
+     broken by a repeal of the law in England.
+
+If, however, his colonelcy had not been marked by any considerable effusion
+of blood, he had acquired fame enough to arouse the intense jealousy of
+Thomas Penn, the Proprietary. When Franklin was on the point of setting out
+on a journey to Virginia, the officers of his regiment took it into their
+heads to escort him out of town as far as the Lower Ferry. This ceremonious
+proceeding was unexpectedly sprung upon him; otherwise, he says, he would
+have prevented it, being naturally averse to all flourishes of that sort.
+As it was, just as he was getting on horseback, the officers, thirty or
+forty in number, came to his door, all mounted, and in their uniforms, and,
+as soon as the cavalcade commenced to move, made things worse by drawing
+their swords and riding with them naked the entire distance to the Lower
+Ferry. The Proprietary, when he heard of the incident, was deeply
+affronted. No such honor, forsooth, he declared, had ever been paid to him,
+when in the Province, nor to any of his Governors, and was only proper when
+due homage was being paid to princes of the blood royal; all of which
+Franklin innocently tells us might be so for aught such a novice in
+matters of this kind as he knew. So aroused indeed was the Proprietary by
+the affair, coming as it did on the heels of the grudge that he already
+owed Franklin for his part in insisting that the Proprietary estates should
+sustain their just share of the common burden of taxation, that he even
+denounced Franklin to the British ministry as the arch obstructionist of
+measures for the King's service, citing the pomp of this occasion as
+evidence of the fact that Franklin harbored the intention of taking the
+government of the Province out of his hands by force. His malice, in fact,
+did not stop short even of an effort to deprive Franklin of his office as
+Deputy Postmaster-General for the Colonies; with no effect, however, except
+that of eliciting a gentle admonition to Franklin from Sir Everard
+Fawkener, the British Postmaster-General.
+
+Thus ended for a time the military career of Franklin amid the crash of his
+electrical apparatus and the gleam of unfleshed swords. Susceptible of
+subdivision as his life is, it would hardly justify a separate chapter on
+Franklin the Soldier; but, all the same, by the splendidly efficient
+service rendered by him to Braddock, by his pamphlet, _Plain Truth_, by his
+Articles of Association and his battery, by his X Y Z dialogue and Militia
+Act, by his tact in conciliating and circumventing the awkward Quaker
+conviction that "peace unweaponed conquers every wrong," and by the energy
+and sound judgment brought by him to the expedition to Gnadenhutten he had
+established his right to be considered in war as well as in peace the man
+whose existence could be less easily spared than that of any other
+Pennsylvanian. There is a pleasure in speculating on the turn that his
+future might have taken if the terms in which Braddock recommended him to
+the favor of the Crown had been followed by the fall of Fort Duquesne
+instead of the battle of the Monongahela. While in his relations to
+Braddock's expedition he was influenced, as he always was in every such
+case, mainly by generous public spirit, yet it is manifest, too, that he
+was fully alive to the significance that his first helpful contact with
+such a British commander as Braddock might have for his own
+self-advancement.
+
+The sterner stuff in the character of Franklin, however, was to be still
+further tried. During the year succeeding his second return from England in
+1762, the minds of the people in the western counties of Pennsylvania, and
+especially of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, whose passions were easily
+deflected into channels of religious fanaticism, were inflamed almost to
+madness by Indian atrocities, and this mental condition resulted in an act
+of abominable butchery, such as has rarely blackened even the history of
+the American Indian himself. Living not far from the town of Lancaster, on
+the Manor of Conestoga, was the remnant of what had once been a
+considerable tribe of the Six Nations. The members of this tribe sent
+messengers to welcome the first English settlers of Pennsylvania with
+presents of venison, corn and furs, and entered into a treaty of friendship
+with William Penn which, in the figurative language of the savage, was to
+last "as long as the Sun should shine, or the Waters run in the Rivers,"
+and which in point of fact was faithfully observed by both parties. In the
+course of time, as the whites purchased land from them, and hemmed them in
+more and more closely, they settled down upon a part of the Manor assigned
+to them by William Penn which they were not allowed by the Provincial
+Government to alienate, and here they lived on terms of unbroken amity with
+their white neighbors. In the further course of time, the tribe dwindled to
+such an extent that there were only twenty survivors, seven men, five
+women, and eight children of both sexes, whose means of subsistence were
+supplied to some extent by mendicancy and the chase, but mainly by the sale
+to the whites of the brooms, baskets and wooden ladles made by the women.
+The oldest of the band, a man named Shehaes, was old enough to have been
+present when the original chain of friendship between the tribe and William
+Penn was brightened by a second treaty between the same contracting
+parties. The youngest were infants. There is good reason to believe that at
+least one or two of the band had been in secret commerce with the hostile
+Indians whose shocking barbarities had filled the souls of such of the
+Pennsylvania borderers as had not been tomahawked, carried off into
+captivity or driven from their homes with sensations little short of
+frenzied desperation. On Wednesday, the 14th of December, 1763, fifty men
+from the territory about Paxton, a small town in Pennsylvania, on the
+Susquehanna above Conestoga, all mounted, and armed with firelocks, hangers
+and hatchets, descended upon the squalid huts of this band, about dawn, and
+slaughtered in cold blood three men, two women and a young boy--the only
+members of the vagabond band whom they found at home. The firelocks,
+hangers and hatchets were all used in perpetrating the bloody work, and the
+miserable victims were scalped and horribly mangled besides. Shehaes
+himself was cut to pieces in his bed. Then, after seizing upon such booty
+as was to be found, and applying the torch to most of the huts, the
+murderers rode away through the snow-drifts to their homes. A shudder of
+horror passed through the whites in the vicinity, and a cry of bitter
+lamentation went up from the younger survivors of the band when they
+returned to the sickening spot, where the charred bodies of their parents
+and other relations, looking as one observer said like half burnt logs,
+told the hideous story.
+
+     We had known the greater part of them from children
+     [said Susannah Wright, a humane white woman, who
+     resided near the spot], had been always intimate with
+     them. Three or four of the women were sensible and
+     civilized, and the Indians' children used to play with
+     ours, and oblige them all they could. We had many
+     endearing recollections of them, and the manner of
+     effecting the brutal enormity so affected us, that we
+     had to beg visitors to forbear to speak of it.
+
+The public officials of the Province appear to have faithfully performed
+their duty immediately after the tragedy. The survivors were gathered
+together by the sheriff of Lancaster, and placed in the workhouse for
+safety. A hundred and forty other friendly Indians, who had been converted
+by the Moravians, fearing that they might be visited with just such
+violence, had found, before the descent upon Conestoga, shelter near
+Philadelphia, at the public expense, under the guidance of a good Moravian
+minister. The Governor, John Penn, issued a proclamation calling upon all
+the civil and military officers of the Colony and all His Majesty's other
+liege subjects to do their duty. But the Governor soon found that he was
+reckoning with that Scotch-Irish temper, which, at its highest point of
+rigidity, is like concrete reinforced with iron rods, and which in this
+instance was more or less countenanced by the sympathy of the entire
+Province. Despite the proclamation of the Governor under the great seal of
+the Colony, the incensed frontiersmen, now fired by the fresh taste of
+blood as well as by the original conviction of the settlements from which
+they came that an angry God had turned his face from the inhabitants of
+Pennsylvania, because they had not smitten, hip and thigh, and utterly
+destroyed the red-skinned Amorites and Canaanites, again assembled, and
+riding into Lancaster, armed as on the previous occasion, broke in the door
+of its workhouse and dispatched every solitary one of the poor wretches who
+had escaped their pitiless hands. Thereupon, they mounted their horses,
+huzzaed in triumph, and rode off unmolested. The whole thing was like the
+flight of the pigeon-hawk, so swift and deadly was it; for, within ten or
+twelve minutes after the alarm was given, the borderers were again in their
+saddles. By a large part of the population of the Province the deed was
+applauded as the infliction of just vengeance upon a race which had many
+unspeakable enormities to answer for in its relations to the whites; by the
+people of the Province generally, except the Quakers, it was but languidly
+condemned, and the proclamations of the Governor proved to be mere paper
+trumpets, for all the efforts of the Government to bring the criminals to
+justice were wholly unsuccessful.
+
+But there was one man in the Province, and he not a Quaker either, to whom
+justice, mercy and law had not lost their meaning. In his _Narrative of the
+Late Massacres in Lancaster County_, Franklin, in words as burning as any
+ever inspired by righteous wrath, denounced with blistering force the
+assassins and their crimes. Anger, Lord Bacon tells us, makes even dull men
+witty. Just indignation in this case lifted one of the soberest and most
+self-contained of men to the level of impassioned feeling and of almost
+lyrical speech. With a firm yet rapid hand, Franklin sketched the history
+of the tribe, its peaceful intercourse with the whites, its decline until
+it numbered only the twenty creatures whom he brings vividly before us with
+a few familiar strokes of individual description, the infamous
+circumstances that attended the destruction of defenseless weakness in hut
+and workhouse. Then, along with illustrations of clemency and magnanimity
+derived from many different historical and national sources, and even from
+the annals of semi-civilized and barbarous communities, and graphically
+contrasted with the conduct of the ruthless men who had wreaked their will
+upon the Conestoga villagers, male and female, and their children, he
+poured out a tide of scathing execration upon the heads of the malefactors
+which showed as nothing else in all his life ever showed how deep were the
+fountains that fed the calm flow of his ordinary benevolence.
+
+     O, ye unhappy Perpetrators of this horrid Wickedness!
+     [he exclaimed, rising with a natural crescendo of
+     exalted feeling even into the sublimated province of
+     the apostrophe] reflect a Moment on the Mischief ye
+     have done, the Disgrace ye have brought on your
+     Country, on your Religion, and your Bible, on your
+     Families and Children! Think on the Destruction of your
+     captivated Country-folks (now among the wild _Indians_)
+     which probably may follow, in Resentment of your
+     Barbarity! Think on the Wrath of the United _Five
+     Nations_, hitherto our Friends, but now provoked by
+     your murdering one of their Tribes, in Danger of
+     becoming our bitter Enemies. Think of the mild and good
+     Government you have so audaciously insulted; the Laws
+     of your King, your Country, and your God, that you have
+     broken; the infamous Death that hangs over your Heads;
+     for Justice, though slow, will come at last. All good
+     People everywhere detest your Actions. You have imbrued
+     your Hands in innocent Blood; how will you make them
+     clean? The dying Shrieks and Groans of the Murdered,
+     will often sound in your Ears. Their Spectres will
+     sometimes attend you, and affright even your innocent
+     Children! Fly where you will, your Consciences will go
+     with you. Talking in your Sleep shall betray you, in
+     the Delirium of a Fever you yourselves shall make your
+     own Wickedness known.
+
+These were honest, fearless words, but, so far as we know, the Erynnes did
+not plant any stings of conscience in the breasts of the men from Paxton
+District whom Franklin elsewhere in this Narrative described as the
+Christian white savages of Paxton and Donegal. On the contrary, several
+hundred men from the same region, armed with rifles and hatchets, and clad
+in hunting shirts, marched towards Philadelphia with the avowed purpose of
+killing the Moravian Indians who had found refuge in its vicinity. The city
+was reduced to a state of terror, and Governor Penn, like his predecessors,
+could think of nothing more expedient to do than to invoke the advice and
+assistance of Franklin. He accordingly made Franklin's house his
+headquarters, and freely consulted with him touching every defensive
+measure required by the crisis. Again Franklin formed an association for
+the protection of Philadelphia; and, under his auspices, the citizens of
+Philadelphia were enrolled into nine companies, six of infantry, two of
+horse, and one of artillery. "Governor Penn," he afterwards declared in a
+letter to Lord Kames, "made my house for some time his headquarters, and
+did everything by my advice; so that, for about forty-eight hours, I was a
+very great man; as I had been once some years before, in a time of public
+danger." On came the insurgents until they reached Germantown, seven miles
+from the city. Here they were met by four citizens, of whom Franklin was
+one, who had been requested by the Governor and his Council to confer with
+them. While the conference was pending, Franklin's regiment, supported by a
+detachment of King's troops, remained in the city under arms, and even
+young Quakers labored incessantly to complete the intrenchments around the
+barracks, in which the menaced Indians with their Moravian shepherd had
+been placed. Indeed, now that the waves of the Presbyterian invasion were
+lapping his own doorsill, the Quaker of every age in Philadelphia appears
+to have entirely lost sight of the duty of non-resistance. The conference
+satisfied the insurgents that graver work was ahead of them than that of
+slaying and scalping old men, women and children, and they retraced their
+steps. "The fighting face we put on," said Franklin, in his letter to Lord
+Kames, "and the reasonings we used with the insurgents,... having turned
+them back and restored quiet to the city, I became a less man than ever;
+for I had, by these transactions, made myself many enemies among the
+populace." He had, indeed, but not one whose enmity was not more honorable
+to him than the friendship of even all his host of friends.
+
+Nor did the eagerness of Franklin to bring the Paxton assassins to justice
+cease with the conference at Germantown. Though pamphlets were sold in the
+streets of Philadelphia lauding their acts, and inveighing against all who
+had assisted in protecting the Moravian Indians, though the Governor
+himself was weak or wicked enough to curry political favor with the party
+which approved the recent outrages, Franklin still inflexibly maintained
+that the law should be vindicated by the condign punishment of the Paxton
+ringleaders. In another place we shall see what his resolute stand cost him
+politically.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[9] In his Plan for Settling Two Western Colonies in North America,
+Franklin says ruefully that, if the English did not flow westwardly into
+the great country back of the Appalachian Mountains on both sides of the
+Ohio, and between that river and the Lakes, which would undoubtedly
+(perhaps in less than another century) become a populous and powerful
+dominion, and a great accession of power either to England or France, the
+French, with the aid of the Indians, would, by cutting off new means of
+subsistence, discourage marriages among the English, and keep them from
+increasing; thus (if the expression might be allowed) killing thousands of
+their children before they were born.
+
+[10] The existence of so much evil and misery in the world was a
+stumbling-block to Franklin as it has been to so many other human beings.
+In a letter to Jane Mecom, dated Dec. 30, 1770, he told her that he had
+known in London some forty-five years before a printer's widow, named
+Ilive, who had required her son by her will to deliver publicly in Salter's
+Hall a solemn discourse in support of the proposition that this world is
+the true Hell, or place of punishment for the spirits who have transgressed
+in a better place and are sent here to suffer for their sins as animals of
+all sorts. "In fact," Franklin continued, "we see here, that every lower
+animal has its enemy, with proper inclinations, faculties, and weapons, to
+terrify, wound, and destroy it; and that men, who are uppermost, are devils
+to one another; so that, on the established doctrine of the goodness and
+justice of the great Creator, this apparent state of general and
+systematical mischief seemed to demand some such supposition as Mrs.
+Ilive's, to account for it consistently with the honour of the Deity."
+
+[11] The American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting
+Useful Knowledge was formed in 1769 by the union of the Philosophical
+Society founded by Franklin, which, after languishing for many years, was
+revived in 1767, and The American Society Held at Philadelphia for the
+Promotion of Useful Knowledge; and Franklin, though absent in England, was
+elected its first President.
+
+[12] As a token of his sense of obligation to the instruction derived by
+him in his boyhood from a free Boston grammar school, Franklin bequeathed
+the sum of one hundred pounds sterling to the free schools of that city,
+subject to the condition that it was to be invested, and that the interest
+produced by it was to be annually laid out in silver medals, to be awarded
+as prizes.
+
+[13] In an earlier letter to James Parker, Franklin commented on the
+"Dutch" immigration into Pennsylvania very much as a Californian was
+afterwards in the habit of doing on the Chinese immigration to our Pacific
+coast. The "Dutch" under-lived, and were thereby enabled, he said, "to
+under-work and under-sell the English." In his essay on _The Increase of
+Mankind_, he asked: "Why should the _Palatine Boors_ be suffered to swarm
+into our Settlements, and, by herding together, establish their Language
+and Manners, to the Exclusion of ours?" Expressions in his letter to
+Jackson, which we do not mention in our text, make it manifest enough that
+he gravely doubted whether the German population of Pennsylvania could be
+relied upon to assist actively in the defence of the Province in the event
+of its being invaded by the French. However, after suggesting some means of
+improving the situation, he is compelled to conclude with these words: "I
+say, I am not against the Admission of Germans in general, for they have
+their Virtues. Their Industry and Frugality are exemplary. They are
+excellent Husbandmen; and contribute greatly to the Improvement of a
+Country."
+
+[14] Another sidelight upon the character of Franklin in his boyhood is
+found in connection with the caution in regard to England that he gave to
+Robert Morris in 1782, when the Revolutionary War was coming to an end.
+"That nation," he said, "is changeable. And though somewhat humbled at
+present, a little success may make them as insolent as ever. I remember
+that, when I was a boxing boy, it was allowed, even after an adversary said
+he had enough, to give him a rising blow. Let ours be a douser."
+
+[15] Franklin certainly set an example on this occasion of the vigilant
+regard to the future which he afterwards enjoined in such a picturesque way
+upon Temple, when he was counselling the latter not to let the season of
+youth slip by him unimproved by diligence in his studies. "The Ancients,"
+he said, "painted _Opportunity_ as an old Man with Wings to his Feet &
+Shoulders, a great Lock of Hair on the forepart of his Head, but bald
+behind; whence comes our old saying, _Take Time by the Forelock_; as much
+as to say, when it is past, there is no means of pulling it back again; as
+there is no Lock behind to take hold of for that purpose." The advice of
+similar tenor in a somewhat later letter from Franklin to Temple has a
+touch of poetry about it. "If this Season is neglected," he said, "it will
+be like cutting off the Spring from the Year." So quick was the sympathy of
+Franklin always with youthful feelings and interests that he never grew too
+old for the application to him of Emerson's highly imaginative lines,
+
+    "The old wine darkling in the cask,
+    Feels the bloom on the living vine."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+FRANKLIN'S FAMILY RELATIONS
+
+
+When we turn from Franklin's philanthropic zeal and public spirit to his
+more intimate personal and social traits, we find much that is admirable,
+not a little that is lovable, and some things with quite a different
+aspect. His vow of self-correction, when he had sowed his wild oats and
+reaped the usual harvest of smut and tares, was, as we have intimated,
+retrospective as well as prospective. He violated his obligations, as his
+brother James' apprentice, by absconding from Boston before his time was
+up, and added aggravation to his original offence by returning to Boston,
+and exhibiting his genteel new suit, watch and silver money to his
+brother's journeymen, while he descanted to them upon the land of milk and
+honey from which he had brought back these indicia of prosperity; his
+brother all the time standing by grum and sullen, and struggling with the
+emotions which afterwards caused him to say to his stepmother, when she
+expressed her wish that the brothers might become reconciled, that Benjamin
+had insulted him in such a manner before his people that he could never
+forget or forgive it. In this, however, he was mistaken, as Franklin
+tersely observes in the _Autobiography_. Some ten years subsequently, on
+his return from one of his decennial visits to Boston, Franklin stopped
+over at Newport, to see this brother, who had removed thither, and he
+found him in a state of rapid physical decline. The former differences were
+forgotten, the meeting was very cordial and affectionate, and, in
+compliance with a request, then made of him by James, Franklin took James'
+son, a boy of ten, as an apprentice, into his own printing house at
+Philadelphia. Indeed, he did more than he was asked to do; for he sent the
+boy for some years to school before putting him to work. Afterwards, when
+the nephew became old enough to launch out into business on his own
+account, Franklin helped him to establish himself as a printer in New
+England with gifts of printing materials and a loan of more than two
+hundred pounds. Thus was the first _deleatur_ of pricking conscience duly
+heeded by Franklin, the Printer; the first _erratum_ revised. And it is but
+just to him to say that the _erratum_, if the whole truth were told, was
+probably more venial than his forgiving spirit allowed him to fully
+disclose. Under the indentures of apprenticeship, it was as incumbent upon
+the older brother to abstain from excessive punishment as it was upon the
+younger not to abscond. Franklin, in the _Autobiography_, while stating
+that James was passionate and often beat him, also states that James was
+otherwise not an ill-natured man, and finds extenuation for his brother's
+violence in the fear of the latter that the success of the Silence Dogood
+letters might make the young apprentice vain, and in the fact that the
+young apprentice himself was perhaps too saucy and provoking. Franklin
+almost always had a word of generous palliation for anyone who had wronged
+him. The chances, we think, distinctly are that the real nature of the
+relations between James and Benjamin are to be found not in the text of the
+_Autobiography_ but in the note to it in which its author declares that the
+harsh and tyrannical treatment of his brother might have been a means of
+impressing him with that aversion to arbitrary power which had stuck to him
+through his whole life. Nor should it be forgotten that the younger
+brother did not bring the Canaan south of the Delaware, nor the watch and
+other evidences of the good fortune that he had found there, to the
+attention of James' journeymen until James, whom he had called to see at
+the printing house, where these journeymen were employed, had received him
+coldly, looked him all over, and turned to his work again. There is the
+fact besides, if Franklin is to be permitted to testify in his own behalf,
+that, when the disputes between the two brothers were submitted to their
+father, whose good sense and fairness frequently led him to be chosen as an
+arbitrator between contending parties, the judgment was generally in
+Benjamin's favor; either, he says, because he was usually in the right (he
+fancied) or else was a better pleader. Another _erratum_ was revised when,
+after plighting his troth to Deborah Read on the eve of his first voyage to
+London, and then forgetting it in the distractions of the English capital,
+he subsequently married her. Still another was revised when he discharged
+the debt to Mr. Vernon, which occasioned him so much mental distress. The
+debt arose in this manner: On his return journey to Philadelphia, after his
+first visit to Boston, he was asked by Mr. Vernon, a friend of his brother,
+John, who resided at Newport, to collect the sum of thirty-five pounds
+currency due to Mr. Vernon in Pennsylvania, and to keep it until Mr. Vernon
+gave him instructions about its remittance. The money was duly collected by
+Franklin on his way to Philadelphia, but unfortunately for him his youthful
+friend Collins, before his departure from Boston, had decided to remove to
+Pennsylvania, too, and proceeding from Boston to New York in advance of
+him, was his companion from New York to Philadelphia. While awaiting
+Franklin's arrival at New York, Collins drank up and gambled away all his
+own money. The consequence was that Franklin had to pay his lodging for him
+at New York and defray all his subsequent expenses. The journey to
+Philadelphia could be completed only with the aid of the Vernon debt, and,
+after the two reached Philadelphia, Collins, being unable to obtain any
+employment because of his bad habits, and knowing that Franklin had the
+balance of the Vernon collection in his hands, repeatedly borrowed sums
+from him, promising to repay them as soon as he was earning something
+himself. By these loans the amount collected for Mr. Vernon was finally
+reduced to such an extent that Franklin was at a painful loss to know what
+he should do in case Mr. Vernon demanded payment. The thought of his
+situation haunted him for some years to come, but happily for him Mr.
+Vernon was an exception to the saying of Poor Richard that creditors are a
+superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times. He kindly made
+no demand upon Franklin for quite a long period, and in the end merely put
+him in mind of the debt, though not pressing him to pay it; whereupon
+Franklin wrote to him, we are told by the _Autobiography_, an ingenuous
+letter of acknowledgment, craved his forbearance a little longer, which was
+granted, and later on, as soon as he was able to do so, paid the principal
+with interest and many thanks. Just why Mr. Vernon was such an indulgent
+creditor the _Autobiography_ does not reveal. If, as Franklin subsequently
+wrote to Strahan, the New England people were artful to get into debt and
+but poor pay, Mr. Vernon at any rate furnishes evidence that they could be
+generous lenders. Perhaps Mr. Vernon simply had his favorable
+prepossessions like many other men who knew Franklin in his early life, or
+perhaps he had some of Franklin's own quick sympathy with the trials and
+struggles of youth, and was not averse to lending him the use, even though
+compulsory, of a little capital, or, perhaps, he was restrained from
+dunning Franklin by his friendship for Franklin's brother.
+
+The _erratum_ into which Franklin fell in writing and publishing his
+free-thinking dissertation on _Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_,
+which was dedicated to his friend Ralph, he revised, as we have seen, by
+destroying all the copies upon which he could lay his hands and also, we
+might add, by a counter pamphlet in which he recanted and combated his own
+reasonings. In his unreflecting hours he mixed the poison; in his more
+reflective hours he compounded the antidote.
+
+Franklin was guilty of another _erratum_ when Ralph found that it was one
+thing to have an essay on Liberty dedicated to him by a friend and another
+thing to have the friend taking liberties with his mistress. This _erratum_
+was never revised by Franklin unless upon principles of revision with which
+Ralph himself at least could not find fault, as the history of the
+_erratum_ is told in the _Autobiography_. The young woman in this case was
+a milliner, genteelly bred, sensible, lively, and of most pleasing
+conversation. Ralph, who, until Pope brought him back with a disillusioning
+thud to the dull earth by a shaft from the _Dunciad_, imagined himself to
+be endowed with an exalted poetic genius, read plays to her in the
+evenings, and finally formed a _liaison_ with her. They lived together for
+a time, but, finding that her income was not sufficient to sustain them
+both and the child that was the fruit of the connection, he took charge of
+a country school where he taught ten or a dozen boys how to read and write
+at sixpence each a week, assumed Franklin's name because he did not wish
+the world to know that he had ever been so meanly employed, recommended his
+mistress to Franklin's protection, and, in spite of every dissuasive that
+Franklin could bring to bear upon him, including a copy of a great part of
+one of Young's satires, which set forth in a strong light the folly of
+courting the Muses, sent to Franklin from time to time profuse specimens of
+the _magnum opus_ over which he was toiling. In the meantime, the
+milliner, having suffered on Ralph's account in both reputation and estate,
+was occasionally compelled to obtain pecuniary assistance from Franklin.
+The result was that he grew fond of her society, and, presuming upon his
+importance to her, attempted familiarities with her which she repelled with
+a proper resentment, and communicated to Ralph, who, on his next return to
+London, let Franklin know that he considered all his obligations to him
+cancelled. As these obligations consisted wholly of sums that Franklin had
+lent to Ralph, or advanced on Ralph's account from time to time out of his
+earnings from his vocation as a printer, Franklin, we suppose, might fairly
+conclude, in accordance with Ralph's method of reasoning, that he had
+revised the _erratum_ by duly paying the penalty for it in terms of money,
+even if in no other form of atonement. At the time, he consoled himself
+with the reflection that Ralph's cancellation of obligations, which he had
+no means of paying, was not very material, and that Ralph's withdrawal of
+his friendship at least meant relief from further pecuniary loans. He does
+not say so, but exemption from further instalments of the laboring epic
+must have counted for something too. The cross-currents of human existence,
+however, were destined to again bring Ralph and Franklin into personal
+intercourse. It was after Franklin had arrived in England in 1757 as the
+agent of the People of Pennsylvania and Ralph, not a Homer or Milton, as he
+had fondly hoped to be, but a historian, pamphleteer and newspaper writer
+of no contemptible abilities, had gotten beyond the necessity of doing what
+Pope in a truculent note to the _Dunciad_ had charged him with doing,
+namely, writing on both sides of a controversy on one and the same day, and
+afterwards publicly justifying the morality of his conduct. Indeed, he had
+gotten far enough beyond it at this stage of his life to be even a sufferer
+from the gout, and, remarkable as it may seem, in the light of the manner
+in which he had paid his indebtedness to Franklin, to be equal to the
+nicety of returning to the Duke of Bedford one hundred and fifty of the two
+hundred pounds that the Duke of Bedford had contributed to the support of
+the _Protestor_, a newspaper conducted by Ralph in the interest of the Duke
+of Bedford against the Duke of Newcastle. The _Autobiography_ states that
+from Governor Denny Franklin had previously learned that Ralph was still
+alive, that he was esteemed one of the best political writers in England,
+had been employed in the dispute between Prince Frederick and the King, and
+had obtained a pension of three hundred a year; that his reputation was
+indeed small as a poet, Pope having damned his poetry in the _Dunciad_, but
+that his prose was thought as good as any man's. A few months after
+receiving this information, Franklin arrived in England, and Ralph called
+on him to renew the tie sundered for some thirty years. One sequel was a
+letter from Franklin to his wife in which he wrote to her as follows:
+
+     I have seen Mr. Ralph, and delivered him Mrs.
+     Garrigues's letter. He is removed from Turnham Green,
+     when I return, I will tell you everything relating to
+     him, in the meantime I must advise Mrs. Garrigue not to
+     write to him again, till I send her word how to direct
+     her letters, he being unwilling, for some good reasons,
+     that his present wife should know anything of his
+     having any connections in America. He expresses great
+     affection for his daughter and grandchildren. He has
+     but one child here.
+
+Other _errata_ of Franklin were due to the amorous disposition over which
+he took such little pains to draw the veil of delicacy and reserve. Sexual
+ardor has doubtless exerted quite as imperious a dominion in youth over
+some other great men, but none of them have been so willing to confess the
+overbearing force of its importunities. Speaking of the time prior to his
+marriage, when he was twenty-four years of age, Franklin says in the
+_Autobiography_: "In the meantime, that hard-to-be-governed passion of
+youth hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my
+way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides
+a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I
+dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it." It was to his son,
+strangely enough, that this chapter of his personal history was unfolded.
+Franklin was writing a word of warning as well as of hope for his
+posterity, and he painted himself, as Cromwell wished to be painted, wart
+and all.
+
+For such _errata_ as these there was no atonement to be made except in the
+sense of self-degradation likely, in the case of every self-respecting man,
+to follow the illicit gratification of strong physical appetites, and this
+Franklin had too ingenuous a way of looking at sexual irregularity to feel
+very acutely. The only real reinforcement that a nature like his could find
+against what Ferdinand in the _Tempest_ calls the suggestions of "our
+worser genius" was the sedative influence of marriage, its duties, its
+responsibilities, and its calm equable flow of mutual affection; and
+Franklin was early married and found in marriage and the human interests
+that cluster about it an uncommon measure of satisfaction and happiness.
+
+It is an old, old story, that story of Benjamin and Deborah told in the
+_Autobiography_. It began on the memorable Sunday morning, when the runaway
+apprentice, shortly after landing at the Market Street wharf in
+Philadelphia, hungry, dirty from his journey, dressed in his working
+clothes, and with his great flap pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings,
+passed up Market Street before the eyes of his future wife, which were alit
+with merriment as he passed, clasping a great puffy Philadelphia roll under
+each arm and eating a third. She saw him from her father's door as he went
+by, presenting this "awkward, ridiculous appearance," and little realized
+that the ludicrous apparition which she saw was not only to be her lifelong
+consort, but, stranger as he then was to every human being in Philadelphia,
+was in coming years to confer upon that city no small part of the heritage
+of his own imperishable renown.
+
+The pair were soon brought into close relations with each other. Keimer,
+the printer, with whom Benjamin found employment, could not lodge Benjamin
+in his own house for lack of furniture; so he found lodging for him with
+Mr. Read, Keimer's landlord and Deborah's father. And Benjamin was now in a
+very different plight from that in which she had first seen him; for he was
+earning a livelihood for himself, and his chest with better clothes in it
+than those that he had on when he was eating his roll under such
+difficulties had come around to him by sea. He was not long in forming "a
+great respect and affection" for Deborah, which he had some reason to
+believe were reciprocated by her. Courtship followed, but he was on the
+point of setting out for London on the fool's errand which Governor Keith
+had planned for him, he and Deborah were but a little over eighteen, and
+her mother thought that it would be more convenient for the marriage to
+take place on his return, after he had purchased in London the printing
+outfit that he was to buy upon the credit of Governor Keith, who really had
+no credit. "Perhaps, too," adds Franklin, "she thought my expectations not
+so well founded as I imagined them to be."
+
+The fateful day came when the annual ship between London and Philadelphia
+was to sail. Of the fond parting we have no record except Franklin's old
+fashioned statement that in leaving he "interchang'd some promises with
+Miss Read." These promises, so far as he was concerned, were soon lost to
+memory in the lethean cares, diversions and dissipations of eighteenth
+century London. By degrees, Franklin tells us, he forgot his engagements
+with Miss Read, and never wrote more than one letter to her, and that to
+let her know that he was not likely to return soon. "This," he says, "was
+another of the great _errata_ of my life, which I should wish to correct if
+I were to live it over again." Another of those _errata_ of his life, he
+might have added, in regard to which, like his use of Mr. Vernon's money,
+his approaches to Ralph's mistress, and his commerce with lewd wenches, the
+world, with which silence often passes as current as innocence, would never
+have been the wiser, if he had not chosen, as so few men have been
+sufficiently courageous and disinterested to do, to make beacons of his own
+sins for others to steer their lives by. He did return, as we know, but
+Miss Read was Miss Read no longer. In his absence, her friends, despairing
+of his return after the receipt of his letter by Deborah (how mercilessly
+he divulges it all), had persuaded her to marry another, one Rogers, a
+potter, "a worthless fellow, tho' an excellent workman, which was the
+temptation to her friends." With him, however, Franklin tells us, "she was
+never happy, and soon parted from him, refusing to cohabit with him or bear
+his name, it being now said that he had another wife." One more concise
+statement from Rogers's marital successor, and Rogers disappears as
+suddenly as if shot through a stage trap-door. "He got into debt, ran away
+in 1727 or 1728, went to the West Indies, and died there." At that time,
+the West Indies seem to have been the dust-pan into which all the human
+refuse of colonial America was swept.
+
+In a letter to his friend Catherine Ray, in 1755, Franklin told her that
+the cords of love and friendship had in times past drawn him further than
+from Rhode Island to Philadelphia, "even back from England to
+Philadelphia." This statement, we fear, if not due to the facility with
+which every good husband is apt to forget that his wife was not the first
+woman that he fell in love with, must be classed with Franklin's statement
+in the _Autobiography_ that Sir Hans Sloane persuaded him to let him add an
+asbestos purse owned by Franklin to his museum of curiosities, his
+statement in a letter to his son that he was never sued until a bill in
+chancery was filed against him after his removal from the office of Deputy
+Postmaster-General, and his statement made at different times that he never
+asked for a public office. We know from Franklin's own pen that it was he
+who solicited from Sir Hans Sloane the purchase, and not Sir Hans Sloane
+who solicited from him the sale, of the asbestos purse; we know from the
+_Autobiography_ that he was sued by some of the farmers to whom he gave his
+bond of indemnity at the time of Braddock's expedition long before his
+removal from the office of Deputy Postmaster-General, and we know, too, as
+the reader has already been told, that he sought Benger's office, as Deputy
+Postmaster-General of the Colonies, before death had done more than cast
+the shadow of his approach over Benger's face. There is a vast difference
+between the situation of a man, who relies upon his memory for the
+scattered incidents of his past life, and that of a biographer whose field
+of vision takes them all in at one glance. It is true that Franklin did not
+know, before he left London, that Deborah had married, but the reasons he
+gives in the _Autobiography_ for desiring to return to Philadelphia are
+only that he had grown tired of London, remembered with pleasure the happy
+months that he had spent in Pennsylvania, and wished again to see it. The
+fact is that he did not renew his courtship of Deborah until the worthless
+Rogers had left the coast clear by fleeing to the West Indies, and he
+himself had in a measure been thrown back upon her by rebuffs in other
+directions. His circuitous proposal after his return to a young relative of
+Mrs. Godfrey, who with her husband and children occupied a part of his
+house, was, as described in the _Autobiography_ more like a negotiation for
+a printing outfit than ordinary wooing. If the love that he brought to
+this affair had been the only kind of which he was capable, his most ardent
+biographer, and every biographer seems to adore him more or less in spite
+of occasional sharp shocks to adoration, might well ask whether his love
+was not as painfully repellent as his system of morals. The incident would
+lose some of its hard, homely outlines if clothed in any but the coarse,
+drab vesture of plain-spoken words with which Franklin clothes it.
+
+     Mrs. Godfrey [he says in the _Autobiography_] projected
+     a match for me with a relation's daughter, took
+     opportunities of bringing us often together, till a
+     serious courtship on my part ensu'd, the girl being in
+     herself very deserving. The old folks encourag'd me by
+     continual invitations to supper, and by leaving us
+     together, till at length it was time to explain. Mrs.
+     Godfrey manag'd our little treaty. I let her know that
+     I expected as much money with their daughter as would
+     pay off my remaining debt for the printing house, which
+     I believe was not then above a hundred pounds. She
+     brought me word they had no such sum to spare; I said
+     they might mortgage their house in the loan-office. The
+     answer to this, after some days, was, that they did not
+     approve the match; that, on inquiry of Bradford, they
+     had been informed the printing business was not a
+     profitable one; the types would soon be worn out, and
+     more wanted; that S. Keimer and D. Harry had failed one
+     after the other, and I should probably soon follow
+     them; and, therefore, I was forbidden the house, and
+     the daughter shut up.
+
+     Whether this was a real change of sentiment or only
+     artifice, on a supposition of our being too far engaged
+     in aflection to retract, and therefore that we should
+     steal a marriage, which would leave them at liberty to
+     give or withhold what they pleas'd, I know not; but I
+     suspected the latter, resented it, and went no more.
+     Mrs. Godfrey brought me afterward some more favorable
+     accounts of their disposition, and would have drawn me
+     on again; but I declared absolutely my resolution to
+     have nothing more to do with that family. This was
+     resented by the Godfreys; we differ'd, and they
+     removed, leaving me the whole house.
+
+This affair, however, Franklin tells us, turned his thoughts to marriage.
+He accordingly looked the matrimonial field, or rather market, over, and,
+to use his own euphemism, made overtures of acquaintance in other places;
+but he soon found, he further tells us, that, the business of a printer
+being generally thought a poor one, he was not to expect money with a wife
+unless with such a one as he should not otherwise think agreeable. Then it
+was that his heart came back to Deborah, sitting forlorn in the weeds of
+separation, though not unquestionably in the weeds of widowhood; for it was
+not entirely certain that Rogers was dead. A friendly intercourse had been
+maintained all along between Franklin and the members of her family ever
+since he had first lodged under their roof, and he had often been invited
+to their home, and had given them sound practical advice. It was natural
+enough, therefore, that he should pity Miss Read's unfortunate situation
+(he never calls her Mrs. Rogers), dejected and averse to society as she
+was, that he should reproach himself with his inconstancy as the cause of
+her unhappiness, though her mother was good enough to take the whole blame
+on herself because she had prevented their marriage before he went off to
+London, and was responsible for the other match, and that compassion and
+self-accusation should have been gradually succeeded by tenderness and
+rekindled affection. The result was a marriage as little attended by
+prudential considerations as any that we could readily imagine; and the
+words in which Franklin chronicles the event are worthy of exact
+reproduction:
+
+     Our mutual affection was revived, but there were now
+     great objections to our union. The match was indeed
+     looked upon as invalid, a preceding wife being said to
+     be living in England; but this could not easily be
+     prov'd, because of the distance; and, tho' there was a
+     report of his death, it was not certain. Then, tho' it
+     should be true, he had left many debts, which his
+     successor might be call'd upon to pay. We ventured,
+     however, over all these difficulties, and I took her to
+     wife, September 1st, 1730. None of the inconveniences
+     happened that we had apprehended; she proved a good and
+     faithful helpmate, assisted me much by attending the
+     shop; we throve together, and have ever mutually
+     endeavour'd to make each other happy.
+
+This paragraph from the _Autobiography_ does not contain the only tribute
+paid by Franklin to his wife as a faithful helpmeet. Elsewhere in that work
+we find this tribute too: "We have an English proverb that says, '_He that
+would thrive, must ask his wife_.' It was lucky for me that I had one as
+much dispos'd to industry and frugality as myself. She assisted me
+chearfully in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop,
+purchasing old linen rags for the paper-makers, etc., etc." His letters are
+of the same tenor. In one to her after the repeal of the Stamp Act, he
+wrote, "Had the Trade between the two Countries totally ceas'd, it was a
+Comfort to me to recollect, that I had once been cloth'd from Head to Foot
+in Woolen and Linnen of my Wife's Manufacture." Many years after Deborah's
+death, he used these words in a letter to Miss Alexander: "Frugality is an
+enriching Virtue; a Virtue I never could acquire in myself; but I was once
+lucky enough to find it in a Wife, who thereby became a Fortune to me. Do
+you possess it? If you do, and I were 20 Years younger, I would give your
+Father 1,000 Guineas for you." And then he adds with the playful humor
+which came to him as naturally as a carol to the throat of a blithe bird:
+"I know you would be worth more to me as a Mennagere, but I am covetous,
+and love good Bargains." Win an industrious and prudent wife, he declared
+on another occasion, and, "if she does not _bring_ a fortune, she will
+help to _make one_." And when his daughter Sally married Richard Bache, he
+wrote to her that she could be as serviceable to her husband in keeping a
+store, if it was where she dwelt, "as your Mother was to me: For you are
+not deficient in Capacity, and I hope are not too proud." Sixteen years
+after his marriage, in a rhyming preface to Poor Richard's _Almanac_, he
+even penned this grateful jingle:
+
+    "Thanks to kind Readers and a careful Wife,
+    With plenty bless'd, I lead an easy Life."
+
+Careful, however, as she had been in her earlier years, Deborah spent
+enough, as she became older and more accustomed to easy living, to make him
+feel that he should say a word of caution to her when the news reached him
+in London that Sally was about to marry a young man who was not only
+without fortune but soon to be involved in business failure. He advises her
+not to make an "expensive feasting Wedding," but to conduct everything with
+the economy required by their circumstances at that time; his partnership
+with Hall having expired, and his loss of the Post Office not being
+unlikely. In that event, he said, they would be reduced to their rents and
+interest on money for a subsistence, which would by no means afford the
+chargeable housekeeping and entertainments that they had been used to.
+Though he himself lived as frugally as possible, making no dinners for
+anybody, and contenting himself with a single dish, when he dined at home,
+yet such was the dearness of living in London in every article that his
+expenses amazed him.
+
+     I see too [he continued], by the Sums you have received
+     in my Absence, that yours are very great, and I am very
+     sensible that your Situation naturally brings you a
+     great many Visitors, which occasion an Expence not
+     easily to be avoided especially when one has been long
+     in the Practice and Habit of it. If we were young
+     enough to begin Business again [he remarks a little
+     later in this letter], it might be another Matter,--but
+     I doubt we are past it; and Business not well managed
+     ruins one faster than no Business. In short, with
+     Frugality and prudent Care we may subsist decently on
+     what we have, and leave it entire to our Children:--but
+     without such Care, we shall not be able to keep it
+     together; it will melt away like Butter in the
+     Sunshine; and we may live long enough to feel the
+     miserable Consequences of our Indiscretion.
+
+Eighteen months later, with studied good-feeling, he tells her that, if he
+does not send her a watch, it will be because the balance on his Post
+Office account was greatly against him, owing to the large sums that she
+had received. But Mrs. Franklin was failing, and a few years later, when
+her memory and other faculties had been enfeebled by paralysis, he found it
+necessary to give a keener edge to admonition in one of his letters to her.
+Referring to her disgust with the Messrs. Foxcroft, because they had not
+supplied her with money to pay for a bill of exchange for thirty pounds, he
+opened his mind to her with almost cruel bluntness as follows:
+
+     That you may not be offended with your Neighbours
+     without Cause; I must acquaint you with what it seems
+     you did not know, that I had limited them in their
+     Payments to you, to the sum of Thirty Pounds per Month,
+     for the sake of our more easily settling, and to
+     prevent Mistakes. This making 360 Pounds a Year, I
+     thought, as you have no House Rent to pay yourself, and
+     receive the Rents of 7 or 8 Houses besides, might be
+     sufficient for the Maintenance of your Family. I judged
+     such a Limitation the more necessary, because you never
+     have sent me any Account of your Expences, and think
+     yourself ill-used if I desire it; and because I know
+     you were not very attentive to Money-matters in your
+     best Days, and I apprehend that your Memory is too much
+     impair'd for the Management of unlimited Sums, without
+     Danger of injuring the future Fortune of your daughter
+     and Grandson. If out of more than 500 L a Year, you
+     could have sav'd enough to buy those Bills it might
+     have been well to continue purchasing them. But I do
+     not like your going about among my Friends to borrow
+     Money for that purpose, especially as it is not at all
+     necessary. And therefore I once more request that you
+     would decline buying them for the future. And I hope
+     you will no longer take it amiss of Messrs. Foxcrofts
+     that they did not supply you. If what you receive is
+     really insufficient for your support satisfy me by
+     Accounts that it is so, and I shall order more.
+
+Like an incision in the rind of a beech, which spreads wider and wider with
+each passing year, is, as a rule, every human failing, as time goes on, and
+poor Mrs. Franklin, now that senile decay was setting in, seems to have
+been but another confirmation of this truth. But faithful wife that she
+was, after the receipt of this letter from her husband, she was scrupulous
+enough to send him receipts as well as accounts; for in the early part of
+the succeeding year he writes to her: "I take notice of the considerable
+Sums you have paid. I would not have you send me any Receipts. I am
+satisfy'd with the Accounts you give." His letter to her about the
+Foxcrofts was doubtless not more pointed than the occasion required. In no
+scales was the salutary medicine of reproof ever weighed more exactly than
+in his. This letter begins as usual, "My Dear Child," and, after conveying
+its rebuke, lapses into the old happy, domestic strain. "I am much
+pleased," he said, "with the little Histories you give me of your fine boy
+(one of her grandsons) which are confirmed by all that have seen him. I
+hope he will be spared and continue the same Pleasure and Comfort to you,
+and that I shall ere long partake with you in it." One instance, perhaps,
+of inattention to money-matters upon the part of Mrs. Franklin, which
+helped to produce the climax of this letter, was in the case of a certain
+Sarah Broughton, who, if we may judge from a single specimen of her spicy
+humor, was something of a tartar. On July 1, 1766, she wrote to Franklin
+that his wife owed her a certain sum of money and also the price of a bed,
+which she had kept for two years, but now wanted to return, because there
+had been a decline in the price of feathers. She had written, the writer
+said, a letter to Mrs. Franklin on the subject, but had received the reply
+from her "that she did not know me, and that I might write to you she was
+an hegehog." "Now sir," continued Franklin's correspondent, "I don't think
+her a hegehog but in reallity she has shot a great many quills at me, but
+thank Heaven none of them has or can hurt me as I doubt not that your known
+justice will induce you to order the above sum of seven pounds, seven
+shillings payed." The keen eye that Mrs. Franklin had in this instance to
+fluctuations in the market price of an article, which her husband and
+herself had frequently bought and sold at their shop in the past, shows
+plainly enough that, even when she was on the eve of her grand climacteric,
+the thriftier instincts of her early life were not wholly dead. Nor does
+she seem to have reserved all her quills for obdurate creditors. From the
+Diary of Daniel Fisher we obtain the following entry:
+
+     As I was coming down from my chamber this afternoon a
+     gentlewoman was sitting on one of the lowest stairs
+     which were but narrow, and there not being room enough
+     to pass, she rose up and threw herself upon the floor
+     and sat there. Mr. Soumien and his wife gently
+     entreated her to arise and take a chair, but in vain;
+     she would keep her seat, and kept it, I think, the
+     longer for their entreaty. This gentlewoman, whom
+     though I had seen before I did not know, appeared to be
+     Mrs. Franklin. She assumed the airs of extraordinary
+     freedom and great humility, lamented heavily the
+     misfortunes of those who are unhappily infected with a
+     too tender or benevolent disposition, said she believed
+     all the world claimed a privilege of troubling her
+     Pappy (so she usually calls Mr. Franklin) with their
+     calamities and distresses, giving us a general history
+     of many such wretches and their impertinent
+     applications to him.
+
+Just what all this meant is not entirely clear. Perhaps it was only real
+sympathy excited by the harassments to which her husband, whom she
+devotedly loved, was incessantly subjected by his public activity, his
+reputation for wise counsel, and his ever-increasing renown. Perhaps it was
+the mere jealousy of affection inspired by her sense of her own unfitness
+in point of education and intellectual companionship to be the wife of a
+man whose doorstep could be so haunted. After this incident the diarist
+became Franklin's clerk, and lived in his house--a footing which enabled
+him to give us a truer insight than we should otherwise have had as to the
+extent to which William Franklin was at one time a festering thorn in the
+side of Mrs. Franklin.
+
+     Mr. Soumien [Fisher diarizes] had often informed me of
+     great uneasiness and dissatisfaction in Mr. Franklin's
+     family in a manner no way pleasing to me, and which in
+     truth I was unwilling to credit, but as Mrs. Franklin
+     and I of late began to be friendly and sociable I
+     discerned too great grounds for Mr. Soumien's
+     reflection, arising solely from the turbulence and
+     jealousy and pride of her disposition. She suspecting
+     Mr. Franklin for having too great an esteem for his son
+     in prejudice of herself and daughter, a young woman of
+     about 12 or 13 years of age, for whom it was visible
+     Mr. Franklin had no less esteem than for his son young
+     Mr. Franklin. I have often seen him pass to and from
+     his father's apartment upon business (for he does not
+     eat, drink or sleep in the house) without the least
+     compliment between Mrs. Franklin and him or any sort of
+     notice taken of each other, till one day as I was
+     sitting with her in the passage when the young
+     gentleman came by she exclaimed to me (he not hearing):
+     "Mr. Fisher, there goes the greatest villain upon
+     earth." This greatly confounded and perplexed me, but
+     did not hinder her from pursuing her invectives in the
+     foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman.
+
+It is pleasant, however, to state that in time Deborah's dislike for
+William Franklin seems to have considerably abated. In 1767, her husband
+could write to her, "I am glad you go sometimes to Burlington. The Harmony
+you mention in our Family and among our Children gives me great Pleasure."
+And before this letter was written, William Franklin had availed himself of
+an opportunity to testify his dutiful readiness to extend his protection to
+her. It was when she had just taken possession of the new house, built by
+her during her husband's absence in England, and his enemies, availing
+themselves of the brief unpopularity incurred by him through recommending
+his friend, John Hughes, as a stamp collector, had aroused the feeling
+against him in Philadelphia to the point of rendering an attack upon this
+house not improbable. As soon as William Franklin, then Governor of New
+Jersey, heard of the danger, to which his father's wife and daughter were
+exposed, he hastened to Philadelphia to offer them a refuge under his own
+roof at Burlington. Mrs. Franklin permitted her daughter to accept the
+offer, but undauntedly refused to accept it herself. This is her own
+account of the matter to her husband divested of its illiteracy.
+
+     I was for nine days [she said] kept in a continual
+     hurry by people to remove, and Sally was persuaded to
+     go to Burlington for safety. Cousin Davenport came and
+     told me that more than twenty people had told him it
+     was his duty to be with me. I said I was pleased to
+     receive civility from anybody; so he staid with me some
+     time; towards night I said he should fetch a gun or
+     two, as we had none. I sent to ask my brother to come
+     and bring his gun also, so we turned one room into a
+     magazine; I ordered some sort of defense upstairs, such
+     as I could manage myself. I said, when I was advised to
+     remove, that I was very sure you had done nothing to
+     hurt anybody, nor had I given any offense to any person
+     at all, nor would I be made uneasy by anybody; nor
+     would I stir or show the least uneasiness, but if any
+     one came to disturb me I would show a proper
+     resentment. I was told that there were eight hundred
+     men ready to assist any one that should be molested.
+
+Indeed, after his marriage, the correspondence of William Franklin
+indicates that, if the relations of Mrs. Franklin to him were not
+altogether what Franklin would fain have had them, that is the relations of
+Hagar rather than of Sarah, he at least bore himself towards her with a
+marked degree of respectful consideration. His letters to her were
+subscribed, "Your ever dutiful son," and, in a letter to his father, he
+informs him that he and his wife were "on a visit to my mother." When
+Deborah died, he was the "chief mourner" in the funeral procession, and, in
+a subsequent letter to his father, he speaks of her as "my poor old
+mother." After the paralytic stroke, which "greatly affected her memory and
+understanding," William Franklin expressed the opinion that she should have
+"some clever body to take care of her," because, he said, she "becomes
+every day more and more unfit to be left alone." No cleverer body for the
+purpose, of course, could be found than her own daughter, who came with her
+husband to reside with and take care of her. In his letter to Franklin
+announcing her death, William Franklin used these feeling words: "She told
+me when I took leave of her on my removal to Amboy, that she never expected
+to see you unless you returned this winter, for that she was sure she
+should not live till next summer. I heartily wish you had happened to have
+come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment in that respect preyed
+a good deal on her spirits." Poor Richard's _Almanac_ had sayings, it is
+hardly necessary to declare, suitable for such an occasion. "There are
+three faithful friends; an old wife, an old dog, and ready money." "A good
+wife lost is God's gift lost."
+
+In the light of what we have narrated, it is obvious that there were
+occasions in Franklin's nuptial life when it was well that he was a
+philosopher as well as a husband. "You can bear with your own Faults, and
+why not a fault in your Wife?," is a question that he is known to have
+asked at least once, and he did not have to leave his own doorstep to find
+an application for his injunction, "Keep your eyes wide open before
+marriage, half shut afterwards." But if there was defect of temper there
+was never any defect of devotion upon the part of the jealous,
+high-spirited, courageous wife. It is true that she had no place in the
+wider sphere of her husband's existence. She did not concern herself even
+about such a political controversy as that over the Stamp Tax except to say
+like the leal wife she was that she was sure that her husband had not done
+anything to hurt anybody.
+
+     You are very prudent [he said to her on one occasion]
+     not to engage in Party Disputes. Women never should
+     meddle with them except in Endeavour to reconcile their
+     Husbands, Brothers, and Friends, who happen to be of
+     contrary Sides. If your Sex can keep cool, you may be a
+     means of cooling ours the sooner, and restoring more
+     speedily that social Harmony among Fellow-Citizens,
+     that is so desirable after long and bitter Dissensions.
+
+Her interest in her husband's electrical studies probably ceased when he
+wrote to her as follows with reference to the two bells that he had placed
+in his house in such a position as to ring when an iron rod with which they
+were connected was electrified by a storm cloud: "If the ringing of the
+Bells frightens you, tie a Piece of Wire from one Bell to the other, and
+that will conduct the lightning without ringing or snapping, but silently."
+She never became equal even to such social standing as her husband acquired
+for himself by his talents and usefulness in Philadelphia; and she would
+have been a serious clog upon him in the social circles to which he was
+admitted in Great Britain and on the Continent, if her aversion to crossing
+the ocean had not been insurmountable. Her letters are marked by a degree
+of illiteracy that make the task of reading them almost like the task of
+reading an unfamiliar foreign tongue; but it should be recollected that in
+the eighteenth century in America it was entirely possible for a person to
+be at once illiterate and a lady. Even Franklin with his _penchant_ for
+simplified spelling must have felt, after meditating some of Deborah's
+written words, that the orthographical line had to be drawn somewhere. The
+following letter from her to her husband, dated October ye 29, 1773, and
+transcribed exactly as written is neither better nor worse than the rest of
+her epistles to her husband:
+
+     My Dear Child:--I have bin verey much distrest aboute
+     you as I did not aney letter nor one word from you nor
+     did I hear one word from oney bodey that you wrote to
+     so I muste submit and inde (?) to submit to what I am
+     to bair I did write by Capt Folkner to you but he is
+     gon down and when I read it over I did not lik t and so
+     if this donte send it I shante like it as I donte send
+     you aney news now I dont go abrode.
+
+     I shall tell you what Consernes my selef our youngest
+     Grandson is the foreed child us a live he has had the
+     Small Pox and had it very fine and got a brod a gen.
+     Capt All will tell you aboute him and Benj Franklin
+     Beache, but as it is so difficall to writ I have deserd
+     him to tell you, I have sent a squerel for your friend
+     and wish her better luck it is a very fine one I have
+     had very bad luck they one kild and another run a way
+     all thow they are bred up tame I have not a Caige as I
+     donte know where the man lives that makes them my love
+     to Salley Franklin my love to all our Cusins as thow
+     menshond remember me to Mr. and Mrs. Weste doe you ever
+     hear anything of Ninely Evans as was.[16]
+
+
+     I thanke you for the silke and hat it at the womons to
+     make it up but have it put up as you wrote (torn) I
+     thonke it it is very prittey; what was the prise? I
+     desier to give my love to everybodey (torn) I shold
+     love Billey was in town 5 or 6 day when the child was
+     in the small pox Mr. Franklin (torn) not sene him yit I
+     am to tell a verey pritey thing about Ben the players
+     is cume to town and they am to ackte on Munday he
+     wanted to see a play he unkill Beache had given him a
+     doler his mama asked him wuther he wold give it for a
+     ticket, or buy his Brother a neckles he sed his Brother
+     a necklas he is a charmm child as ever was Borne my
+     Grand cheldren are the Best in the world Sally will
+     write I cante write aney mor I am your a feckshone
+     wife,
+
+                              D. FRANKLIN.
+
+But, in spite of the qualifications we have stated, there was a place after
+all, even aside from the joint care of the shop, in which the pair throve
+so swimmingly together, that Deborah could occupy in the thoughts of a man
+with such quick, strong affections, such liberality of mind and such a keen
+interest in the ordinary concerns of life as we find in Franklin. This
+place becomes manifest enough when we read the letters that passed between
+the two.
+
+A more considerate, loving wife than these letters show her to have been it
+would be hard to conceive. Napoleon said of his marshals that only one of
+them loved him, the others loved the Emperor. The devotion of Deborah to
+her husband is all the more noteworthy because it appears to have been but
+slightly, if at all, influenced by his public distinction. Her attachment
+was to Franklin himself, the early lover with whom she had "interchanged
+promises" when but a girl, and who, after deserting her for a time, had
+come back to her in her desolation like day returning to the dark and
+lonely night, the business comrade to whom her industry and prudence had
+proved in effect a fortune, the most admired and beloved man in the circle
+of her social relationships, the patient, dutiful, affectionate friend and
+husband, the father of her daughter and son. Inarticulate as were her
+struggles with syntax and orthography, she was to him the most faithful of
+correspondents. Long after she had reached an age when the fond diminutives
+of early married life are usually exchanged for soberer language, she
+addressed him in her letters as "My Dear Child," and sometimes as "My
+Dearest Dear Child." "I am set down to confab a little with my dear child,"
+was the way in which she began one of her letters, "Adue my dear child, and
+take care of your selef for mamey's sake as well as your one," was the way
+in which she ended another. So frequently, too, did she write to him when
+they were separated from each other that he repeatedly acknowledged in his
+replies her extraordinary constancy as a correspondent; on one occasion
+writing to her: "I think nobody ever had more faithful Correspondents than
+I have in Mr. Hughes and you.... It is impossible for me to get or keep out
+of your Debts." When they had been married over twenty-seven years, he
+thanks her in one of his letters for writing to him so frequently and
+fully, and, when they had been married nearly forty years, he wrote to her
+that he thought that she was the most punctual of all his correspondents.
+And not only did she write often enough to him to elicit these
+acknowledgments, but her letters afford ample evidence that to lack a
+letter from him when she expected one was nothing less than a bitter
+disappointment to her. "I know," he said in a letter to her, "you love to
+have a Line from me by every Packet, so I write, tho' I have little to
+say." We have already seen how her failure to hear from, or of, him led her
+on one occasion to end her plaint with words strong enough to express
+resignation to the very worst trial to which human life is subject. On
+another occasion she wrote: "Aprill 7 this day is Cumpleet 5 munthes senes
+you lefte your one House I did reseve a letter from the Capes senes that
+not one line I due supose that you did write by the packit but that is not
+arived yit." The same hunger for everything that related to him, no matter
+how trivial, finds utterance in her petition in another letter that he
+_wold_ tell her _hough_ his poor _armes was_ and _hough_ he was on his
+_voiag_ and _hough_ he _air_ and _everey_ thing is with him _wich_ she
+wanted _verey_ much to know. Nor did her affection limit itself to letters.
+Whenever he was absent from her and stationary whether at Gnadenhutten, or
+London, his table was never wanting in something to remind him of home and
+of the attentive wife whose domestic virtues in spite of her deficiencies
+of education gave home so much of its meaning.
+
+     We have enjoyed your roast beef [he wrote to her from
+     Gnadenhutten] and this day began on the roast veal. All
+     agree that they are both the best that ever were of the
+     kind. Your citizens, that have their dinners hot and
+     hot, know nothing of good eating. We find it in much
+     greater perfection when the kitchen is four score miles
+     from the dining room.
+
+     The apples are extremely welcome, and do bravely to eat
+     after our salt pork; the minced pies are not yet come
+     to hand, but I suppose we shall find them among the
+     things expected up from Bethlehem on Tuesday; the
+     capillaire is excellent, but none of us having taken
+     cold as yet, we have only tasted it.
+
+Other letters of his written from Gnadenhutten testify that she missed no
+opportunity, so long as he was in the wilderness, to send him something
+better than the salt pork, to which her apples were such a brave sequel, to
+relieve the harsh privations of camp life for himself and his brother
+officers. He tells her in one of his letters that all the gentlemen send
+their compliments. "They drink your health at every meal, having always
+something on the table to put them in mind of you." Even when the Atlantic
+was between them, his life was kept continually refreshed by the same
+bountiful stream of supplies. A menu, made up of the items that she sent
+him, might well have softened the heart of even such a rank, swashbuckling
+enemy of the American Colonies as Dr. Johnson, who loved a good dinner even
+more than he hated the Americans. Dried venison, bacon, smoked beef,
+apples, cranberries, nuts, Indian and buckwheat meal, and peaches, dried
+with and without their skins, are all mentioned in his acknowledgments of
+her favors. Some of the nuts and apples he presented on one occasion to
+Lord and Lady Bathurst "a very great lady, the best woman in England,"
+accompanied by a brief note which borrowed the point of its graceful
+pleasantry from the effort of Great Britain to tax the Colonies without
+their consent:
+
+"Dr. Franklin presents his respectful compliments to Lord Bathurst, with
+some American nuts; and to Lady Bathurst, with some American apples; which
+he prays they will accept as a tribute from that country, small indeed, but
+_voluntary_."
+
+Franklin's first absence from his wife in England lasted some five years,
+his second some ten; and such was Deborah's passionate attachment to him
+that it can scarcely be doubted that, if he had not, during these periods
+of absence, cheated himself and her from year to year with the idea that
+his business would soon permit him to return to Philadelphia, she would
+have joined him despite her aversion to the sea. This aversion was natural
+enough under the maritime conditions of that time; for even Franklin, whose
+numerous transatlantic voyages were usually attended by fair weather, and
+who was an uncommonly resourceful sailor, left behind him the statement
+that he never crossed the ocean without vowing that he would do so no
+more.[17] As it was, the frequently recurring expectation upon her part
+that a few months more would restore her husband to his home checked any
+thought that she may have had of making a voyage to England. There is no
+evidence that she ever harbored any such intention. An interesting feature
+of Franklin's life in England in his maturer years is the effort of his
+friend Strahan to induce Mrs. Franklin to come over to that country with
+Sally and to take up her permanent residence there with her husband. As to
+Sally, it began with the half jocular, half serious, proposal from Franklin
+to Strahan, before the former left Pennsylvania for London in 1757, that
+Sally, then but a mere child, and Strahan's son should make a match of it.
+"Please to acquaint him," Franklin asked of Strahan on one occasion, after
+saying that he was glad to hear so good a character of his son-in-law,
+"that his spouse grows finely and will probably have an agreeable person.
+That with the best natural disposition in the world, she discovers daily
+the seeds and tokens of industry, economy, and, in short, of every female
+virtue, which her parents will endeavour to cultivate for him." Some years
+later he added that Sally was indeed a very good girl, affectionate,
+dutiful and industrious, had one of the best hearts, and though not a wit,
+was, for one of her years, by no means deficient in understanding. Many
+years later, after time and the cares of motherhood had told on her, a keen
+observer, Manasseh Cutler, is so ungallant as to speak of this daughter as
+"a very gross and rather homely lady," but there is evidence that, even if
+she was never the superbly handsome woman that James Parton says she was,
+yet in the soft bloom of her young womanhood the prediction of her father
+that she would have an agreeable person was unquestionably fulfilled.
+
+When Franklin passed over to England as the agent of the people of
+Pennsylvania, Strahan became so fond of him that an earnest effort to fix
+the whole family in England as a permanent place of residence followed
+almost as a matter of course, and he not only formally opened up his
+feelings on the subject to Franklin but indited a letter to Mrs. Franklin
+which he appears to have believed would prove an irresistible masterpiece
+of persuasive eloquence. This letter is one of the topics upon which
+Franklin repeatedly touches in his correspondence with Deborah. In a letter
+to her of January 14, 1758, he tells her that their friend Strahan had
+offered to lay him a considerable wager that a letter that Strahan had
+written would bring her immediately over to England, but that he had told
+Strahan that he would not pick his pocket, for he was sure that there was
+no inducement strong enough to prevail with her to cross the seas. Later he
+wrote to her, "Your Answer to Mr. Strahan was just what it should be. I was
+much pleas'd with it. He fancy'd his Rhetoric and Art would certainly bring
+you over." Finding that he was unable himself to persuade Mrs. Franklin to
+settle down in England, Strahan urged Franklin to try his hand, and the
+letter in which Franklin reports this fact to his wife makes it apparent
+enough that Strahan had the matter deeply at heart.
+
+     He was very urgent with me [says Franklin] to stay in
+     England and prevail with you to remove hither with
+     Sally. He propos'd several advantageous Schemes to me,
+     which appear'd reasonably founded. His Family is a very
+     agreeable one; Mrs. Strahan a sensible and good Woman,
+     the Children of amiable Characters, and particularly
+     the young Man (who is) sober, ingenious and
+     industrious, and a (desirable) Person. In Point of
+     Circumstances there can be no Objection; Mr. Strahan
+     being (now) living in a Way as to lay up a Thousand
+     Pounds every Year from the Profits of his Business,
+     after maintaining his Family and paying all Charges. I
+     gave him, however, two Reasons why I could not think of
+     removing hither, One, my Affection to Pennsilvania and
+     long established Friendships and other connections
+     there: The other, your invincible Aversion to crossing
+     the Seas. And without removing hither, I could not
+     think of parting with my Daughter to such a Distance. I
+     thank'd him for the Regard shown us in the Proposal,
+     but gave him no Expectation that I should forward the
+     Letters. So you are at liberty to answer or not, as you
+     think proper. Let me however know your Sentiments. You
+     need not deliver the Letter to Sally, if you do not
+     think it proper.
+
+She did answer, but we are left to infer from a subsequent letter from
+Franklin to her, in which he alludes to this letter of hers, that, if
+Strahan was disappointed by his failure to bring about the migration of the
+Franklins, his disappointment was largely swallowed up in the shock
+experienced by his literary vanity in finding that his elaborate appeal had
+not drawn her over. We cannot share his disappointment, whatever it was,
+when we recollect that to Sally's marriage to Richard Bache we are indebted
+for more than one descendant of Franklin whose talents and public services
+have won an honorable place in the history of the nation.
+
+It is gratifying to state that no one can read either Franklin's letters to
+Deborah or to other persons without feeling unqualifiedly assured that he
+entertained a sincere and profound affection for the good wife whose heart
+was for nearly fifty years fastened upon him and his every want with such
+solicitous tenderness. His married life was distinguished to such an
+eminent degree by the calm, pure flow of domestic happiness that for that
+reason, if for no other, we find it impossible to reconcile ourselves to
+the protean facility with which, in his old age, he yielded to the
+seductions of French love-making. The interval, to say the least, is long
+between the honest apples, which his own good American wife sent him from
+time to time, when he was in London, and the meretricious apples which
+Madame Brillon thought that "King John" i. e. M. Brillon might be decent
+enough to offer to some extent to his neighbors when they were all together
+in Paradise where we shall want for nothing. If one wishes fully to realize
+how little fettered was the mind of Franklin by local ideals and
+conventions and how quick it was, like the changeful face of the sea, to
+mirror all its external relations, one has but to read first Franklin's
+letters to his wife, as thoroughly Anglo-Saxon as any ever penned in an
+English manse, and then his letters to Madame Brillon, and the exquisite
+bagatelle, as thoroughly French as the Abbe Morellet's "Humble Petition
+presented to Madam Helvetius by her Cats," in which he told Madame
+Helvetius of the new connection formed by Deborah with M. Helvetius in the
+Elysian Fields. There is every reason to believe that Franklin's marriage
+vow was never dishonored during Deborah's life, lax as his conduct was
+before his marriage and lax as his diction at least was after her death. In
+the Diary from which we have already quoted quite liberally, Fisher, after
+narrating the extraordinary manner in which Deborah bewailed the troubles
+of her "Pappy," observes, "Mr. Franklin's moral character is good, and he
+and Mrs. Franklin live irreproachably as man and wife." Franklin's loyalty
+to his wife is also evidenced by a letter from Strahan to Deborah in which
+he uses these words:
+
+     For my own part, I never saw a man who was, in every
+     respect, so perfectly agreeable to me. Some are amiable
+     in one view, some in another, he in all. Now Madam, as
+     I know the ladies here consider him in exactly the same
+     light I do, upon my word I think you should come over,
+     with all convenient speed, to look after your interest;
+     not but that I think him as faithful to his Joan as any
+     man breathing; but who knows what repeated and strong
+     temptation may in time, and while he is at so great a
+     distance from you, accomplish?
+
+This interrogatory was, perhaps, the rhetorical stroke upon which Strahan
+relied to give the _coup de grace_ to Mrs. Franklin's abhorrence of the
+sea. It was certainly calculated to set a jealous-minded wife to thinking.
+But it seems to have had as little effect upon Deborah as the other
+artifices of this masterly letter. The terms "his Joan" in it were
+doubtless suggested by Franklin's song, _My Plain Country Joan_, one verse
+of which, as good, or rather as bad, as the rest, was as follows:
+
+    "Some faults we have all, and so has my Joan,
+    But then they're exceedingly small;
+    And, now I am used, they are like my own,
+    I scarcely can see 'em at all,
+    My dear friends,
+    I scarcely can see 'em at all."
+
+Another indication of the marital fidelity of which Strahan speaks is found
+in a letter from Franklin to Deborah after his second return from England
+in which he said: "I approve of your opening all my English Letters, as it
+must give you Pleasure to see that People who knew me there so long and so
+intimately, retain so sincere a Regard for me." But it would be grossly
+unjust to Franklin to measure the degree of his attachment to his Joan by
+the fact merely that he preserved inviolate the nuptial pledge which a man
+of honor can fairly be expected as a matter of course to observe
+scrupulously. Not only the lines just quoted by us but the general
+character of his married life demonstrates that the only thing that he ever
+regretted about his intercourse with Deborah was that his own censurable
+conduct should have made her for a time the wife of anyone but himself.
+
+In his correspondence with his friend Catherine Ray, there are two pleasing
+references to Deborah.
+
+     Mrs. Franklin [one reads] was very proud, that a young
+     lady should have so much regard for her old husband, as
+     to send him such a present (a cheese). We talk of you
+     every time it comes to table. She is sure you are a
+     sensible girl, and a notable housewife, and talks of
+     bequeathing me to you as a legacy; but I ought to wish
+     you a better, and hope she will live these hundred
+     years; for we are grown old together, and if she has
+     any faults, I am so used to 'em that I don't perceive
+     'em; as the song says [and then, after quoting from his
+     _Plain Country Joan_ the stanza which we have quoted,
+     he adds:]. Indeed, I begin to think she has none, as I
+     think of you. And since she is willing I should love
+     you, as much as you are willing to be loved by me, let
+     us join in wishing the old lady a long life and a
+     happy.
+
+The other reference to Deborah occurs in a letter to Miss Ray, written
+after Franklin's return from a recent visit to New England, in which he
+describes his feelings before reaching Philadelphia. "As I drew nearer," he
+said, "I found the attraction stronger and stronger. My diligence and speed
+increased with my impatience. I drove on violently, and made such long
+stretches, that a very few days brought me to my own house, and to the arms
+of my good old wife and children."
+
+It is to Franklin's own letters to his wife, however, that we must resort
+to appreciate how fully he reciprocated her affection. Illiterate as her
+letters were, they were so full of interest to him that he seems to have
+re-read as well as read them. In one letter to her, for example, after his
+arrival in England in 1757, he tells her, "I have now gone through all your
+agreeable letters, which give me fresh pleasure every time I read them."
+And that he was quick to feel the dearth of such letters we have testimony
+in the form of a playful postscript to one of his letters to her of the
+preceding year when he was at Easton, Pennsylvania. The special messenger,
+he said, that had been dispatched to Philadelphia with a letter from him to
+her, as well as letters from other persons to their wives and sweethearts,
+had returned "without a scrap for poor us."
+
+     The messenger says [he continues] he left the letters
+     at your house, and saw you afterwards at Mr. Duche's,
+     and told you when he would go, and that he lodged at
+     Honey's, next door to you, and yet you did not write;
+     so let Goody Smith (a favorite servant of theirs) give
+     one more just judgment, and say what should be done to
+     you. I think I won't tell you that we are well, nor
+     that we expect to return about the middle of the week,
+     nor will I send you a word of news; that's poz.
+
+The letter ends, "I am your _loving_ husband"; and then comes the
+postscript: "I have _scratched out the loving words_, being writ in haste
+by mistake, _when I forgot I was angry_."
+
+His letters to her bear all the tokens of conjugal love and of a deep,
+tranquil domestic spirit. At times, he addresses her as "My Dear Debby,"
+and once as "My Dear Love," but habitually as "My Dear Child." This was the
+form of address in the first of his published letters to her dated December
+27, 1755, and in his last, dated July 22, 1774. "I am, dear girl, your
+loving husband," "I am, my dear Debby, your ever loving husband," are among
+the forms of expression with which he concludes. The topics of his letters
+are almost wholly personal or domestic. They illustrate very strikingly how
+little dependent upon intellectual congeniality married happiness is,
+provided that there is a mutual sense of duty, mutual respect and a real
+community of domestic interests.
+
+In one of his London letters, he informs her that another French
+translation of his book had just been published, with a print of himself
+prefixed, which, though a copy of that by Chamberlin, had so French a
+countenance that she would take him for one of that lively nation. "I think
+you do not mind such things," he added, "or I would send you one."[18] To
+politics he rarely refers except to reassure her when uneasiness had been
+created in her mind by one of the reckless partisan accusations which
+husbands in public life soon learn to rate at their real value but their
+wives never do. "I am concern'd that so much Trouble should be given you by
+idle Reports concerning me," he says on one occasion. "Be satisfied, my
+dear, that while I have my Senses, and God vouchsafes me this Protection, I
+shall do nothing unworthy the Character of an honest Man, and one that
+loves his Family."
+
+As a rule his letters to Deborah have little to say about the larger world
+in which he moved when he was in England. If he refers to the Royal Family,
+it is only to mention that the Queen had just been delivered of another
+Prince, the eighth child, and that there were now six princes and two
+princesses, all lovely children. After the repeal of the Stamp Act lifted
+the embargo laid by patriotic Americans on importations of clothing from
+England, he wrote to Deborah that he was willing that she should have a new
+gown, and that he had sent her fourteen yards of Pompadour satin. He had
+told Parliament, he stated, that, before the old clothes of the Americans
+were worn out, they might have new ones of their own making. "And, indeed,"
+he added, "if they had all as many old Cloathes as your old Man has, that
+would not be very unlikely, for I think you and George reckon'd when I was
+last at home at least 20 pair of old Breeches." To his own fame and the
+social attentions which he received from distinguished men abroad he makes
+only the most meagre allusion.
+
+     The agreeable conversation I meet with among men of
+     learning, and the notice taken of me by persons of
+     distinction, are the principal things that soothe me
+     for the present, under this painful absence from my
+     family and friends. Yet those would not keep me here
+     another week, if I had not other inducements; duty to
+     my country, and hopes of being able to do it service.
+
+Thus he wrote to his wife about four months after he arrived in England in
+1757. A few weeks later, he said:
+
+     I begin to think I shall hardly be able to return
+     before this time twelve months. I am for doing
+     effectually what I came about; and I find it requires
+     both time and patience. You may think, perhaps, that I
+     can find many amusements here to pass the time
+     agreeable. 'Tis true, the regard and friendship I meet
+     with from persons of worth, and the conversation of
+     ingenious men, give me no small pleasure; but at this
+     time of life, domestic comforts afford the most solid
+     satisfaction, and my uneasiness at being absent from my
+     family, and longing desire to be with them, make me
+     often sigh in the midst of cheerful company.[19]
+
+The real interest of Franklin's correspondence with his wife consists in
+the insight that it gives us into his private, as contrasted with his
+public, relations. His genius, high as it rose into the upper air of human
+endeavor, rested upon a solid sub-structure of ordinary stone and cement,
+firmly planted in the earth, and this is manifest in his family history as
+in everything else. The topics, with which he deals in his letters to
+Deborah, are the usual topics with which a kind, sensible, practical
+husband and householder, without any elevated aspirations of any kind,
+deals in his letters to his wife. There was no lack of common ground on
+which she and he could meet in correspondence after the last fond words
+addressed by him to her just before he left New York for England in 1757
+had been spoken, "God preserve, guard and guide you." First of all, there
+was his daughter Sally to whom he was lovingly attached. In a letter to his
+wife, shortly before he used the valedictory words just quoted, he said: "I
+leave Home, and undertake this long Voyage more chearfully, as I can rely
+on your Prudence in the Management of my Affairs, and Education of my dear
+Child; and yet I cannot forbear once more recommending her to you with a
+Father's tenderest Concern." From this time on, during his two absences in
+England, Sally seems to have ever been in his thoughts. There are several
+references to her in one of his earliest letters to Deborah after he
+reached England in 1757.
+
+     I should have read Sally's French letter with more
+     pleasure [he said], but that I thought the French
+     rather too good to be all her own composing.... I send
+     her a French Pamela. I hear [he further said] there has
+     a miniature painter gone over to Philadelphia, a
+     relation to John Reynolds. If Sally's picture is not
+     done to your mind by the young man, and the other
+     gentleman is a good hand and follows the business,
+     suppose you get Sally's done by him, and send it to me
+     with your small picture, that I may here get all our
+     little family drawn in one conversation piece.
+
+This idea was not carried out because, among other reasons, as he
+subsequently informed Deborah, he found that family pieces were no longer
+in fashion.[20] In this same letter there is a gentle caress for Sally.
+
+     Had I been well [he said], I intended to have gone
+     round among the shops and bought some pretty things for
+     you and my dear good Sally (whose little hands you say
+     eased your headache) to send by this ship, but I must
+     now defer it to the next, having only got a crimson
+     satin cloak for you, the newest fashion, and the black
+     silk for Sally; but Billy (William Franklin) sends her
+     a scarlet feather, muff, and tippet, and a box of
+     fashionable linen for her dress.
+
+In other letters there are repeated indications of the doting persistency
+with which his mind dwelt upon his daughter. But the softest touch of all
+is at the end of one of them. After speaking of the kindness, with which
+Mrs. Stevenson, Polly Stevenson's mother, had looked after his physical
+welfare, he adds: "But yet I have a thousand times wish'd you with me, and
+my little Sally with her ready Hands and Feet to do, and go, and come, and
+get what I wanted." All these allusions to Sally are found in his letters
+to Deborah during his first mission to England. But little Sally was
+growing apace, and, when he returned to England on his second mission in
+1764, there was soon to be another person with an equal, if not a superior,
+claim upon her helpful offices. We have already quoted from his letter to
+Deborah warning her against "an expensive feasting wedding." In this letter
+he says of Sally's fiance, Richard Bache:
+
+     I know very little of the Gentleman or his Character,
+     nor can I at this Distance. I hope his Expectations are
+     not great of any Fortune to be had with our Daughter
+     before our Death. I can only say, that if he proves a
+     good Husband to her, and a good Son to me, he shall
+     find me as good a Father as I can be:--but at present I
+     suppose you would agree with me, that we cannot do more
+     than fit her out handsomely in Cloaths and Furniture,
+     not exceeding in the whole Five Hundred Pounds, of
+     Value. For the rest, they must depend as you and I did,
+     on their own Industry and Care: as what remains in our
+     Hands will be barely sufficient for our Support, and
+     not enough for them when it comes to be divided at our
+     Decease.
+
+Hardly, however, had the betrothal occurred before it was clouded by
+business reverses which had overtaken the prospective son-in-law. These led
+to a suggestion from the father that may or may not have been prompted by
+the thought that a temporary separation might bring about the termination
+of an engagement marked by gloomy auspices.
+
+     In your last letters [he wrote to Deborah], you say
+     nothing concerning Mr. Bache. The Misfortune that has
+     lately happened to his Affairs, tho' it may not lessen
+     his Character as an honest or a Prudent man, will
+     probably induce him to forbear entering hastily into a
+     State that must require a great Addition to his
+     Expence, when he will be less able to supply it. If you
+     think that in the meantime it will be some Amusement to
+     Sally to visit her Friends here (in London) and return
+     with me, I should have no Objection to her coming over
+     with Capt. Falkener, provided Mrs. Falkener comes at
+     the same time as is talk'd of. I think too it might be
+     some Improvement to her.
+
+Poor Richard had incurred considerable risks when he selected his own mate,
+and, all things considered, he acquiesced gracefully enough in the
+betrothal of his daughter to a man of whom he knew practically nothing
+except circumstances that were calculated to bring to his memory many pat
+proverbs about the folly of imprudent marriages. If, therefore, his idea
+was to enlist the chilling aid of absence in an effort to bring the
+engagement to an end, fault can scarcely be found with him. We know from
+one of William Franklin's letters that the friends of the family had such
+misgivings about the union as to excite the anger of Deborah. The
+suggestion that Sally should be sent over to England did not find favor
+with her, and in a later letter Franklin writes to her, "I am glad that you
+find so much reason to be satisfy'd with Mr. Bache. I hope all will prove
+for the best." And all did prove for the best, as the frequency with which
+Richard Bache's name occurs in Franklin's will, to say nothing more,
+sufficiently attests. When the marriage was solemnized, Franklin's strong
+family affection speedily crowned it with his full approval. In due season,
+the fact that the contract was a fruitful one is brought to our notice by a
+letter from him to his wife in which he tells his "Dear Child," then his
+wife for nearly forty years, that he had written to Sally by Captain
+Falkener giving her Sir John Pringle's opinion as to the probability of
+Sally's son having been rendered exempt from the smallpox by inoculation.
+Thenceforth there is scarcely a letter from the grandfather to the
+grandmother in which there is not some mention made of this grandson,
+Benjamin Franklin Bache, the rabid Jeffersonian and editor of after years,
+whose vituperative editorials in the Aurora recall Franklin's statement in
+the latter part of his life that the liberty of the press ought to be
+attended by the ancient liberty of the cudgel. "I am glad your little
+Grandson," says one letter, "recovered so soon of his Illness, as I see you
+are quite in Love with him, and your Happiness wrapt up in his; since your
+whole long Letter is made up of the History of his pretty Actions." In a
+subsequent letter to Deborah, he passes to the boy's father, who had come
+over to England, where his mother and sisters resided, and was on the point
+of returning to Philadelphia. "Mr. Bache is about returning. His Behaviour
+here has been very agreeable to me. I have advis'd him to settle down to
+Business in Philadelphia, where I hope he will meet with Success. I
+mentioned to you before, that I saw his Mother and Sisters at Preston, who
+are genteel People, and extreamly agreeable." In the same letter, he tells
+Deborah that he has advised Bache to deal in the ready money way though he
+should sell less.
+
+     He may keep his Store [he said] in your little North
+     Room for the present. And as he will be at no expence
+     while the Family continues with you, I think he may,
+     with Industry and Frugality, get so forward, as at the
+     end of his Term, to pay his Debts and be clear of the
+     World, which I much wish to see. I have given him L200
+     Sterl'g to add something to his Cargo.
+
+It is not long before he is writing to Deborah about "Sister Bache and her
+amiable Daughters." Like the commerce of material gifts, which his wife and
+himself kept up with each other, when separated, are the details about his
+godson, William Hewson, the son of his friend Polly, which he exchanges
+with Deborah for details about his grandson, who came to be known, it
+seems, as "the Little King Bird," and the "Young Hercules."
+
+     In Return for your History of your _Grandson_ [he wrote
+     to her on one occasion], I must give you a little of
+     the History of my _Godson_. He is now 21 Months old,
+     very strong and healthy, begins to speak a little, and
+     even to sing. He was with us a few Days last Week, grew
+     fond of me, and would not be contented to sit down to
+     Breakfast without coming to call _Pa_, rejoicing when
+     he had got me into my Place. When seeing me one Day
+     crack one of the Philada Biscuits into my Tea with the
+     Nut-crackers, he took another and try'd to do the same
+     with the Tea-Tongs. It makes me long to be at home to
+     play with Ben.
+
+Indeed, by this time, Franklin had become such a fatuous grandfather that
+he ceases to call his grandson Ben and speaks of him as "Benny Boy" when
+he does not speak of him as "the dear boy."
+
+In the fulness of time, Richard and Sally Bache were destined to be the
+parents of numerous children. When Franklin returned from his mission to
+France, the youngest of them soon became as devoted to him as had been
+Billy Hewson, or the youthful son of John Jay, whose singular attachment to
+him is referred to in one of his letters to Jay. In the same description,
+in which Manasseh Cutler speaks in such sour terms of the person of Mrs.
+Bache, he tells us that, when he saw her at Franklin's home in
+Philadelphia, she had three of her children about her, over whom she seemed
+to have no kind of command, but who appeared to be excessively fond of
+their grandpapa. Indeed, all children who were brought into close
+companionship with Franklin loved him, and instinctively turned to him for
+responsive love and sympathy. Men may be the best judges of the human
+intellect, but children are the best judges of the human heart.
+
+Francis Folger, the only legitimate child of Franklin except Sally, is not
+mentioned in his correspondence with his wife. The colorless Franky who is
+was not this child. Franklin's son was born a year after the marriage of
+Franklin and Deborah in 1730, and died, when a little more than four years
+of age, and therefore long before the date of the earliest letter extant
+from Franklin to Deborah. Though warned but a few years previously by an
+epidemic of smallpox in Philadelphia, which had been accompanied by a high
+rate of mortality, Franklin could not make up his mind to subject the child
+to the hazards of inoculation. The consequence was that, when a second
+epidemic visited the city, Francis contracted the disease, and died.
+Franklin, to use his own words to his sister Jane Mecom, long regretted him
+bitterly, and also regretted that he had not given him the disease by
+inoculation.
+
+     All, who have seen my grandson [he said in another
+     letter to his sister] agree with you in their accounts
+     of his being an uncommonly fine boy, which brings often
+     afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now
+     dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom since seen
+     equaled in every thing, and whom to this day I cannot
+     think of without a sigh.
+
+But Sally and his grandson were far from being the only persons who
+furnished material for Franklin's letters to his wife. These letters also
+bring before us in many ways other persons connected with him and Deborah
+by ties of blood, service or friendship. He repeatedly sends his "duty" to
+his mother-in-law, Mrs. Read, and when he is informed of the death of "our
+good mother," as he calls her, he observes, "'Tis, I am sure, a
+Satisfaction to me, that I cannot charge myself with having ever fail'd in
+one Instance of Duty and Respect to her during the many Years that she
+call'd me Son." "My love to Brother John Read and Sister, and cousin
+Debbey, and young cousin Johnny Read, and let them all know, that I
+sympathize with them all affectionately," was his message to her relations
+in the same letter.
+
+Some of his letters conveyed much agreeable information to Deborah about
+his and her English relations. Of these we shall have something to say in
+another connection.
+
+"Billy," William Franklin, is mentioned in his father's letters to Deborah
+on many other occasions than those already cited by us; for he was his
+father's intimate companion during the whole of the first mission to
+England. He appears to have truly loved his sister, Sally, and is often
+mentioned in Franklin's letters to Deborah as sending Sally his love or
+timely gifts. If he really presented his duty to his mother half as often
+as Franklin reported, she had no cause to complain of his lack of
+attention. That her earlier feelings about him had undergone a decided
+change, before he went to England with his father, we may infer from one
+of Franklin's letters in which, in response to her "particular inquiry," he
+tells her that "Billy is of the Middle Temple, and will be call'd to the
+Bar either this Term or the next." Some seven years later, he tells her
+that it gave him pleasure to hear from Major Small that he had left her and
+Sally and "our other children" well also.
+
+Mention of Peter, his negro servant, is also several times made in
+Franklin's letters to Deborah. In one letter, written when he was
+convalescing after a severe attack of illness, he tells Deborah that not
+only had his good doctor, Doctor Fothergill, attended him very carefully
+and affectionately, and Mrs. Stevenson nursed him kindly, but that Billy
+was of great service to him, and Peter very diligent and attentive. But a
+later letter does not give quite so favorable a view of Peter, after the
+latter had inhaled a little longer the free air of England.
+
+     Peter continues with me [said Franklin] and behaves as
+     well as I can expect, in a Country where they are many
+     Occasions of spoiling servants, if they are ever so
+     good. He has a few Faults as most of them, and I see
+     with only one Eye, and hear only with one Ear; so we
+     rub on pretty comfortably.
+
+These words smack of the uxorious policy recommended to husbands by Poor
+Richard. The same letter gives us a glimpse of another negro servant, who
+was even more strongly disposed than Peter to act upon the statement in
+Cowper's _Task_ that slaves cannot breathe in England.
+
+     King, that you enquire after [says Franklin], is not
+     with us. He ran away from our House, near two Years
+     ago, while we were absent in the Country; But was soon
+     found in Suffolk, where he had been taken in the
+     Service of a Lady, that was very fond of the Merit of
+     making him a Christian, and contributing to his
+     Education and Improvement. As he was of little Use, and
+     often in Mischief, Billy consented to her keeping him
+     while we stay in England. So the Lady sent him to
+     School, has taught him to read and write, to play on
+     the Violin and French Horn, with some other
+     Accomplishments more useful in a Servant. Whether she
+     will finally be willing to part with him, or persuade
+     Billy to sell him to her, I know not. In the meantime
+     he is no Expence to us.
+
+And that was certainly something worth noting about a servant who could
+play upon the French horn.
+
+But it is of Goody Smith, the servant in the Franklin household at
+Philadelphia, whose judgment was invoked upon the failure of Deborah to
+answer her husband's letter from Easton, that mention is most often made in
+the portions of Franklin's letters to his wife which relate to servants. In
+a letter to Deborah from Easton, he expresses his obligations to Goody
+Smith for remembering him and sends his love to her. In another letter to
+Deborah, when he was on his way to Williamsburg in Virginia, he says, "my
+Duty to Mother, and love to Sally, Debby, Gracey, &c., not forgetting the
+Goodey." Subsequently, when in England, he tells Deborah:
+
+     I have order'd two large print Common Prayer Books to
+     be bound on purpose for you and Goodey Smith; and that
+     the largeness of the Print may not make them too
+     bulkey, the Christnings, Matrimonies, and everything
+     else that you and she have not immediate and constant
+     Occasion for, are to be omitted. So you will both of
+     you be repriev'd from the Use of Spectacles in Church a
+     little longer.
+
+In another letter from England, Franklin mentions that he sends Deborah a
+pair of garters knit by Polly Stevenson who had also favored him with a
+pair. "Goody Smith may, if she pleases," he adds, "make such for me
+hereafter, and they will suit her own fat Knees. My Love to her." And love
+to her he sends again when he hears that she is recovering from an illness.
+Franklin likewise refers several times in his letters to Deborah to
+another servant, John, who accompanied him on his return to England in
+1764, but the behavior of this servant seems to have been too
+unexceptionable for him to be a conspicuous figure in his master's letters.
+They were evidently a kind master and mistress, Franklin and Deborah. "I am
+sorry for the death of your black boy," he wrote to her on one occasion
+from London, "as you seem to have had a regard for him. You must have
+suffered a good deal in the fatigue of nursing him in such a distemper."
+
+Over and over again in his letters to Deborah, Franklin approves himself a
+"lover of his friends" like his friend Robert Grace. He sends his love to
+them individually, and he sends his love to them collectively. Even during
+a brief absence, as when he was off on his military expedition, his letters
+to Deborah are sprinkled with such messages as "our Compliments to Mrs.
+Masters and all enquiring Friends," "My Love to Mr. Hall" (his business
+partner), "Give my hearty Love to all Friends," "Love to all our friends
+and neighbours." During another brief absence in Virginia, he sends his
+respects to "Mrs. Masters and all the Officers and in short to all
+Philadelphia." In a later letter to Deborah, written from Utrecht, the form
+of his concluding words on the previous occasion is made still more
+comprehensive. "My Love," he said, "to my dear Sally, and affectionate
+Regards to all Pennsylvania." In one of his letters from England, he wrote,
+"Pray remember me kindly to all that love us, and to all that we love. 'Tis
+endless to name names," and on still another occasion, in asking Deborah to
+thank all his friends for their favors, which contributed so much to the
+comfort of his voyage, he added, "I have not time to name Names: You know
+whom I love and honour." He had such troops of friends that he might well
+shrink from the weariness of naming them all. Indeed, he scarcely writes a
+letter to Deborah that does not bear witness to the extent and warmth of
+his friendships. When he left Philadelphia for England in 1757, about a
+dozen of his friends accompanied him as far as Trenton, but, in the letter
+to Deborah which informs us of this fact, he does not give us the names of
+any of them. This letter was written from Trenton. Mrs. Grace and "Dear
+Precious Mrs. Shewell," Mrs. Masters, "Mrs. Galloway & Miss," Mrs. Redman,
+Mrs. Graeme, Mrs. Thomson, Mrs. Story, Mrs. Bartram, Mrs. Smith and Mrs.
+Hilborne all come in at one time, as well as other ladies whom he does not
+name, for his best respects, in return for friendly wishes that they had
+transmitted to him through Deborah. In another letter he sends his love to
+"our dear precious Polly Hunt and all our kind inquiring friends." Friends
+escorted him to Trenton when he was on his way to England in 1757, friends
+bestowed all sorts of gifts on him to render his voyage comfortable, Mr.
+Thomas Wharton even lending him a woollen gown which he found a comfortable
+companion in his winter passage; friends did him the honor to drink his
+health in the unfinished kitchen of the new house built in his absence; and
+friends "honored" the dining-room in this home "with their Company." When
+he heard of the convivial gathering in the unfinished kitchen, he wrote to
+Deborah, "I hope soon to drink with them in the Parlour," but there is a
+tinge of dissatisfaction in his observations to Deborah on the gathering in
+the dining-room.
+
+     It gives me Pleasure [he said] that so many of my
+     Friends honour'd our new Dining Room with their
+     Company. You tell me only of a Fault they found with
+     the House, that it was too little, and not a Word of
+     anything they lik'd in it: Nor how the Kitchen Chimneys
+     perform; so I suppose you spare me some Mortification,
+     which [he adds with a slight inflection of sarcasm] is
+     kind.
+
+His dear friend, Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Wharton, Mr. Roberts, Mr. and Mrs.
+Duffield, Neighbor Thomson, Dr. and Mrs. Redman, Mrs. Hopkinson, Mr. Duche,
+Dr. Morgan and Mr. Hopkinson are other friends mentioned in a later letter
+of his to Deborah. In the same letter, he rejoices that his "good old
+Friend, Mr. Coleman, is got safe home, and continues well." Coleman, as we
+shall see, was one of the two friends who had come to his aid in his early
+manhood when he was sued and threatened with ruin by his creditors. The
+death of the dear, amiable Miss Ross, "our Friend Bond's heavy loss," the
+disorder that had befallen "our friend Kinnersley" and other kindred facts
+awaken his ready sympathy; presents of books, seeds and the like, as well
+as messages of love and respect, remind his friends how freshly green his
+memory of them is.
+
+The letters have much to say, too, about the presents to Deborah and Sally
+which were almost incessantly crossing the outflowing currents of apples
+and buckwheat meal from Philadelphia. These presents are far too numerous
+to be all specified by us, but some perhaps it may not be amiss to recall.
+In one letter, he writes to Deborah that he is sending her a large case
+marked D. F. No. 1 and a small box marked D. F. No. 2, and that in the
+large case is another small box containing some English china, viz.: melons
+and leaves for a dessert of fruit and cream, or the like; a bowl remarkable
+for the neatness of the figures, made at Bow near London, some coffee cups
+of the same make, and a Worcester bowl, ordinary. In the same box, to show
+the difference of workmanship, he said, there was something from all the
+china works in England and one old true china basin mended of an odd color,
+four silver salt ladles, newest but ugliest fashion, a little instrument to
+core apples, another to make little turnips out of great ones and six
+coarse diaper breakfast cloths. The latter, he stated, were to be spread
+on the tea table, for nobody breakfasted in London on the naked table but
+on the cloth set a large tea board with the cups. In the large case were
+likewise some carpeting for a best room floor, and bordering to go along
+with it, also two large fine Flanders bed-ticks, two pair of large
+superfine fine blankets, two fine damask table-cloths and napkins, and
+forty-three ells of Ghentish sheeting Holland, all of which Deborah had
+ordered of him; also fifty-six yards of cotton, printed curiously from
+copper plates, a new invention, to make bed and window curtains, and seven
+yards of chair bottoms printed in the same way very neat. "These were my
+Fancy," Franklin remarks, "but Mrs. Stevenson tells me I did wrong not to
+buy both of the same Colour." In the large case, too, were seven yards of
+printed cotton, blue ground, to make Deborah a gown.
+
+     I bought it by Candlelight, and lik'd it then [the
+     letter said], but not so well afterwards. If you do not
+     fancy it, send it as a Present from me to sister Jenny.
+     There is a better Gown for you, of flower'd Tissue, 16
+     yards, of Mrs. Stevenson's Fancy, cost 9 Guineas; and I
+     think it a great Beauty. There was no more of the Sort,
+     or you should have had enough for a _Negligee_ or Suit.
+
+     There is also Snuffers, Snuff Stand, and Extinguisher
+     of Steel, which I send for the Beauty of the Work. The
+     Extinguisher is for Spermaceti Candles only, and is of
+     a new Contrivance, to preserve the Snuff upon the
+     Candle.
+
+Small box No. 2 contained cut table glass of several sorts. After stating
+its contents, Franklin adds, "I am about buying a compleat Set of Table
+China, 2 Cases of silver handled Knives and Forks, and 2 pair Silver
+Candlesticks; but these shall keep to use here till my Return, as I am
+obliged sometimes to entertain polite Company."
+
+But there is nothing in this letter equal in interest to the paragraph
+that brings to our mental eye the handsome, buxom figure of Deborah
+herself.
+
+     I forgot to mention another of my Fancyings, _viz._: a
+     Pair of Silk Blankets, very fine. They are of a new
+     kind, were just taken in a French Prize, and such were
+     never seen in England before: they are called Blankets,
+     but I think will be very neat to cover a Summer Bed,
+     instead of a Quilt or Counterpain. I had no Choice, so
+     you will excuse the Soil on some of the Folds; your
+     Neighbour Forster can get it off. I also forgot, among
+     the China, to mention a large fine Jugg for Beer, to
+     stand in the Cooler. I fell in Love with it at first
+     Sight; for I thought it look'd like a fat jolly Dame,
+     clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white Calico Gown
+     on, good natur'd and lovely, and put me, in mind
+     of--Somebody. It has the Coffee Cups in its Belly,[21]
+     pack'd in best Chrystal Salt, of a peculiar nice
+     Flavour, for the Table, not to be powder'd.
+
+The receipt of such a case and box as these was doubtless an event long
+remembered in the Franklin home at Philadelphia. In a subsequent letter
+from Franklin to Deborah, the following gifts to Sally are brought to our
+attention:
+
+     By Capt. Lutwidge I sent my dear Girl a newest
+     fashion'd white Hat and Cloak, and sundry little
+     things, which I hope will get safe to hand. I now send
+     her a pair of Buckles, made of French Paste Stones,
+     which are next in Lustre to Diamonds. They cost three
+     Guineas, and are said to be cheap at that Price.
+
+These were but a few of the many gifts that Deborah and Sally received from
+Franklin, when he was in London. In their relations to their own
+households, philosophers are frequently not unlike the ancient one, who,
+when told by a messenger that his house was on fire, looked up for a minute
+from his task to say impatiently that his wife attended to all his domestic
+affairs. This is not true of Franklin, who was wholly free from the crass
+ignorance and maladroit touch which render many husbands as much out of
+place in their own houses as the officious ass in AEsop's fable was in his
+master's dining-hall. Even the fences, the well and the vegetable garden at
+times are mentioned in his letters to Deborah, and his mechanical skill
+stood him in good stead as a householder. He knew how the carpets should be
+laid down, what stuff should be purchased for curtains in the blue chamber,
+and by what kind of hooks they should be fastened to the curtain rails, and
+the number of curtains at each window that the London fashions required. In
+one letter he gives Deborah minute instructions as to how the blue room in
+his Philadelphia home was to be painted and papered. In a subsequent
+letter, after saying that he was glad to hear that certain pictures were
+safe arrived at Philadelphia, he adds, "You do not tell me who mounted the
+great one, nor where you have hung it up."
+
+In his relations to his home, at any rate, we can discern nothing of the
+lack of order, with which he was so frank in reproaching himself. During
+the time that he was detained in New York by Lord Loudon, he several times
+had occasion to send a message to his wife about something that he had left
+behind in his house at Philadelphia, or in his house at Woodbridge in New
+Jersey, and nothing could be more exact than his recollection as to just
+where each thing was. He writes for his best spectacles; he had left them
+on the table, he said, meaning at Woodbridge. In the right hand little
+drawer under his desk in Philadelphia was some of the Indian Lady's
+gut-cambric; it was to be rolled up like a ribbon, wrapt in paper and
+placed in the Indian seal skin hussiff, with the other things already in
+it, and the hussiff was to be forwarded to him. It would be an acceptable
+present to a gimcrack great man in London that was his friend. In certain
+places on his book-shelves at Woodbridge, which he precisely locates, were
+the _Gardener's Dictionary_, by P. Miller, and the _Treatise on
+Cydermaking_. They were to be delivered to Mr. Parker.
+
+Occasional shadows, of course, fall across the happy and honored life
+reflected in Franklin's letters to Deborah. We cannot have the evening,
+however soft and still, without its fading light; or, as Franklin himself
+put it in one of these letters, "we are not to expect it will be always
+Sunshine." Strenuous and absorbing as were his public tasks during each of
+his missions to England; signalized as the latter were by the honors
+conferred on him by ancient seats of learning, and the attentions paid him
+by illustrious men; charming and refreshing as were his excursions for
+health and recreation about the British Islands and on the Continent, and
+his hours of social relaxation in the country houses of England, Scotland
+and Ireland; supplied as he was at No. 7 Craven Street with every domestic
+comfort that the assiduous management of Mrs. Stevenson--who even took care
+that his shirts should be well-aired as Deborah directed--could provide,
+his thoughts, now and then, as we have seen, tristfully reverted to his
+home on the other side of the Atlantic. Some six months after his arrival
+in England in 1757, he expressed the hope that, if he stayed another
+winter, it would be more agreeable than the greatest part of the time that
+he had spent in England. Some two months after his return to England in
+1764, he writes to Deborah that he hopes that a few months--the few months
+slid into ten years--will finish affairs in England to his wish, and bring
+him to that retirement and repose, with his little family, so suitable to
+his years, and which he has so long set his heart upon. Some four years
+later, he wrote to Deborah:
+
+     I feel stronger and more active. Yet I would not have
+     you think that I fancy I shall grow young again. I know
+     that men of my Bulk often fail suddenly: I know that
+     according to the Course of Nature I cannot at most
+     continue much longer, and that the living even of
+     another Day is uncertain. I therefore now form no
+     Schemes, but such as are of immediate Execution;
+     indulging myself in no future Prospect except one, that
+     of returning to Philadelphia, there to spend the
+     Evening of Life with my Friends and Family.
+
+There was a time when he loved England and would perhaps have contentedly
+lived and died there, if his Lares and Penates could have been enticed into
+taking up their abode there. With his broad, tolerant, jocund nature, he
+was, it must be confessed, not a little like a hare, which soon makes a
+form for itself wherever it happens to crouch. The homesickness, which
+colors a few of his letters, is to no little extent the legacy of illness.
+But much as he was absent from home, alchemist as he always was in
+transmuting all that is disagreeable in life into what is agreeable, or at
+least endurable, the family hearthside never ceased to have a bright,
+cheerful glow for his well-ordered, home-loving nature.
+
+Grave illness was more than once his lot during his mission to England.[22]
+Shortly after his arrival in that country in 1757, he was seized with a
+violent attack of sickness, accompanied by delirium, which left him in an
+invalid condition for quite a time. From the account that he gives of the
+cupping, vomiting and purging that he underwent, under the care of good
+Doctor Fothergill, there would seem to have been no lack of opportunity for
+the escape of the disease, which, judging by the amount of bark that he
+took in substance and infusion, was probably some form of malarial fever.
+This attack gives a decidedly valetudinary tone to one of his subsequent
+letters to Deborah. "I am much more tender than I us'd to be," he said,
+"and sleep in a short Callico Bedgown with close Sleeves, and Flannel
+close-footed Trousers; for without them I get no warmth all Night. So it
+seems I grow older apace." Deborah's health, too, about this time was not
+overgood, for, a few months later, he writes to her: "It gives me Concern
+to receive such frequent Accts of your being indisposed; but we both of
+us grow in Years, and must expect our Constitutions, though tolerably good
+in themselves, will by degrees give way to the Infirmities of Age." Shortly
+after Franklin's arrival in England in 1764, he was seized with another
+attack of illness, but he was soon able to declare that, thanks to God, he
+was got perfectly well, his cough being quite gone, and his arms mending,
+so that he could dress and undress himself, if he chose to endure a little
+pain. A few months later, he says it rejoices him to learn that Deborah is
+freer than she used to be from the headache and the pain in her side. He
+himself, he said, was likewise in perfect health. Again he writes to
+Deborah in the succeeding year: "I congratulate you on the soon expected
+Repeal of the Stamp Act; and on the great Share of Health we both enjoy,
+tho' now going in Four-score (that is, in the fourth score)." He was not
+allowed, however, to indulge long the spirit of congratulation, for, a few
+months later, one of his letters to Deborah brings to our knowledge the
+fact that he had been very ill. After his recovery from this illness, he
+does not seem to have been attacked by anything again while in England,
+beyond a fit or so of the gout, and in 1768 he readily assents to the
+statement of Deborah that they were both blessed with a great share of
+health considering their years, then sixty-three. A few years more,
+however, and Franklin's correspondence indicates plainly enough that this
+statement was no longer applicable to Deborah. In the letter
+last-mentioned, her husband writes to her that he wonders to hear that his
+friends were backward in bringing her his letters when they arrived, and
+thinks it must be a mere imagination of hers, the effect of some melancholy
+humor she happened then to be in; and some four years afterwards he
+recommends to her a dietary for the preservation of her health and the
+improvement of her spirits. But both were then beyond repair, and, two
+years later, she was in the Elysian fields where, despite what was
+reported, as we shall see, by Franklin to Madame Helvetius about his
+Eurydice and M. Helvetius, it is impossible to believe that she, faithful,
+loving creature that she was, did anything but inconsolably await his
+coming.
+
+Of course, we are not wholly dependent upon Franklin's letters to Deborah
+for details relating to Sally and Richard Bache. A very readable letter of
+his is the one written by him to Sally from Reedy Island on his way to
+England in 1764. Its opening sentences bring home to us anew the multitude
+of his friends and the fervid enthusiasm of their friendship.
+
+     Our good friends, Mr. Galloway, Mr. Wharton, and Mr.
+     James, came with me in the ship from Chester to New
+     Castle and went ashore there [he said]. It was kind to
+     favour me with their good company as far as they could.
+     The affectionate leave taken of me by so many friends
+     at Chester was very endearing. God bless them and all
+     Pennsylvania.
+
+Then, after observing that the natural prudence and goodness of heart, with
+which God had blessed Sally, made it less necessary for him to be
+particular in giving her advice, Franklin tells her that the more
+attentively dutiful and tender she was towards her good mama the more she
+would recommend herself to him, adding, "But why should I mention _me_,
+when you have so much higher a promise in the commandments, that such
+conduct will recommend you to the favour of God." After this, he warns her
+that her conduct should be all the more circumspect, that no advantage
+might be given to the malevolence of his political enemies, directs her to
+go constantly to church and advises her in his absence to acquire those
+useful accomplishments, arithmetic and book-keeping.
+
+In his next letter to Sally, he tells her that he has met her husband at
+Preston, where he had been kindly entertained for two or three days by her
+husband's mother and sisters, whom he liked much. The comfort that this
+assurance gave to a wife, who had never met her husband's relatives, can be
+readily appreciated. He had advised Bache, he said, to settle down to
+business in Philadelphia, where he would always be with her; almost any
+profession a man has been educated in being preferable, in his opinion, to
+an office held at pleasure, as rendering him more independent, more a
+freeman, and less subject to the caprices of superiors. This means, of
+course, that the Baches, too, were looking for a seat in the Post-Office
+carryall, in which room was found for so many of Franklin's relations and
+_proteges_.
+
+     By Industry & Frugality [Franklin further said], you
+     may get forward in the World, being both of you yet
+     young. And then what we may leave you at our Death may
+     be a pretty Addition, tho' of itself far from
+     sufficient to maintain & bring up a Family. It is of
+     the more Importance for you to think seriously of this,
+     as you may have a Number of Children to educate. 'Till
+     my Return you need be at no Expence for Rent, etc, as
+     you are all welcome to continue with your Mother, and
+     indeed it seems to be your Duty to attend her, as she
+     grows infirm, and takes much Delight in your Company
+     and the Child's. This Saving will be a Help in your
+     Progress: And for your Encouragement I can assure you
+     that there is scarce a Merchant of Opulence in your
+     Town, whom I do not remember a young Beginner with as
+     little to go on with, & no better Prospects than Mr.
+     Bache.
+
+Ben of course is not overlooked. "I am much pleas'd with the Acc' I receive
+from all Hands of your dear little Boy. I hope he will be continu'd a
+Blessing to us all." It must have been a great gratification to him to
+learn that Betsey, William Franklin's wife, as well as Deborah, had stood
+as godmother for the child. In his next letter to Sally, acknowledging the
+receipt of a pleasing letter from her, he states that he is glad that she
+has undertaken the care of the housekeeping, as it would be an ease to her
+mother, especially if she could manage to her approbation. "_That_," he
+commented significantly, "may perhaps be at first a Difficulty."[23] It
+would be of use to her, he continued, if she would get a habit of keeping
+exact accounts, and it would be some satisfaction to him to see them, for
+she should remember, for her encouragement in good economy, that, whatever
+a child saves of its parents' money, will be its own another day. "Study,"
+the letter concludes, "Poor Richard a little, and you may find some
+Benefit from his Instructions." These letters were all written from London.
+The rest of Franklin's letters to Sally alone were written from Passy. In
+the first he says that, if she knew how happy her letters made him, and
+considered how many of them miscarried, she would, he thought, write
+oftener. A daughter had then been added to the members of the Bache
+household, and that he had a word to pen about her goes almost without
+saying. He expresses the hope that Sally would again be out of the city
+during the hot months for the sake of this child's health, "for I begin to
+love the dear little creature from your description of her," he said. This
+was the letter in which Sally was so pointedly scored for not living more
+simply and frugally.
+
+     I was charmed [he declared] with the account you gave
+     me of your industry, the table cloths of your own
+     spinning, &c.; but the latter part of the paragraph,
+     that you had sent for linen from France, because
+     weaving and flax were grown dear, alas, that dissolved
+     the charm; and your sending for long black pins, and
+     lace, and _feathers!_ disgusted me as much as if you
+     had put salt into my strawberries. The spinning, I see,
+     is laid aside, and you are to be dressed for the ball!
+     You seem not to know, my dear daughter, that, of all
+     the dear things in this world, idleness is the dearest,
+     except mischief.
+
+Then Ben as usual comes in for notice. As he intended him for a
+Presbyterian as well as a Republican, he had sent him to finish his
+education at Geneva, Franklin stated.
+
+     He is much grown [he continues] in very good health,
+     draws a little, as you will see by the enclosed, learns
+     Latin, writing, arithmetic, and dancing, and speaks
+     French better than English. He made a translation of
+     your last letter to him, so that some of your works may
+     now appear in a foreign language.
+
+A few sentences more, with regard to her second son, Will, and another
+topic and there is a regurgitation of his disgust over Sally's
+extravagance.
+
+     When I began [he said] to read your account of the high
+     prices of goods, "a pair of gloves, $7; a yard of
+     common gauze, $24, and that it now required a fortune
+     to maintain a family in a very plain way," I expected
+     you would conclude with telling me, that everybody as
+     well as yourself was grown frugal and industrious; and
+     I could scarce believe my eyes in reading forward, that
+     "there never was so much pleasure and dressing going
+     on," and that you yourself wanted black pins and
+     feathers from France to appear, I suppose, in the mode!
+     This leads me to imagine, that it is perhaps not so
+     much that the goods are grown dear, as that the money
+     is grown cheap, as everything else will do when
+     excessively plenty; and that people are still as easy
+     nearly in their circumstances, as when a pair of gloves
+     might be had for half a crown. The war indeed may in
+     some degree raise the prices of goods, and the high
+     taxes which are necessary to support the war may make
+     our frugality necessary; and, as I am always preaching
+     that doctrine, I cannot in conscience or in decency
+     encourage the contrary, by my example, in furnishing my
+     children with foolish modes and luxuries. I therefore
+     send all the articles you desire, that are useful and
+     necessary, and omit the rest; for, as you say you
+     should "have great pride in wearing anything I send,
+     and showing it as your father's taste," I must avoid
+     giving you an opportunity of doing that with either
+     lace or feathers. If you wear your cambric ruffles as I
+     do, and take care not to mend the holes, they will come
+     in time to be lace, and feathers, my dear girl, may be
+     had in America from every cock's tail.
+
+Franklin's last letter to Sally was written from Passy, and contains the
+inimitable strictures on the Order of the Cincinnati, to which we shall
+hereafter return, but nothing of any personal or domestic interest.
+
+Two of the letters of Franklin are written to Sally and her husband
+together. "Dear Son and Daughter," is the way he begins, and one ends, "I
+am ever my dear Children, your affectionate Father."
+
+Both of these letters were written from Passy. One of them, in addition to
+letting the parents know that Ben promised to be a stout, as well as a
+good, man, presents with no little pathos the situation of the writer on
+the eve of his departure from France for Philadelphia in 1785. After
+mentioning his efforts to engage some good vessel bound directly for
+Philadelphia, which would agree to take him on board at Havre with his
+grandsons, servants and baggage, he sketches this lugubrious picture of
+himself.
+
+     Infirm as I am, I have need of comfortable Room and
+     Accommodations. I was miserably lodg'd in coming over
+     hither, which almost demolish'd me. I must be better
+     stow'd now, or I shall not be able to hold out the
+     Voyage. Indeed my Friends here are so apprehensive for
+     me, that they press me much to remain in France, and
+     three of them have offer'd me an Asylum in their
+     Habitations. They tell me I am here among a People who
+     universally esteem and love me; that my Friends at home
+     are diminish'd by Death in my Absence; that I may there
+     meet with Envy and its consequent Enmity which here I
+     am perfectly free from; this supposing I live to
+     compleat the Voyage, but of that they doubt. The Desire
+     however of spending the little Remainder of Life with
+     my Family, is so strong, as to determine me to try, at
+     least, whether I can bear the Motion of a Ship. If not,
+     I must get them to set me on shore somewhere in the
+     Channel, and content myself to die in Europe.
+
+This is melancholy enough, but the wonderful old man weathered out the
+voyage, and contrived on the way to write three elaborate treatises on
+practical subjects which, good as they are of their kind, the general
+reader would gladly exchange for the addition of a few dozen pages to the
+_Autobiography_. In his last years, he was like the mimosa tree, dying, to
+all appearances, one year, and the next throwing out fresh verdurous
+branches from his decaying trunk.
+
+Among the writings of Franklin are also letters to Richard Bache alone. The
+first is dated October 7, 1772, and begins, "Loving Son." But loving son as
+Bache was, Franklin was too indisposed to encourage pecuniary laxity in a
+son-in-law, who had to make his way in the world, not to remind him that
+there remained five guineas unpaid, which he had had of him just on going
+away. "Send it in a Venture for Ben to Jamaica," he said. The next letter
+to Bache relates to the hospitable Post-office. Bache, he says, will have
+heard, before it got to hand, that the writer had been displaced, and
+consequently would have it no longer in his power to assist him in his
+views relating to the Post-office; "As things are," he remarked, "I would
+not wish to see you concern'd in it. For I conceive that the Dismissing me
+merely for not being corrupted by the Office to betray the Interests of my
+Country, will make it some Disgrace among us to hold such an Office."
+
+The remainder of Franklin's letters to Bache, with the exception of a
+letter introducing to him Thomas Paine, the author of _Common Sense_, were
+written from Passy. One of them had something pungent but just enough to
+say about Lee and Izard and the cabal for removing Temple. Sally declared
+on one occasion that she hated all South Carolinians from B (Bee, a member
+of Congress from South Carolina) to Izard. This letter discloses the fact
+that Ben had been placed at school at Geneva in "_the old thirteen United
+States of Switzerland_," as the writer calls them. It is signed "I am your
+affectionate father." Another letter indicates that Franklin had sent a
+profile of the growing boy to his parents, so that they could see the
+changes which he had undergone in the preceding four years. This letter
+also expresses the willingness of the grandfather to give at his expense
+to William, Bache's second son, the best education that America could
+afford. In his next and last letter to Bache, Franklin makes these comments
+upon Ben which not only show how much he loved him but how quietly his
+temperament could accept even such a disappointment as his failure to
+secure the merited office for Temple.
+
+     Benny continues well, and grows amazingly. He is a very
+     sensible and a very good Lad, and I love him much. I
+     had Thoughts of bringing him up under his Cousin, and
+     fitting him for Public Business, thinking he might be
+     of Service hereafter to his Country; but being now
+     convinc'd that _Service is no Inheritance_, as the
+     Proverb says, I have determin'd to give him a Trade
+     that he may have something to depend on, and not be
+     oblig'd to ask Favours or Offices of anybody. And I
+     flatter myself he will make his way good in the World
+     with God's Blessing. He has already begun to learn the
+     business from Masters [a printer and a letter founder]
+     who come to my House, and is very diligent in working
+     and quick in learning.
+
+Two letters to the boy himself are among Franklin's published writings. The
+first is couched in sweet, simple terms, suited to the age of his youthful
+correspondent, and the second is interesting only as evidencing how closely
+the grandfather scanned the drawings and handwriting of his grandson, and
+as emphasizing the importance that he always attached to arithmetic and
+accounts as elements of an useful education.
+
+Sally's reply to her father's rebuke, on account of the modish vanities,
+that she asked of him, was quite spirited.
+
+     How could my dear papa [she said] give me so severe a
+     reprimand for wishing a little finery. He would not, I
+     am sure, if he knew how much I have felt it. Last
+     winter (in consequence of the surrender of General
+     Burgoyne) was a season of triumph to the Whigs, and
+     they spent it gayly; you would not have had me, I am
+     sure, stay away from the Embassadors' or Gerard's
+     entertainments, nor when I was invited to spend a day
+     with General Washington and his lady; and you would
+     have been the last person, I am sure, to have wished to
+     see me dressed with singularity: Though I never loved
+     dress so much as to wish to be particularly fine, yet I
+     never will go out when I cannot appear so as to do
+     credit to my family and husband.
+
+Apparently, Sally was not always so unsuccessful as she was on this
+occasion in her efforts to secure something to wear, suitable to her
+situation as the daughter of a very distinguished citizen of Philadelphia
+in easy circumstances. Nothing, she once wrote to her father, was ever more
+admired than her new gown. It is obvious, however, that Franklin was
+resolved that his daughter at least should heed and profit by what Father
+Abraham had to say in his discourse about the effect of silks, satins,
+scarlet and velvets in putting out the kitchen fire. In his will, he
+bequeathed to her the picture of Louis XV., given to him by the King, which
+was set with four hundred and eight diamonds, "requesting, however, that
+she would not form any of those diamonds into ornaments either for herself
+or daughters, and thereby introduce or countenance the expensive, vain, and
+useless fashion of wearing jewels in this country." The outer circle of the
+diamonds was sold by Sally, and on the proceeds she and her husband made
+the tour of Europe.
+
+When Franklin returned from his second mission, it was to reside with his
+daughter and son-in-law in the new house with the kitchen, dining-room and
+blue chamber mentioned in his letters to Deborah. Cohabitation with the
+Baches proved so agreeable that he wrote Polly Hewson that he was delighted
+with his little family. "Will," he told Temple, "has got a little Gun,
+marches with it, and whistles at the same time by way of Fife." There are
+also some amusing observations in a later letter of his to Temple on a
+letter written by Ben to Temple, when Temple was at the house of his Tory
+father in New Jersey, but which was never sent.
+
+     It was thought [said Franklin] to be too full of Pot
+     hooks & Hangers, and so unintelligible by the dividing
+     Words in the Middle and joining Ends of some to
+     Beginnings of others, that if it had fallen into the
+     Hands of some Committee it might have given them too
+     much Trouble to decypher it, on a Suspicion of its
+     containing Treason, especially as directed to a Tory
+     House.
+
+An earlier letter from Franklin to Polly Hewson about Ben is marked by the
+same playful spirit. "Ben," the grandfather said, "when I delivered him
+your Blessing, inquired the Age of Elizabeth [Mrs. Hewson's daughter] and
+thought her yet too young for him; but, as he made no other Objection, and
+that will lessen every day, I have only to wish being alive to dance with
+your Mother at the Wedding."
+
+After his arrival in America, Franklin was appointed Postmaster-General of
+the Colonies by Congress, and this appointment gave Richard Bache another
+opportunity to solicit an office from his father-in-law. With his usual
+unfaltering nepotism, Franklin appointed him Deputy Postmaster-General, but
+subsequently Congress removed him, and there was nothing for him to do but
+to court fortune in business again, with such aid as Franklin could give
+him in mercantile circles in France. In the latter years of Franklin's
+life, there was a very general feeling that he had made public office too
+much of a family perquisite, and this feeling weakened Richard Bache's
+tenure on the Post Office, and helped to frustrate all Franklin's plans for
+the public preferment of Temple and Benjamin Franklin Bache. Much as
+Washington admired Franklin the latter was unable to obtain even by the
+most assiduous efforts an office under his administration for either of
+them.
+
+When Franklin's ship approached Philadelphia on his return from Paris, it
+was his son-in-law who put off in a boat to bring him and his grandsons
+ashore, and, when he landed at Market Street wharf, he was received by a
+crowd of people with huzzas and accompanied with acclamations quite to his
+door.
+
+After his return he again took up his residence with the Baches in the same
+house as before, and there is but little more to say about the members of
+the Bache family. There are, however, some complimentary things worth
+recalling that were said of Sally by some of her French contemporaries.
+
+     She [Marbois wrote to Franklin in 1781] passed a part
+     of last year in exertions to rouse the zeal of the
+     Pennsylvania ladies; and she made on this occasion such
+     a happy use of the eloquence which you know she
+     possesses, that a large part of the American army was
+     provided with shirts, bought with their money or made
+     by their hands. If there are in Europe [he also said]
+     any women who need a model of attachment to domestic
+     duties and love for their country, Mrs. Bache may be
+     pointed out to them as such.
+
+The Marquis de Chastellux tells us that she was "simple in her manners,"
+and "like her respectable father, she possesses his benevolence."
+
+Of course, from the letters of Franklin himself we obtain some insight into
+the domestic conditions by which he was surrounded in his home during the
+last stages of his existence. To John Jay and Mrs. Jay he wrote, shortly
+after his arrival in America, that he was then in the bosom of his family,
+and found four new little prattlers, who clung about the knees of their
+grandpapa, and afforded him great pleasure. It is a peaceful slope, though
+near the foot of the hill, which is presented to our eyes in these words
+written by him to Jan Ingenhousz:
+
+     Except that I am too much encumber'd with Business, I
+     find myself happily situated here, among my numerous
+     Friends, plac'd at the Head of my Country by its
+     unanimous Voice, in the Bosom of my Family, my
+     Offspring to wait on me and nurse me, in a House I
+     built 23 Years since to my Mind.
+
+A still later letter, in which he speaks of Sally, tends to support the
+idea that it was not his but William Franklin's fault that the
+reconciliation, which was supposed to have taken place between father and
+son abroad, was not sufficiently complete to repress the acrid reference
+made by Franklin in his will to the fact that his son had been a Loyalist.
+
+     I too [he wrote to his friend, Mather Byles] have a
+     Daughter, who lives with me and is the Comfort of my
+     declining Years, while my Son is estrang'd from me by
+     the Part he took in the late War, and keeps aloof,
+     residing in England, whose Cause he _espous'd_; whereby
+     the old Proverb is exemplified;
+
+    "My Son is my Son till he take him a Wife;
+    But my Daughter's my Daughter all Days of her Life."
+
+We are the quicker to place the blame for the recrudescence of the former
+bitterness upon William Franklin because the life of Franklin is full of
+proofs that he had a truly forgiving disposition.[24] It is a fact,
+however, that his unrelenting antipathy to Loyalists is the one thing in
+his career unworthy of a sense of justice and breadth of intellectual
+charity, otherwise well-nigh perfect. We cannot but regret that anything
+should have shaken the poise of a character which Lecky has truthfully
+termed "one of the calmest and best balanced of human characters." But it
+is not given even to a Franklin to see things in their ordinary colors
+through a blood-red mist, and quite as true as any saying that Poor Richard
+ever conceived or borrowed is _Acerrima proximorum odia_.
+
+In still another letter, one to Madame Brillon, he says, "A dutiful and
+affectionate Daughter, with her Husband and Six Children compose my Family.
+The Children are all promising, and even the youngest, who is but four
+Years old, contributes to my Amusement"; and, about a year and a half
+before his death, he records in a letter to Elizabeth Partridge, the
+"Addition of a little good-natured Girl, whom I begin to love as well as
+the rest." In yet another letter, this time to his friend, Alexander Small,
+after the birth of this little girl, there is a revelation of the domestic
+quietude in which his long life closed. "I have," he said, "seven promising
+grandchildren by my daughter, who play with and amuse me, and she is a kind
+attentive nurse to me when I am at any time indisposed; so that I pass my
+time as agreeably as at my age a man may well expect, and have little to
+wish for, except a more easy exit than my malady seems to threaten." By
+this time, Benjamin Franklin Bache was old enough to be turning to the
+practical purposes of self-support the knowledge of printing which he had
+acquired in France. "I am too old to follow printing again myself," wrote
+Franklin to Mrs. Catherine Greene, "but, loving the business, I have
+brought up my grandson Benjamin to it, and have built and furnished a
+printing-house for him, which he now manages under my eye." The type used
+by Benjamin in his business were those which his grandfather had cast with
+the aid of his servants in Paris, and had employed in printing the
+brilliant little productions penned by his friends and himself, which
+created so much merriment in the _salon_ of Madame Helvetius.
+
+The seven children of Sarah Bache were Benjamin Franklin Bache, who married
+Margaret Marcoe, William Hartman Bache, who married Catharine Wistar, Eliza
+Franklin Bache, who married John Edward Harwood, Louis Bache, who married
+first Mary Ann Swift, and then Esther Egee, Deborah Bache, who married
+William J. Duane, Richard Bache, who married Sophia B. Dallas, a daughter
+of Alexander J. Dallas, and Sarah Bache, who married Thomas Sargeant.
+
+Besides being a good husband, father and grandfather, Franklin was also a
+good son. His father, Josiah, had seven children by his first wife, Anne,
+and ten by his second, Abiah Folger, Franklin's mother. Of this swarm, we
+are told by the _Autobiography_ that Franklin could remember thirteen
+children sitting at one time at his father's table, who all grew up to be
+men and women, and married. Franklin himself was the youngest son, and the
+youngest child but two. In few subjects was his adult interest keener than
+in that of population, and the circumstances of his early life were
+certainly calculated to stimulate it into a high degree of precocious
+activity. It is a pleasing portrait that he paints of his father for us in
+the _Autobiography_. After describing his physique in the terms already
+quoted by us, Franklin says:
+
+     He was ingenious, could draw prettily, was skilled a
+     little in music, and had a clear pleasing voice, so
+     that when he played psalm tunes on his violin and sung
+     withal, as he sometimes did in an evening after the
+     business of the day was over, it was extremely
+     agreeable to hear. He had a mechanical genius too, and,
+     on occasion, was very handy in the use of other
+     tradesman's tools; but his great excellence lay in a
+     sound understanding and solid judgment in prudential
+     matters, both in private and publick affairs. In the
+     latter, indeed, he was never employed, the numerous
+     family he had to educate and the straitness of his
+     circumstances keeping him close to his trade; but I
+     remember well his being frequently visited by leading
+     people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of
+     the town or of the church he belonged to, and showed a
+     good deal of respect for his judgment and advice: he
+     was also much consulted by private persons about their
+     affairs when any difficulty occurred, and frequently
+     chosen an arbitrator between contending parties. At his
+     table he liked to have, as often as he could, some
+     sensible friend or neighbour to converse with, and
+     always took care to start some ingenious or useful
+     topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the
+     minds of his children. By this means he turned our
+     attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the
+     conduct of life; and little or no notice was ever taken
+     of what related to the victuals on the table, whether
+     it was well or ill-dressed, in or out of season, of
+     good or bad flavour, preferable or inferior to this or
+     that other thing of the kind, so that I was bro't up in
+     such a perfect inattention to those matters as to be
+     quite indifferent what kind of food was set before me,
+     and so unobservant of it, that to this day if I am
+     asked I can scarce tell a few hours after dinner what I
+     dined upon. This has been a convenience to me in
+     travelling, where my companions have been sometimes
+     very unhappy for want of a suitable gratification of
+     their more delicate, because better instructed, tastes
+     and appetites.
+
+A story is credited to Josiah by Franklin which is quite in the manner of
+the son. When Charles the First ordered his proclamation authorizing sports
+on Sunday to be read in all churches, many clergymen complied, some refused
+and others hurried it through as indistinctly as possible. But a certain
+clergyman to the surprise of his congregation read it distinctly. He
+followed the reading, however, with the Fourth Commandment, _Remember to
+keep holy the Sabbath Day_, and then said, "Brethren, I have laid before
+you the Command of your King, and the Commandment of your God. I leave it
+to yourselves to judge which of the two ought rather to be observed."
+
+It is to be wished that Franklin could have given us in the _Autobiography_
+a companion portrait of his mother also; but this he has not done. He tells
+us little more than that she was the daughter of Peter Folger, a resident
+of Nantucket, had, like her husband, an excellent constitution, and suckled
+all her ten children--a point of capital importance with her son. Franklin
+further tells us that he never knew either his father or his mother to have
+any sickness but that of which they died, he at eighty-nine and she at
+eighty-five. They were both buried in Boston, and rested for many years
+under a monument, erected over their graves by Franklin, with a happy
+inscription from his pen, until this monument, having fallen into a state
+of dilapidation, was replaced in 1827 by a more durable one, erected by a
+number of citizens of Boston, who were desirous, as their supplementary
+inscription states, of reminding succeeding generations that he was born in
+Boston. In his inscription, Franklin, true to his ideals, states with pride
+that Josiah and Abiah lived lovingly together in wedlock fifty-five years,
+and, without an estate, or any gainful employment, by constant labor and
+industry, with God's blessing, maintained a large family comfortably, and
+brought up thirteen children and seven grandchildren reputably. In the
+light of the altered domestic standards of the present time, it requires
+some little effort, after reading these words, to accept the subsequent
+statement in the inscription that Josiah was not only a pious but a
+"prudent" man.
+
+Peter Folger was evidently regarded by Franklin with distinct favor because
+of his tolerant characteristics. The flower of tolerance did not often lift
+up its head in the frigid air of what some one has wittily styled the "ice
+age" of New England history. In the _Autobiography_, Franklin speaks of
+Folger as one of the first settlers of New England, of whom honourable
+mention is made by Cotton Mather, in his church history of that country,
+entitled _Magnolia Christi Americana_, as "_a godly, learned Englishman_,"
+if he remembers the words rightly.
+
+     I have heard [the _Autobiography_ goes on] that he
+     wrote sundry small occasional pieces, but only one of
+     them was printed, which I saw now many years since. It
+     was written in 1675, in the home-spun verse of that
+     time and people, and addressed to those then concerned
+     in the government there. It was in favour of liberty of
+     conscience, and in behalf of the Baptists, Quakers, and
+     other sectaries that had been under persecution,
+     ascribing the Indian Wars, and other distresses that
+     had befallen the country, to that persecution, as so
+     many judgments of God to punish so heinous an offense,
+     and exhorting a repeal of those uncharitable laws. The
+     whole appeared to me as written with a good deal of
+     decent plainness and manly freedom. The six concluding
+     lines I remember, though I have forgotten the two first
+     of the stanza; but the purport of them was, that his
+     censures proceeded from good-will, and, therefore, he
+     would be known to be the author,
+
+    "Because to be a libeller (says he)
+    I hate it with my heart;
+    From Sherburne town, where now I dwell,
+    My name I do put here;
+    Without offense your real friend,
+    It is Peter Folgier."
+
+Verses like these, it is to be feared, call for somewhat the same spirit of
+toleration as that which Folger himself exhibited towards the Baptists and
+Quakers, but they were well worthy of remembrance, at any rate, for the
+brave and enlightened spirit by which they were informed.[25]
+
+Peter Folger's plainness of speech seems to have been a family
+characteristic. In a letter to his sister Jane, written in his last years,
+Franklin told her frankly that, if there had been a misunderstanding
+between her and one of her relations, he should have concluded that it was
+her fault, "for I think our Family," he said, "were always subject to being
+a little Miffy." Then, as was his habit, when he had discharged the
+disagreeable duty of saying something slightly censorious, he brings the
+stress of his good nature to bear upon his pen just a little harder than
+usual.
+
+     By the way [he asked] is our Relationship in Nantucket
+     worn-out? I have met with none from thence of late
+     years, who were disposed to be acquainted with me,
+     except Captain Timothy Foulger. They are wonderfully
+     shy. But I admire their honest plainness of Speech.
+     About a year ago I invited two of them to dine with me.
+     Their answer was, that they would, if they could not do
+     better. I suppose they did better; for I never saw them
+     afterwards, and so had no Opportunity of showing my
+     Miff, if I had one.
+
+The letters from Franklin to his father and mother are few in number but
+not lacking in interest. To the one to Josiah, in which he made the heinous
+confession that his mind was not very clear as to the difference between
+Arianism and Arminianism, we have already adverted. In this letter, besides
+the burden of defending his religious orthodoxy before a very stern
+tribunal, he had to assume the burden of satisfying his good mother that
+there was nothing odious in the principles and practices of the Freemasons;
+and this in the face of the fact that one of their rules was not to admit
+women into their lodges. Another letter, which begins "Honoured Father and
+Mother," and ends, "Your affectionate and dutiful son," discourses in quite
+a learned fashion upon various remedies that might take the place of the
+ebbing _vis medicatrix naturae_ which had served the aged pair so well for
+such a long span of years; but the son is careful to say that he hopes that
+his parents will consider his advice upon such subjects only as marks of
+his good will and put no more of it in practice than should happen to agree
+with their doctor's directions. Another letter, beginning "Honoured
+Mother," deals with topics of a very different nature from either religious
+dogmas or the _sapo philosophorum_ of his medicinal communication. Cousin
+Josiah Davenport and his spouse had arrived at Philadelphia hearty and
+well. He had met them the evening before at Trenton, thirty miles off, and
+had accompanied them to town. How gracious, we may remark, was the old
+Pennsylvania hospitality which sometimes greeted the coming guest thirty
+miles away, and, instead of speeding the parting guest, sometimes followed
+him for as great a distance when he was going!
+
+     They [Franklin continued] went into their own house on
+     Monday, and I believe will do very well, for he seems
+     bent on industry, and she appears a discreet, notable
+     young woman. My wife has been to see them every day,
+     calling in as she passes by; and I suspect has fallen
+     in love with our new cousin; for she entertains me a
+     deal, when she comes home, with what Cousin Sally does,
+     and what Cousin Sally says, what a good contriver she
+     is, and the like.
+
+In his next letter to Abiah, Franklin sends her one of his far-famed
+almanacs, and then adds, "I send you also a moidore enclosed, which please
+to accept towards chaise hire, that you may ride warm to meetings this
+winter." From the moidore he passes to infantile complaints which it must
+have pained the heart of the mother of ten children to hear had carried off
+many children in Philadelphia that summer, and then, after just a word
+about Cousin Coleman and two of the outspoken Folgers, he has this to say
+about Sally: "Your granddaughter is the greatest lover of her book and
+school, of any child I ever knew, and is very dutiful to her mistress as
+well as to us."
+
+In one of her letters to her son Abiah tells him that she is very weak and
+short-breathed, so that she can't sit up to write much, although she sleeps
+well at night, and her cough is better, and she has a pretty good stomach
+to her victuals. In the same letter, she also says: "Pray excuse my bad
+writing and inditing, for all tell me I am too old to write letters." No
+courtier could have framed a more graceful response to this appeal, let
+alone the sincerity of filial respect and love.
+
+     We received your kind Letter of the 2d Instant [wrote
+     Franklin] and we are glad to hear you still enjoy such
+     a Measure of Health, notwithstanding your great Age. We
+     read your Writing very easily. I never met with a Word
+     in your Letters but what I could readily understand;
+     for, tho' the Hand is not always the best, the Sense
+     makes everything plain.
+
+The numerous family details in this letter render it the most interesting
+of Franklin's letters to his mother. They had concluded, he said, to sell
+at the first good opportunity a negro slave and his wife, who appear to
+have been guilty of some thievery, "for we do not like Negro Servants," he
+declared. For the sake of human consistency, it is to be hoped that the
+pair were sold long before he became the President of the Pennsylvania
+Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and assailed the African slave trade
+with such telling raillery. But, to sell all one's own negroes, and then to
+enter upon a perfervid course of agitation for the enfranchisement of one's
+neighbor's negroes, without compensation, was a thing of not uncommon
+occurrence in American history, so long as the institution of slavery
+lasted. Will (William Franklin), he tells Abiah, had acquired a habit of
+idleness on the expedition against Canada, but had begun of late to apply
+himself to business, and he hoped would become an industrious man. "He
+imagin'd his Father," said Franklin, "had got enough for him, but I have
+assured him that I intend to spend what little I have myself, if it please
+God that I live long enough; and, as he by no means wants Sense, he can see
+by my going on, that I am like to be as good as my Word."
+
+     Sally [he says] grows a fine Girl, and is extremely
+     industrious with her Needle, and delights in her Book.
+     She is of a most affectionate Temper, and perfectly
+     dutiful and obliging to her Parents, and to all.
+     Perhaps I flatter myself too much, but I have Hopes
+     that she will prove an ingenious, sensible, notable,
+     and worthy Woman, like her Aunt Jenny. She goes now to
+     the Dancing-School.
+
+After Franklin decamped from Boston as a boy, he rarely again saw his
+parents, but, down to the days of their respective deaths, he kept in touch
+with them immediately, through his own correspondence with them, and also
+mediately through his correspondence with his sister Jane. "You have
+mentioned nothing in your letter of our dear parents," he observes in one
+of his letters to her. "Dear Sister, I love you tenderly for your care of
+our father in his sickness," he writes to her on another occasion. And,
+finally, when Abiah, "home had gone and ta'en her wages," he sent these
+feeling words to this same sister and her husband:
+
+     Dear Brother and Sister, I received yours with the
+     affecting news of our dear good mother's death. I thank
+     you for your long continued care of her in her old age
+     and sickness. Our distance made it impracticable for us
+     to attend her, but you have supplied all. She has lived
+     a good life, as well as a long one, and is happy.
+
+Josiah left an estate valued at twenty-four hundred dollars. Some years
+after his death, when Franklin happened to be in Boston, an old man
+produced a bond, executed by the father for about fifteen or seventeen
+pounds, and asked the son to pay it. This Franklin declined to do, taking
+the position that, as he had never received any share of his father's
+estate, he did not think himself obliged to pay any of the debts due by it.
+Another reason, as he afterwards stated in a letter to his sister Jane, in
+which the incident was mentioned, was that he considered the matter one
+rather for the attention of his brother John, the administrator of his
+father, than himself. But, in this same letter, nevertheless, he sent these
+instructions to Jane: "If you know that Person, I wish you would now, out
+of Hall's Money (a sum that was to be collected for him and to be given to
+her) pay that Debt; for I remember his Mildness on the Occasion with some
+Regard." A soft answer, we know, tends to turn away wrath, but it is not
+often, we imagine, that mildness proves such an effective policy for the
+collection of a stale debt.
+
+"Dear kindred blood! How I do love you all!" the exclamation of Daniel
+Webster, might as well have issued from the great, loving heart of
+Franklin. Like the brethren of Joseph, the son of Jacob, pretty much all of
+his contemporary relations came to share in one way or another in the good
+fortune of the only prosperous member of the family. Franklin was too young
+to have ever met the two brothers of his father, who lived and died in
+England--John, the Banbury dyer, with whom Franklin's paternal
+grandfather, Thomas resided in his old age, and with whom Franklin's father
+served an apprenticeship, and Thomas, the Ecton forerunner of Franklin
+himself, whom we have already mentioned. But his paternal uncle, Benjamin,
+who followed Franklin's father to New England, and lived in the same house
+with him for some years, Franklin did know, and brings before us quite
+clearly in the _Autobiography_. He was bred a silk dyer in England, was an
+ingenious and very pious man, we are assured by his nephew, and died at a
+great age. It was to the warm affection that existed between this uncle,
+whose grandson, Samuel Franklin, was one of Franklin's correspondents, and
+Franklin's father that Franklin owed his Christian name. Besides being a
+dyer, a great attender of sermons of the best preachers, "which he took
+down in his shorthand," he was, the _Autobiography_ states, a poet, and
+"also much of a politician; too much, perhaps, for his station."
+
+In his agreeable life of Franklin, Parton has this to say of the uncle's
+poetry books.
+
+     The poetry books of Uncle Benjamin, which are still in
+     perfect preservation, though it is a hundred and eighty
+     years since he bought the first of them, are neatly
+     written and carefully indexed. Many of the pieces are
+     acrostics, and several are curiously shaped on the
+     page-dwindling or expanding in various forms, according
+     to the quaint fancy of the poet.
+
+No true poet, of course, ever had the patience to index his poems, and the
+best that can be said of the uncle as a poet is that, though he did not
+reach even the lowest slopes of Parnassus, he attained a point distinctly
+nearer to its base than the nephew ever did. Every family event seems to
+have been a peg for him to hang a verse upon, and among his lines are these
+sent across the Atlantic in return for something from the pen of his
+nephew who was at that time about seven years of age:
+
+    "'Tis time for me to throw aside my pen,
+    When hanging sleeves read, write, and rhyme like men,
+    This forward spring foretells a plenteous crop;
+    For, if the bud bear grain, what will the top!
+    If plenty in the verdant blade appear,
+    What may we not soon hope for in the ear!
+    When flowers are beautiful before they're blown,
+    What rarities will afterward be shown."
+
+The uncle was living in New England when Josiah, Franklin's brother, who
+had run away to sea, and who had not been heard from for nine years, turned
+up again in Boston. That was a domestic event of entirely too much
+importance to be unsung by an uncle at once pious and poetical. So, after
+some vigorous references to the Deity, who
+
+    "Stills the storm and does Asswage
+      Proud Dreadfull seas Death-Threatning Rage,"
+
+the honest poet breaks out into this invocation in which he had every right
+to believe that the long-lost Josiah would heartily join:
+
+    "O Let men praise this mighty Lord,
+    And all his Wondrous Works Record;
+    Let all the Sons of men, before
+    Whose Eyes those Works are Done, Adore."
+
+But his rhymes appear to have fallen upon an ear deaf to the appeals of
+both piety and poetry, for one of the poet's poetry books contains this
+resentful entry:
+
+"The Third part of the 107 psalm, Which Follows Next, I composed to sing at
+First meeting with my Nephew Josiah Franklin, But being unaffected with
+Gods Great Goodn's: In his many preservations and Deliverances, It was
+coldly Entertain'd."
+
+The extent to which his uncle Benjamin had been a politician in England was
+brought home to Franklin by a curious incident when he was in London. A
+second-hand book dealer, who knew nothing of the relationship between the
+two, offered to sell him a collection of pamphlets, bound in eight volumes
+folio, and twenty-four volumes, quarto and octavo, and containing all the
+principal pamphlets and papers on political topics, printed in England from
+the Restoration down to the year 1715. On examining them, Franklin was
+satisfied from the handwriting of the tables of contents, memoranda of
+prices and marginal notes in them, as well as from other circumstances,
+that his Uncle Benjamin was the collector, and he bought them. In all
+probability, they had been sold by the uncle, when he emigrated from
+England to New England more than fifty years before.
+
+The _Autobiography_ does not mention the fact that Franklin had at least
+one aunt on the paternal side, but he had. In a letter in the year 1767 to
+Samuel Franklin, the grandson of his Uncle Benjamin, after stating that
+there were at that time but two of their relations bearing the name of
+Franklin living in England, namely, Thomas Franklin, of Lutterworth, in
+Leicestershire, a dyer, and his daughter, Sally, Franklin asserts that
+there were besides still living in England Eleanor Morris, an old maiden
+lady, the daughter of Hannah, the sister of Franklin's father, and Hannah
+Walker, the granddaughter of John, the brother of Franklin's father, and
+her three sons. No Arab was ever made happier by the reception of a guest
+than was Franklin by the discovery of a new Franklin. In 1781, when a lady
+at Koenigsberg, who was the granddaughter of a John Franklin, communicated
+to him certain facts about her family history, he replied in terms that
+left her no footing for a claim of relationship, but added affably, "It
+would be a Pleasure to me to Discover a Relation in Europe, possessing the
+amiable Sentiments express'd in your Letter. I assure you I should not
+disown the meanest." One of the statements of this letter was that he had
+exact accounts of every person of his family since the year 1555, when it
+was established in England. Such a thing as sensitiveness to his humble
+origin or the social obscurity of his kinsfolk could find no lodgment in a
+mind so capacious, a heart so kind, or a nature so full of manly
+self-respect as his. To say nothing more, he was too much of a philosopher
+not to realize how close even the high-born nobleman, when detached from
+privilege and social superstition, is to the forked radish, to which
+elemental man has been likened. It is true that he once wrote to his sister
+Jane that he would not have her son Peter put the Franklin arms on soap of
+his making, and this has been cited as evidence that even Franklin had his
+petty modicum of social pride. The imputation overlooks the reason that he
+gave, namely, that to use the Franklin coat of arms for such a purpose
+would look too much like an attempt to counterfeit the soap formerly made
+by Peter's uncle John. It was Franklin's true pride of character that
+disarmed the social arrogance which might otherwise have rendered him less
+triumphantly successful than he was in winning his way into the favor of
+the most accomplished men, and the most beautiful and elegant women, in
+France.
+
+With regard to his generous conduct to his brother James we have already
+spoken. Of Jemmy, James' son, who became Franklin's apprentice at James'
+request, we have a view in a letter from Franklin to his sister Jane in
+which he uses Jemmy as an illustration of how unreasonably her son Benny,
+when Mr. Parker's apprentice, might have complained of the clothes
+furnished to him by his master.
+
+     I never knew an apprentice [he said] contented with the
+     clothes allowed him by his master, let them be what
+     they would. Jemmy Franklin, when with me, was always
+     dissatisfied and grumbling. When I was last in Boston,
+     his aunt bid him go to a shop and please himself, which
+     the gentleman did, and bought a suit of clothes on my
+     account dearer by one half than any I ever afforded
+     myself, one suit excepted; which I don't mention by way
+     of complaint of Jemmy, for he and I are good friends,
+     but only to show you the nature of boys.
+
+What a good friend he proved to Jemmy, when the latter became his own
+master, we have seen. The _erratum_ of which Franklin was guilty in his
+relations to his brother James was fully corrected long before he left a
+will behind him conferring upon James' descendants the same measure of his
+remembrance as that conferred by him upon the descendants of his brother
+Samuel and his sisters.
+
+Four of Franklin's brothers died young, and Josiah, his sea faring brother,
+perished at sea not long after he excited the dudgeon of his uncle Benjamin
+by his indifference to his uncle's line of thanksgiving.
+
+As long as Franklin's brothers John and Peter were engaged, as their father
+had been, in the business of making soap and candles, Franklin assisted
+them by obtaining consignments of their wares from them, and advertising
+these wares in his newspaper, and selling them in his shop. Later, when he
+became Deputy Postmaster-General of the Colonies, he made John postmaster
+at Boston and Peter postmaster at Philadelphia. Referring to a visit that
+he paid to John at Newport, Franklin says in the _Autobiography_, "He
+received me very affectionately, for he always lov'd me." When John died in
+1756 at the age of sixty-five, some years after his brother Benjamin had
+thoughtfully devised a special catheter for his use, the latter wrote to
+his sister Jane, "I condole with you on the loss of our dear brother. As
+our number grows less, let us love one another proportionably more."
+John's widow he made postmistress at Boston in her husband's place.
+
+Peter Franklin died in 1766 in the seventy-fourth year of his age. As soon
+as the news of Peter's death reached Franklin in London, he wrote a most
+feeling letter to Peter's widow, Mary.
+
+     It has pleased God at length [he said] to take from us
+     my only remaining Brother, and your affectionate
+     Husband, with whom you have lived in uninterrupted
+     Harmony and Love near half a Century.
+
+     Considering the many Dangers & Hardships his Way of
+     Life led him into, and the Weakness of his
+     Constitution, it is wonderful that he lasted so long.
+     It was God's Goodness that spared him to us. Let us,
+     instead of repining at what we have lost, be thankful
+     for what we have enjoyed.
+
+He then proceeds, in order to allay the widow's fears as to her future, to
+tell her that he proposes to set up a printing house for her adopted son to
+be carried on in partnership with her, and to further encourage this son if
+he managed well.[26]
+
+Of Franklin's brother Samuel, we know but little.
+
+Franklin's oldest sister, Elizabeth Dowse, the wife of Captain Dowse, lived
+to a very great age, and fell into a state of extreme poverty. When he was
+consulted by her relations in New England as to whether it was not best for
+her to give up the house in which she was living, and to sell her personal
+effects, he sent a reply full of wise kindness.
+
+     As _having their own way_ is one of the greatest
+     comforts of life to old people [he said], I think their
+     friends should endeavour to accommodate them in that,
+     as well as in anything else. When they have long lived
+     in a house, it becomes natural to them; they are almost
+     as closely connected with it, as the tortoise with his
+     shell; they die, if you tear them out of it; old folks
+     and old trees, if you remove them, it is ten to one
+     that you kill them; so let our good old sister be no
+     more importuned on that head. We are growing old fast
+     ourselves, and shall expect the same kind of
+     indulgences; if we give them, we shall have a right to
+     receive them in our turn.
+
+     And as to her few fine things, I think she is in the
+     right not to sell them, and for the reason she gives,
+     that they will fetch but little; and when that little
+     is spent, they would be of no further use to her; but
+     perhaps the expectation of possessing them at her death
+     may make that person tender and careful of her, and
+     helpful to her to the amount of ten times their value.
+     If so, they are put to the best use they possibly can
+     be.
+
+     I hope you visit sister as often as your affairs will
+     permit, and afford her what assistance and comfort you
+     can in her present situation. _Old age_, _infirmities_,
+     and _poverty_, joined, are afflictions enough. The
+     _neglect_ and _slights_ of friends and near relations
+     should never be added. People in her circumstances are
+     apt to suspect this sometimes without cause;
+     _appearances_ should therefore be attended to, in our
+     conduct towards them, as well as _realities_.
+
+And then follows the sentence which indicates that, apart from the value,
+which belonged to his advice on any practical point, there was good reason
+why his views about sister Dowse's house and finery should be entitled to
+peculiar respect. "I write by this post to cousin Williams," he said, "to
+continue his care, which I doubt not he will do."
+
+This letter was addressed to his sister Jane. In another to her, written a
+few weeks later, he said, "I am glad you have resolved to visit sister
+Dowse oftener; it will be a great comfort to her to find she is not
+neglected by you, and your example may, perhaps, be followed by some
+others of her relations." In the succeeding year, when he was settled in
+England, he writes to his sister Jane, "My wife will let you see my letter,
+containing an account of our travels, which I would have you read to sister
+Dowse, and give my love to her."
+
+Another sister of Franklin, Mary, married Captain Robert Holmes. He was the
+master of a sloop that plied between Boston and the Delaware, and, when he
+heard at New Castle that his run-a-way brother-in-law was living in
+Philadelphia, he wrote to him begging him to return to Boston, and received
+from him a reply, composed with so much literary skill that Governor Keith
+of Pennsylvania, when the letter was shown to him by Holmes, declared that
+the writer appeared to be a young man of promising parts, and should be
+encouraged. Mrs. Holmes died of cancer of the breast, which is responsible
+for the only occasion perhaps on which Franklin was ever known to incline
+his ear to the virtues of a nostrum.
+
+     We have here in town [he wrote to his sister Jane] a
+     kind of shell made of some wood, cut at a proper time,
+     by some man of great skill (as they say), which has
+     done wonders in that disease among us, being worn for
+     some time on the breast. I am not apt to be
+     superstitiously fond of believing such things, but the
+     instances are so well attested, as sufficiently to
+     convince the most incredulous.
+
+Another sister of Franklin, Lydia, married Robert Scott, but our
+information about her is very meagre.
+
+This is also true of Anne Harris, still another sister of his. We do know,
+however, that some of her family wandered away to London before Franklin
+left America on his mission to France, and that one of them took pains to
+apprise him of her urgent wants after he arrived there. She was, she said,
+"Obliged to Worke very hard and Can But just git the common necessarys of
+life," and therefore had "thoughts of going into a family as housekeeper
+... having lived in that station for several years and gave grate
+satisfaction." With a curious disregard to existing conditions, quite
+unworthy of her connection with her illustrious relative, she even asked
+him to aid her in securing the promotion of her son in the British Navy.
+
+A daughter of this sister, Grace Harris, married Jonathan Williams, a
+Boston merchant engaged in the West India trade, who enjoyed the honor of
+acting as the moderator of the meetings held at Faneuil Hall in 1773 for
+the purpose of preventing the landing of the odious tea. She must have been
+an elated mother when she received from her uncle in 1771 a letter in which
+he spoke of her two sons in these terms:
+
+     They are, I assure you, exceeding welcome to me; and
+     they behave with so much Prudence, that no two young
+     Men could possibly less need the Advice you would have
+     me give them. Josiah is very happily employ'd in his
+     Musical Pursuits. And as you hinted to me, that it
+     would be agreeable to you, if I employ'd Johnathan in
+     Writing, I requested him to put my Accounts in Order,
+     which had been much neglected. He undertook it with the
+     utmost chearfulness and Readiness, and executed it with
+     the greatest Diligence, making me a compleat new Set of
+     Books, fairly written out and settled in a Mercantile
+     Manner, which is a great Satisfaction to me, and a very
+     considerable service. I mention this, that you may not
+     be in the least Uneasy from an Apprehension of their
+     Visit being burthensome to me; it being, I assure you,
+     quite the contrary.
+
+     It has been wonderful to me to see a young Man from
+     America, in a Place so full of various Amusements as
+     London is, as attentive to Business, as diligent in it,
+     and keeping as close at home till it was finished, as
+     if it had been for his own Profit; and as if he had
+     been at the Public Diversions so often, as to be tired
+     of them.
+
+     I pray God to keep and preserve you and yours, and give
+     you again, in due time, a happy Sight of these valuable
+     Sons.
+
+The same favorable opinion of these two grandnephews found expression in a
+letter from Franklin to his sister Jane. Josiah, he said, had attained his
+heart's desire in being under the tuition of Mr. Stanley (the musical
+composer), who, though he had long left off teaching, kindly undertook, at
+Franklin's request, to instruct him, and was much pleased with his
+quickness of apprehension, and the progress he was making, and Jonathan
+appeared a very valuable young man, sober, regular and inclined to industry
+and frugality, which were promising signs of success in business. "I am
+very happy in their Company," the letter further stated.
+
+With the help of Franklin, Jonathan, one of these two young men, became the
+naval agent of the United States at Nantes, when Franklin was in France.
+Later, he was charged by Arthur Lee with improperly retaining in his hands
+in this capacity upwards of one hundred thousand livres due to the United
+States, and Franklin insisted that Arthur Lee should make good his charge.
+
+     I have no desire to screen Mr. Williams on acct of
+     his being my Nephew [he said] if he is guilty of what
+     you charge him with. I care not how soon he is
+     deservedly punish'd and the family purg'd of him; for I
+     take it that a Rogue living in (a) Family is a greater
+     Disgrace to it than one _hang'd out_ of it.
+
+But, when steps were taken by Franklin to have the accounts passed upon by
+a body of disinterested referees, Lee haughtily refused to reduce his vague
+accusation to a form sufficiently specific to be laid before them. After
+John Adams succeeded Silas Deane, Franklin and himself united in executing
+an order for the payment to Williams of the balance claimed by him, but
+Adams had been brought over to the suspicions of Lee to such an extent that
+the order provided that it was not to be understood as an approval of the
+accounts, but that Williams was to be responsible to Congress for their
+correctness. With such impetuosity did Adams adopt these suspicions that,
+in a few days after his arrival at Paris, when he had really had no
+opportunity to investigate the matter, he concurred with Lee in ordering
+Williams to close his existing accounts and to make no new ones. This, of
+course, was equivalent to dismissal from the employment. Franklin, probably
+realizing not only the hopelessness of a contest of one against two, but
+the unwisdom from a public point of view of feeding the flame of such a
+controversy, united with his colleagues in signing the order.[27]
+
+A bequest of books that he made to Williams is one among many other still
+more positive proofs that his confidence in his grandnephew was never
+impaired, and it is only fair to the memory of Adams to suppose that, if he
+ever had any substantial doubts about Williams' integrity, they were
+subsequently dispelled, for when President he appointed Williams a major
+of artillery in the federal army; an appointment which ultimately resulted
+in his being made the first Superintendent of the Military Academy at West
+Point. The quarrel, however, did neither Franklin nor the American cause
+any good. It gave additional color to the accusation that he was too quick
+to billet his relatives upon the public, and had the effect also of
+intensifying the dissensions between our representatives in France which
+constitute such a painful chapter in the history of the American
+Revolution. To make things worse, Jonathan failed in business, before he
+left France, and had to obtain a _surseance_ against his creditors through
+the application of his granduncle to the Count de Vergennes.
+
+Franklin's sister, Sarah, did not long survive her marriage to Joseph
+Davenport. Her death, Franklin wrote to his sister Jane, "was a loss
+without doubt regretted by all that knew her, for she was a good woman." It
+was at his instance that Davenport removed to Philadelphia, and opened a
+bakery where he sold "choice middling bisket," and occasionally "Boston
+loaf sugar" and "choice pickled and spiced oisters in cags."
+
+There is a letter from Franklin to Josiah Davenport, the son of Sarah
+Davenport, written just after the failure of the latter in business which
+shows that, open as the door of the Post Office usually was to members of
+the Franklin family, it was sometimes slammed with a bang in the face of a
+_mauvais sujet_ of that blood. Franklin advises Josiah not to think of any
+place in the Post Office.
+
+     The money you receive [he said] will slip thro' your
+     Fingers, and you will run behind hand imperceptibly,
+     when your Securities must suffer, or your Employers. I
+     grow too old to run such Risques, and therefore wish
+     you to propose nothing more of the kind to me. I have
+     been hurt too much by endeavouring to help Cousin Ben
+     Mecom. I have no Opinion of the Punctuality of Cousins.
+     They are apt to take Liberties with Relations they
+     would not take with others, from a Confidence that a
+     Relation will not sue them. And tho' I believe you now
+     resolve and intend well in case of such an Appointment,
+     I can have no Dependence that some unexpected
+     Misfortune or Difficulty will not embarras your Affairs
+     and render you again insolvent. Don't take this unkind.
+     It is better to be thus free with you than to give you
+     Expectations that cannot be answered.
+
+So Josiah, who was keeping a little shop at the time, like the famous
+office-seeker, who is said to have begun by asking Lincoln for an office
+and to have ended by asking him for a pair of trousers, had to content
+himself with a gift of four dozen of Evans' maps, "which," said Franklin in
+his letter, "if you can sell you are welcome to apply the Money towards
+Clothing your Boys, or to any other Purpose."
+
+But, of all Franklin's collateral relatives, the one that he loved best was
+his sister Jane, the wife of Edward Mecom. She survived her brother four
+years, dying at the age of eighty-two, and, from her childhood until his
+death, they cherished for each other the most devoted affection. Her
+letters show that she was a woman of uncommon force of character and mind,
+and the possessor of a heart so overflowing with tenderness that, when she
+heard of the birth of Mrs. Bache's seventh child, she even stated to her
+brother in her delight that she was so fond of children that she longed to
+kiss and play with every clean, healthy one that she saw on the street.
+Mrs. Bache, she thought, might yet be the mother of twelve children like
+herself, though she did not begin so young.
+
+In a letter written to her by Franklin from Philadelphia just after he
+reached his majority, and when she was a fresh girl of fourteen, he reminds
+her that she was ever his peculiar favorite. He had heard, he said, that
+she was grown a celebrated beauty, and he had almost determined to give her
+a tea table, but when he considered that the character of a good housewife
+was far preferable to that of being only a pretty gentlewoman he had
+concluded to send her a spinning wheel, as a small token of his sincere
+love and affection. Then followed this priggish advice:
+
+     Sister, farewell, and remember that modesty, as it
+     makes the most homely virgin amiable and charming, so
+     the want of it infallibly renders the most perfect
+     beauty disagreeable and odious. But, when that
+     brightest of female virtues shines among other
+     perfections of body and mind in the same person, it
+     makes the woman more lovely than an angel.
+
+The spinning wheel was a fit symbol of the narrow, struggling life, which
+was to be Jane Mecom's portion, and which would have imposed upon her a
+load heavier than she could have borne if her good Philadelphia genius had
+not always been by her side, either in person or by his watchful proxy,
+Jonathan Williams, the father of his grandnephew of that name, to sustain
+her fainting footsteps. Children she had, and to spare, but they were all
+striking illustrations of the truth, uttered by the Virginia planter, who
+affirmed that it is easier for one parent to take care of thirteen children
+than it is for thirteen children to take care of one parent. Nothing could
+be more beautiful than the relations between brother and sister; on the one
+side a vigilant sympathy and generosity which never lost sight for a moment
+of the object of their affectionate and helpful offices; on the other a
+grateful idolatry, slightly tinged with the reserve of reverence. Clothes,
+flour, firewood, money were among the more direct and material forms
+assumed by Franklin's assistance, given not begrudgingly and frugally, but
+always with the anxious fear, to no little extent justified by Jane's own
+unselfish and self-respecting reticence, that she was not as frank as she
+might be in laying before him the real measure of her necessities. "Let me
+know if you want any assistance," he was quick to ask her after his return
+from England in 1775, signing the letter in which he made the request,
+"Your very loving brother." "Your bill is honoured," he writes to her on
+another occasion after his return from France to Philadelphia. "It is
+impossible for me always to guess what you may want, and I hope, therefore,
+that you will never be shy in letting me know wherein I can help to make
+your life more comfortable."
+
+     How has my poor old Sister gone thro' the Winter? [he
+     inquired of Jonathan Williams, the younger]. Tell me
+     frankly whether she lives comfortably, or is pinched?
+     For I am afraid she is too cautious of acquainting me
+     with all her Difficulties, tho' I am always ready and
+     willing to relieve her when I am acquainted with them.
+
+It is manifest that at times he experienced a serious sense of difficulty
+in doing for her as much as he was disposed to do, and once, when she had
+thanked him with even more than her usual emphasis for a recent
+benefaction, he parried her gratitude with one of the humorous stories that
+served him for so many different purposes. Her letter of extravagant
+thanks, he said, put him in mind of the story of the member of Parliament
+who began one of his speeches with saying he thanked God that he was born
+and bred a Presbyterian; on which another took leave to observe that the
+gentleman must needs be of a most grateful disposition, since he was
+thankful for such very small matters. The truth is that her pecuniary
+condition was such that gifts, which might have seemed small enough to
+others, loomed large to her. Many doubtless were the shifts to which she
+had to resort to keep her large family going. When her brother was in
+London on his second mission, he received a letter from her asking him for
+some fine old linen or cambric dyed with bright colors, such as with all
+her own art and the aid of good old Uncle Benjamin's memoranda she had
+been unable, she said, to mix herself. With this material, she hoped that
+she and her daughter Jenny, who, with a little of her assistance, had taken
+to making flowers for the ladies' heads and bosoms with pretty good
+acceptance, might get something by it worth their pains, if they lived till
+next spring. Her language was manifestly that of a person whose life had
+been too pinched to permit her to deal with the future except at very close
+range. Of course, her request was complied with. The contrast between her
+situation in life and that of her prosperous and distinguished brother is
+brought out as clearly as the colors that she vainly sought to emulate in a
+letter written by her to Deborah, when she hears the rumor that Franklin
+had been made a Baronet and Governor of Pennsylvania. Signing herself,
+"Your ladyship's affectionate sister, and obedient humble servant," she
+wrote:
+
+     Dear Sister: For so I must call you, come what will,
+     and if I do not express myself proper, you must excuse
+     it, seeing I have not been accustomed to pay my
+     compliments to Governor and Baronet's ladies. I am in
+     the midst of a great wash, and Sarah still sick, and
+     would gladly be excused writing this post, but my
+     husband says I must write, and give you joy, which we
+     heartily join in.
+
+This was in 1758 when Franklin and other good Americans rarely alluded to
+England except as "home"; but sixteen years later the feelings of Jane
+Mecom about baronetcies and colonial governorships had undergone such a
+change--for she was a staunch patriot--that, when it was stated in a Boston
+newspaper that it was generally believed that Franklin had been promoted by
+the English Government to an office of superior importance, he felt that it
+was necessary to write to her as follows:
+
+     But as I am anxious to preserve your good opinion, and
+     as I know your sentiments, and that you must be much
+     afflicted yourself, and even despise me, if you thought
+     me capable of accepting any office from this
+     government, while it is acting with so much hostility
+     towards my native country, I cannot miss this first
+     opportunity of assuring you, that there is not the
+     least foundation for such a report.
+
+     You need not [he said on one occasion to Jane] be
+     concern'd, in writing to me, about your bad Spelling;
+     for, in my Opinion, as our Alphabet now Stands, the bad
+     Spelling, or what is call'd so, is generally the best,
+     as conforming to the Sound of the Letters and of the
+     Words. To give you an Instance: A Gentleman receiving a
+     Letter, in which were these Words,--_Not finding Brown
+     at hom, I delivard your meseg to his yf_. The Gentleman
+     finding it bad Spelling, and therefore not very
+     intelligible, called his Lady to help him read it.
+     Between them they pick'd out the meaning of all but the
+     _yf_, which they could not understand. The lady
+     propos'd calling her Chambermaid: for Betty, says she,
+     has the best knack at reading bad Spelling of anyone I
+     know. Betty came, and was surprised, that neither Sir
+     nor Madam could tell what _yf_ was. "Why," says she,
+     "_yf_ spells _Wife_; what else can it spell?" And,
+     indeed, it is a much better, as well as shorter method
+     of spelling _Wife_, than by _doubleyou_, _i_, _ef_,
+     _e_, which in reality spells _doubleyifey_.
+
+The affectionate interest felt by Franklin in his sister extended to her
+husband and children. Some of his letters were written to Jane and Edward
+Mecom jointly, and he evidently entertained a truly fraternal regard for
+the latter. The fortunes of the children he endeavored to promote by every
+means in his power. Benny Mecom was placed by him as an apprentice with his
+partner in the printing business in New York, Mr. Parker, and one of his
+most admirable letters is a letter to his sister Jane, already mentioned by
+us, in which he comments upon a complaint of ill-treatment at the hands of
+Mr. Parker which Benny had made to her. The wise, kindly and yet firm
+language in which he answers one by one the heads of Benny's complaint,
+which was obviously nothing more than the grumbling of a disaffected boy,
+lacks nothing but a subject of graver importance to be among the most
+notable of his letters. On the whole, it was too affectionate and indulgent
+in tone to have keenly offended even such parental fondness as that which
+led Poor Richard to ask, in the words of Gay,
+
+    "Where yet was ever found the mother
+    Who'd change her booby for another?"
+
+But occasionally there is a sentence or so in it which makes it quite plain
+that Franklin was entirely too wise not to know that the rod has a function
+to perform in the management of a boy. Referring to Benny's habit of
+staying out at night, sometimes all night, and refusing to give an account
+of where he had spent his time or in what company, he said,
+
+     This I had not heard of before though I perceive you
+     have. I do not wonder at his correcting him for that.
+     If he was my own son I should think his master did not
+     do his duty by him if he omitted it, for to be sure it
+     is the high road to destruction. And I think the
+     correction very light, and not likely to be very
+     effectual, if the strokes left no marks.
+
+In the same letter, there is a sly passage which takes us back to the part
+of Jacques' homily which speaks of
+
+    "The whining schoolboy with his satchel,
+    And shining morning face creeping like snail,
+    Unwillingly to school."
+
+     I did not think it anything extraordinary [Franklin
+     said] that he should be sometimes willing to evade
+     going to meeting, for I believe it is the case with all
+     boys, or almost all. I have brought up four or five
+     myself, and have frequently observed that if their
+     shoes were bad they would say nothing of a new pair
+     till Sunday morning, just as the bell rung, when, if
+     you asked them why they did not get ready, the answer
+     was prepared, "I have no shoes," and so of other
+     things, hats and the like; or, if they knew of anything
+     that wanted mending, it was a secret till Sunday
+     morning, and sometimes I believe they would rather tear
+     a little than be without the excuse.
+
+Franklin had dipped deeply into the hearts of boys as well as men.
+
+When Benny became old enough to enter upon business for himself, his uncle
+put him in possession of a printing outfit of his own at Antigua with the
+understanding that Benny was to pay him one third of the profits of the
+business; the proportion which he usually received in such cases.
+Apparently there was every promise of success: an established newspaper, no
+competing printer, high prices and a printer who, whatever his faults, had
+come to be regarded by Mr. Parker as one of his "best hands." But the curse
+of Reuben--instability--rested upon Benny. Taking offence at a proposal of
+his uncle respecting the distribution of the profits of the business,
+really intended to pave the way, when Benny had conquered his "flighty
+unsteadiness of temper," to a gift of the whole printing outfit to him, the
+nephew insisted that his uncle should name some certain price for the
+outfit, and allow him to pay it off in instalments; for, though he had, he
+said, a high esteem for his uncle, yet he loved freedom, and his spirit
+could not bear dependence on any man, though he were the best man living.
+Provoked by a delay in answering this letter, for which one of Franklin's
+long journeys was responsible, Benny again wrote to his uncle, stating that
+he had formed a fixed resolution to leave Antigua, and that nothing that
+could be said to him would move or shake it. Leave Antigua he did, and,
+when we next hear of him, it is through a letter from Franklin to Jane in
+which he tells her that Benjamin had settled his accounts with him, and
+paid the balance due him honorably, and had also made himself the owner of
+the printing outfit which had been shipped back from Antigua to
+Philadelphia.
+
+From this time on until Benny slid down into the gulf of insolvency; owing
+his uncle some two hundred pounds, and leaving assets that the latter
+reckoned would scarce amount to four shillings in the pound, he seems to
+have had no success of any sort except that of winning the hand of a girl
+for whom Franklin and Deborah had a peculiar partiality. This was after
+Benny had returned to Boston and, as a bookseller as well as a printer, had
+begun life anew with a loan from his uncle, and with good credit.
+
+When he was "near being married" his uncle wrote to Jane:
+
+     I know nothing of that affair, but what you write me,
+     except that I think Miss Betsey a very agreeable,
+     sweet-tempered, good girl, who has had a housewifely
+     education, and will make, to a good husband, a very
+     good wife. Your sister and I have a great esteem for
+     her; and, if she will be kind enough to accept of our
+     nephew, we think it will be his own fault, if he is not
+     as happy as the married state can make him. The family
+     is a respectable one, but whether there be any fortune
+     I know not; and, as you do not inquire about this
+     particular, I suppose you think with me, that where
+     everything else desirable is to be met with, that is
+     not very material.
+
+What Deborah thought of Miss Betsey may be inferred from a postscript that
+she hastily annexed to this letter: "If Benny will promise to be one of the
+tenderest husbands in the world, I give my consent. He knows already what I
+think of Miss Betsey. I am his loving aunt." In a subsequent letter,
+Franklin wrote to Deborah from London that he was glad that "Ben has got
+that good girl." Miss Betsey did not prove to be a fortune to her husband,
+though she did prove to be such a fruitful wife to him that, when the crash
+of bankruptcy came, there were a number of small children to be included in
+his schedule of liabilities. Nor is it easy to see how she or any other
+woman could prove a fortune to any man of whom such a picture could be
+sketched as that which Thomas, the author of the _History of Printing_,
+sketches of Benny as he was shortly after his return from Antigua.
+
+     Benjamin Mecom [writes Thomas] was in Boston several
+     months before the arrival of his press and types from
+     Antigua, and had much leisure. During this interval he
+     frequently came to the house where I was an apprentice.
+     He was handsomely dressed, wore a powdered bob-wig,
+     ruffles, and gloves: gentleman-like appendages, which
+     the printers of that day did not assume--and thus
+     appareled, he would often assist for an hour at the
+     press.... I viewed him at the press with admiration. He
+     indeed put on a apron to save his clothes from
+     blacking, and guarded his ruffles.... He got the
+     nickname of "Queer Notions" among the printers.
+
+The result of it all was that the patience of the uncle was at last
+completely worn out. "I can not comprehend," he wrote to Deborah from
+London, "how so very sluggish a Creature as Ben. Mecom is grown, can
+maintain in Philadelphia so large a Family. I hope they do not hang upon
+you: for really as we grow old and must grow more helpless, we shall find
+we have nothing to spare."
+
+In a subsequent letter to Williams he spoke of his sister's children as if
+they were all thriftless. If such was the case, it was not because of any
+lack of interest on his part in them. In a letter, recommending his son
+William to Jane's motherly care and advice, he says, "My compliments to my
+new niece, Miss Abiah, and pray her to accept the enclosed piece of gold,
+to cut her teeth; it may afterwards buy nuts for them to crack." In another
+letter to his sister, he expresses pleasure at hearing that her son Peter
+is at a place where he has full employ. If Peter should get a habit of
+industry at his new place, the exchange, he said pointedly, would be a
+happy one. In a later letter to Jane, he declares that he is glad that
+Peter is acquainted with the crown-soap business and that he hopes that he
+will always take care to make the soap faithfully and never slight the
+manufacture, or attempt to deceive by appearances. Then he may boldly put
+his name and mark, and, in a little time, it will acquire as good a
+character as that made by his uncle (John) or any other person whatever. He
+also tells Jane that if Peter will send to Deborah a box of his soap (but
+not unless it be right good) she would immediately return the ready money
+to him for it. Many years later his letters to his sister show that he was
+then aiding her in different ways, and among others by buying soap of her
+manufacture from her, and that some cakes of this soap were sent by him as
+gifts to friends of his in France. Indeed, he told Jane that she would do
+well to instruct her grandson in the art of making that soap. In the same
+letter that he wrote to her about Peter and the crown-soap he sent his love
+to her son Neddy, and Neddy's wife, and the rest of Jane's children. Neddy,
+born like Benny under an unlucky star, had at the time not only a wife but
+a disorder which his uncle hoped that he would wear out gradually, as he
+was yet a young man. If Eben, another of Jane's sons, would be industrious
+and frugal, it was ten to one, his uncle said, that he would get rich; for
+he seemed to have spirit and activity. As to Johnny, still another of
+Jane's sons, if he ever set up as a goldsmith, he should remember that
+there was one accomplishment, without which he could not possibly thrive in
+that trade; that was perfect honesty. In the latter part of his life, after
+he had been badly hurt by Benny, and had seen so much of his sound counsel
+come to nothing, he was slower to give advice to the Mecoms.
+
+     Your Grandson [he wrote to Jane, referring to one of
+     her grandsons, who was for a time in his employment at
+     Philadelphia] behaves very well, and is constantly
+     employ'd in writing for me, and will be so some time
+     longer. As to my Reproving and Advising him, which you
+     desire, he has not hitherto appeared to need it, which
+     is lucky, as I am not fond of giving Advice, having
+     seldom seen it taken. An Italian Poet in his Account of
+     a Voyage to the Moon, tells us that
+
+    _All things lost on Earth are treasur'd there_.
+
+     on which somebody observ'd, There must then be in the
+     Moon a great deal of _Good Advice_.
+
+Among the letters from Franklin to Jonathan Williams, the elder, is one
+asking him to lay out for his account the sum of fifty pounds in the
+purchase of a marriage present for one of Jane's daughters, who thanks him
+for it in terms that fall little short of ecstacy.
+
+But attached as Franklin was to his sister he did not hesitate to reprove
+her when reproof was in his judgment necessary. There is such a thing as
+not caring enough for a person to reprove him. "It was not kind in you," he
+wrote to her on one occasion, "when your sister commended good works, to
+suppose she intended it a reproach to you. It was very far from her
+thoughts." His language was still more outspoken on another occasion when
+Jane wished him to oust a member of the Franklin connection, with whom she
+was at odds, from the Post Office to make a place for Benny.
+
+     And now [he said] as to what you propose for Benny, I
+     believe he may be, as you say, well enough qualified
+     for it; and, when he appears to be settled, if a
+     vacancy should happen, it is very probable he may be
+     thought of to supply it; but it is a rule with me not
+     to remove any officer, that behaves well, keeps regular
+     accounts, and pays duly; and I think the rule is
+     founded on reason and justice. I have not shown any
+     backwardness to assist Benny, where it could be done
+     without injuring another. But if my friends require of
+     me to gratify not only their inclinations, but their
+     resentments, they expect too much of me. Above all
+     things I dislike family quarrels, and, when they happen
+     among my relations, nothing gives me more pain. If I
+     were to set myself up as a judge of those subsisting
+     between you and brother's widow and children, how
+     unqualified must I be, at this distance, to determine
+     rightly, especially having heard but one side. They
+     always treated me with friendly and affectionate
+     regard; you have done the same. What can I say between
+     you, but that I wish you were reconciled, and that I
+     will love that side best, that is most ready to forgive
+     and oblige the other? You will be angry with me here,
+     for putting you and them too much upon a footing; but I
+     shall nevertheless be, dear sister, your truly
+     affectionate brother.
+
+Nor did he attempt to disguise his real feelings in a letter which he wrote
+to Jane near the end of his life in which he told her that her son-in-law,
+Collas, who kept a store in Carolina, had wished to buy some goods on
+credit at Philadelphia, but could not do it without his recommendation,
+which he could not give without making himself pecuniarily liable; and
+_that_ he was not inclined to do, having no opinion either of the honesty
+and punctuality of the people, with whom Collas proposed to traffic, or of
+his skill and acuteness in merchandizing. This he wrote, he declared,
+merely to apologize for any seeming unkindness. The unkindness was but
+seeming indeed; for the letter also contained these solicitous words:
+
+     You always tell me that you live comfortably; but I
+     sometimes suspect that you may be too unwilling to
+     acquaint me with any of your Difficulties from an
+     Apprehension of giving me Pain. I wish you would let me
+     know precisely your Situation, that I may better
+     proportion my Assistance to your Wants. Have you any
+     Money at Interest, and what does it produce? Or do you
+     do some kind of Business for a Living?
+
+Jane seems to have maintained her good humor in the face of every timely
+reproof of her brother, and other than timely reproofs, we may be sure,
+there were none. Indeed, she worshipped him so devoutly--devotedly is too
+feeble an adverb--that there was no need for her at any time in her
+relations with him to fall back upon her good nature. A few extracts from
+her letters to Franklin will show how deeply the love and gratitude excited
+by her brother's ceaseless beneficence sank into her heart.
+
+     I am amazed beyond measure [she wrote to Deborah, when
+     she heard of the threatened attack on Franklin's house]
+     that your house was threatened in the tumult. I thought
+     there had been none among you would proceed to such a
+     length to persecute a man merely for being the best of
+     characters, and really deserving good from the hand and
+     tongue of all his fellow creatures.... What a wretched
+     world would this be if the vile of mankind had no laws
+     to restrain them.
+
+Additional edge to the indignation, expressed in this letter, was doubtless
+given by the fact that the writer had just received from her brother, who
+was then in London, a box containing, among other things, "a printed cotton
+gown, a quilted coat, a bonnet, a cap, and some ribbons" for herself and
+each of her daughters.
+
+It is made manifest by other letters than this that her brother's
+benevolence towards her and her family were quite as active when he was
+abroad as when he was at home. In 1779, she tells him that, in a letter
+from him to her, he, like himself, does all for her that the most
+affectionate brother can be desired or expected to do.
+
+     And though [she further said] I feel myself full of
+     gratitude for your generosity, the conclusion of your
+     letter affects me more, where you say you wish we may
+     spend our last days together. O my dear brother, if
+     this could be accomplished, it would give me more joy
+     than anything on this side Heaven could possibly do. I
+     feel the want of a suitable conversation--I have but
+     little here. I think I could assume more freedom with
+     you now, and convince you of my affection for you. I
+     have had time to reflect and see my error in that
+     respect. I suffered my diffidence and the awe of your
+     superiority to prevent the familiarity I might have
+     taken with you, and ought, and (which) your kindness to
+     me might have convinced me would be acceptable.
+
+A little later she wrote:
+
+     Your very affectionate and tender care of me all along
+     in life excites my warmest gratitude, which I cannot
+     even think on without tears. What manifold blessings I
+     enjoy beyond many of my worthy acquaintance, who have
+     been driven from their home, lost their interest, and
+     some have the addition of lost health, and one the
+     grievous torment of a cancer, and no kind brother to
+     support her, while I am kindly treated by all about me,
+     and ample provision made for me when I have occasion.
+
+As heartfelt was another letter written by her while he was still in
+France:
+
+     Believe me, my dear brother, your writing to me gives
+     me so much pleasure that the great, the very great
+     presents you have sent me are but a secondary joy. I
+     have been very sick this winter at my daughter's; kept
+     my chamber six weeks, but had a sufficiency for my
+     supply of everything that could be a comfort to me of
+     my own, before I received any intimation of the great
+     bounty from your hand, which your letter has conveyed
+     to me, for I have not been lavish of what I before
+     possessed, knowing sickness and misfortunes might
+     happen, and certainly old age; but I shall now be so
+     rich that I may indulge in a small degree a propensity
+     to help some poor creatures who have not the blessing I
+     enjoy. My good fortune came to me altogether to comfort
+     me in my weak state; for as I had been so unlucky as
+     not to receive the letter you sent me through your son
+     Bache's hands, though he informs me he forwarded it
+     immediately. His letter with a draft for twenty five
+     guineas came to my hand just before yours, which I
+     have received, and cannot find expression suitable to
+     acknowledge my gratitude how I am by my dear brother
+     enabled to live at ease in my old age (after a life of
+     care, labor, and anxiety) without which I must have
+     been miserable.
+
+Most touching of all are the words which she addressed to her brother
+shortly before his death, "Who that know and love you can bear the thought
+of surviving you in this gloomy world?" Even after his death, his goodness
+continued to shield her from want, for by his will he devised to her
+absolutely the house in Unity Street, Boston, in which she lived, and
+bequeathed to her an annuity of sixty pounds. By his will, he also
+bequeathed to her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, living
+at the time of his decease, in equal shares, fifty pounds sterling; the
+same amount that he bequeathed to the descendants living at that time of
+his brother Samuel, his sister Anne Harris, his brother James, his sister
+Sarah and his sister Lydia, respectively.
+
+As we have seen, Franklin's feelings about Deborah's relatives were hardly
+less cordial than his feelings about his own. In addition to his
+mother-in-law, Mrs. Read, and Brother John Read and Sister Read, and Cousin
+Debbey, and young cousin Johnny Read, two other kinsmen of Deborah, Joseph
+Read and James Read are mentioned in his letters. Indeed, at one time he
+even contrived to ward off the Franklins, Mecoms and Davenports from the
+Post Office long enough to appoint Joseph to the Postmastership at
+Philadelphia; but James was so unfortunate as to rub against one of the
+most highly sensitive surfaces of his disposition. In a letter to him,
+Franklin says, "Your visits never had but one thing disagreeable in them,
+that is, they were always too short"; but, in a later letter, he assails
+Read fiercely for surreptitiously obtaining a judgment against Robert
+Grace, one of the original members of the Junto, and produces a power of
+attorney to himself from William Strahan, authorizing him to recover a
+large sum of money that Read owed Strahan. "Fortune's wheel is often
+turning," he grimly reminds Read. The whole letter is written with a degree
+of asperity that Franklin rarely exhibited except when his sense of
+injustice was highly inflamed, and the circumstances, under which Read
+secured the judgment, the "little charges," that he had cunningly
+accumulated on it, and the cordial affection of Franklin for Grace would
+appear to have fully justified Franklin's stern rebuke and exultant
+production of Strahan's power of attorney. But everything, it must be
+confessed, becomes just a little clearer when we learn from a subsequent
+letter of Franklin to Strahan that, before he received Strahan's power of
+attorney and account, there had been a misunderstanding between Read and
+himself,
+
+     occasion'd by his endeavouring to get a small Office
+     from me (Clerk to the Assembly) which I took the more
+     amiss, as we had always been good Friends, and the
+     Office could not have been of much Service to him, the
+     Salary being small; but valuable to me, as a means of
+     securing the Public Business to our Printing House.
+
+The reader will remember that Franklin reserved the right to make full
+reprisals when anyone undertook to dislodge him from a public office.
+
+Nor, as has been apparent enough, was the interest of Franklin limited to
+contemporary Franklins. If he had been a descendant of one of the high-bred
+Washingtons of Northamptonshire--the shire to which the lineage of George
+Washington, as well as his own, ran back--he could not have been more
+curious about his descent than he was. "I have ever had pleasure," the
+opening sentence of the _Autobiography_ declares, "in obtaining any little
+anecdotes of my ancestors." From notes, placed in his hands by his uncle
+Benjamin, he learned some interesting particulars about his English
+forbears. They had resided in the village of Ecton, in Northamptonshire, on
+the great northern turnpike, sixty-six miles from London, for certainly
+three hundred years, on a freehold of about thirty acres, and the eldest
+son of the family had always been bred to the trade of a blacksmith.[28]
+Perhaps as Parton conjectures, some swart Franklin at the ancestral forge
+on the little freehold may have tightened a rivet in the armor, or replaced
+a shoe upon the horse, of a Washington, or doffed his cap to a Washington
+riding past. From the registers, examined by Franklin, when he visited
+Ecton, which ended with the year 1755, he discovered that he was the
+youngest son of the youngest son for five generations back.
+
+One of his letters to Deborah contained much agreeable information about
+his and her English relations, which he collected at this time. After
+leaving Cambridge, where his vanity, he said, had been not a little
+gratified by the particular regard shown him by the chancellor and the
+vice-chancellor of the university and the heads of colleges, he found on
+inquiry at Wellingborough that Mary Fisher, the daughter and only child of
+Thomas Franklin, his father's eldest brother, was still living. He knew
+that she had lived at Wellingborough, and had been married there about
+fifty years before to one Richard Fisher, a grazier and tanner, but,
+supposing that she and her husband were both dead, he had inquired for
+their posterity.
+
+     I was directed [he says] to their house, and we found
+     them both alive, but weak with age, very glad however
+     to see us. She seems to have been a very smart,
+     sensible woman. They are wealthy, have left off
+     business, and live comfortably. They have had only one
+     child, a daughter, who died, when about thirty years of
+     age, unmarried. She gave me several of my uncle
+     Benjamin's letters to her, and acquainted me where the
+     other remains of the family lived, of which I have,
+     since my return to London, found out a daughter of my
+     father's only sister, very old, and never married. She
+     is a good, clever woman, but poor, though vastly
+     contented with her situation, and very cheerful. The
+     others are in different parts of the country. I intend
+     to visit them, but they were too much out of our tour
+     in that journey.
+
+This was in 1758. Mary Fisher had good reason to be weak with age; for this
+letter states that she was five years older than Franklin's sister Dowse,
+and remembered her going away with Franklin's father and his first wife and
+two other children to New England about the year 1685, or some
+seventy-three years before Franklin's visit to Wellingborough.
+
+    "Where are the old men?
+    I who have seen much,
+    Such have I never seen."
+
+Only the truly gray earth, humming, as it revolves on its axis, the
+derisive song, heard by the fine ear of Emerson, could ask this question,
+unrebuked by such a stretch of human memory as that. The letter then goes
+on to say that from Wellingborough the writer passed to Ecton, about three
+or four miles away, where Franklin's father was born, and where his father,
+grandfather, and great-grandfather had lived, and how many of the family
+before them they knew not.
+
+     We went first [Franklin tells us] to see the old house
+     and grounds; they came to Mr. Fisher with his wife,
+     and, after letting them for some years, finding his
+     rent something ill paid, he sold them. The land is now
+     added to another farm, and a school kept in the house.
+     It is a decayed old stone building, but still known by
+     the name of the Franklin House. Thence we went to visit
+     the rector of the parish, who lives close by the
+     church, a very ancient building. He entertained us very
+     kindly, and showed us the old church register, in which
+     were the births, marriages, and burials of our
+     ancestors for two hundred years, as early as his book
+     began. His wife, a good-natured, chatty old lady
+     (granddaughter of the famous Archdeacon Palmer, who
+     formerly had that parish, and lived there) remembered a
+     great deal about the family; carried us out into the
+     churchyard, and showed us several of their gravestones,
+     which were so covered with moss, that we could not read
+     the letters, till she ordered a hard brush and basin of
+     water, with which Peter (Franklin's negro servant)
+     scoured them clean, and then Billy (William Franklin)
+     copied them. She entertained and diverted us highly
+     with stories of Thomas Franklin, Mrs. Fisher's father,
+     who was a conveyancer, something of a lawyer, clerk of
+     the county courts and clerk to the Archdeacon in his
+     visitations; a very leading man in all county affairs,
+     and much employed in public business. He set on foot a
+     subscription for erecting chimes in their steeple, and
+     completed it, and we heard them play. He found out an
+     easy method of saving their village meadows from being
+     drowned, as they used to be sometimes by the river,
+     which method is still in being; but, when first
+     proposed, nobody could conceive how it could be; "but
+     however," they said, "if Franklin says he knows how to
+     do it, it will be done." His advice and opinion were
+     sought for on all occasions, by all sorts of people,
+     and he was looked upon, she said, by some, as something
+     of a conjuror. He died just four years before I was
+     born, on the same day of the same month.
+
+The likeness between Thomas and his nephew may have been insufficient under
+any circumstances to justly suggest the thought of a metempsychosis to
+William Franklin, but Thomas does seem to have been a kind of tentative
+effort upon the part of Nature to create a Benjamin Franklin.
+
+The letter then states that, after leaving Ecton, the party finally arrived
+at Birmingham where they were soon successful in looking up Deborah's and
+cousin Wilkinson's and cousin Cash's relations. First, they found one of
+the Cashes, and he went with them to Rebecca Flint's where they saw her and
+her husband. She was a turner, and he a button-maker; they were childless
+and glad to see any person that knew their sister Wilkinson. They told
+their visitors what letters they had received from America, and even
+assured them--such are the short and simple annals of the poor--that they
+had out of respect preserved a keg in which a gift of sturgeon from America
+had reached them. Then follow certain details about other members of this
+family connection, commonplace enough, however, to reconcile us to the fact
+that they have been cut short by the mordant tooth of time which has not
+spared the remainder of the letter.
+
+On his second mission to England, Franklin paid another visit to these
+Birmingham relations of his wife, and was in that city for several days.
+The severest test of a good husband is to ask whether he loves his wife's
+relations as much as his own. To even this test Franklin appears to have
+been equal.
+
+Sally Franklin, the daughter of Thomas Franklin, of Lutterworth, a second
+cousin of Franklin, also flits through the correspondence between Deborah
+and her husband. When she was about thirteen years of age, her father
+brought her to London to see Franklin, and Mrs. Stevenson persuaded him to
+leave the child under her care for a little schooling and improvement,
+while Franklin was off on one of his periodical tours.
+
+     When I return'd [the latter wrote to Deborah] I found
+     her indeed much improv'd, and grown a fine Girl. She is
+     sensible, and of a sweet, obliging Temper, but is now
+     ill of a violent Fever, and I doubt we shall lose her,
+     which particularly afflicts Mrs. Stevenson, not only as
+     she has contracted a great Affection for the Child, but
+     as it was she that persuaded her Father to leave her
+     there.
+
+Sally, however, settled all doubts by getting well and furnishing future
+material for Franklin's letters to Deborah. One letter tells Deborah that
+Sally's father was very desirous that Franklin should take her to America
+with him; another pays the compliment to Sally, who was at the time in the
+country with her father, of saying that she is a very good girl; another
+thanks Deborah for her kind attitude toward her husband's partially-formed
+resolution of bringing Sally over to America with him; another announces
+that Sally is again with Mrs. Stevenson; and still another doubtless
+relieved Deborah of no little uncertainty of mind by informing her that
+Sally was about to be married to a farmer's son. "I shall miss her,"
+comments Franklin, "as she is nimble-footed and willing to run of Errands
+and wait upon me, and has been very serviceable to me for some Years, so
+that I have not kept a Man."
+
+Among Franklin's papers, too, was found at his death a letter from his
+father to him, beginning "Loving Son," which also makes some valuable
+contributions to our knowledge of Franklin's forefathers.
+
+     As to the original of our name, there is various
+     opinions [says Josiah]; some say that it came from a
+     sort of title, of which a book that you bought when
+     here gives a lively account, some think we are of a
+     French extract, which was formerly called Franks; some
+     of a free line, a line free from that vassalage which
+     was common to subjects in days of old; some from a bird
+     of long red legs. Your uncle Benjamin made inquiry of
+     one skilled in heraldry, who told him there is two
+     coats of armor, one belonging to the Franklins of the
+     North, and one to the Franklins of the west. However,
+     our circumstances have been such as that it hath hardly
+     been worth while to concern ourselves much about these
+     things any farther than to tickle the fancy a little.
+
+Josiah then has a word to say about his great-grandfather, the Franklin who
+kept his Bible under a joint stool during the reign of Bloody Mary, and his
+grandfather. The former, he says, in his travels
+
+     went upon liking to a taylor; but he kept such a stingy
+     house, that he left him and travelled farther, and came
+     to a smith's house, and coming on a fasting day, being
+     in popish times, he did not like there the first day;
+     the next morning the servant was called up at five in
+     the morning, but after a little time came a good toast
+     and good beer, and he found good housekeeping there; he
+     served and learned the trade of a smith.
+
+Josiah's grandfather, the letter tells us, was a smith also, and settled in
+Ecton, and "was imprisoned a year and a day on suspicion of his being the
+author of some poetry that touched the character of some great man." An
+ancestry that could boast one sturdy Tubal Cain, ready, though the fires of
+Smithfield were brightly burning, to hazard his life for his religious
+convictions, and another, with letters and courage enough to lampoon a
+great man in England in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, is an
+ancestry that was quite worthy of investigation. It at least tickles the
+fancy a little, to use Josiah's phrase, to imagine that the flame of the
+Ecton forge lit up, generation after generation, the face of some brawny,
+honest toiler, not unlike the village blacksmith, whose rugged figure and
+manly, simple-hearted, God-fearing nature are portrayed with so much
+dignity and beauty in the well-known verses of Longfellow. Be this as it
+may, the humble lot of neither ancestral nor contemporary Franklins was a
+source of mortification to Poor Richard even after the popularity of his
+_Almanac_ had brought in a pair of shoes, two new shifts, and a new warm
+petticoat to his wife, and to him a second-hand coat, so good that he was
+no longer ashamed to go to town or be seen there.
+
+"He that has neither fools nor beggars among his kindred, is the son of a
+thunder gust," said Poor Richard.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] This lady, whose father was Lewis Evans, of Philadelphia, a surveyor
+and map-maker, was a god-daughter of Deborah, and, according to a letter
+from Franklin to Deborah, dated July 22, 1774, fell little short of being
+ubiquitous. He wrote: "She is now again at Tunis, where you will see she
+has lately lain in of her third Child. Her Father, you know, was a
+geographer, and his daughter has some connection, I think, with the whole
+Globe; being born herself in America, and having her first Child in Asia,
+her second in Europe, and now her third in Africa."
+
+[17] A readable essay might be written upon the sea-voyages of Franklin.
+The sloop, in which he absconded from Boston, in 1723, was favored with a
+fair wind, and reached New York in three days. His voyage from Philadelphia
+to Boston in 1724 lasted for about a fortnight. The "little vessel," in
+which he sailed, he tells us in the _Autobiography_, "struck on a shoal in
+going down the bay, and sprung a leak." "We had," Franklin says, "a
+blustering time at sea, and were oblig'd to pump almost continually, at
+which I took my turn." The cabin accommodations and abundant sea stores
+that fell to the lot of Ralph and himself, under circumstances already
+mentioned by us, on their voyage from Philadelphia to England in 1724, in
+the _London-Hope_, Captain Annis, were rare windfalls; but the voyage was
+marked by a great deal of bad weather. The return voyage of Franklin from
+London to Philadelphia in 1726, in the _Berkshire_, Captain Clark,
+including _obiter_ delays on the south coast of England, consumed the whole
+interval between July 21 and Oct. 12. All the incidents of this long voyage
+were entered in the Journal kept by him while it was under way, and there
+are few writings in which the ordinary features of an ocean passage at that
+time are so clearly brought before the reader: the baffling winds, the
+paralyzing calms; the meagre fare; the deadly _ennui_; and the moody
+sullenness bred by confinement and monotony. The word "helm-a-lee,"
+Franklin states, became as disagreeable to their ears as the sentence of a
+judge to a convicted malefactor. Once he leapt overboard and swam around
+the ship to "wash" himself, and another time he was deterred from "washing"
+himself by the appearance of a shark, "that mortal enemy to swimmers." For
+a space his ship was in close enough companionship for several days with
+another ship for the masters of the two vessels, accompanied by a passenger
+in each instance, to exchange visits. On his second voyage, of about thirty
+days, to England, in 1757, the packet, in which he was a passenger, easily
+outstripped the hostile cruisers by which she was several times chased, but
+wore about with straining masts just in time to escape shipwreck on the
+Scilly rocks. Of his return to America in 1762, he wrote to Strahan from
+Philadelphia: "We had a long Passage near ten Weeks from Portsmouth to this
+Place, but it was a pleasant one; for we had ten sail in Company and a Man
+of War to protect us; we had pleasant Weather and fair Winds, and
+frequently visited and dined from ship to ship." At the end of his third
+voyage to England in 1764, Franklin wrote to Deborah from the Isle of Wight
+that no father could have been tenderer to a child than Captain Robinson
+had been to him. "But we have had terrible Weather, and I have often been
+thankful that our dear Sally was not with me. Tell our Friends that din'd
+with us on the Turtle that the kind Prayer they then put up for thirty Days
+fair Wind for me was favourably heard and answered, we being just 30 Days
+from Land to Land." Of his return voyage to America in 1775, he wrote to
+Priestley: "I had a passage of six weeks, the weather constantly so
+moderate that a London wherry might have accompanied us all the way." His
+thirty-day voyage to France in 1776 proved a rough and debilitating one to
+him at his advanced age, but Captain Wickes was not only able to keep his
+illustrious passenger out of the Tower, but to snatch up two English prizes
+on his way over. We need say no more than we have already incidentally said
+in our text of the seven weeks that Franklin gave up to his pen and
+thermometer on his return voyage to America in 1785. After the passage, he
+wrote to Mrs. Hewson that it had been a pleasant and not a long one in
+which there was but one day, a day of violent storm, on which he was glad
+that she was not with them.
+
+[18] A copious note on the leading portraits of Franklin will be found in
+the _Narrative and Critical History of America_, edited by Justin Winsor,
+vol. vii., p. 37. The best of them resemble each other closely enough to
+make us feel satisfied that we should recognize him at once, were it
+possible for us to meet him in life on the street.
+
+[19] Franklin was frequently the recipient of one of the most delightful of
+all forms of social attention, an invitation to a country house in the
+British Islands. On Oct. 5, 1768, he writes to Deborah that he has lately
+been in the country to spend a few days at friends' houses, and to breathe
+a little fresh air. On Jan. 28, 1772, after spending some seven weeks in
+Ireland and some four weeks in Scotland, he tells the same correspondent
+that he has received abundance of civilities from the gentry of both these
+kingdoms.
+
+[20] Speaking of a portrait of Sally in a letter to Deborah from London in
+1758, Franklin says: "I fancy I see more Likeness in her Picture than I did
+at first, and I look at it often with Pleasure, as at least it reminds me
+of her."
+
+[21] The only blot upon the useful labors of Jared Sparks, as the editor of
+Franklin's productions, is the liberties that he took with their wording.
+Sometimes his alterations were the offspring of good feeling, sometimes of
+ordinary puristic scruples, and occasionally of the sickly prudery which
+led our American grandfathers and grandmothers to speak of the leg of a
+turkey as its "drum-stick." The word "belly" appears to have been
+especially trying to his nice sense of propriety. One result was these
+scornful strictures by Albert Henry Smyth in the Introduction to his
+edition of Franklin's writings: "He is nice in his use of moral epithets;
+he will not offend one stomach with his choice of words. Franklin speaks of
+the Scots 'who entered England and _trampled on its belly_ as far as
+Derby,'--'marched on,' says Sparks. Franklin is sending some household
+articles from London to Philadelphia. In the large packing case is 'a jug
+for beer.' It has, he says, 'the coffee cups in its belly.' Sparks performs
+the same abdominal operation here."
+
+[22] The maladies to which Franklin was subject, and the spells of illness
+that he experienced, like everything else relating to him, have been
+described in detail by at least one of his enthusiastic latter-day
+biographers. We are content, however, to be classed among those biographers
+in whose eyes no amount of genius can hallow an ague or glorify a cutaneous
+affection.
+
+[23] "I must mention to you," Sally said in a letter to her father, dated
+Oct. 30, 1773, "that I am no longer housekeeper; it gave my dear mama so
+much uneasiness, and the money was given to me in a manner which made it
+impossible to save anything by laying in things beforehand, so that my
+housekeeping answered no good purpose, and I have the more readily given it
+up, though I think it my duty, and would willingly take the care and
+trouble off of her, could I possibly please and make her happy."
+
+[24] The entire conduct of Franklin towards his son after the dismissal of
+the father from office by the British Government seems to have been
+thoroughly considerate and decorous. His wish that William Franklin would
+resign his office as Governor of New Jersey, which he could not hold
+without pecuniary loss to his father, and without apparent insensibility to
+the indignity to which his father had been subjected, was delicately
+intimated only. Even after William Franklin became a prisoner in
+Connecticut in consequence of his disloyalty to the American cause,
+Franklin, while giving Temple some very good practical reasons why he could
+not consent that he should be the bearer of a letter from Mrs. William
+Franklin to her husband, takes care to tell Temple that he does not blame
+his desire of seeing a father that he had so much reason to love. At this
+time he also relieved with a gift of money the immediate necessities of
+Mrs. William Franklin. The temper of his letters to Temple, when Temple
+went over to England from France, at his instance, to pay his duty to
+William Franklin, was that of settled reconciliation with his son. "Give my
+Love to your Father," is a message in one of these letters. When he touched
+at Southampton on his return from his French mission, William Franklin,
+among others, was there to greet him. In the succeeding year we find
+Franklin asking Andrew Strahan to send him a volume and to present his
+account for it to his son. But on one occasion during the last twelve
+months of his life, he speaks of William no longer as "my son" but as
+"William Franklin." On the whole, it would appear that it was not so much
+the original defection of the son from the American cause as the fact that
+he kept aloof from the father, after the return of the father from France,
+which was responsible for the asperity with which the latter refers in his
+will to the political course of William Franklin during the Revolution.
+
+[25] Altogether Peter Folger must have been a man of sterling sense and
+character. He was one of the five Commissioners appointed to survey and
+measure the land on the Island of Nantucket, and in the order of
+appointment the following provision was inserted: "Whatsoever shall be done
+by them, or any three of them, _Peter Folger being one_, shall be accounted
+legal and valid."
+
+[26] That Peter Franklin had some of the ability of his famous brother we
+may infer from a long letter written to him by Franklin in which the
+latter, after acknowledging the receipt of a ballad by Peter, descants upon
+the superiority of the old, simple ditties over modern songs in lively and
+searching terms which he would hardly have wasted on a man of ordinary
+intelligence.
+
+[27] The first letter from the Commissioners to Jonathan Williams, dated
+Apr. 13, 1778, simply asked him to abstain from any further purchases as
+naval agent, and to close his accounts for the present. It was not until
+May 25, 1778, that a letter was addressed to him by the Commissioners
+expressly revoking his authority as naval agent on the ground that Congress
+had authorized William Lee to superintend the commercial affairs of America
+in general, and he had appointed M. Schweighauser, a German merchant, as
+the person to look after all the maritime and commercial interests of
+America in the Nantes district. In signing the letter, Franklin took care
+to see that this clause was inserted: "It is not from any prejudice to you,
+Mr. Williams, for whom we have a great respect and esteem, but merely from
+a desire to save the public money, to prevent the clashing of claims and
+interests, and to avoid confusion and delays, that we have taken this
+step." The result was that, instead of the uniform commission of two per
+cent., charged by Williams for transacting the business of the naval
+agency, Schweighauser, whose clerk was Ludlow Lee, a nephew of Arthur Lee,
+charged as much as five per cent. on the simple delivery of tobacco to the
+farmers-general. Later Williams, who was an expert accountant, was restored
+to the position which he had really filled with blameless integrity and
+efficiency. After his return to America, his career was an eminent one. He
+is termed by General George W. Cullum in his work on the campaigns and
+engineers of the War of 1812-15 the father of the Engineer Service of the
+United States. In the same work, General Cullum also speaks of his "noble
+character."
+
+[28] In sending a MS. to Edward Everett, which he placed in the library of
+the Massachusetts Historical Society, Thomas Carlyle said: "The poor
+manuscript is an old Tithes-Book of the parish of Ecton, in
+Northamptonshire, from about 1640 to 1700, and contains, I perceive,
+various scattered faint indications of the civil war time, which are not
+without interest; but the thing which should raise it above all tithe-books
+yet heard of is, that it contains actual notices, in that fashion, of the
+ancestors of Benjamin Franklin--blacksmiths in that parish! Here they
+are--their forge-hammers yet going--renting so many 'yard lands' of
+Northamptonshire Church-soil--keeping so many sheep, etc., etc.,--little
+conscious that one of the demi-gods was about to proceed out of them."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Franklin's American Friends
+
+
+The friends mentioned in the correspondence between Franklin and Deborah
+were only some of the many friends with whom Franklin was blessed during
+the course of his life. He had the same faculty for inspiring friendship
+that a fine woman has for inspiring love. In reading his general
+correspondence, few things arrest our attention more sharply than the
+number of affectionate and admiring intimates, whose lives were in one way
+or another interwoven with his own, and, over and over again, in reading
+this correspondence, our attention is unexpectedly drawn for a moment to
+some cherished friend of his, of whom there is scarcely a hint elsewhere in
+his writings.
+
+It was from real considerations of practical convenience that he sometimes
+avoided the serious task of enumerating all the friends, to whom he wished
+to be remembered, by sending his love to "all Philadelphia" or "all
+Pennsylvania."
+
+A dozen of his friends, as we have stated, accompanied him as far as
+Trenton, when he was on his way to New York to embark upon his first
+mission abroad in 1757. A cavalcade of three hundred of them accompanied
+him for sixteen miles to his ship, when he was on his way down the Delaware
+on his second mission abroad in 1764.
+
+     Remember me affectionately to all our good Friends who
+     contributed by their Kindness to make my Voyage
+     comfortable [he wrote to Deborah a little later from
+     London]. To Mr. Roberts, Mrs. Thompson, Mrs.
+     Smith, Mrs. Potts, Mrs. Shewell; Messrs.
+     Whartons, Capt. Falkner, Brothers & Sisters Reads &
+     Franklins, Cousin Davenport, and everybody.
+
+When he returned from England in 1762, he was able to write to Strahan with
+a flush of pardonable exultation that he had had the happiness to find that
+Dr. Smith's reports of the diminutions of his friends were all false. "My
+house," he said, "has been full of a succession of them from morning to
+night, ever since my arrival, congratulating me on my return with the
+utmost cordiality and affection." And, several years later, when the news
+reached Philadelphia that he was again safely in England, the bells rang
+until near midnight, and libations were poured out for his health, success
+and every other happiness. "Even your old friend Hugh Roberts," said
+Cadwallader Evans, who gave this information to Franklin, "stayed with us
+till eleven o'clock, which you know was a little out of his common road,
+and gave us many curious anecdotes within the compass of your forty years
+acquaintance." This rejoicing, of course, was, to a considerable degree,
+the result of political fermentation, and, if we say nothing of other
+demonstrations, like the flourish of naked swords, which angered the
+Proprietary so deeply, and made Franklin himself feel just a little
+foolish, it is only because it is impossible to declare how far these
+demonstrations were the tributes of personal friendship rather than of
+public gratitude. In a letter to Doctor Samuel Johnson, of Connecticut,
+Franklin tells him that he will shortly print proposals for publishing the
+Doctor's pieces by subscription, and disperse them among his friends "along
+the continent." This meant much to an author, coming as it did from a man,
+of whom it might perhaps be said that he could have travelled all the way
+from Boston to Virginia without ever being at a loss for the hospitable
+roof of a friend to shelter him at night.
+
+Nowhere outside of Pennsylvania did Franklin have warmer friends than in
+New England, the land of his birth. He fled from Boston in 1723, and
+returned to it on a brief visit in 1724. Aside from other occasional
+returns, he afterwards revisited it at regular intervals of ten years in
+1733, 1743, 1753 and 1763. Many pleasant hours were spent by him among his
+wayside friends in New England on those postal and other journeys which
+took him within her borders.
+
+     I left New England slowly, and with great reluctance
+     [he wrote to his friend Catherine Ray, afterwards
+     Greene, at Block Island in 1755]. Short day's journeys,
+     and loitering visits on the road, for three or four
+     weeks, manifested my unwillingness to quit a country,
+     in which I drew my first breath, spent my earliest and
+     most pleasant days, and had now received so many fresh
+     marks of the people's goodness and benevolence, in the
+     kind and affectionate treatment I had everywhere met
+     with. I almost forgot I had a _home_, till I was more
+     than half way towards it, till I had, one by one,
+     parted with all my New England friends, and was got
+     into the western borders of Connecticut, among mere
+     strangers. Then, like an old man, who, having buried
+     all he loved in this world, begins to think of heaven,
+     I began to think of and wish for home.
+
+The only drawback to the pleasure of his New England journeys was the vile
+roads of the time. In a letter to John Foxcroft, in the year 1773, in which
+he refers to a fall which Foxcroft had experienced, he says, "I have had
+three of those Squelchers in different Journeys, and never desire a
+fourth." Two of these squelchers, we know, befell him on the rough roads of
+New England, in the year 1763; for, in a letter from Boston to his friend
+Mrs. Catherine Greene (formerly Ray), of that year, he writes to her that
+he is almost ashamed to say that he has had another fall, and put his
+shoulder out. "Do you think, after this," he added, "that even your kindest
+invitations and Mr. Greene's can prevail with me to venture myself again on
+such roads?" In August of the same year, Franklin informed Strahan that he
+had already travelled eleven hundred and forty miles on the American
+Continent since April, and that he would make six hundred and forty more
+before he saw home. To this and other postal tours of inspection he owed in
+part those friends "along the continent," to whom he proposed to appeal in
+Dr. Johnson's behalf, as well as that unrivalled familiarity with American
+colonial conditions, which stands out in such clear relief in his works. On
+one occasion, the accidents by flood and field, to which he was exposed on
+his American journeys, during the colonial era, resulted in a tie, which,
+while not the tie of friendship, proved to his cost to be even more lasting
+than that tie sometimes is. When he was about forty-three years of age, a
+canoe, in which he was a passenger, was upset near Staten Island, while he
+was endeavoring to board a stage-boat bound for New York. He was in no
+danger, as he said to a friend forty years afterwards when recalling the
+incident, for, besides being near the shore, he could swim like a duck or a
+Bermudian. But, unfortunately for him, there was a Jew on the stage-boat
+who chose to believe that he had saved Franklin's life by inducing the
+stage-boat to stop, and take Franklin in. As far as the latter could learn,
+he was not more indebted to the Jew than to the Jew's fellow-passengers for
+being plucked from an element which he never wearied of asserting is not
+responsible even for bad colds, and, in return for the consideration, that
+he had received from the stage-boat, he dined all its passengers to their
+general satisfaction, when he reached New York, at "The Tavern"; but the
+Jew had no mind to allow the benefaction to sink out of sight for the
+number of the benefactors.
+
+     This Hayes [Franklin wrote to the friend, who had
+     forwarded to him a letter from Hayes' widow] never saw
+     me afterwards, at New York, or Brunswick, or Phila'da
+     that he did not dun me for Money on the Pretence of his
+     being poor, and having been so happy as to be
+     Instrumental in saving my Life, which was really in no
+     Danger. In this way he got of me some times a double
+     Joannes, sometimes a Spanish Doubloon, and never less;
+     how much in the whole I do not know, having kept no
+     Account of it; but it must have been a very
+     considerable Sum; and he never incurr'd any Risque, nor
+     was at any Trouble in my Behalf, I have long since
+     thought him well paid for any little expence of
+     Humanity he might have felt on the Occasion. He seems,
+     however, to have left me to his Widow as part of her
+     Dowry.
+
+This was about as far as the kindly nature of Franklin ever went in dealing
+with a beggar or a bore.
+
+In New York or New Jersey, he was little less at home than in Pennsylvania
+or New England. In a letter to Deborah in 1763, after telling her that he
+had been to Elizabeth Town, where he had found their children returned from
+the Falls and very well, he says, "The Corporation were to have a Dinner
+that day at the Point for their Entertainment, and prevail'd on us to stay.
+There was all the principal People & a great many Ladies."
+
+As we shall see, the foundations of his New Jersey friendships were laid
+very early. In following him on his journeys through Maryland, we find him
+entertained at the country seats of some of the most prominent gentlemen of
+the Colony, as for instance at Colonel Tasker's and at Mr. Milligan's. He
+was several times in Virginia in the course of his life, and it is an
+agreeable thing to a Virginian, who recollects that a Virginian, Arthur
+Lee, is to be reckoned among the contentious "bird and beast" people, for
+whom Franklin had such a dislike, to recollect also that not only are
+Washington and Jefferson to be reckoned among Franklin's loyal and admiring
+friends, but that, after Franklin had been a few days in Virginia at Mr.
+Hunter's, he expressed his opinion of both the country and its people in
+these handsome terms: "Virginia is a pleasant Country, now in full Spring;
+the People extreamly obliging and polite." There can be no better
+corrective of the petty sectional spirit, which has been such a blemish on
+our national history, and has excited so much wholly unfounded and
+senseless local prejudice, than to note the appreciation which that open,
+clear-sighted eye had for all that was best in every part of the American
+Colonies. "There are brave Spirits among that People," he said, when he
+heard that the Virginia House of Burgesses had appointed its famous
+Committee of Correspondence for the purpose of bringing the Colonies
+together for their common defense. He was never in the Carolinas or
+Georgia, we believe, though he was for a time the Agent in England of
+Georgia as well as other Colonies. But he had enough friends in Charleston,
+at any rate, when he was on his first mission abroad, to write to his
+Charleston correspondent, Dr. Alexander Garden, the eminent botanist from
+whom Linnaeus borrowed a name for the gardenia, that he purposed, God
+willing, to return by way of Carolina, when he promised himself the
+pleasure of seeing and conversing with his friends in Charleston. And to
+another resident of Charleston, Dr. John Lining, several highly interesting
+letters of his on scientific subjects were written. For Henry Laurens, of
+South Carolina, his fellow-commissioner for the purpose of negotiating the
+treaty of peace with Great Britain, he entertained a warm feeling of esteem
+and good will which was fully reciprocated by Laurens. It was a just remark
+of Laurens that Franklin knew very well how to manage a cunning man, but
+that, when he conversed or treated with a man of candor, there was no man
+more candid than himself. For Colonel John Laurens, of South Carolina, the
+son of Henry Laurens, the aide to Washington, and the intrepid young
+soldier, who perished in one of the last conflicts of the Revolutionary
+War, Franklin formed a strong sentiment of affection, when Laurens came to
+France, at the instance of Washington, for the purpose of obtaining some
+additional aids from the King for the prosecution of the war. In a letter
+to him, signed "most affectionately yours," when Laurens was about to
+return to America, Franklin inclosed him an order for another hundred louis
+with an old man's blessing. "Take my Blessing with it," he said, "and my
+Prayers that God may send you safe & well home with your Cargoes. I would
+not attempt persuading you to quit the military Line, because I think you
+have the Qualities of Mind and Body that promise your doing great service &
+acquiring Honour in that Line."[29]
+
+How profound was the mutual respect and affection that Washington and
+Franklin entertained for each other, we have seen. It is an inspiring thing
+to note how the words of the latter swell, as with the strains of some
+heroic measure, when his admiration for the great contemporary, whose
+services to "the glorious cause" alone exceeded his, lifts him up from the
+lower to the higher levels of our emotional and intellectual nature.
+
+     Should peace arrive after another Campaign or two, and
+     afford us a little Leisure [he wrote to Washington from
+     Passy, on March 5, 1780], I should be happy to see your
+     Excellency in Europe, and to accompany you, if my Age
+     and Strength would permit, in visiting some of its
+     ancient and most famous Kingdoms. You would, on this
+     side of the Sea, enjoy the great Reputation you have
+     acquir'd, pure and free from those little Shades that
+     the Jealousy and Envy of a Man's Countrymen and
+     Cotemporaries are ever endeavouring to cast over living
+     Merit. Here you would know, and enjoy, what Posterity
+     will say of Washington. For 1000 Leagues have nearly
+     the same Effect with 1000 Years. The feeble Voice of
+     those grovelling Passions cannot extend so far either
+     in Time or Distance. At present I enjoy that Pleasure
+     for you, as I frequently hear the old Generals of this
+     martial Country (who study the Maps of America, and
+     mark upon them all your Operations) speak with sincere
+     Approbation and great Applause of your conduct; and
+     join in giving you the Character of one of the greatest
+     Captains of the Age.
+
+The caprice of future events might well have deprived these words of some
+of their rich cadence, but it did not, and, even the voice of cis-Atlantic
+jealousy and envy seems to be as impotent in the very presence of
+Washington, as at the distance of a thousand leagues away, when we place
+beside this letter the words written by Franklin to him a few years later
+after the surrender of Cornwallis:
+
+     All the world agree, that no expedition was ever better
+     planned or better executed; it has made a great
+     addition to the military reputation you had already
+     acquired, and brightens the glory that surrounds your
+     name, and that must accompany it to our latest
+     posterity. No news could possibly make me more happy.
+     The infant Hercules has now strangled the two serpents
+     (the several armies of Burgoyne and Cornwallis) that
+     attacked him in his cradle, and I trust his future
+     history will be answerable.[30]
+
+Cordial relations of friendship also existed between Franklin and
+Jefferson. In their versatility, their love of science, their speculative
+freedom and their faith in the popular intelligence and conscience the two
+men had much in common. As members of the committee, that drafted the
+Declaration of Independence, as well as in other relations, they were
+brought into familiar contact with each other; and to Jefferson we owe
+valuable testimony touching matters with respect to which the reputation of
+Franklin has been assailed, and also a sheaf of capital stories, that helps
+us to a still clearer insight into the personal and social phases of
+Franklin's life and character. One of these stories is the famous story of
+Abbe Raynal and the Speech of Polly Baker, when she was prosecuted the
+fifth time for having a bastard child.
+
+     The Doctor and Silas Deane [Jefferson tells us] were in
+     conversation one day at Passy on the numerous errors in
+     the Abbe's "_Histoire des deux Indes_" when he happened
+     to step in. After the usual salutations, Silas Deane
+     said to him, "The Doctor and myself, Abbe, were just
+     speaking of the errors of fact into which you have been
+     led in your history." "Oh no, Sir," said the Abbe,
+     "that is impossible. I took the greatest care not to
+     insert a single fact, for which I had not the most
+     unquestionable authority." "Why," says Deane, "there is
+     the story of Polly Baker, and the eloquent apology you
+     have put into her mouth, when brought before a court of
+     Massachusetts to suffer punishment under a law which
+     you cite, for having had a bastard. I know there never
+     was such a law in Massachusetts." "Be assured," said
+     the Abbe, "you are mistaken, and that that is a true
+     story. I do not immediately recollect indeed the
+     particular information on which I quote it; but I am
+     certain that I had for it unquestionable authority."
+     Doctor Franklin, who had been for some time shaking
+     with unrestrained laughter at the Abbe's confidence in
+     his authority for that tale, said, "I will tell you,
+     Abbe, the origin of that story. When I was a printer
+     and editor of a newspaper, we were sometimes slack of
+     news, and to amuse our customers I used to fill up our
+     vacant columns with anecdotes and fables, and fancies
+     of my own, and this of Polly Baker is a story of my
+     making, on one of those occasions." The Abbe without
+     the least disconcert, exclaimed with a laugh, "Oh, very
+     well, Doctor, I had rather relate your stories than
+     other men's truths."
+
+Another of Jefferson's stories, is the equally famous one of John Thompson,
+hatter.
+
+     When the Declaration of Independence [he says] was
+     under the consideration of Congress, there were two or
+     three unlucky expressions in it which gave offence to
+     some members. The words "Scotch and other foreign
+     auxiliaries" excited the ire of a gentleman or two of
+     that country. Severe strictures on the conduct of the
+     British King, in negativing our repeated repeals of the
+     law which permitted the importation of slaves, were
+     disapproved by some Southern gentlemen, whose
+     reflections were not yet matured to the full abhorrence
+     of that traffic. Although the offensive expressions
+     were immediately yielded, these gentlemen continued
+     their depredations on other parts of the instrument. I
+     was sitting by Doctor Franklin, who perceived that I
+     was not insensible to these mutilations. "I have made
+     it a rule," said he, "whenever in my power, to avoid
+     becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a
+     public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I
+     will relate to you. When I was a journeyman printer,
+     one of my companions, an apprentice hatter, having
+     served out his time, was about to open shop for
+     himself. His first concern was to have a handsome
+     signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in
+     these words, 'John Thompson, _Hatter, makes_ and _sells
+     hats_ for ready money,' with a figure of a hat
+     subjoined; but he thought he would submit it to his
+     friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to
+     thought the word '_Hatter_' tautologous, because
+     followed by the words 'makes hats' which showed he was
+     a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the
+     word '_makes_' might as well be omitted, because his
+     customers would not care who made the hats. If good and
+     to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. He
+     struck it out. A third said he thought the words '_for
+     ready money_' were useless, as it was not the custom of
+     the place to sell on credit; everyone who purchased
+     expected to pay. They were parted with, and the
+     inscription now stood, 'John Thompson sells hats.'
+     '_Sells hats!_' says his next friend. 'Why nobody will
+     expect you to give them away; what then is the use of
+     that word?' It was stricken out, and '_hats_' followed
+     it, the rather as there was one painted on the board.
+     So the inscription was reduced ultimately to 'John
+     Thompson,' with the figure of a hat subjoined."
+
+The next story has the same background, the Continental Congress.
+
+     I was sitting by Doctor Franklin [says Jefferson], and
+     observed to him that I thought we should except books
+     (from the obligations of the non-importation
+     association formed in America to bring England to
+     terms); that we ought not to exclude science, even
+     coming from an enemy. He thought so too, and I proposed
+     the exception, which was agreed to. Soon after it
+     occurred that medicine should be excepted, and I
+     suggested that also to the Doctor. "As to that," said
+     he, "I will tell you a story. When I was in London, in
+     such a year, there was a weekly club of physicians, of
+     which Sir John Pringle was President, and I was invited
+     by my friend Doctor Fothergill to attend when
+     convenient. Their rule was to propose a thesis one week
+     and discuss it the next. I happened there when the
+     question to be considered was whether physicians had,
+     on the whole, done most good or harm? The young
+     members, particularly, having discussed it very
+     learnedly and eloquently till the subject was
+     exhausted, one of them observed to Sir John Pringle,
+     that although it was not usual for the President to
+     take part in a debate, yet they were desirous to know
+     his opinion on the question. He said they must first
+     tell him whether, under the appellation of physicians,
+     they meant to include _old women_, if they did he
+     thought they had done more good than harm, otherwise
+     more harm than good."
+
+This incident brings back to us, as it doubtless did to Franklin, the
+augurs jesting among themselves over religion.[31]
+
+It is to be regretted that many other easy pens besides that of Jefferson
+have not preserved for us some of those humorous stories and parables of
+which Franklin's memory was such a rich storehouse. Doctor Benjamin Rush,
+one of his intimate friends, is said to have entertained the purpose of
+publishing his recollections of Franklin's table-talk. The purpose was
+never fulfilled, but the scraps of this talk which we find in Dr. Rush's
+diary are sufficient to show that, even in regard to medicine, Franklin had
+a stock of information and conclusions which were well worth the hearing.
+
+As a member of the Continental Congress, Franklin was brought into close
+working intercourse with Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and formed a
+sincere sentiment of friendship for him, which was strengthened by the
+expedition that they made together to Canada, as two of the three
+commissioners appointed by Congress to win the Canadians over to the
+American cause. Samuel Chase, another Marylander, was the third
+commissioner, and the three were accompanied by John Carroll, the brother
+of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, whose character as a Catholic priest, it
+was hoped, would promote the success of the mission. On his way back to
+Philadelphia, in advance of his fellow-commissioners, Franklin acknowledged
+in grateful terms the help that he had received on his return journey from
+the friendly assistance and tender care of this good man, who became his
+firm friend, and was subsequently made the first Catholic Bishop of America
+upon his recommendation. William Carmichael, another Marylander, who was
+for a time the secretary of Silas Deane at Paris, was also one of
+Franklin's friends. There is a tinge of true affection about his letters to
+Carmichael, and the latter, in a letter written in the year 1777, while
+stating that Franklin's age in some measure hindered him from taking so
+active a part in the drudgery of business as his great zeal and abilities
+warranted, remarks, "He is the Master to whom we children in politics all
+look up for counsel, and whose name is everywhere a passport to be well
+received." When Carmichael was the American Secretary of Legation at
+Madrid, Franklin still remembered enough of his Spanish to request the
+former to send him the _Gazette_ of Madrid and any new pamphlets that were
+curious. "I remember the Maxim you mention of Charles V, _Yo y el Tiempo_,"
+he wrote to Carmichael on one occasion, "and have somewhere met with an
+Answer to it in this distich,
+
+    'I and time 'gainst any two,
+    Chance and I 'gainst Time and you.'
+
+"And I think the Gentlemen you have at present to deal with, would do
+wisely to guard a little more against certain Chances." In another letter,
+Franklin, referring to his "Essay on Perfumes," dedicated to the Academy of
+Brussels, writes to Carmichael, "You do my little Scribblings too much
+honour in proposing to print them; but they are at your Disposition, except
+the Letter to the Academy which having several English Puns in it, can not
+be translated, and besides has too much _grossierete_ to be borne by the
+polite Readers of these Nations."
+
+It was in Pennsylvania and New England, however, so far as America was
+concerned, that Franklin formed the intimate friendships which led him so
+often to say towards the close of his life, as one old friend after another
+dropped through the bridge of Mirzah, that the loss of friends is the tax
+imposed upon us by nature for living too long.
+
+The closest friend of his early youth was his Boston friend, John Collins.
+The reader has already learnt how soon religious skepticism, drinking and
+gambling ate out the core of this friend's character.
+
+With his intensely social nature, Franklin had hardly found employment in
+Philadelphia before in his own language he began to have some acquaintance
+among the young people of the town, that were lovers of reading, with whom
+he spent his evenings very agreeably. His first group of friends in
+Philadelphia was formed before he left Pennsylvania for London in 1724. In
+his pictorial way--for the _Autobiography_ is engraved with a burin rather
+than written with a pen--Franklin brings the figures of this group before
+us with admirable distinctness. They were three in number, and all were
+lovers of reading. Two of them, Charles Osborne and Joseph Watson, were
+clerks to an eminent conveyancer in Philadelphia, Charles Brogden. The
+third, James Ralph, who has already been mentioned by us, was clerk to a
+merchant. Watson was a pious, sensible young man, of great integrity; the
+others were rather more lax in their principles of religion, particularly
+Ralph, who, as well as Collins, to quote the precise words of Franklin's
+confession, had been unsettled by him, "for which," he adds, "they both
+made me suffer."
+
+     Osborne [Franklin continues] was sensible, candid,
+     frank; sincere and affectionate to his friends; but, in
+     literary matters, too fond of criticising. Ralph was
+     ingenious, genteel in his manners, and extremely
+     eloquent; I think I never knew a prettier talker. Both
+     of them great admirers of poetry, and began to try
+     their hands in little pieces. Many pleasant walks we
+     four had together on Sundays into the woods, near
+     Schuylkill, where we read to one another, and conferr'd
+     on what we read.
+
+Ralph had the most fatal of all gifts for a clever man--the gift of writing
+poetry tolerably well. Osborne tried to convince him that he had no genius
+for it, and advised him to stick to mercantile pursuits. Franklin
+conservatively approved the amusing one's self with poetry now and then so
+far as to improve one's language, but no farther.
+
+Thus things stood when the friends proposed that each should produce at
+their next meeting a poetical version of the 18th Psalm. Ralph composed his
+version, showed it to Franklin, who admired it, and, being satisfied that
+Osborne's criticisms of his muse were the suggestions of mere envy, asked
+Franklin to produce it at the next symposium of the friends as his own.
+Franklin, who had a relish for practical jokes throughout his life, fell in
+readily with Ralph's stratagem. But we shall let a writer, whose diction is
+as incompressible as water, narrate what followed in his own lively way:
+
+     We met; Watson's performance was read; there were some
+     beauties in it, but many defects. Osborne's was read;
+     it was much better; Ralph did it justice; remarked some
+     faults, but applauded the beauties. He himself had
+     nothing to produce. I was backward; seemed desirous of
+     being excused; had not had sufficient time to correct,
+     etc.; but no excuse could be admitted; produce I must.
+     It was read and repeated; Watson and Osborne gave up
+     the contest, and join'd in applauding it. Ralph only
+     made some criticisms, and propos'd some amendments; but
+     I defended my text. Osborne was against Ralph, and told
+     him he was no better a critic than poet, so he dropt
+     the argument. As they two went home together, Osborne
+     expressed himself still more strongly in favour of what
+     he thought my production; having restrain'd himself
+     before, as he said, lest I should think it flattery.
+     "But who would have imagin'd," said he, "that Franklin
+     had been capable of such a performance, such painting,
+     such force, such fire! He has even improv'd the
+     original. In his common conversation he seems to have
+     no choice of words; he hesitates and blunders; and yet,
+     good God! how he writes!" When we next met, Ralph
+     discovered the trick we had plaid him, and Osborne was
+     a little laught at.
+
+     This transaction fixed Ralph in his resolution of
+     becoming a poet. I did all I could to dissuade him from
+     it, but he continued scribbling verses till _Pope_
+     cured him.[32]
+
+Watson, we are told by Franklin, died in his arms a few years after this
+incident, much lamented, being the best of their set. Osborne went to the
+West Indies, where he became an eminent lawyer, and made money, but died
+young. "He and I," observes Franklin, "had made a serious agreement, that
+the one who happen'd first to die should, if possible, make a friendly
+visit to the other, and acquaint him how he found things in that separate
+state. But he never fulfill'd his promise."
+
+This group of friends was succeeded on Franklin's return from London by the
+persons who constituted with him the original members of the Junto: Joseph
+Breintnal, "a copyer of deeds for the scriveners," Thos. Godfrey, the
+mathematical precisian, for whom Franklin had so little partiality,
+Nicholas Scull, "a surveyor, afterwards Surveyor-general, who lov'd books,
+and sometimes made a few verses," William Parsons, "bred a shoemaker, but,
+loving reading, had acquir'd a considerable share of mathematics, which he
+first studied with a view to astrology, that he afterwards laught at,"
+William Maugridge, "a joiner, a most exquisite mechanic, and a solid,
+sensible man," Hugh Meredith, Stephen Potts, and George Webb, journeymen
+printers, Robert Grace, "a young gentleman of some fortune, generous,
+lively, and witty; a lover of punning and of his friends," and William
+Coleman, then a merchant's clerk about Franklin's age, who had the coolest,
+clearest head, the best heart, and the exactest morals, Franklin declares,
+of almost any man he ever met with. Coleman subsequently became a merchant
+of great note, and a provincial judge; and the friendship between Franklin
+and himself continued without interruption until Coleman's death, a period
+of more than forty years. Like Scull, Parsons also became Surveyor-General.
+The reader will remember how, partly inspired by his affection for Robert
+Grace, and partly by resentment over a small office, Franklin applied the
+sharp edge of the _lex talionis_ to Jemmy Read. How both Coleman and Grace
+came to the aid of Franklin in an hour of dire distress, we shall see
+hereafter.
+
+Such letters from Franklin to Parsons, as have survived, bear the marks of
+intimate friendship. In one to him, when he was in command of a company at
+Easton, dated December 15, 1755, in which reference is made to arms and
+supplies, that had been forwarded for the defence of that town against the
+Indians, Franklin says, "Be of good Courage, and God guide you. Your
+Friends will never desert you." Four of the original members of the Junto
+were among the first members of the Philosophical Society, established by
+Franklin, Parsons, as Geographer, Thomas Godfrey, as Mathematician, Coleman
+as Treasurer, and Franklin himself as Secretary. Parsons died during the
+first mission of Franklin to England, and, in a letter to Deborah the
+latter comments on the event in these words: "I regret the Loss of my
+Friend Parsons. Death begins to make Breaches in the little Junto of old
+Friends, that he had long forborne, and it must be expected he will now
+soon pick us all off one after another." In another letter, written some
+months later to Hugh Roberts, a member of the Junto, but not one of the
+original members, he institutes a kind of Plutarchian contrast between
+Parsons and Stephen Potts, who is described in the _Autobiography_ as a
+young countryman of full age, bred to country work, of uncommon natural
+parts, and great wit and humor, but a little idle.
+
+     Two of the former members of the Junto you tell me [he
+     said] are departed this life, Potts and Parsons. Odd
+     characters both of them. Parsons a wise man, that often
+     acted foolishly; Potts a wit, that seldom acted wisely.
+     If _enough_ were the means to make a man happy, one had
+     always the _means_ of happiness, without ever enjoying
+     the _thing_; the other had always the _thing_, without
+     ever possessing the _means_. Parsons, even in his
+     prosperity, always fretting; Potts, in the midst of his
+     poverty, ever laughing. It seems, then, that happiness
+     in this life rather depends on internals than
+     externals; and that, besides the natural effects of
+     wisdom and virtue, vice and folly, there is such a
+     thing as a happy or an unhappy constitution. They were
+     both our friends, and loved us. So, peace to their
+     shades. They had their virtues as well as their
+     foibles; they were both honest men, and that alone, as
+     the world goes, is one of the greatest of characters.
+     They were old acquaintances, in whose company I
+     formerly enjoyed a great deal of pleasure, and I cannot
+     think of losing them, without concern and regret.
+
+The Hugh Roberts to whom this letter was written was the Hugh Roberts, who
+found such pleasure in the glad peal of bells, that announced the safe
+arrival of Franklin in England, and in his reminiscences of his friend of
+forty years' standing, that he quite forgot that it was his rule to be in
+bed by eleven o'clock. He was, if Franklin may be believed, an eminent
+farmer, which may account for the early hours he kept; and how near he was
+to Franklin the affectionate tone of this very letter abundantly testifies.
+After expressing his grief because of their friend Syng's loss of his son,
+and the hope that Roberts' own son might be in every respect as good and
+useful as his father (than which he need not wish him more, he said)
+Franklin takes Roberts gently to task for not attending the meetings of the
+Junto more regularly.
+
+     I do not quite like your absenting yourself from that
+     Good old club, the Junto. Your more frequent presence
+     might be a means of keeping them from being all engaged
+     in measures not the best for public welfare. I exhort
+     you, therefore, to return to your duty; and, as the
+     Indians say, to confirm my words, I send you a
+     Birmingham tile. I thought the neatness of the figures
+     would please you.
+
+Even the Birmingham tile, however, did not have the effect of correcting
+Roberts' remissness, for in two subsequent letters Franklin returns to the
+same subject. In the first, he tells Roberts that he had received his
+letter by the hands of Roberts' son in London, and had had the pleasure
+withal of seeing this son grow up a solid, sensible young man. He then
+reverts to the Junto. "You tell me you sometimes visit the ancient Junto. I
+wish you would do it oftener. I know they all love and respect you, and
+regret your absenting yourself so much. People are apt to grow strange, and
+not understand one another so well, when they meet but seldom." Then follow
+these words which help us to see how he came to declare so confidently on
+another occasion that, compared with the entire happiness of existence, its
+occasional unhappiness is but as the pricking of a pin.
+
+     Since we have held that Club, till we are grown grey
+     together, let us hold it out to the End. For my own
+     Part, I find I love Company, Chat, a Laugh, a Glass,
+     and even a Song, as well as ever; and at the same Time
+     relish better than I used to do the grave Observations
+     and wise Sentences of old Men's Conversation; so that I
+     am sure the Junto will be still as agreeable to me as
+     it ever has been. I therefore hope it will not be
+     discontinu'd, as long as we are able to crawl together.
+
+The second of the two letters makes still another appeal of the same
+nature.
+
+     I wish [Franklin said] you would continue to meet the
+     Junto, notwithstanding that some Effects of our publick
+     political Misunderstandings may sometimes appear there.
+     'Tis now perhaps one of the _oldest_ Clubs, as I think
+     it was formerly one of the _best_, in the King's
+     Dominions. It wants but about two years of Forty since
+     it was establish'd. We loved and still love one
+     another; we are grown Grey together, and yet it is too
+     early to Part. Let us sit till the Evening of Life is
+     spent. The Last Hours are always the most joyous. When
+     we can stay no longer, 'tis time enough then to bid
+     each other good Night, separate, and go quietly to bed.
+
+When even the bed of death could be made to wear this smooth and peaceful
+aspect by such a genial conception of existence, it is not surprising that
+Catherine Shipley, a friend of later date, should have asked Franklin to
+instruct her in the art of procuring pleasant dreams. It was in this
+letter, too, that he told Roberts that he was pleased with his punning, not
+merely because he liked punning in general, but because he learned from the
+use of it by Roberts that he was in good health and spirits. Of Hugh
+Roberts it needs to be only further said that he was one of Franklin's many
+friends who did what they could by courteous offices, when Franklin was
+abroad, to testify that they loved him too much to be unmindful that he had
+left a family behind him entitled to their protection and social
+attentions. For his visits to his family Franklin sometimes thanks him.
+
+The Philip Syng mentioned in one of the letters to Hugh Roberts was another
+Philadelphia crony of Franklin's. He was enough of an electrician to be
+several times given due credit by the unhesitating candor of Franklin for
+ideas which the public would otherwise, perhaps, have fathered upon
+Franklin himself, who was entirely too careless about his own fine feathers
+to have any desire for borrowed plumage.
+
+Samuel Rhoads, also, was one of the intimate Philadelphia friends to whom
+Franklin was in the habit of sending his love. He, too, was an original
+member of the Philosophical Society established by Franklin and was set
+down as "Mechanician" on its roll of membership. At any rate, even if
+"Mechanician" was a rather pompous term for him, as "Geographer" was for
+William Parsons, the surveyor, he was enough of a builder to warrant
+Franklin in imparting to him many valuable points about the construction of
+houses, which were brought to the former's attention when he was abroad. A
+striking proof, perhaps, of the strength of the attachment between the two
+is found in the fact that Rhoads built the new residence, previously
+mentioned by us, for Franklin without a rupture in their friendship;
+although there appears to have been enough of the usual provoking delays to
+cause Franklin no little dissatisfaction.
+
+Rhoads was a man of considerable public importance in his time. He enjoyed
+the distinction of being one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Hospital,
+a conspicuous member of the Assembly of Pennsylvania, and a Mayor of
+Philadelphia.
+
+He was one, too, of the Committee of the Assembly which audited Franklin's
+accounts as the Agent of the Colony upon the latter's return from England
+in 1762, and he was likewise a member of the Committee which had previously
+reported that the estates of the Proprietaries in Pennsylvania were not
+being unfairly taxed. In one of Franklin's letters to him, there is a
+humorous reference to Rhoads' political career. "I congratulate you," he
+said, "on Your Retirement, and you being able to divert yourself with
+farming; 'tis an inexhaustible source of perpetual Amusement. Your Country
+_Seat_ is of a more secure kind than _that_ in the Assembly: and I hope not
+so much in the Power of the Mob to jostle you out of."
+
+A golden sentence in this letter is one of the best that Franklin ever
+penned. "As long as I have known the World I have observ'd that Wrong is
+always growing more Wrong till there is no bearing it, and that right
+however oppos'd, comes right at last."
+
+Rhoads, Syng and Roberts were all three included with Luke Morris, another
+old friend and an _et cetera_, intended to embrace other friends besides,
+in a letter which Franklin wrote from Passy to Dr. Thomas Bond.
+
+     I thank you [he said] for the pleasing account you give
+     me of the health and welfare of my old friends, Hugh
+     Roberts, Luke Morris, Philip Syng, Samuel Rhoads, &c.,
+     with the same of yourself and family. Shake the old
+     ones by the hand for me, and give the young ones my
+     blessing. For my own part, I do not find that I grow
+     any older. Being arrived at seventy, and considering
+     that by travelling further in the same road I should
+     probably be led to the grave, I stopped short, turned
+     about, and walked back again; which having done these
+     four years, you may now call me sixty-six.
+
+Dr. Thomas Bond, the Physician of the Philosophical Society established by
+Franklin, to whom this letter was written, was also one of Franklin's
+lifelong friends. He was the Doctor Bond, who found that he could make no
+headway with his hospital project until it was encouraged by a _ca ira_
+from Franklin, something like that which he is said to have uttered many
+years afterwards in France when the issue of the American Revolution was
+uncertain. For the society of physicians and liberal-minded clergymen
+Franklin had a peculiar partiality. To the one class he was attracted by
+both the scientific and humanitarian nature of their profession, to say
+nothing of the incessant intercourse with their fellow creatures, which
+makes all physicians more or less men of the world; and to the questioning
+spirit of the eighteenth century he was too true not to have a natural
+affinity for clergymen of the latitudinarian type. The ties between Dr.
+Thomas Bond, Dr. John Bard and Dr. Benjamin Rush and himself were very
+close. He had such a high opinion of Dr. Bond's pills that on one occasion
+he even writes to his wife from Virginia to send him some by post. On
+another occasion, when he was in England, he tells Deborah to thank Dr.
+Bond for the care that he takes of her. In a letter to the Doctor himself,
+he remarks that he did not know why their school of physic in Philadelphia
+should not soon be equal to that in Edinburgh, an observation which seemed
+natural enough to later Philadelphians when it was not only considered
+throughout the United States a high compliment to say of a man that he was
+as clever as a Philadelphia lawyer, but a medical education was in a large
+part of the United States deemed incomplete unless it had received the
+finishing touch from the clinics of that city.
+
+When Dr. John Bard removed to New York, where he became the first President
+of the New York Medical Society, Franklin stated in a letter to Cadwallader
+Colden that he esteemed Dr. Bard an ingenious physician and surgeon, and a
+discreet, worthy and honest man. In a letter to Dr. Bard and his wife in
+1785, he used these tender words: "You are right in supposing, that I
+interest myself in everything that affects you and yours, sympathizing in
+your afflictions, and rejoicing in your felicities; for our friendship is
+ancient, and was never obscured by the least cloud."
+
+Dr. Rush was such a fervid friend and admirer of Franklin that the latter
+found it necessary to request him, if he published his discourse on the
+Moral Sense, to omit totally and suppress that most extravagant encomium on
+his friend Franklin, which hurt him exceedingly in the unexpected hearing,
+and would mortify him beyond conception if it should appear from the press.
+The doctor replied by saying that he had suppressed the encomium, but had
+taken the liberty of inscribing the discourse to Franklin by a simple
+dedication, and earnestly insisted upon the permission of his friend to
+send his last as he did his first publication into the world under the
+patronage of his name. In the "simple" dedication, the panegyric, which had
+made Franklin so uncomfortable, was moderated to such an extent that no
+character was ascribed to him more transcendent than that of the friend and
+benefactor of mankind.
+
+To Dr. Rush we are under obligations for several stories about Franklin. He
+tells us that, when chosen by Congress to be one of our Commissioners to
+France, Franklin turned to him, and remarked: "I am old and good for
+nothing; but, as the storekeepers say of their remnants of cloth, 'I am but
+a fag end, and you may have me for what you please.'" No one doubts now
+that for the purpose of the French mission he was by far the best piece of
+goods in the shop. Another story, which came to Dr. Rush at second hand,
+sounds apocryphal. "Why do you wear that old coat today?" asked Silas Deane
+of Franklin, when they were on their way to sign the Treaty of Alliance
+with France. Deane referred to the coat, in which Franklin was clad, when
+Wedderburn made the rabid attack on him before the Privy Council, to which
+we shall refer later. "To give it its revenge," was the reply. Franklin may
+have said that, but it was not like him to say anything of the sort.
+
+But we get back to the domain of unquestionable authenticity when we turn
+to Dr. Rush's account of Franklin's death-bed:
+
+     The evening of his life was marked by the same activity
+     of his moral and intellectual powers which
+     distinguished its meridian. His conversation with his
+     family upon the subject of his dissolution was free and
+     cheerful. A few days before he died, he rose from his
+     bed and begged that it might be made up for him so
+     _that he might die in a decent manner_. His daughter
+     told him that she hoped he would recover and live many
+     years longer. He calmly replied, "_I hope not._" Upon
+     being advised to change his position in bed, that he
+     might breathe easy, he said, "_A dying man can do
+     nothing easy._" All orders and bodies of people have
+     vied with each other in paying tributes of respect to
+     his memory.
+
+A Philadelphia friend, for whom Franklin entertained a peculiar affection,
+was John Bartram, the botanist. "Our celebrated Botanist of Pennsylvania,"
+Franklin deservedly terms him in a letter to Jan Ingenhousz. In one letter
+Franklin addresses him as "My ever dear friend," in another as "My good and
+dear old friend" and in another as "My dear good old friend." In 1751,
+Bartram published his _Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil,
+Rivers, Productions, Animals, and other Matters worthy of Notice. Made by
+Mr. John Bartram in his Travels from Pensilvania to Onondaga, Oswego, and
+the Lake Ontario, in Canada_, and, in a letter to Jared Eliot, Franklin,
+after mentioning the fact that Bartram corresponded with several of the
+great naturalists in Europe, and would be proud of an acquaintance with
+him, said: "I make no Apologies for introducing him to you; for, tho' a
+plain illiterate Man, you will find he has Merit." "He is a Man of no
+Letters, but a curious Observer of Nature," was his statement in a
+subsequent letter to the same correspondent. Through the mediation of
+Franklin, Bartram was made the American botanist to the King, and given a
+pension for the fearless and tireless search for botanical specimens, which
+he had prosecuted, when American forest, savannah and everglade were as
+full of death as the berry of the nightshade. It was the thought of what he
+had hazarded that led Franklin to write to him in 1769: "I wish you would
+now decline your long and dangerous peregrinations in search of new plants,
+and remain safe and quiet at home, employing your leisure hours in a work
+that is much wanted, and which no one besides is so capable of performing;
+I mean the writing a Natural History of our country." The pension meant so
+much to Bartram that he found difficulty in assuring himself that it would
+last. In one letter, Franklin tells him that he imagines that there is no
+doubt but the King's bounty to him would be continued, but he must continue
+on his part to send over now and then a few such curious seeds as he could
+procure to keep up his claim. In another letter, he tells him that there is
+no instance in the then King's reign of a pension once granted ever being
+taken away, unless for some great offence. Franklin himself was first of
+all a sower of seed, of that seed which produces the wholesome plants of
+benevolence and utility; so it seems quite in keeping to find him, when he
+was absent from America, maintaining a constant interchange of different
+sorts of seed with Bartram. If Bartram chooses to try the seed of naked
+oats and Swiss barley, six rows to one ear, he can get some, Franklin
+writes, by calling on Mrs. Franklin. In another letter, he acknowledges the
+receipt of seeds from Bartram, and, in return for it, sends him some of the
+true rhubarb seed which he desires; also some green dry peas, highly
+esteemed in England as the best for making pea soup; and also some
+caravances or beans, of which a cheese was made in China. Strangely enough,
+he could learn nothing about the seed of the lucerne or alfalfa plant, one
+of the oldest of forage plants, for which Bartram wrote. Later, he sends
+Bartram a small box of upland rice, brought from Cochin China, and also a
+few seeds of the Chinese tallow tree.
+
+Another particular friend of Franklin was John Hughes of Philadelphia. This
+is the Hughes, out of whose debt as a correspondent Franklin, when in
+England, found it impossible to keep. He was a man of considerable
+political importance, for he served on the Committee of the Assembly, which
+was charged with the expenditure of the L60,000 appropriated by the
+Assembly, after Braddock's defeat, mainly for the defence of the Province,
+and on the Committee of the Assembly, which audited Franklin's accounts
+after his return from England in 1762; and was also one of the delegates
+appointed by the Assembly to confer with Teedyuscung, the King of the
+Delawares, at Easton in 1756. Even when Franklin, his party associate, was
+defeated as a candidate for re-election to the Assembly in 1764, Hughes
+contrived to clamber back into his own seat. The departure for England of
+Franklin, shortly after this election, was the signal for the most venomous
+of all the attacks made upon him by the class of writers which he happily
+termed "bug-writers"; that is, writers, to use his words, who resemble
+"those little dirty stinking insects, that attack us only in the dark,
+disturb our Repose, molesting and wounding us, while our Sweat and Blood
+are contributing to their Subsistence." But the friendship of Hughes was
+equal to the emergency. Incensed at the outrageous nature of the attack, he
+published a card over his signature, in which he promised that, if Chief
+Justice Allen, or any gentleman of character, would undertake to justify
+the charges against Franklin, he would pay L10 to the Hospital for every
+one of these charges that was established; provided that the person, who
+made them, would pay L5 for every false accusation against Franklin that he
+disproved. The assailants endeavored to turn Hughes' challenge into
+ridicule by an anonymous reply, but Hughes rejoined with a counter-reply
+above his own signature, in which, according to William Franklin, he lashed
+them very severely for their baseness. This brought on a newspaper
+controversy, which did not end, until Chief Justice Allen, who was drawn
+into its vortex, was enraged to find that it had cost him L25. Later, the
+recommendation of Hughes by Franklin, as the Stamp Distributor for
+Pennsylvania and the Counties of New Castle, Kent and Sussex, gave the
+worst shock to the popularity of the latter that it ever received. The
+fierce heat that colonial resentment kindled under the hateful office
+proved too much for even such a resolute incumbent as Hughes, but he was
+not long in finding a compensation in the somewhat lower temperature of the
+office of Collector of Customs for the Colonies, which he held until his
+death.
+
+Thomas Hopkinson, of Philadelphia, too, was one of Franklin's particular
+friends. He shared his enthusiasm for electrical experiments, and was the
+first President of the Philosophical Society established by him. With his
+usual generosity, Franklin took pains in a note to one of his scientific
+papers to publish the fact that the power of points to _throw off_ the
+electrical fire was first communicated to him by this friend, then
+deceased. Nor did he stop there, but referred to him at the same time as a
+man "whose virtue and integrity, in every station of life, public and
+private, will ever make his Memory dear to those who knew him, and knew how
+to value him." There is an amusing reference to Hopkinson in the
+_Autobiography_ in connection with the occasion on which Franklin himself
+was so transported by Whitefield's eloquence as to empty his pockets, gold
+and all, into the collector's dish. Disapproving of Whitefield's desire to
+establish an orphan asylum in Georgia, and suspecting that subscriptions
+would be solicited by him for that object, and yet distrusting his own
+capacity to resist a preacher, by whom, in the language of Isaiah, the
+hearts of the people were stirred, as the trees of the wood are stirred
+with the wind, he took the precaution of emptying his pockets before he
+left home. But Whitefield's pathos was too much for him also. Towards the
+conclusion of the discourse, he felt a strong desire to give, and applied
+to a Quaker neighbor, who stood near him, to borrow some money for the
+purpose. The application was unfortunately made, the _Autobiography_ says,
+to perhaps the only man in the company who had the firmness not to be
+affected by the preacher. His answer was, "_At any other time, Friend
+Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely; but not now, for thee seems to be
+out of thy right senses._"
+
+Anyone who enjoyed Franklin's friendship experienced very little difficulty
+in passing it on to his son at his death. Francis Hopkinson, the son of
+Thomas Hopkinson, and the author of _Hail Columbia_, is one example of
+this. Franklin's letters to him are marked by every indication of
+affection, and he bequeathed to him all his philosophical instruments in
+Philadelphia, and made him one of the executors of his will with Henry
+Hill, John Jay and Mr. Edward Duffield, of Benfield, in Philadelphia
+County. In doing so, with his happy faculty for such things he managed to
+pay a twofold compliment to both father and son in one breath. After
+expressing in a letter to Francis Hopkinson his pleasure that Hopkinson had
+been appointed to the honorable office of Treasurer of Loans, he added: "I
+think the Congress judg'd rightly in their Choice, and Exactness in
+accounts and scrupulous fidelity in matters of Trust are Qualities for
+which your father was eminent, and which I was persuaded was inherited by
+his Son when I took the liberty of naming him one of the Executors of my
+Will." Franklin even had a mild word of commendation for Hopkinson's
+political squibs, some of which, when on their way across the ocean to him,
+fell into the hands of the British along with Henry Laurens. The captors,
+it is safe to say, attached very different degrees of importance to the two
+prizes, and Hopkinson himself accepted the situation with the cheerful
+observation, "They are heartily welcome to any performance of mine in that
+way. I wish the dose was stronger and better for their sake." Several of
+the letters from Franklin to Francis Hopkinson bring out two of the most
+winning traits of the writer, his ability to find a sweet kernel under
+every rind however bitter, and his aversion to defamation, which led him to
+say truthfully on one occasion that between abusing and being abused he
+would rather be abused.
+
+     As to the Friends and Enemies you just mention [he
+     declared in one of them], I have hitherto, Thanks to
+     God, had Plenty of the former kind; they have been my
+     Treasure; and it has perhaps been of no Disadvantage to
+     me, that I have had a few of the latter. They serve to
+     put us upon correcting the Faults we have, and avoiding
+     those we are in danger of having. They counteract the
+     Mischief Flattery might do us, and their Malicious
+     Attacks make our Friends more zealous in serving us,
+     and promoting our Interest. At present, I do not know
+     of more than two such Enemies that I enjoy, viz. Lee
+     and Izard. I deserved the Enmity of the latter, because
+     I might have avoided it by paying him a Compliment,
+     which I neglected. That of the former I owe to the
+     People of France, who happen'd to respect me too much
+     and him too little; which I could bear, and he could
+     not. They are unhappy, that they cannot make everybody
+     hate me as much as they do; and I should be so, if my
+     Friends did not love me much more than those Gentlemen
+     can possibly love one another.
+
+Every ugly witch is but a transfigured princess. This idea is one that was
+readily adopted by Franklin's amiable philosophy of life. The thought that
+enemies are but wholesome mortifications for the pride of human flesh is a
+thought that he often throws out in his letters to other persons besides
+Hopkinson. In one to the gallant Col. Henry Bouquet, who was also, it may
+be said in passing, a warm friend of Franklin, the pen of the latter halts
+for a moment to parenthesize the fact that God had blessed him with two or
+three enemies to keep him in order.
+
+But there were few facts in which Franklin found more satisfaction than the
+fact that all his enemies were mere political enemies, that is to say,
+enemies like Dr. William Smith, who shot poisoned arrows at him, when he
+was living, and fired minute guns over his grave, when he was dead.
+
+     You know [he wrote to his daughter Sally from Reedy
+     Island, when he was leaving America on his second
+     mission to England], I have many enemies, all indeed on
+     the public account (for I cannot recollect that I have
+     in a private capacity given just cause of offence to
+     any one whatever), yet they are enemies, and very
+     bitter ones; and you must expect their enmity will
+     extend in some degree to you, so that your slightest
+     indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order
+     the more sensibly to wound and afflict me.
+
+The same distinction between personal and political hostility is drawn by
+him in a letter to John Jay of a much later date in which he uses the only
+terms of self-approval, so far as we can recollect, that a biographer might
+prefer him never to have employed.
+
+     I have [he said], as you observe, some enemies in
+     England, but they are my enemies as an _American_; I
+     have also two or three in America; who are my enemies
+     as a _Minister_; but I thank God there are not in the
+     whole world any who are my Enemies as a _Man_; for by
+     his grace, thro' a long life, I have been enabled so to
+     conduct myself, that there does not exist a human Being
+     who can justly say, "Ben. Franklin has wrong'd me."
+     This, my friend, is in old age a comfortable
+     Reflection.
+
+In one of the letters to Hopkinson, mentioned by us, he tells Hopkinson
+that he does well to refrain from newspaper abuse. He was afraid, he
+declared, to lend any American newspapers in France until he had examined
+and laid aside such as would disgrace his countrymen, and subject them
+among strangers to a reflection like that used by a gentleman in a
+coffee-house to two quarrelers, who, after a mutually free use of the
+words, _rogue_, _villain_, _rascal_, _scoundrel_, etc., seemed as if they
+would refer their dispute to him. "I know nothing of you, or your Affair,"
+said he; "I only perceive _that you know one another_."
+
+The conductor of a newspaper, he thought, should consider himself as in
+some degree the guardian of his country's reputation, and refuse to insert
+such writings as might hurt it. If people will print their abuses of one
+another, let them do it in little pamphlets, and distribute them where they
+think proper, instead of troubling all the world with them, he suggested.
+In expressing these sentiments, Franklin was but preaching what he had
+actually practised in the management of the _Pennsylvania Gazette_. This
+fact imparts additional authority to the pungent observations on the
+liberty of the press contained in one of the last papers that he ever
+wrote, namely, his _Account of the Supreme Court of Judicature in
+Pennsylvania, viz.: the Court of the Press_. In this paper, he arraigns the
+license of the press in his half-serious, half-jocular fashion with
+undiminished vigor, and ends with the recommendation to the Legislature
+that, if the right of retaliation by the citizen was not to be left
+unregulated, it should take up the consideration of both liberties, that of
+the press and that of the cudgel, and by an explicit law mark their extent
+and limits.
+
+Doctor Cadwallader Evans of Philadelphia was also on a sufficiently
+affectionate footing with Franklin for the latter to speak of him as his
+"good old friend." When news of his death reached Franklin in London in
+1773, the event awakened a train of reflection in his mind which led him to
+write to his son that, if he found himself on his return to America, as he
+feared he would do, a stranger among strangers, he would have to go back to
+his friends in England.
+
+Dr. Evans' idea of establishing a medical library at the Hospital was so
+grateful to Franklin's untiring public spirit that, as soon as he heard of
+it from Dr. Evans, he sent him at once the only medical book that he had,
+and took steps to solicit other donations of such books for the purpose in
+England. There are some instructive observations on political and medical
+subjects in his earlier letters to Dr. Evans, but his later ones are mainly
+given over to the movement for the production of silk in Pennsylvania in
+which Dr. Evans was deeply interested. The industry, intelligence and
+enthusiasm with which Franklin seconded his efforts to make the exotic
+nursling a success is one of the many laudable things in his career.
+
+Another close friend of Franklin was Abel James, a Quaker, and an active
+member of the society in Pennsylvania for the manufacture of silk, or the
+Filature, as it was called. When he returned to England in 1764, Abel
+James, Thomas Wharton and Joseph Galloway were the friends who were so
+loath to part with him that they even boarded his ship at Chester, and
+accompanied him as far as New Castle. The enduring claim of James upon the
+attention of posterity consists in the fact that he was so lucky, when the
+books and papers, entrusted by Franklin to the care of Joseph Galloway were
+raided, as to recover the manuscript of the first twenty-three pages of the
+_Autobiography_, which brought the life of Franklin down to the year 1730.
+Subsequently he sent a copy to "his dear and honored friend," with a letter
+urging him to complete the work. "What will the world say," he asked, "if
+kind, humane and benevolent Ben. Franklin should leave his friends and the
+world deprived of so pleasing and profitable a work; a work which would be
+useful and entertaining not only to a few, but to millions?"
+
+The names of Thomas Wharton and Samuel Wharton, two Philadelphia friends of
+Franklin, are more than once coupled together in Franklin's letters. Thomas
+Wharton was a partner of Galloway and Goddard in the establishment of the
+_Philadelphia Chronicle_. It was his woollen gown that Franklin found such
+a comfortable companion on his winter voyage. He would seem to have been
+the same kind of robust invalid as the neurasthenic who insisted that he
+was dying of consumption until he grew so stout that he had to refer his
+imaginary ill-health to dropsy.
+
+     Our friend W---- [Franklin wrote to Dr. Evans], who is
+     always complaining of a constant fever, looks
+     nevertheless fresh and jolly, and does not fall away in
+     the least. He was saying the other day at Richmond,
+     (where we were together dining with Governor Pownall)
+     that he had been pestered with a fever almost
+     continually for these three years past, and that it
+     gave way to no medicines, all he had taken, advised by
+     different physicians, having never any effect towards
+     removing it. On which I asked him, if it was not now
+     time to inquire, whether he had really any fever at
+     all. He is indeed the only instance I ever knew, of a
+     man's growing fat upon a fever.
+
+It was with the assistance of Thomas Wharton that Thomas Livezy, a
+Pennsylvania Quaker, sent Franklin a dozen bottles of wine, made of the
+"small wild grape" of America, accompanied by a letter, which Franklin with
+his _penchant_ for good stories, must have enjoyed even more than the wine.
+Referring to the plan of converting the government of Pennsylvania from a
+Proprietary into a Royal one, Livezy wrote that, if it was true that there
+would be no change until the death of Thomas Penn, he did not know but that
+some people in the Province would be in the same condition as a German's
+wife in his neighborhood lately was "who said nobody could say she wished
+her husband dead, but said, she wished she could see how he would look when
+he was dead." "I honestly confess," Livezy went on to say, "I do not wish
+him (Penn) to die against his will, but, if he could be prevailed on to die
+for the good of the people, it might perhaps make his name as immortal as
+Samson's death did his, and gain him more applause here than all the acts
+which he has ever done in his life."
+
+The humor of Franklin's reply, if humor it can be termed, was more
+sardonic.
+
+     The Partizans of the present [he said] may as you say
+     flatter themselves that such Change will not take
+     place, till the Proprietor's death, but I imagine he
+     hardly thinks so himself. Anxiety and uneasiness are
+     painted on his brow and the woman who would like to see
+     how he would look when dead, need only look at him
+     while living.
+
+With Samuel Wharton, Franklin was intimate enough to soothe his gout-ridden
+feet with a pair of "Gouty Shoes" given or lent to him by Wharton. This
+Wharton was with him one of the chief promoters of the Ohio settlement, of
+which the reader will learn more later, and the project was brought near
+enough to success by Franklin for his over-zealous friends to sow the seeds
+of what might have been a misunderstanding between him and Wharton, if
+Franklin had not been so healthy-minded, by claiming that the credit for
+the prospective success of the project would belong to Wharton rather than
+to Franklin. But, as Franklin said, many things happen between the cup and
+the lip, and enough happened in this case to make the issue a wholly vain
+one. Subsequently we know that Franklin in one letter asked John Paul Jones
+to remember him affectionately to Wharton and in another referred to
+Wharton as a "particular friend of his." His feelings, it is needless to
+say, underwent a decided change when later the fact was brought to his
+attention that Wharton had converted to his own use a sum of money placed
+in his hands by Jan Ingenhousz, one of the most highly-prized of all
+Franklin's friends.
+
+There is a thrust at Parliament in a letter from Franklin to Samuel
+Wharton, written at Passy, which is too keen not to be recalled. He is
+describing the Lord George Gordon riots, during which Lord Mansfield's
+house was destroyed.
+
+     If they had done no other Mischief [said Franklin], I
+     would have more easily excused them, as he has been an
+     eminent Promoter of the American War, and it is not
+     amiss that those who have approved the Burning our poor
+     People's Houses and Towns should taste a little of the
+     Effects of Fire themselves. But they turn'd all the
+     Thieves and Robbers out of Newgate to the Number of
+     three hundred, and instead of replacing them with an
+     equal Number of other Plunderers of the Publick, which
+     they might easily have found among the Members of
+     Parliament, they burnt the Building.
+
+The relations between Franklin and Ebenezer Kinnersley, who shared his
+enthusiasm for electrical experiments, John Foxcroft, who became his
+colleague, as Deputy Postmaster-General for America after the death of
+Colonel Hunter, and the Rev. Thomas Coombe, the assistant minister of
+Christ Church and St. Peter's in Philadelphia, were of an affectionate
+nature, but there is little of salient interest to be said about these
+relations. Malice has asserted that Franklin did not give Kinnersley due
+credit for ideas that he borrowed from him in his electrical experiments.
+If so, Kinnersley must have had a relish for harsh treatment, for in a
+letter to Franklin, when speaking of the lightning rod, he exclaimed, "May
+it extend to the latest posterity of mankind, and make the name of FRANKLIN
+like that of NEWTON _immortal_!"
+
+James Wright, and his sister, Susannah Wright, who resided at Hempfield,
+near Wright's Ferry, Pennsylvania, were likewise good friends of Franklin.
+Part at any rate of the flour, on which Braddock's army subsisted, was
+supplied by a mill erected by James Wright near the mouth of the Shawanese
+Run. Susannah Wright was a woman of parts, interested in silk culture, and
+fond of reading. On one occasion, Franklin sends her from Philadelphia a
+couple of pamphlets refuting the charges of plagiarism preferred by William
+Lauder against the memory of Milton and a book or tract entitled
+_Christianity not Founded on Argument_. On another occasion, in a letter
+from London to Deborah, he mentions, as part of the contents of a box that
+he was transmitting to America, some pamphlets for the Speaker and "Susy"
+Wright. Another gift to her was a specimen of a new kind of candles, "very
+convenient to read by." She would find, he said, that they afforded a clear
+white light, might be held in the hand even in hot weather without
+softening, did not make grease spots with their drops like those made by
+common candles, and lasted much longer, and needed little or no snuffing.
+
+A sentiment of cordial friendship also existed between Franklin and
+Anthony Benezet, a Philadelphia Quaker, born in France, who labored
+throughout his life with untiring zeal for the abolition of the Slave
+Trade. This trade, in the opinion of Franklin, not only disgraced the
+Colonies, but, without producing any equivalent benefit, was dangerous to
+their very existence. When actually engaged in business, as a printer, no
+less than two books, aimed at the abolition of Slavery, one by Ralph
+Sandyford, and the other by Benjamin Lay, both Quakers, were published by
+him. The fact that Sandyford's book was published before 1730 and Lay's as
+early as 1736, led Franklin to say in a letter to a friend in 1789, when
+the feeling against Slavery was much more widespread, that the headway,
+which it had obtained, was some confirmation of Lord Bacon's observation
+that a good motion never dies--the same reflection, by the way, with which
+he consoled himself when his abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer fell
+still-born.
+
+When Franklin took a friend to his bosom, it was usually, as he took
+Deborah, for life. But Joseph Galloway, one of his Philadelphia friends,
+was an exception to this rule. When Galloway decided to cast his lot with
+the Loyalists, after Franklin, in a feeling letter to him, had painted
+their "rising country" in auroral colors, Franklin simply let him lapse
+into the general mass of detested Tories. Previously, his letters to
+Galloway, while attended with but few personal details, had been of a
+character to indicate that he not only entertained a very high estimate of
+Galloway's abilities but cherished for him the warmest feeling of
+affection. Indeed, in assuring Galloway of this affection, he sometimes
+used a term as strong as "unalterable." When Galloway at the age of forty
+thought of retiring from public life, Franklin told him that it would be in
+his opinion something criminal to bury in private retirement so early all
+the usefulness of so much experience and such great abilities. Several
+years before he had written to Cadwallader Evans that he did not see that
+Galloway could be spared from the Assembly without great detriment to their
+affairs and to the general welfare of America. Among the most valuable of
+his letters, are his letters to Galloway on political conditions in England
+when the latter was the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly. In one he
+expresses the hope that a few months would bring them together, and hazards
+the belief that, in the calm retirement of Trevose, Galloway's country
+place, they might perhaps spend some hours usefully in conversation over
+the proper constitution for the American Colonies. When Franklin learned
+from his son that hints had reached the latter that Galloway's friendship
+for Franklin had been chilled by the fear that he and Franklin would be
+rivals for the same office, Franklin replied by stating that, if this
+office would be agreeable to Galloway, he heartily wished it for him.
+
+     No insinuations of the kind you mention [he said],
+     concerning Mr. G.,--have reached me, and, if they had,
+     it would have been without the least effect; as I have
+     always had the strongest reliance on the steadiness of
+     his friendship, and on the best grounds, the knowledge
+     I have of his integrity, and the often repeated
+     disinterested services he has rendered me.
+
+In another letter to his son, he said, "I cast my eye over Goddard's Piece
+against our friend Mr. Galloway, and then lit my Fire with it."
+
+The shadow of the approaching cloud is first noticed in a letter to
+Galloway in 1775, in which Franklin asks him for permission to hint to him
+that it was whispered in London by ministerial people that he and Mr. Jay
+of New York were friends to their measures, and gave them private
+intelligence of the views of the Popular Party. While at Passy, Franklin
+informed the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs that General and
+Lord Howe, Generals Cornwallis and Grey and other British officers had
+formally given it as their opinion in Parliament that the conquest of
+America was impracticable, and that Galloway and other American Loyalists
+were to be examined that week to prove the contrary. "One would think the
+first Set were likely to be the best Judges," he adds with acidulous
+brevity. Later on, he did not dispose of Galloway so concisely. In a letter
+to Richard Bache, after suggesting that some of his missing letter books
+might be recovered by inquiry in the vicinity of Galloway's country seat,
+he says, smarting partly under the loss of his letter books, and partly
+under the deception that Galloway had practised upon him:
+
+     I should not have left them in his Hands, if he had not
+     deceiv'd me, by saying, that, though he was before
+     otherwise inclin'd, yet that, since the King had
+     declar'd us out of his Protection, and the Parliament
+     by an Act had made our Properties Plunder, he would go
+     as far in the Defence of his Country as any man; and
+     accordingly he had lately with Pleasure given Colours
+     to a Regiment of Militia, and an Entertainment to 400
+     of them before his House. I thought he was become a
+     stanch Friend to the glorious Cause. I was mistaken. As
+     he was a Friend of my Son's, to whom in my Will I had
+     Left all my Books and Papers, I made him one of my
+     Executors, and put the Trunk of Papers into his Hands,
+     imagining them safer in his House (which was out of the
+     way of any probable March of the enemies' Troops) than
+     in my own.
+
+The correspondence between Franklin and Galloway is enlivened by only a
+single gleam of Franklin's humor. This was kindled by the protracted
+uncertainty which attended the application of his associates and himself to
+the British Crown for the Ohio grant.
+
+     The Affair of the Grant [Franklin wrote to Galloway]
+     goes on but slowly. I do not yet clearly see Land. I
+     begin to be a little of the Sailor's Mind when they
+     were handing a Cable out of a Store into a Ship, and
+     one of 'em said: "Tis a long, heavy Cable. I wish we
+     could see the End of it." "D--n me," says another, "if
+     I believe it has any End; somebody has cut it off."[33]
+
+James Logan, the accomplished Quaker scholar, David Hall, Franklin's
+business partner, and Charles Thomson, the Secretary of Congress, were
+other residents of Pennsylvania, with whom Franklin was connected by ties
+of friendship, and we shall have occasion to speak of them again when we
+come to his business and political career. "You will give an old man leave
+to say, My Love to Mrs. Thompson," was a closing sentence in one of his
+letters to Charles Thomson.
+
+David Rittenhouse, of Philadelphia, the celebrated astronomer was also a
+dear friend of his.
+
+Of his New York friends, John Jay was the one, of whom he was fondest, and
+this friendship included the whole of Jay's family. In a letter from Passy
+to Jay, shortly after Jay arrived at Madrid, as our minister
+plenipotentiary to Spain, he tells him that he sends for Mrs. Jay at her
+request a print of himself.
+
+     The Verses at the bottom [he wrote] are truly
+     extravagant. But you must know, that the Desire of
+     pleasing, by a perpetual rise of Compliments in this
+     polite Nation, has so us'd up all the common
+     Expressions of Approbation, that they are become flat
+     and insipid, and to use them almost implies Censure.
+     Hence Musick, that formerly might be sufficiently
+     prais'd when it was called _bonne_, to go a little
+     farther they call'd it _excellente_, _then superbe_,
+     _magnifique_, _exquise_, celeste, all which being in
+     their turns worn out, there only remains _divine_; and,
+     when that is grown as insignificant as its
+     Predecessors, I think they must return to common Speech
+     and common Sense; as from vying with one another in
+     fine and costly Paintings on their Coaches, since I
+     first knew the Country, not being able to go farther in
+     that Way, they have returned lately to plain Carriages,
+     painted without Arms or Figures, in one uniform Colour.
+
+In a subsequent letter, Franklin informs Jay that, through the assistance
+of the French Court, he is in a position to honor the drafts of Jay to the
+extent of $25,000. "If you find any Inclination to hug me for the good News
+of this Letter," he concluded, "I constitute and appoint Mrs. Jay my
+Attorney, to receive in my Behalf your embraces."
+
+Afterwards Jay was appointed one of our Commissioners to negotiate the
+treaty of peace with Great Britain, and he and his family settled down
+under the same roof with Franklin at Passy. The result was a mutual feeling
+of attachment, so strong that when Jay returned to America Franklin could
+write to him of a kind letter that he had received from him: "It gave me
+Pleasure on two Accounts; as it inform'd me of the public Welfare, and that
+of your, I may almost say _our_ dear little Family; for, since I had the
+Pleasure of their being with me in the same House, I have ever felt a
+tender Affection for them, equal I believe to that of most Fathers." In
+other letters to Jay, there are repeated references by Franklin to the
+child of Jay mentioned above whose singular attachment to him, he said, he
+would always remember. "Embrace my little Friend for me," he wrote to Jay
+and his wife, when he was wishing them a prosperous return voyage to
+America, and, in a later letter, after his own return to America, to the
+same pair, he said he was so well as to think it possible that he might
+once more have the pleasure of seeing them both at New York, with his dear
+young friend, who, he hoped, might not have quite forgotten him.
+
+Beyond the Harlem River, his friends were only less numerous than they
+were in Pennsylvania. Among the most conspicuous were Josiah Quincy, John
+Winthrop, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard
+College, and Dr. Samuel Cooper, the celebrated clergyman and patriot. We
+mention these three Boston friends of his first because they were feelingly
+grouped in a letter that he wrote to James Bowdoin, another valued Boston
+friend of his, towards the close of his life. In this letter, he tells
+Bowdoin that it had given him great pleasure to receive his kind letter, as
+it proved that all his friends in Boston were not estranged from him by the
+malevolent misrepresentations of his conduct that had been circulated
+there, but that one of the most esteemed still retained a regard for him.
+"Indeed," Franklin said, "you are now almost the only one left me by
+nature; Death having, since we were last together, depriv'd me of my dear
+Cooper, Winthrop, and Quincy." Winthrop, he had said, in an earlier letter
+to Dr. Cooper, was one of the old friends for the sake of whose society he
+wished to return from France and spend the small remnant of his days in New
+England. The friendship between Quincy and Franklin began when Franklin was
+a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and had its origin in the sum of ten
+thousand pounds, which Quincy, as the agent of the Colony of Massachusetts,
+obtained through the assistance of Franklin from the Colony of Pennsylvania
+for the military needs of the former colony. Quincy, Franklin said in the
+_Autobiography_, returned thanks to the Assembly in a handsome memorial,
+went home highly pleased with the success of his embassy, and ever after
+bore for him the most cordial and affectionate friendship.
+
+For Quincy's highly promising son, Josiah, who died at sea at the early age
+of thirty-five, Franklin formed a warm regard when Josiah came over to
+London during the second mission of Franklin to England. To the father he
+wrote of the son in terms that were doubtless deeply gratifying to him,
+and, in a letter to James Bowdoin, he said: "I am much pleased with Mr.
+Quincy. It is a thousand pities his strength of body is not equal to his
+strength of mind. His zeal for the public, like that of David for God's
+house, will, I fear, eat him up." Later, when the younger Quincy's zeal had
+actually consumed him, Franklin wrote to the elder Quincy:
+
+     The epitaph on my dear and much esteemed young Friend,
+     is too well written to be capable of Improvement by any
+     Corrections of mine. Your Moderation appears in it,
+     since the natural affection of a Parent has not induced
+     you to exaggerate his Virtues. I shall always mourn his
+     Loss with you; a Loss not easily made up to his
+     Country.
+
+And then, referring to some of the falsehoods in circulation about his own
+conduct as Commissioner, he exclaimed: "How differently constituted was his
+noble and generous Mind from that of the miserable Calumniators you
+mention! Having Plenty of Merit in himself, he was not jealous of the
+Appearance of Merit in others, but did Justice to their Characters with as
+much Pleasure as these People do Injury."
+
+When he sat down at Saratoga to write to a few friends by way of farewell,
+fearing that the mission to Canada at his time of life would prove too much
+for him, Quincy was the first of his New England friends to whom he sent an
+adieu.
+
+To Dr. Samuel Cooper, Franklin wrote some of the most valuable of all his
+political letters, but the correspondence between them is marked by few
+details of a personal or social nature. It was upon the recommendation of
+Franklin that the degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred upon Cooper by
+the University of Edinburgh. "The Part I took in the Application for your
+Degree," he wrote to Dr. Cooper, "was merely doing justice to Merit, which
+is the Duty of an honest Man whenever he has the Opportunity." That Dr.
+Cooper was duly grateful, we may infer, among other things, from a letter
+in which Franklin tells his sister Jane that he is obliged to good Dr.
+Cooper for his prayers. That he was able to hold his own even with such a
+skilful dispenser of compliments as Franklin himself we may readily believe
+after reading the letter to Franklin in which he used these words: "You
+once told me in a letter, as you were going to France, the public had had
+the eating your flesh and seemed resolved to pick your bones--we all agree
+the nearer the bone the sweeter the meat." It was to Dr. Cooper that
+Franklin expressed the hope that America would never deserve the reproof
+administered to an enthusiastical knave in Pennsylvania, who, when asked by
+his creditor to give him a bond and pay him interest, replied:
+
+     No, I cannot do that; I cannot in conscience either
+     receive or pay Interest, it is against my Principle.
+     You have then the Conscience of a Rogue, says the
+     Creditor: You tell me it is against your Principle to
+     pay Interest; and it being against your Interest to pay
+     the Principal, I perceive you do not intend to pay me
+     either one or t'other.
+
+The letters of Franklin to James Bowdoin are full of interest, but the
+interest is scientific.
+
+Another Boston friend of Franklin was Mather Byles. In a letter to him,
+Franklin expresses his pleasure at learning that the lives of Byles and his
+daughters had been protected by his "points," and his regret that
+electricity had not really proved what it was at first supposed to be--a
+cure for the palsy.
+
+     It is however happy for you [Franklin said], that, when
+     Old Age and that Malady have concurr'd to infeeble you,
+     and to disable you for Writing, you have a Daughter at
+     hand to nurse you with filial Attention, and to be your
+     Secretary, of which I see she is very capable, by the
+     Elegance and Correctness of her Writing in the Letter I
+     am now answering.
+
+Other letters from Franklin to Byles have unhappily perished. This fact is
+brought to our knowledge by a letter from him to Elizabeth Partridge, which
+shows that even the famous letter to her, in which he spoke of the end of
+his brother as if he had gone off quietly from a party of pleasure in a
+sedan chair, led for a time a precarious existence. If this was the letter,
+he said, of which she desired a copy, he fancied that she might possibly
+find it in Boston, as Dr. Byles once wrote to him that many copies had been
+taken of it. Then follows this playful and characteristic touch. "I too,
+should have been glad to have seen that again, among others I had written
+to him and you. But you inform me they were eaten by the Mice. Poor little
+innocent Creatures, I am sorry they had no better Food. But since they like
+my Letters, here is another Treat for them."
+
+Another Massachusetts friend of Franklin was Samuel Danforth, the President
+of its Colonial Council. "It gave me great pleasure," Franklin wrote to
+this friend on one occasion, "to receive so chearful an Epistle from a
+Friend of half a Century's Standing, and to see him commencing Life anew in
+so valuable a Son." When this letter was written, Franklin was in his
+sixty-eighth year, but how far he was from being sated with the joy of
+living other passages in it clearly manifest.
+
+     I hope [he said] for the great Pleasure of once more
+     seeing and conversing with you: And tho' living-on in
+     one's Children, as we both may do, is a good thing, I
+     cannot but fancy it might be better to continue living
+     ourselves at the same time. I rejoice, therefore, in
+     your kind Intentions of including me in the Benefits of
+     that inestimable Stone, which, curing all Diseases
+     (even old Age itself) will enable us to see the future
+     glorious state of our America, enjoying in full
+     security her own Liberties, and offering in her Bosom
+     a Participation of them to all the oppress'd of other
+     Nations. I anticipate the jolly Conversation we and
+     twenty more of our Friends may have 100 Years hence on
+     this subject, over that well replenish'd Bowl at
+     Cambridge Commencement.
+
+In Connecticut, too, Franklin had some highly prized friends. Among them
+were Jared Eliot, the grandson of Apostle Eliot, and the author of an essay
+upon _Field Husbandry in New England_, Ezra Stiles, President of Yale
+College, Dr. Samuel Johnson and Jared Ingersoll. The letters from Franklin
+to Eliot are a charming _melange_ of what is now known as Popular Science
+and Agriculture. To Franklin there was philosophy even in the roasting of
+an egg, and for agriculture he had the partiality which no one, so close to
+all the pulsations of nature as he was, can fail to entertain. When he
+heard from his friend Mrs. Catherine Greene that her son Ray was "smart in
+the farming way," he wrote to her, "I think agriculture the most honourable
+of all employments, being the most independent. The farmer has no need of
+popular favour, nor the favour of the great; the success of his crops
+depending only on the blessing of God upon his honest industry." Franklin,
+of course, was writing before the day of the trust, the high protective
+tariff, the San Jose scale and the boll weevil.
+
+In one letter to Eliot he gossips delightfully upon such diverse topics as
+the price of linseed oil, the kind of land on which Pennsylvania hemp was
+raised, the recent weather, northeast storms, the origin of springs,
+sea-shell strata and import duties. Something is also said in the letter
+about grass seed, and it is curious to note that apparently Franklin was
+not aware that in parts of New England timothy has always been known as
+herd's-grass. And this reminds us that he repeatedly in his later life
+protested against the use in New England of the word "improve" in the
+sense of "employ" as a barbarous innovation, when in point of fact the word
+had been used in that sense in a lampoon in the _Courant_, when that lively
+sheet was being published under his youthful management. In another letter,
+written probably in the year 1749, Franklin tells Eliot that he had
+purchased some eighteen months before about three hundred acres of land
+near Burlington, and was resolved to improve it in the best and speediest
+manner. "My fortune, (thank God)," he said, "is such that I can enjoy all
+the necessaries and many of the Indulgences of Life; but I think that in
+Duty to my children I ought so to manage, that the profits of my Farm may
+Balance the loss my Income will Suffer by my retreat to it." He then
+proceeds to narrate to Eliot what he had done to secure this result; how he
+had scoured up the ditches and drains in one meadow, reduced it to an
+arable condition, and reaped a good crop of oat fodder from it, and how he
+had then immediately ploughed the meadow again and harrowed it, and sowed
+it with different kinds of grass seed. "Take the whole together," he said
+with decided satisfaction, "it is well-matted, and looks like a green
+corn-field." He next tells how he drained a round pond of twelve acres, and
+seeded the soil previously covered by it, too. Even in such modest
+operations as these the quick observation and precise standards of a man,
+who was perhaps first of all a man of science, are apparent. He noted that
+the red clover came up in four days and the herd's-grass in six days, that
+the herd's-grass was less sensitive to frost than the red clover, and that
+the thicker grass seed is sown the less injured by the frost the young
+grass is apt to be. By actual experiment, he found that a bushel of clean
+chaff of timothy or salem grass seed would yield five quarts of seed. In
+another letter to Eliot he has a word to say about the Schuyler copper mine
+in New Jersey (the only valuable copper mine in America that he knew of)
+which yielded good copper and turned out vast wealth to its owners. And
+then there is a ray from the splendor in which the lordly Schuylers lived
+in this bit of descriptive detail:
+
+     Col. John Schuyler, one of the owners, has a deer park
+     five miles round, fenced with cedar logs, five logs
+     high, with blocks of wood between. It contains a
+     variety of land, high and low, woodland and clear.
+     There are a great many deer in it; and he expects in a
+     few years to be able to kill two hundred head a year,
+     which will be a very profitable thing. He has likewise
+     six hundred acres of meadow, all within bank.
+
+The fact that Col. John Schuyler had six hundred acres of meadow land
+within bank was not lost on Eliot; for later Franklin writes to him again
+promising to obtain from Colonel Schuyler a particular account of the
+method pursued by him in improving this land. "In return," said Franklin,
+"(for you know there is no Trade without Returns) I request you to procure
+for me a particular Acct of the manner of making a new kind of Fence we saw
+at Southhold, on Long Island, which consists of a Bank and Hedge." With the
+exactitude of an experimental philosopher, he then details the precise
+particulars that he desired, disclosing in doing so the fact that
+Pennsylvania was beginning in many places to be at a loss for wood to fence
+with. This statement need not surprise the reader, for in his _Account of
+the New-Invented Pennsylvanian Fireplaces_, published some six years
+before, Franklin informs us that wood, at that time the common fuel, which
+could be formerly obtained at every man's door, had then to be fetched near
+one hundred miles to some towns, and made a very considerable article in
+the expense of families. From this same essay, we learn that it was deemed
+uncertain by Franklin whether "Pit-Coal" would ever be discovered in
+Pennsylvania! In another letter from Franklin to Eliot, along with some
+items about Peter Collinson, "a most benevolent, worthy man, very curious
+in botany and other branches of natural history, and fond of improvements
+in agriculture, &c.," Hugh Roberts' high opinion of Eliot's "Pieces,"
+ditching, the Academy, barometers, thermometers and hygrometers, Franklin
+has some sprightly observations to make upon the love of praise. Rarely, we
+venture to say, have more winning arguments ever been urged for the
+reversal of the world's judgment upon any point.
+
+     What you mention concerning the love of praise is
+     indeed very true; it reigns more or less in every
+     heart; though we are generally hypocrites, in that
+     respect, and pretend to disregard praise, and our nice,
+     modest ears are offended, forsooth, with what one of
+     the ancients calls _the sweetest kind of music_. This
+     hypocrisy is only a sacrifice to the pride of others,
+     or to their envy; both which, I think, ought rather to
+     be mortified. The same sacrifice we make, when we
+     forbear to _praise ourselves_, which naturally we are
+     all inclined to; and I suppose it was formerly the
+     fashion, or Virgil, that courtly writer, would not have
+     put a speech into the mouth of his hero, which
+     now-a-days we should esteem so great an indecency;
+
+        "Sum pius AEneas ...
+        ... fama super aether a notus."
+
+     One of the Romans, I forget who, justified speaking in
+     his own praise by saying, _Every freeman had a right to
+     speak what he thought of himself as well as of others_.
+     That this is a natural inclination appears in that all
+     children show it, and say freely, _I am a good boy; Am
+     I not a good girl?_ and the like, till they have been
+     frequently chid, and told their trumpeter is dead; and
+     that it is unbecoming to sound their own praise, &c.
+     But _naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret_.
+     Being forbid to praise themselves, they learn instead
+     of it to censure others; which is only a roundabout way
+     of praising themselves; for condemning the conduct of
+     another, in any particular, amounts to as much as
+     saying, _I am so honest, or wise, or good, or prudent,
+     that I could not do or approve of such an action_. This
+     fondness for ourselves, rather than malevolence to
+     others, I take to be the general source of censure and
+     back biting; and I wish men had not been taught to dam
+     up natural currents, to the overflowing and damage of
+     their neighbour's grounds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Another advantage, methinks, would arise from freely
+     speaking our good thoughts of ourselves, viz. if we
+     were wrong in them, somebody or other would readily set
+     us right; but now, while we conceal so carefully our
+     vain, erroneous self-opinions, we may carry them to our
+     grave, for who would offer physic to a man that seems
+     to be in health? And the privilege of recounting freely
+     our own good actions might be an inducement to the
+     doing of them, that we might be enabled to speak of
+     them without being subject to be justly contradicted or
+     charged with falsehood; whereas now, as we are not
+     allowed to mention them, and it is an uncertainty
+     whether others will take due notice of them or not, we
+     are perhaps the more indifferent about them; so that,
+     upon the whole, I wish the out-of-fashion practice of
+     praising ourselves would, like other old fashions, come
+     round into fashion again. But this I fear will not be
+     in our time, so we must even be contented with what
+     little praise we can get from one another. And I will
+     endeavour to make you some amends for the trouble of
+     reading this long scrawl, by telling you, that I have
+     the sincerest esteem for you, as an ingenious man and a
+     good one, which together make the valuable member of
+     society.
+
+It is letters like this that cause us to feel that, if it were known that
+the lost letters of Franklin were somewhere still in existence, the world
+might well organize another company of Argonauts to find them.
+
+In a subsequent letter to Eliot, Franklin thanks him for his gift of Merino
+wool, and tells him that it was one Mr. Masters who made dung of leaves,
+and not Mr. Roberts. In the same letter, he takes occasion to let Eliot
+know that Peter Collinson has written to him that the worthy, learned and
+ingenious Mr. Jackson, who had been prevailed on to give some dissertations
+on the husbandry of Norfolk for the benefit of the Colonies, admired
+Eliot's agricultural tracts. In still another letter to Eliot, Franklin,
+true to the brief that he held for love of praise, writes to him in these
+terms of unreserved gratification:
+
+     The _Tatler_ tells us of a Girl, who was observed to
+     grow suddenly proud, and none cou'd guess the Reason,
+     till it came to be known that she had got on a new Pair
+     of Garters. Lest you should be puzzled to guess the
+     Cause, when you observe any Thing of the kind in me, I
+     think I will not hide my new Garters under my
+     Petticoats, but take the Freedom to show them to you,
+     in a paragraph of our friend Collinson's Letter,
+     viz.--But I ought to mortify, and not indulge, this
+     Vanity; I will not transcribe the Paragraph, yet I
+     cannot forbear.
+
+He then transcribes the paragraph in which Collinson had informed him that
+the Grand Monarch of France had commanded the Abbe Mazeas to write a letter
+in the politest terms to the Royal Society, to return the King's thanks and
+compliments in an express manner to Mr. Franklin of Pennsylvania for his
+useful discoveries in electricity, and the application of pointed rods to
+prevent the terrible effect of thunderstorms. "I think, now I have stuck a
+Feather in thy Cap," ended Collinson, "I may be allowed to conclude in
+wishing thee long to wear it."
+
+     On reconsidering this Paragraph [continued Franklin], I
+     fear I have not so much Reason to be proud as the Girl
+     had; for a Feather in the Cap is not so useful a Thing,
+     or so serviceable to the Wearer, as a Pair of good silk
+     Garters. The Pride of Man is very differently
+     gratify'd; and, had his Majesty sent me a marshal's
+     staff, I think I should scarce have been so proud of
+     it, as I am of your Esteem.
+
+There were many principles of congeniality at work to cause Franklin to
+open his heart so familiarly to Eliot, but one of the most active doubtless
+was their common love of good stories. "I remember with Pleasure the
+cheerful Hours I enjoy'd last Winter in your Company," he wrote to Eliot,
+after his visit to New England in 1754, "and would with all my heart give
+any ten of the thick old Folios that stand on the Shelves before me, for a
+_little book_ of the Stories you then told with so much Propriety and
+Humor."
+
+We have already referred to the famous letter, in which, Franklin, a few
+weeks before his death, stated his religious creed with such unfaltering
+clearness and directness to Dr. Ezra Stiles, who had written to him, saying
+that he wished to know the opinion of his venerable friend concerning Jesus
+of Nazareth, and expressing the hope that he would not impute this to
+impertinence or improper curiosity in one, who, for so many years, had
+continued to love, estimate and reverence his abilities and literary
+character with an ardor and affection bordering on adoration. In his reply,
+Franklin declared that he had never before been questioned upon religion,
+and he asked Dr. Stiles not to publish what he had written.
+
+     I have ever [he said] let others enjoy their religious
+     Sentiments, without reflecting on them for those that
+     appeared to me unsupportable and even absurd. All Sects
+     here, and we have a great Variety, have experienced my
+     good will in assisting them with Subscriptions for
+     building their new Places of Worship; and, as I have
+     never opposed any of their Doctrines, I hope to go out
+     of the World in Peace with them all.
+
+This letter is so full of interest for the reader that it is to be
+regretted that Dr. Stiles did not oftener indulge the national weakness for
+asking questions before his aged correspondent went out of the world in
+peace with the sects, which most assuredly would have followed him with a
+shower of stones as thick as that which overwhelmed St. Stephen, if they
+had known that the discreet old philosopher, who contrived to keep on such
+comfortable working terms with every one of them, doubted all the while the
+divinity of our Lord. This letter also has a readable word to say in
+response to the honor that Dr. Stiles proposed to do Franklin by placing
+his portrait in the same room at Yale with that of Governor Yale, whom
+Franklin pronounced "a great and good man." Yale College, Franklin
+gratefully recalled, was the first learned society that took notice of him,
+and adorned him with its honors, though it was from the University of St.
+Andrews that he received the title which made him known to the world as
+"Dr. Franklin."
+
+Dr. Samuel Johnson has been termed "the venerable father of the Episcopal
+Church of Connecticut and the apostle of sound learning and elegant
+literature in New England," and it is not surprising that Franklin should
+have strained his dialectical skill almost to the point of casuistry in an
+effort to meet the various reasons which the Doctor gave him for his
+hesitation about accepting the headship of the Academy, such as his years,
+his fear of the small-pox, the politeness of Philadelphia and his imagined
+rusticity, his diffidence of his powers and his reluctance about drawing
+off parishioners from Dr. Jenney, the rector of Christ Church and St.
+Peters. As we have seen, even the multiplying effect of setting up more
+than one pigeon box against a house was ineffective to lure the
+apprehensive churchman to Philadelphia. In one of his letters to Dr.
+Johnson, the enthusiasm of Franklin over the Academy project endows his
+words with real nobility of utterance.
+
+     I think with you [he said], that nothing is of more
+     importance for the public weal, than to form and train
+     up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are,
+     in my opinion, the _strength_ of a state far more so
+     than riches or arms, which, under the management of
+     Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction,
+     instead of providing for the safety of a people. And
+     though the culture bestowed on _many_ should be
+     successful only with a _few_, yet the influence of
+     those few and the service in their power may be very
+     great. Even a single woman, that was wise, by her
+     wisdom saved a city.
+
+     I think also, that general virtue is more probably to
+     be expected and obtained from the _education_ of youth,
+     than from the _exhortation_ of adult persons; bad
+     habits and vices of the mind being, like diseases of
+     the body, more easily prevented than cured. I think,
+     moreover, that talents for the education of youth are
+     the gift of God; and that he on whom they are bestowed,
+     whenever a way is opened for the use of them, is as
+     strongly _called_ as if he heard a voice from heaven.
+
+Remarkable words these to fall from a man who, some two months later, in
+another letter to Dr. Johnson, modestly declared himself to be unfit to
+sketch out the idea of the English School for the Academy, having neither
+been educated himself (except as a tradesman) nor ever been concerned in
+educating others, he said.
+
+     Nobody would imagine [said Dr. Johnson, after reading
+     the sketch,] that the draught you have made for an
+     English education was done by a Tradesman. But so it
+     sometimes is, a true genius will not content itself
+     without entering more or less into almost everything,
+     and of mastering many things more in spite of fate
+     itself.
+
+The friendship between Franklin and Jared Ingersoli is preserved in a
+single letter only, the one from which we have already quoted in which
+Franklin had his good-natured jest at the expense of the doleful New
+England Sunday.
+
+All of these friends were men, but in Catherine Ray, afterwards the wife of
+Governor William Greene of Rhode Island, and the mother of Ray Greene, one
+of the early United States Senators from that State, Franklin had a friend
+whose sex gave a different turn of sentiment and expression to his pen. His
+first letter to this young woman ("Dear Katy" is the way he addresses her)
+was written after his return to Philadelphia from a journey to New England
+in 1754. She then lived on Block Island, and, when he last saw her, she was
+fading out of sight on the ocean on her way to that island from the
+mainland.
+
+     I thought too much was hazarded [he wrote], when I saw
+     you put off to sea in that very little skiff, tossed by
+     every wave. But the call was strong and just, a sick
+     parent. I stood on the shore, and looked after you,
+     till I could no longer distinguish you, even with my
+     glass; then returned to your sister's, praying for your
+     safe passage.
+
+These words are followed by the paragraph already quoted, in which Franklin
+acknowledged the affectionate hospitality of New England and the paragraph,
+already quoted, too, in which he spoke of his being restored to the arms of
+his good old wife and children.
+
+     Persons subject to the _hyp_ [he continued] complain of
+     the northeast wind, as increasing their malady. But
+     since you promised to send me kisses in that wind, and
+     I find you as good as your word, it is to me the gayest
+     wind that blows, and gives me the best spirits. I write
+     this during a northeast storm of snow, the greatest we
+     have had this winter. Your favours come mixed with the
+     snowy fleeces, which are as pure as your virgin
+     innocence, white as your lovely bosom, and--as cold.
+     But let it warm towards some worthy young man, and may
+     Heaven bless you both with every kind of happiness.
+
+The letter concludes with these words:
+
+     I desired Miss Anna Ward to send you over a little book
+     I left with her, for your amusement in that lonely
+     island. My respects to your good father, and mother,
+     and sister. Let me often hear of your welfare, since
+     it is not likely I shall ever again have the pleasure
+     of seeing you. Accept mine, and my wife's sincere
+     thanks for the many civilities I receiv'd from you and
+     your relations; and do me the justice to believe me,
+     dear girl, your affectionate, faithful, friend, and
+     humble servant.
+
+This letter was dated March 4, 1755, and was in reply to one from Miss Ray
+which, though dated as far back as January of the same year, had just
+reached him.
+
+His next letter was dated September 11, 1755, not long after he rendered
+his unavailing services to Braddock, and was a reply to three other letters
+of hers of March 3, March 30 and May 1 of that year. It begins: "Begone,
+business, for an hour, at least, and let me chat a little with my Katy,"
+and apologizes for his belated reply.
+
+     Equal returns [he declares], I can never make, tho' I
+     should write to you by every post; for the pleasure I
+     receive from one of yours is more than you can have
+     from two of mine. The small news, the domestic
+     occurrences among our friends, the natural pictures you
+     draw of persons, the sensible observations and
+     reflections you make, and the easy, chatty manner in
+     which you express everything, all contribute to
+     heighten the pleasure; and the more as they remind me
+     of those hours and miles, that we talked away so
+     agreeably, even in a winter journey, a wrong road, and
+     a soaking shower.
+
+In answer to Miss Ray's inquiry about his health, he tells her that he
+still relishes all the pleasures of life that a temperate man can in reason
+desire, and, through favor, has them all in his power. In answer to her
+question as to whether everybody loved him yet, and why he made them do so,
+he replied:
+
+     I must confess (but don't you be jealous), that many
+     more people love me now, than ever did before; for
+     since I saw you I have been enabled to do some general
+     services to the country, and to the army, for which
+     both have thanked and praised me, and say they love me.
+     They say so, as you used to do; and if I were to ask
+     any favours of them, they would, perhaps, as readily
+     refuse me; so that I find little real advantage in
+     being beloved, but it pleases my humor.... I long to
+     hear, [he says in another part of the same letter]
+     whether you have continued ever since in that monastery
+     (Block Island); or have broke into the world again,
+     doing pretty mischief; how the lady Wards do, and how
+     many of them are married, or about it; what is become
+     of Mr. B---- and Mr. L----, and what the state of your
+     heart is at this instant? But that, perhaps, I ought
+     not to know; and, therefore, I will not conjure, as you
+     sometimes say I do. If I could conjure, it should be to
+     know what was that _oddest question about me that ever
+     was thought_ of, which you tell me a lady had just sent
+     to ask you.
+
+     I commend your prudent resolutions, in the article of
+     granting favours to lovers. But, if I were courting
+     you, I could not hardly approve such conduct. I should
+     even be malicious enough to say you were too _knowing_,
+     and tell you the old story of the Girl and the Miller.
+     I enclose you the songs you write for, and with them
+     your Spanish letter with a translation. I honour that
+     honest Spaniard for loving you. It showed the goodness
+     of his taste and judgment. But you must forget him, and
+     bless some worthy young Englishman.
+
+Then comes the reference to his Joan (Deborah) which we have quoted in
+another place. She sends her respectful compliments to Miss Ray, he states;
+and lastly in a postscript he gives Miss Ray this caution: "As to your
+spelling, don't let those laughing girls put you out of conceit with it. It
+is the best in the world, for every letter of it stands for something."
+
+The sincerity of this conviction he proved at least once on another
+occasion by himself spelling his Katy's first name with a C instead of a K.
+
+It is to be feared that Miss Ray was a lively flirt, and it is hard to read
+Franklin's frequent allusions to Deborah in his letters to her without
+suspecting that he found it necessary at times to use his wife just a
+little as a shield.
+
+The next letter from Franklin to Miss Ray is marked by the understrain of
+coarse license, which ran through his character, and was partly the note of
+his age, and partly the note of overflowing vital force.
+
+     I hear you are now in Boston [he said], gay and lovely
+     as usual. Let me give you some fatherly Advice. Kill no
+     more Pigeons than you can eat--Be a good Girl and don't
+     forget your Catechism.--Go constantly to Meeting--or
+     church--till you get a good Husband,--then stay at
+     home, & nurse the Children, and live like a
+     Christian--Spend your spare Hours, in sober Whisk,
+     Prayers, or learning to cypher--You must practise
+     _addition_ to your Husband's Estate, by Industry &
+     Frugality; _subtraction_ of all unnecessary Expenses;
+     _Multiplication_ (I would gladly have taught you that
+     myself, but you thought it was time enough, & wou'dn't
+     learn) he will soon make you a Mistress of it. As to
+     _Division_, I say with Brother Paul, _Let there be no
+     Division among ye_. But as your good Sister Hubbard (my
+     love to her) is well acquainted with _The Rule of Two_,
+     I hope you will become an expert in the _Rule of
+     Three_; that when I have again the pleasure of seeing
+     you, I may find you like my Grape Vine, surrounded with
+     Clusters, plump, juicy, blushing, pretty little rogues,
+     like their Mama. Adieu. The Bell rings, and I must go
+     among the Grave ones, and talk Politics.
+
+Passages like these are among the things which really tarnish the
+reputation of Franklin, and make us feel at times that, essentially
+admirable as he was, in some respects he was compounded of pipe, and not of
+porcelain, clay. The postscript to this letter, too, is flavored with the
+rude gallantry of the husking-bee. "The Plums," it said, "came safe, and
+were so sweet from the Cause you mentioned, that I could scarce taste the
+Sugar." But when Deputy-Postmaster Franklin next writes to Miss Ray it is
+with the light, playful grace of his best hours.
+
+     Your Apology [he said] for being in Boston, "_that you
+     must visit that Sister once a year_" makes me suspect
+     you are here for some other Reason; for why should you
+     think your being there would need an Excuse to me when
+     you knew that I knew how dearly you lov'd that Sister?
+     Don't offer to hide your Heart from me. You know I can
+     conjure.--Give my best respects, to yr Sister, &
+     tell her and all your other Sisters and Brothers, that
+     they must behave very kindly to you, & love you dearly;
+     or else I'll send a young Gentleman to steal & run away
+     with you, who shall bring you to a Country from whence
+     they shall never hear a word of you, without paying
+     Postage. Mrs. Franklin joins in Love to you & sincere
+     wishes for your welfare, with dear good Girl, your
+     affectionate Friend.
+
+Some six months later, when Franklin is on the eve of leaving America on
+his first mission to England, he writes briefly to Miss Ray again, and
+tells her he cannot go without taking leave of his dear friend, and is
+ashamed of having allowed her last letter to remain unanswered so long.
+
+     Present my best compliments [he adds] to your good
+     mamma, brother and sister Ward, and all your other
+     sisters, the agreeable Misses Ward, Dr. Babcock and
+     family, the charitable Misses Stanton, and, in short,
+     to all that love me. I should have said all that love
+     you, but that would be giving you too much trouble.
+     Adieu, dear good girl, and believe me ever your
+     affectionate friend.
+
+On the return of Franklin from England, he resumed his correspondence with
+Miss Ray; but Miss Ray she was no longer, for the divination of the
+conjurer had not failed him, and she was then married to William Greene. In
+a letter to Mrs. Greene, dated January 23, 1763, this fact leads to another
+smutty joke on Franklin's part over the arithmetic of matrimony, the worse
+for being jestingly ascribed to Mrs. Franklin, who, he said, accepted Mrs.
+Greene's apology for dropping the correspondence with her, but hoped that
+it would be renewed when Mrs. Greene had more leisure. That the joke should
+be debited to the manners of the day fully as much as to Franklin himself,
+is made clear enough by the fact that it is immediately followed by the
+assurance that he would not fail to pay his respects to Mr., as well as
+Mrs., Greene when he came their way. "Please to make my Compliments
+acceptable to him," he added. The conclusion of this letter is in the
+former affectionate vein. "I think I am not much alter'd; at least my
+Esteem & Regard for my Katy (if I may still be permitted to call her so) is
+the same, and I believe will be unalterable whilst I am B. Franklin."
+
+That they did prove unalterable it is hardly necessary to say. Some
+twenty-six years after the date of this letter, Franklin writes to Mrs.
+Greene: "Among the felicities of my life I reckon your friendship, which I
+shall remember with pleasure as long as that life lasts." And, in the
+meantime, he had given Mrs. Greene the proof of affectionate interest
+which, of all others, perhaps, is most endearing in a friend; that is he
+had taken her children as well as herself to his heart. After a brief visit
+with Sally to the Greenes in 1763, he wrote to Mrs. Greene, "My Compliments
+too to Mr. Merchant and Miss Ward if they are still with you; and kiss the
+Babies for me. Sally says, & _for me too_." This letter ends, "With perfect
+Esteem & Regard, I am, Dear Katy (I can't yet alter my Stile to Madam) your
+affectionate friend." In another letter to Mrs. Greene, about a month
+later, he says, "My best respects to good Mr. Greene, Mrs. Ray, and love to
+your little ones. I am glad to hear they are well, and that your Celia goes
+alone." The last two letters mentioned by us were written from Boston.
+Franklin's next letter to Mrs. Greene was written from Philadelphia,
+condoles with her on the death of her mother, tells her that his dame sends
+her love to her with her thanks for the care that she had taken of her old
+man, and conveys his love to "the little dear creatures." "We are all glad
+to hear of Ray, for we all love him," he wrote to Mrs. Greene from Paris.
+
+In the same letter, he said, "I live here in great Respect, and dine every
+day with great folks; but I still long for home & for Repose; and should be
+happy to eat Indian Pudding in your Company & under your hospitable Roof."
+
+Hardly had he arrived in America on his return from France before he sent
+this affectionate message to Mrs. Greene and her husband: "I seize this
+first Opportunity of acquainting my dear Friends, that I have once more the
+great Happiness of being at home in my own Country, and with my Family,
+because I know it will give you Pleasure." As for Mrs. Greene, Jane Mecom
+informed him that, when she heard of his arrival, she was so overjoyed that
+her children thought she was afflicted with hysteria.
+
+The friendship which existed between Franklin and the Greenes also existed
+between them and his sister Jane, who was a welcome guest under their roof.
+"I pity my poor old Sister, to be so harassed & driven about by the enemy,"
+he wrote to Mrs. Greene from Paris in 1778, "For I feel a little myself the
+Inconvenience of being driven about by my friends."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[29] The death of John Laurens in an obscure skirmish, almost at the very
+end of the Revolutionary War, after a brief career, distinguished by rare
+intellectual promise and daring valor is one of the most painful tragedies
+of that war. "He had not a fault that I could discover," Washington said of
+him, "unless it were intrepidity bordering on rashness."
+
+[30] It may be said of the fame of Washington in his own land, with
+something like approximate accuracy, that a file of wild geese winging its
+flight along the Atlantic Seaboard from Maine to the alluvial meadows of
+the Roanoke in Southern Virginia, is, for but brief periods only out of
+sight of some statue or monument erected in his honor by his grateful
+countrymen. The fame of Franklin in America is but little less strikingly
+attested. As long ago as 1864, Parton could say this of it: "As there are
+few counties in the Union which have not a town named Franklin, so there
+are few towns of any magnitude, which do not possess a Franklin Street, or
+a Franklin Square, a Franklin hotel, a Franklin bank, a Franklin
+fire-engine, a Franklin Lyceum, a Franklin lodge, or a Franklin charitable
+association. His bust and his portrait are only less universal than those
+of Washington, and most large cities contain something of the nature of a
+monument to Franklin." How little this fame has died down since these words
+were written was seen in the pomp and splendor with which the second
+centenary of the birth of Franklin was celebrated in the United States and
+France in 1906.
+
+[31] Another story of Franklin's told by Jefferson is good enough at any
+rate for a footnote. At parties at the French Court he sometimes had a game
+of chess with the old Duchess of Bourbon. Happening once to put her king
+into prize, he took it. "Ah," said she, "we do not take kings so." "We do
+in America," said he.
+
+[32] It may be said of Ralph that few names are surer of immortality than
+his, though not for the reasons upon which he founded his deceitful hopes.
+Between the _Autobiography_ and the _Dunciad_ he is, not unlike a mummy,
+preserved long beyond the date at which, in the ordinary course of things,
+he would have been overtaken by oblivion. This is one of the couplets that
+Pope bestowed upon him in the _Dunciad_:
+
+    "Silence, ye Wolves! While Ralph to Cynthia howls,
+    And makes night hideous--answer him, ye owls."
+
+The couplet was accompanied by a still more venomous sting in prose: "James
+Ralph, a name inserted after the first editions, not known till he writ a
+swearing-piece called _Sawney_, very abusive of Dr. Swift, Mr. Gay, and
+myself. These lines allude to a thing of his entitled _Night_, a poem. This
+low writer attended his own works with panegyrics in the Journals, and once
+in particular praised himself highly above Mr. Addison, in wretched remarks
+upon that author's account of English poets, printed in a London Journal,
+September, 1728. He was wholly illiterate and knew no language, not even
+French. Being advised to read the rules of dramatic poetry before he began
+a play, he smiled and replied 'Shakspeare writ without rules.' He ended at
+last in the common sink of all such writers, a political newspaper, to
+which he was recommended by his friend Arnal, and received a small pittance
+for pay; and being detected in writing on both sides on one and the same
+day, he publicly justified the morality of his conduct." Another couplet of
+the _Dunciad_ is this:
+
+    "And see! the very Gazetteers give o'er,
+    Ev'n Ralph repents, and Henley writes no more."
+
+[33] "The ship Ohio still aground," is the manner in which Franklin
+communicated on one occasion to Galloway the slow progress that the
+application for the Ohio grant was making.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Franklin's British Friends
+
+
+In Great Britain, Franklin had almost as many friends as in America. During
+his missions to England, he resided at No. 7 Craven Street, London, the
+home of Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, a widow, and the mother of "Polly," whose
+filial relations to him constituted an idyll in his life. Into all the
+interests and feelings of this home, he entered almost as fully and
+sympathetically as he did into those of his own home in Philadelphia; as is
+charmingly attested by his Craven Street _Gazette_. Mrs. Stevenson looked
+after his clothing, attended to him when he was sick, and made the
+purchases from time to time that the commissions of Deborah and Jane Mecom
+called for. In one of his letters to Temple, written after his return from
+his second mission to England, Franklin mentions a long letter that he had
+received from her in the form of "a kind of Journal for a Month after our
+Departure, written on different Days, & of different Dates, acquainting me
+who has call'd, and what is done, with all the small News. In four or five
+Places, she sends her Love to her dear Boy, hopes he was not very sick at
+Sea, &c., &c." This journal doubtless set forth in a matter-of-fact way the
+daily life of the Craven Street household, which Franklin idealized with
+such captivating vivacity in the humorous pages of the Craven Street
+_Gazette_. At the Craven Street house, he and his son lived in great
+comfort, occupying four rooms, and waited upon by his man-servant, and
+Billy's negro attendant; and, when he moved about the streets of London, it
+was in a modest chariot of his own. Franklin's letters to Deborah
+frequently conveyed affectionate messages from Mrs. Stevenson and Polly to
+Deborah and her daughter Sally. Occasionally, too, presents of one kind or
+another from Mrs. Stevenson found their way across the Atlantic to Deborah
+and Sally. Altogether, the Craven Street house, if not a true home to
+Franklin in every sense of the word, was a cheerful semblance of one. A
+letter from Dr. Priestley to him, which he received shortly after his
+return from Canada, during the American Revolution, bears witness to the
+impression left by his amiable traits upon the memory of the good woman
+with whom he had resided so long. After telling Franklin that Franklin's
+old servant Fevre often mentioned him with affection and respect, Dr.
+Priestley added, "Mrs. Stevenson is much as usual. She can talk about
+nothing but you." The feeling was fully returned.
+
+     It is always with great Pleasure [he wrote to her from
+     Passy], when I think of our long continu'd Friendship,
+     which had not the least Interruption in the Course of
+     Twenty Years (some of the happiest of my Life), that I
+     spent under your Roof and in your Company. If I do not
+     write to you as often as I us'd to do, when I happen'd
+     to be absent from you, it is owing partly to the
+     present Difficulty of sure Communication, and partly to
+     an Apprehension of some possible Inconvenience, that my
+     Correspondence might occasion you. Be assured, my dear
+     Friend, that my Regard, Esteem, and Affection for you,
+     are not in the least impair'd or diminish'd; and that,
+     if Circumstances would permit, nothing would afford me
+     so much Satisfaction, as to be with you in the same
+     House, and to experience again your faithful, tender
+     Care, and Attention to my Interests, Health, and
+     Comfortable Living, which so long and steadily attach'd
+     me to you, and which I shall ever remember with
+     Gratitude.
+
+And, when the news of Mrs. Stevenson's death was communicated to Franklin
+by her daughter, the retrospect of the last twenty-five years that it
+opened up to him framed itself into these tender words in his reply.
+
+     During the greatest Part of the Time, I lived in the
+     same House with my dear deceased Friend, your Mother;
+     of course you and I saw and convers'd with each other
+     much and often. It is to all our Honours, that in all
+     that time we never had among us the smallest
+     Misunderstanding. Our Friendship has been all clear
+     Sunshine, without the least Cloud in its Hemisphere.
+     Let me conclude by saying to you, what I have had too
+     frequent Occasions to say to my other remaining old
+     Friends, "The fewer we become, the more let us love one
+     another."
+
+On the back of the last letter, dated July 24, 1782, that he received from
+Mrs. Stevenson, he indorsed this memorandum: "This good woman, my dear
+Friend, died the first of January following. She was about my Age."
+
+But the closest friendship that Franklin formed in England was with Mary,
+or Polly, Stevenson. To her, perhaps, the most delightful of all his
+familiar letters were written--letters so full of love and watchful
+interest as to suggest a father rather than a friend. It is not too much to
+say that they are distinguished by a purity and tenderness of feeling
+almost perfect, and by a combination of delicate humor and instructive
+wisdom to which it would be hard to find a parallel. The first of them
+bears date May 4, 1759, and the last bears date May 30, 1786. That the
+letters, some forty-six in number, are not more numerous even than they are
+is due to the fact that, during the period of their intercourse, the two
+friends were often under the same roof, or, when they were not, saw each
+other frequently.
+
+In his first letter, addressed to "My Dear Child," Franklin tells Polly,
+who was then about twenty years of age, that he had hoped for the pleasure
+of seeing her the day before at the Oratorio in the Foundling Hospital, but
+that, though he looked with all the eyes he had, not excepting even those
+he carried in his pocket, he could not find her. He had, however, he said,
+fixed that day se'nnight for a little journey into Essex, and would take
+Mrs. Stevenson with him as far as the home of Mrs. Tickell, Polly's aunt,
+at Wanstead, where Polly then was, and would call for Mrs. Stevenson there
+on his return. "Will," he says in a postscript, "did not see you in the
+Park." Will, of course, was his son. In the succeeding year, he writes to
+Polly that he embraces most gladly his dear friend's proposal of a subject
+for their future correspondence, though he fears that his necessary
+business and journeys, with the natural indolence of an old man, will make
+him too unpunctual a correspondent.
+
+     But why will you [he asks], by the Cultivation of your
+     Mind, make yourself still more amiable, and a more
+     desirable Companion for a Man of Understanding, when
+     you are determin'd, as I hear, to live single? If we
+     enter, as you propose, into _moral_ as well as natural
+     Philosophy, I fancy, when I have fully establish'd my
+     Authority as a Tutor, I shall take upon me to lecture
+     you a little on that Chapter of Duty.
+
+He then maps out a course of reading for her, to be conducted in such a
+manner as to furnish them with material for their letters. "Believe me
+ever, my dear good Girl," he concludes, "your affectionate Friend and
+Servant."
+
+With his next letter, he sends her a gift of books, and begs her to accept
+it, as a small mark of his esteem and friendship, and the gift is
+accompanied with more specific advice as to the manner in which she was to
+prosecute her studies, and obtain the benefit of his knowledge and counsel.
+When he writes again, his letter discloses the fact that a brisk
+interchange of ideas had been actually established between them. "'Tis a
+very sensible Question you ask," he says, "how the Air can affect the
+Barometer, when its Opening appears covered with Wood?" And her observation
+on what she had lately read concerning insects is very just and solid too,
+he remarks. The question he has no difficulty in answering, and the
+observation on insects leads to some agreeable statements about the
+silk-worm, the bee, the cochineal and the Spanish fly, and finally to an
+interesting account of the way in which the great Swedish naturalist,
+Linnaeus had been successfully called in by his King to suggest some means
+of checking the ravages of the worm that was doing such injury to the
+Swedish ships. Nor was all this mellifluous information imparted without a
+timely caution.
+
+     There is, however [he concluded], a prudent Moderation
+     to be used in Studies of this kind. The Knowledge of
+     Nature may be ornamental, and it may be useful; but if,
+     to attain an Eminence in that, we neglect the Knowledge
+     and Practice of essential Duties, we deserve
+     Reprehension. For there is no Rank in Natural Knowledge
+     of equal Dignity and Importance with that of being a
+     good Parent, a good Child, a good Husband or Wife, a
+     good Neighbour or Friend, a good Subject or Citizen,
+     that is, in short, a good Christian. Nicholas Gimcrack,
+     therefore, who neglected the Care of his Family, to
+     Pursue Butterflies, was a just Object of Ridicule, and
+     we must give him up as fair Game to the satyrist.
+
+A later letter is an amusing illustration of the manner in which he
+occasionally reminded his pupil that she must not take herself and
+Philosophy too seriously. Polly was at the time at the famous Wells of
+Bristol about which so much of the social pageantry of the eighteenth
+century centred.
+
+     Your first Question, _What is the Reason the Water at
+     this place, tho' cold at the Spring, becomes warm by
+     Pumping?_ it will be most prudent in me to forbear
+     attempting to answer [he said], till, by a more
+     circumstantial account, you assure me of the Fact. I
+     own I should expect that Operation to warm, not so much
+     the Water pump'd, as the Person pumping. The Rubbing of
+     dry Solids together has been long observ'd to produce
+     Heat; but the like Effect has never yet, that I have
+     heard, been produc'd by the mere Agitation of Fluids,
+     or Friction of Fluids with Solids.
+
+He might have let the matter rest there but he did not. The occasion was
+too opportune a one to impress upon Polly the importance of not jumping at
+conclusions too quickly for him to refrain from borrowing an apt story from
+Selden about a young woman who, finding herself in the presence of some
+gentlemen, when they were examining what they called a Chinese shoe, and
+carrying on a dispute about it, put in her word, and said modestly,
+"Gentlemen, are you sure it is a Shoe? Should not that be settled first?"
+
+Then he passes to a highly edifying explanation of tidal movements in
+rivers, so simple that even a child, to say nothing of a bright-witted
+girl, could experience no difficulty in understanding it, and ends with the
+question:
+
+     After writing 6 Folio Pages of Philosophy to a young
+     Girl, is it necessary to finish such a Letter with a
+     Compliment? Is not such a Letter of itself a
+     Compliment? Does it not say, she has a Mind thirsty
+     after Knowledge, and capable of receiving it; and that
+     the most agreeable Things one can write to her are
+     those that tend to the Improvement of her
+     Understanding?
+
+With his next letter, he enclosed a paper containing his views on several
+points relating to the air and the evaporation of water, and informed Polly
+that he would shortly accompany her good mother again to Wanstead, when
+they could take a walk to some of Lord Tilney's ponds, and make a few
+experiments there that would explain the nature of tides more fully.
+
+"Adieu, my dear little Philosopher," he exclaims in another letter, after
+suggesting that thirsty unfortunates at sea might be greatly relieved by
+sitting in sea water, and declaring that wet clothes do not create colds,
+whatever damp may do. No one catches cold by bathing, he said, and no
+clothes can be wetter than water itself.
+
+In another letter, he makes some most readable observations upon the
+evaporation of rivers and the relations of colors to heat. The ignorant, he
+declared, suppose in some cases that a river loses itself by running
+underground, whereas in truth it has run up into the air. And, with
+reference to the interdependence of heat and color, he pursued this fresh
+train of ideas:
+
+     What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some
+     Use? May we not learn from hence, that black Clothes
+     are not so fit to wear in a hot Sunny Climate or
+     Season, as white ones; because in such Cloaths the Body
+     is more heated by the Sun when we walk abroad, and are
+     at the same time heated by the Exercise, which double
+     Heat is apt to bring on putrid dangerous Fevers? That
+     Soldiers and Seamen, who must march and labour in the
+     Sun, should, in the East or West Indies have an Uniform
+     of white? That Summer Hats, for Men or Women, should be
+     white, as repelling that Heat which gives Headaches to
+     many, and to some the fatal Stroke that the French call
+     the _Coup de Soleil_? That the Ladies' Summer Hats,
+     however, should be lined with Black, as not
+     reverberating on their Faces those Rays which are
+     reflected upwards from the Earth or Water? That the
+     putting a white Cap of Paper or Linnen _within_ the
+     _Crown_ of a black Hat, as some do, will not keep out
+     the Heat, tho' it would if placed _without_? That
+     Fruit-Walls being black'd may receive so much Heat from
+     the Sun in the Daytime, as to continue warm in some
+     degree thro' the Night, and thereby preserve the Fruit
+     from Frosts, or forward its Growth?--with sundry other
+     particulars of less or greater Importance, that will
+     occur from time to time to attentive Minds?
+
+Sometimes he exchanges language like this for such bantering questions as
+these: "Have you finish'd your Course of Philosophy? No more Doubts to be
+resolv'd? No more Questions to ask? If so, you may now be at full Leisure
+to improve yourself in Cards."
+
+Another letter, dated June 7, 1762, was written in contemplation of the
+fact that he was about to leave the Old World for the New.
+
+     I fancy I feel a little like dying Saints [he said],
+     who, in parting with those they love in this World, are
+     only comforted with the Hope of more perfect Happiness
+     in the next. I have, in America, Connections of the
+     most engaging kind; and, happy as I have been in the
+     Friendships here contracted, _those_ promise me greater
+     and more lasting Felicity. But God only knows whether
+     these Promises shall be fulfilled.
+
+Then came the letter written to her from a "wretched inn" at Portsmouth
+when he was on the point of embarking for America. It is none the less
+noteworthy because it reveals the fact that the thought of a marriage
+between Polly and his son had been a familiar one to him and her.
+
+     It (the paper on which he wrote) [he said] will tell my
+     Polly how much her Friend is afflicted, that he must,
+     perhaps, never again, see one for whom he has so
+     sincere an Affection, join'd to so perfect an Esteem;
+     who he once flatter'd himself might become his own, in
+     the tender Relation of a Child, but can now entertain
+     such pleasing Hopes no more. Will it tell _how much_ he
+     is afflicted? No, it can not.
+
+     Adieu, my dearest Child. I will call you so. Why should
+     I not call you so, since I love you with all the
+     Tenderness, All the Fondness of a Father? Adieu. May
+     the God of all Goodness shower down his choicest
+     Blessings upon you, and make you infinitely Happier,
+     than that Event could have made you.
+
+No wonder that the fatherless girl should have felt from the day that she
+received this letter until the day that she helped to assuage the pain of
+Franklin's last hours by her loving ministrations that the heart in which
+she was so deeply cherished was one of these blessings. A few months later,
+Franklin writes to her from America a long, communicative letter, valuable
+among other reasons for the evidence that it affords of the ready sympathy
+with which he had entered into her circle of youthful friendships. He tells
+her that he shares her grief over her separation from her old friend Miss
+Pitt; "Pitty," he calls her in another place in this letter when he sends
+his love to her. He congratulates her upon the recovery of her "dear
+Dolly's" health. This was Dorothea Blount to whom he repeatedly refers in
+his letters to her. "I love that dear good Girl myself, and I love her
+other Friends," he said. Polly's statement in the letter, to which his
+letter was a reply, that she had lately had the pleasure of spending three
+days with Doctor and Mrs. Hawkesworth at the house of John Stanley, all
+warm friends of his, elicits from him the exclamation, "It was a sweet
+Society!"
+
+These are but a few of the many details that make up this letter. Polly was
+one of the stimulating correspondents who brought out all that was best in
+Franklin's own intellectual resources, and the next time that he wrote to
+her from America he used this appreciative and grateful language. "The
+Ease, the Smoothness, the Purity of Diction, and Delicacy of Sentiment,
+that always appear in your Letters, never fail to delight me; but the
+tender filial Regard you constantly express for your old Friend is
+particularly engaging."
+
+In later letters to Polly, written after his return to England in 1764,
+there are other lively passages like those that animated his letters to her
+before his return to America. On one occasion he answers a letter from her
+in verse.
+
+     A Muse, you must know, visited me this Morning! I see
+     you are surpriz'd, as I was. I never saw one before.
+     And shall never see another. So I took the Opportunity
+     of her Help to put the Answer into Verse, because I was
+     some Verse in your Debt ever since you sent me the last
+     Pair of Garters.
+
+This letter is succeeded by a highly vivacious one from Paris where he
+enjoyed the honor of conversing with the King and Queen while they sat at
+meat. The latter letter is so full of sparkling fun that we cannot but
+regret that Franklin did not leave behind him equally detailed narratives
+of his travels in Germany and Holland, and over the face of Great Britain.
+All the way to Dover, he said, he was engaged in perpetual disputes with
+innkeepers, hostlers and postilions because he was prevented from seeing
+the country by the forward tilt of the hoods of the post-chaises in which
+he was driven; "they insisting that the Chaise leaning forward was an Ease
+to the Horses, and that the contrary would kill them." "I suppose the
+chaise leaning forward," he surmised, "looks to them like a Willingness to
+go forward, and that its hanging back shows a Reluctance." He concludes a
+humorous description of the seasickness of a number of green passengers
+between Dover and Calais, who made a hearty breakfast in the morning,
+before embarking, for fear that, if the wind should fail, they might not
+get over till supper time, with the remark, "So it seems there are
+Uncertainties, even beyond those between the Cup and the Lip." Impositions
+suffered by Franklin on the journey, the smooth highways of France, the
+contrast between the natural brunettes of Calais and Boulogne and the
+natural blondes of Abbeville, the Parisian complexions to which nature in
+every form was a total stranger, the _Grand Couvert_ where the Royal Family
+supped in public, the magnificence of Versailles and Paris, to which
+nothing was wanting but cleanliness and tidiness, the pure water and fine
+streets of Paris, French politeness, the paintings, the plays and operas of
+the gayest capital in the world all furnished topics for this delightful
+letter, composed in the high spirits born of rapid movement from one novel
+experience to another, and doubtless endued, when read, with the never
+failing charm that belongs to foreign scenes, scanned by the eyes of those
+we love. Franklin did not know which were the most rapacious, the English
+or the French boatmen or porters, but the latter had with their knavery, he
+thought, the most politeness. The only drawback about the roads in France,
+paved with smooth stone-like streets for many miles together, and flanked
+on each side with trees, was the labor which the peasants complained that
+they had to expend upon them for full two months in the year without pay.
+Whether this was truth, or whether, like Englishmen, they grumbled, cause
+or no cause, Franklin had not yet been able to fully inform himself.
+
+Passing over his speculations as to the origin of the fair complexions of
+the women of Abbeville, where wheels and looms were going in every house,
+we stop for a moment to reproduce this unsparing description of the manner
+in which the women of Paris exercised the art which has never been known to
+excite any form of approval except feminine self-approval.
+
+     As to Rouge, they don't pretend to imitate Nature in
+     laying it on. There is no gradual Diminution of the
+     Colour, from the full Bloom in the Middle of the Cheek
+     to the faint Tint near the Sides, nor does it show
+     itself differently in different Faces. I have not had
+     the Honour of being at any Lady's Toylette to see how
+     it is laid on, but I fancy I can tell you how it is or
+     may be done. Cut a hole of 3 Inches Diameter in a Piece
+     of Paper; place it on the Side of your Face in such a
+     Manner as that the Top of the Hole may be just under
+     your Eye; then with a Brush dipt in the Colour, paint
+     Face and Paper together; so when the Paper is taken off
+     there will remain a round Patch of Red exactly the Form
+     of the Hole. This is the Mode, from the Actresses on
+     the Stage upwards thro' all Ranks of Ladies to the
+     Princesses of the Blood, but it stops there, the Queen
+     not using it, having in the Serenity, Complacence, and
+     Benignity that shine so eminently in, or rather through
+     her Countenance, sufficient Beauty, tho' now an old
+     Woman, to do extreamly well without it.
+
+In picturing the royal supper, with its gold service and its _A boire pour
+le Roy_ and its _A boire pour la Reine_, Franklin even draws a sketch of
+the table so that Polly can see just where the King and Queen and Mesdames
+Adelaide, Victoria, Louise and Sophie sat, and just where Sir John Pringle
+and himself stood, when they were brought by an officer of the court to be
+talked to by the royal personages. This letter also contains what is
+perhaps the handsomest compliment ever paid to French politeness: "It seems
+to be a Point settled here universally, that Strangers are to be treated
+with Respect; and one has just the same Deference shewn one here by being a
+Stranger, as in England by being a Lady."
+
+The grave statement in this letter that travelling is one way of
+lengthening life, at least in appearance, is made the starting-point for
+the laughing statement that the writer himself had perhaps suffered a
+greater change in his own person than he could have done in six years at
+home.
+
+     I had not been here Six Days [he declared] before my
+     Taylor and Perruquier had transform'd me into a
+     Frenchman. Only think what a Figure I make in a little
+     Bag-Wig and naked Ears! They told me I was become 20
+     Years younger, and look'd very _galante_; So being in
+     Paris where the Mode is to be sacredly follow'd I was
+     once very near making Love to my Friend's Wife.
+
+The next words in the letter are also full of effervescing gaiety: "This
+Letter shall cost you a Shilling, and you may consider it cheap, when you
+reflect, that it has cost me at least 50 Guineas to get into the Situation,
+that enables me to write it. Besides, I might, if I had staied at home,
+have won perhaps two Shillings of you at Cribbidge."
+
+Among the best of his subsequent letters is the one--instinct with his
+usual wisdom and good feeling--in which he advises Polly to return to her
+aunt, Mrs. Tickell, as soon as a temporary separation was at an end, and
+continue by every means in her power, no matter how sorely tried by her
+aunt's infirmities, to make the remainder of the latter's days as
+comfortable as possible. Polly adopted the advice of this letter, and
+reaped her reward not only in the gratified sense of duty, upon which the
+letter laid such emphasis, but also in the fortune which she received upon
+the death of Mrs. Tickell.
+
+In 1770, she was married to Dr. William Hewson, a brilliant physician, who
+was prematurely cut off by surgical infection, leaving her the mother of
+three young children. It was probably of him that she wrote to Franklin
+from Margate in the year preceding her marriage with him that she had met
+with a very sensible physician the day before and would not have Franklin
+or her mother surprised if she should run off with this young man. To be
+sure, this would be an imprudent step at the discreet age of thirty; but
+there was no saying what one should do, if solicited by a man of an
+insinuating address and good person, though he might be too young for one,
+and not yet established in his profession. The letter began with a welcome
+to Franklin, who had just returned from the Continent, and he was quick to
+respond with a pleasantry to her communication about the young physician.
+
+     There are certain circumstances in Life, sometimes [he
+     said], wherein 'tis perhaps best not to hearken to
+     Reason. For instance; possibly, if the Truth were
+     known, I have Reason to be jealous of this same
+     insinuating, handsome young Physician; but as it
+     flatters more my Vanity, and therefore gives me more
+     Pleasure, to suppose you were in Spirits on acct of
+     my safe Return, I shall turn a deaf Ear to Reason in
+     this Case, as I have done with Success in twenty
+     others.
+
+In a subsequent letter, Franklin tells Polly that her mother has been
+complaining of her head more than ever before.
+
+     If she stoops, or looks, or bends her Neck downwards,
+     on any occasion, it is with great Pain and Difficulty,
+     that she gets her Head up again. She has, therefore,
+     borrowed a Breast and Neck Collar of Mrs. Wilkes, such
+     as Misses wear, and now uses it to keep her Head up.
+     Mr. Strahan has invited us all to dine there to-morrow,
+     but she has excused herself. Will you come, and go with
+     me? If you cannot well do that, you will at least be
+     with us on Friday to go to Lady Strachans.
+
+His own head, he says, is better, owing, he is fully persuaded, to his
+extreme abstemiousness for some days past at home, but he is not without
+apprehensions that, being to dine abroad that day, the next day, and the
+day after, he may inadvertently bring it on again, if he does not think of
+his little monitor and guardian angel, and make use of the proper and very
+pertinent clause she proposes in his grace. This clause was doubtless
+suggested by his previous letter about the insinuating, handsome physician
+in which he had written to his little monitor that he had just come home
+from a venison feast, where he had drunk more than a philosopher ought. His
+next letter warily refrains from giving his flat approval to Dr. Hewson's
+proposal. His attitude towards Mrs. Greene's marriage had been equally
+cautious. He was probably of the opinion that, along with the other good
+advice, that finds its way to the moon, is not a little relating to nuptial
+engagements. The whole letter is stamped with the good sense and wholesome
+feeling which such situations never failed to evoke from him.
+
+     I assure you [he said] that no Objection has occurr'd
+     to me. His Person you see; his Temper and his
+     Understanding you can judge of; his Character, for
+     anything I have ever heard, is unblemished; his
+     Profession, with the Skill in it he is suppos'd to
+     have, will be sufficient to support a Family, and,
+     therefore, considering the Fortune you have in your
+     Hands (tho' any future Expectation from your Aunt
+     should be disappointed) I do not see but that the
+     Agreement may be a rational one on both sides.
+
+     I see your Delicacy, and your Humility too; for you
+     fancy that if you do not prove a great Fortune, you
+     will not be lov'd; but I am sure that were I in his
+     situation in every respect, knowing you so well as I
+     do, and esteeming you so highly, I should think you a
+     Fortune sufficient for me without a Shilling.
+
+Having thus expressed his concern, equal to any father's, he said, for her
+happiness, and dispelled the idea on her part that he did not favor the
+proposal, because he did not immediately advise its acceptance, he left, he
+concluded, the rest to her sound judgment, of which no one had a greater
+share, and would not be too inquisitive as to her particular reasons,
+doubts and fears.
+
+They were married only to share the bright vision of unclouded married
+happiness for some four years, and then to be separated by that tragic
+agency which few but Franklin have ever been able to invest with the
+peaceful radiance of declining day. A letter from Franklin to Mrs. Hewson,
+written shortly after the marriage, laughs as it were through its tears
+over the mournful plight in which Dolly and he have been left by her
+desertion, but it shows that he is beginning to get into touch with all the
+changes brought about by the new connection. We have already seen how fully
+his heart went out to his godson who sprang from the union. He has a word
+to say about him in another letter to Mrs. Hewson after a jest at the
+expense of Mrs. Stevenson's Jacobite prejudices.
+
+     I thank you [he said] for your intelligence about my
+     Godson. I believe you are sincere, when you say you
+     think him as fine a Child as you wish to see. He had
+     cut two Teeth, and three, in another Letter, make five;
+     for I know you never write Tautologies. If I have
+     over-reckoned, the Number will be right by this Time.
+     His being like me in so many Particulars pleases me
+     prodigiously; and I am persuaded there is another,
+     which you have omitted, tho' it must have occurr'd to
+     you while you were putting them down. Pray let him have
+     everything he likes; I think it of great Consequence
+     while the Features of the Countenance are forming; it
+     gives them a pleasant Air, and, that being once become
+     natural and fix'd by Habit, the Face is ever after the
+     handsomer for it, and on that much of a Person's good
+     Fortune and Success in Life may depend. Had I been
+     cross'd as much in my Infant Likings and Inclinations
+     as you know I have been of late Years, I should have
+     been, I was going to say, not near so handsome; but as
+     the Vanity of that Expression would offend other Folk's
+     Vanity, I change it out of regard to them, and say, a
+     great deal more homely.
+
+His next letter is written to Mrs. Hewson, then a widow, from Philadelphia,
+after his return from his second mission to England, and tells her that the
+times are not propitious for the emigration to America, which she was
+contemplating, but expresses the hope that they might all be happy together
+in Philadelphia a little later on.
+
+When he next writes, it is from Paris on January 12, 1777. "My Dear, Dear
+Polly," he begins, "Figure to yourself an old Man, with grey Hair Appearing
+under a Martin Fur Cap, among the Powder'd Heads of Paris. It is this odd
+Figure that salutes you, with handfuls of Blessings on you and your dear
+little ones." He had failed to bring about a union between Polly and his
+son, but, inveterate matchmaker that he was, this letter shows that he
+still had, as a grandfather, the designs on Eliza, Polly's daughter, that
+he had disclosed in his previous letter to Polly, when he expressed the
+hope that he might be alive to dance with Mrs. Stevenson at the wedding of
+Ben and this child. "I give him (Ben)," it said, with a French grimace
+between its lines, "a little French Language and Address, and then send him
+over to pay his Respects to Miss Hewson." In another letter, he tells Polly
+that, if she would take Ben under her care, as she had offered to do, he
+would set no bad example to her _other_ children. Two or three years later,
+he wrote to her from Philadelphia that Ben was finishing his studies at
+college, and would, he thought, make her a good son. Indeed a few days
+later he referred to Ben in another letter as "your son Ben."
+
+"Does my Godson," he asked in a letter from France to Mrs. Hewson, along
+with many affectionate inquiries about his "dear old Friend," Mrs.
+Stevenson, and other English friends of theirs, "remember anything of his
+Doctor Papa? I suppose not. Kiss the dear little Fellow for me; not
+forgetting the others. I long to see them and you." Then in a postscript he
+tells Mrs. Hewson that, at the ball in Nantes, Temple took notice that
+there were no heads less than five, and that there were a few seven lengths
+of the face above the forehead. "You know," he observes with the old
+sportive humor, "that those who have practis'd Drawing, as he has, attend
+more to Proportions, than People in common do." In another letter from
+Passy, he asks Mrs. Hewson whether Jacob Viny, who was in the wheel
+business, could not make up a coach with the latest useful improvements and
+bring them all over in it. In the same letter, he inserts a word to relieve
+Mrs. Stevenson of her anxiety about her swelled ankles which she attributed
+to the dropsy; and the paragraph ends with the words, "My tender Love to
+her."
+
+As Polly's children grew older, the references to them in Franklin's
+letters to the mother became more and more frequent and affectionate.
+
+     You cannot be more pleas'd [he wrote to her from
+     Passy], in talking about your Children, your Methods of
+     Instructing them, and the Progress they make, than I am
+     in hearing it, and in finding, that, instead of
+     following the idle Amusements, which both your Fortune
+     and the Custom of the Age might have led you into, your
+     Delight and your Duty go together, by employing your
+     Time in the Education of your Offspring. This is
+     following Nature and Reason, instead of Fashion; than
+     which nothing is more becoming the Character of a Woman
+     of Sense and Virtue.
+
+Repeatedly Franklin sends little books to Mrs. Hewson's children, and on
+one occasion he sends two different French grammars, one of which, after
+the French master of her children had taken his choice, was to be given to
+his godson, as his New Year's gift, together with the two volumes of
+_Synonymes Francaises_. At one time before he left France, he thought of
+visiting Mrs. Hewson in England and asked her advice about doing so in the
+existing state of the British temper. When she counselled him against the
+journey, he wrote to her, "Come, my dear Friend, live with me while I stay
+here, and go with me, if I do go, to America." As the result of this
+invitation, Mrs. Hewson and her children spent the winter of 1784-85 with
+him at Passy, and his first letter to her, after she returned to England,
+bears indications in every line of the regret inspired by his loss of her
+society, after, to use his own words, he had passed a long winter in a
+manner that made it appear the shortest of any he ever spent. One of his
+peculiarities was to make a point of telling a friend anything of a
+pleasant nature that he had heard about him. Since her departure, M.
+LeVeillard in particular, he said, had told him at different times what
+indeed he knew long since, "_C'est une bien digne Femme, cette Madame
+Hewson, une tres amable Femme._" The letter then terminates with the
+request that, when she prayed at church for all that travelled by land or
+sea, she would think of her ever affectionate friend, but starts up again
+in a postscript, in which he sends his love to William, Thomas and Eliza,
+Mrs. Hewson's children, and asks their mother to tell them that he missed
+their cheerful prattle. Temple being sick, and Benjamin at Paris, he had
+found it very _triste_ breakfasting alone, and sitting alone, and without
+any tea in the evening. "My love to every one of the Children," is his
+postscript to his next letter, in which, when he was on the eve of leaving
+France, he told Mrs. Hewson that he said nothing to persuade her to go with
+him or to follow him, because he knew that she did not usually act from
+persuasion, but judgment. In nothing was he wiser than in his reserve about
+giving advice when the persons to be advised were themselves in possession
+of all the facts of the case essential to a proper decision. When he
+touched at Southampton, Mrs. Hewson was not yet resolved to sever the ties
+that connected her with England, but subsequently she did come over with
+her children to Philadelphia, and made it her home for the rest of her
+life. The last letter but one that Franklin wrote to her before she sailed
+is among the most readable letters in the correspondence. Referring to
+three letters of hers, that had not reached him until nearly ten years
+after they were written, he said:
+
+     This pacquet had been received by Mr. Bache, after my
+     departure for France, lay dormant among his papers
+     during all my absence, and has just now broke out upon
+     me, _like words_, that had been, as somebody says,
+     _congealed in northern air_. Therein I find all the
+     pleasing little family history of your children; how
+     William had begun to spell, overcoming, by strength of
+     memory, all the difficulty occasioned by the common
+     wretched alphabet, while you were convinced of the
+     utility of our new one; how Tom, genius-like, struck
+     out new paths, and, relinquishing the old names of the
+     letters, called U _bell_ and P _bottle_; how Eliza
+     began to grow jolly, that is, fat and handsome,
+     resembling Aunt Rooke, whom I used to call _my lovely_.
+     Together with all the _then_ news of Lady Blount's
+     having produced at length a boy; of Dolly's being well,
+     and of poor good Catherine's decease; of your affairs
+     with Muir and Atkinson, and of their contract for
+     feeding the fish in the channel; of the Vinys and their
+     jaunt to Cambridge in the long carriage; of Dolly's
+     journey to Wales with Mrs. Scott; of the Wilkeses, the
+     Pearces, Elphinstones, &c.;--concluding with a kind of
+     promise, that, as soon as the ministry and Congress
+     agreed to make peace, I should have you with me in
+     America. That peace has been some time made; but, alas!
+     the promise is not yet fulfilled.
+
+Rarely, indeed, we imagine has one person, even though a father, or a
+husband, ever enveloped the life of another with such an atmosphere of
+pure, caressing, intimate sympathy and affection as surrounds these
+letters. Perhaps, our review of them would be incomplete, if we did not
+also recall the comments made by Franklin to Polly upon the death of her
+mother, and Polly's own comments upon the close of his life.
+
+     The Departure of my dearest Friend [he wrote to Polly
+     from Passy], which I learn from your last Letter,
+     greatly affects me. To meet with her once more in this
+     Life was one of the principal Motives of my proposing
+     to visit England again, before my Return to America.
+     The last Year carried off my Friends Dr. Pringle, and
+     Dr. Fothergill, Lord Kaims, and Lord le Despencer. This
+     has begun to take away the rest, and strikes the
+     hardest. Thus the Ties I had to that Country, and
+     indeed to the World in general, are loosened one by
+     one, and I shall soon have no Attachment left to make
+     me unwilling to follow.
+
+This is the description given by Mrs. Hewson of his last years after
+stating that during the two years that preceded his death he did not
+experience so much as two months of exemption from pain, yet never uttered
+one repining or peevish word.
+
+     When the pain was not too violent to be amused, he
+     employed himself with his books, his pen, or in
+     conversation with his friends; and upon every occasion
+     displayed the clearness of his intellect, and the
+     cheerfulness of his temper. Even when the intervals
+     from pain were so short, that his words were frequently
+     interrupted, I have known him to hold a discourse in a
+     sublime strain of piety. I never shall forget one day
+     that I passed with our friend last summer (1789). I
+     found him in bed in great agony; but, when that agony
+     abated a little, I asked him if I should read to him.
+     He said, "Yes," and the first book I met with was
+     "Johnson's Lives of the Poets." I read the "Life of
+     Watts," who was a favorite author with Dr. Franklin;
+     and instead of lulling him to sleep, it roused him to a
+     display of the powers of his memory and his reason. He
+     repeated several of Watts's "Lyric Poems," and
+     descanted upon their sublimity in a strain worthy of
+     them and of their pious author.
+
+Sublime or not, it cannot be denied that the poems of Dr. Watts have been a
+staff of comfort and support to many a pilgrim on his way to the "fields of
+endless light where the saints and angels walk."
+
+Another very dear English friend of Franklin was William Strahan, King's
+Printer, the partner at one time of Thomas Cadell the Elder, and the
+publisher of Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. The frequent
+references in Franklin's letters to him to Madeira wine would seem to
+indicate that, if it had been possible for such a temperate man as Franklin
+to have what is known as a boon companion, Strahan would have been he. On
+one occasion, Franklin writes to him that he has a great opinion of his
+wisdom (Madeira apart), on another, after twitting him good-humoredly with
+the restless condition of England, he observes: "You will say my _Advice_
+'smells of _Madeira_.' You are right. This foolish Letter is mere chitchat
+_between ourselves_ over the _second bottle_."
+
+The friendship between the two began before they had even seen each other.
+From writing to each other from time to time, in the course of business,
+about books and stationery, they finally came to feel as if they really
+knew each other, and to exchange familiar messages on that footing. In his
+earliest letter to Strahan, Franklin signs himself, "Your humble servant
+unknown," but, before he has even carried into execution the floating
+intention of going over to England, which, again and again, manifests
+itself in his letters to Strahan, his spouse is corresponding with Mrs.
+Strahan, and he has arranged a match between Sally and Master Billy, one of
+Strahan's sons. "My compliments to Mrs. Strahan, and to your promising son,
+perhaps one day mine," he wrote to Strahan several years before his first
+mission to England, "God send our children good and suitable matches, for I
+begin to feel a parents' cares in that respect, and fondly wish to see them
+well settled before I leave them." A little later, he has arranged the
+match so entirely to his satisfaction, and, as the event proved, to that of
+Strahan too, that he writes glibly to Strahan of William Strahan as "our
+son Billy" and of Sally as "our daughter Sally." The same letter
+foreshadows the mission to England that brought the two friends for the
+first time face to face. "Our Assembly," it said, "talk of sending me to
+England speedily. Then look out sharp, and if a fat old fellow should come
+to your printing-house and request a little smouting, depend upon it 'tis
+your affectionate friend and humble servant."
+
+The earlier cis-Atlantic letters of Franklin to Strahan are mainly letters
+of business over which we need not linger here; but they contain some
+paragraphs of general interest besides those relating to Sally and Master
+Billy. In one place, Franklin declares that he is glad that the Polybius,
+which he had ordered from Strahan, did not come; it was intended for his
+son, who was, when the order was given, in the army, and apparently bent
+on a military life, but that, as peace had cut off the prospect of
+advancement in that way, his son would apply himself to other business. In
+any event, Polybius would appear to have been a rather pedantic authority
+for the military operations of the American backwoods. The other business
+to which William Franklin had decided to apply himself was that of the
+profession, which, in the opinion of the general public, approximates most
+nearly to a state of warfare--the law, and, in the letters from Franklin to
+Strahan, William's altered plans are brought home to us in the form of
+orders for law books and the request that Strahan would have William
+entered as a student at the Inns of Court.
+
+These earlier letters also contain some piquant comments on colonial
+conditions. Such are the remarks prompted by Pope's sneer in the _Dunciad_
+at the supposed popularity of the poetaster, Ward, in "ape-and-monkey
+climes."
+
+     That Poet has many Admirers here, and the Reflection he
+     somewhere casts on the Plantations as if they had a
+     Relish for such Writers as Ward only, is injurious.
+     Your Authors know but little of the Fame they have on
+     this side of the Ocean. We are a kind of Posterity in
+     respect to them. We read their Works with perfect
+     impartiality, being at too great distance to be byassed
+     by the Factions, Parties and Prejudices that prevail
+     among you. We know nothing of their Personal Failings;
+     the Blemishes in their Character never reaches (sic)
+     us, and therefore the bright and amiable part strikes
+     us with its full Force. They have never offended us or
+     any of our Friends, and we have no competitions with
+     them, therefore we praise and admire them without
+     Restraint. Whatever Thomson writes send me a dozen
+     copies of. I had read no poetry for several years, and
+     almost lost the Relish of it, till I met with his
+     Seasons. That charming Poet has brought more Tears of
+     Pleasure into my Eyes than all I ever read before. I
+     wish it were in my Power to return him any Part of the
+     Joy he has given me.
+
+Many years later, some appreciative observations of the same critic on the
+poetry of Cowper were to make even that unhappy poet little less proud than
+the girl in the Tatler with the new pair of garters.
+
+The friendship, initiated by the early letters of Franklin to Strahan,
+ripened fast into the fullest and freest intimacy when Franklin went over
+to England in 1757. They were both printers, to begin with, and were both
+very social in their tastes. Strahan was besides no mean political _quid
+nunc_, and Franklin was all his life an active politician. So interesting
+were the reports that he made to Franklin at the latter's request on
+political conditions in England, after Franklin returned to America from
+his first mission to that country, that Franklin acknowledged his debt in
+these flattering terms:
+
+     Your accounts are so clear, circumstantial, and
+     complete, that tho' there is nothing too much, nothing
+     is wanting to give us, as I imagine, a more perfect
+     knowledge of your publick affairs than most people have
+     that live among you. The characters of your speakers
+     and actors are so admirably sketch'd, and their views
+     so plainly opened, that we see and know everybody; they
+     all become of our acquaintance. So excellent a manner
+     of writing seems to me a superfluous gift to a mere
+     printer. If you do not commence author for the benefit
+     of mankind, you will certainly be found guilty
+     hereafter of burying your talent. It is true that it
+     will puzzle the Devil himself to find anything else to
+     accuse you of, but remember he may make a great deal of
+     that. If I were king (which may God in mercy to us all
+     prevent) I should certainly make you the
+     historiographer of my reign. There could be but one
+     objection--I suspect you might be a little partial in
+     my favor.
+
+"Straney" was the affectionate nickname by which Franklin addressed Strahan
+after he came into personal contact with him, and, as usual, the
+friendship that he formed for the head of the family drew all the other
+members of the family within its folds. His friendship was rarely, we
+believe, confined to one member of a family. That was the reason why, in
+one of his last letters to Mrs. Hewson, he could picture his condition in
+Philadelphia in these terms: "The companions of my youth are indeed almost
+all departed, but I find an agreeable society among their children and
+grandchildren." And so, in Franklin's relations with the Strahans, we find
+his affection taking in all the members of the household. "My dear Love to
+Mrs. Strahan," he says in a letter to Strahan from Philadelphia in 1762,
+"and bid her be well for all our sakes. Remember me affectionately to
+Rachey and my little Wife and to your promising Sons my young Friends
+Billy, George and Andrew." A similar message in another letter to Strahan
+is followed by the statement, "I hope to live to see George a Bishop," and,
+a few days afterwards, Franklin recurs to the subject in these terms: "Tell
+me whether George is to be a Church or Presbyterian parson. I know you are
+a Presbyterian yourself; but then I think you have more sense than to stick
+him into a priesthood that admits of no promotion. If he was a dull lad it
+might not be amiss, but George has parts, and ought to aim at a mitre."
+
+There are other repeated references in Franklin's letters to Strahan's
+daughter whom Franklin called his wife. "I rejoice to hear," he says in one
+of them, "that Mrs. Strahan is recovering; that your family in general is
+well, and that my little woman in particular is so, and has not forgot our
+tender connection." In a letter, which we have already quoted, after
+charging Strahan with not being as good-natured as he ought to be, he says,
+"I am glad, however that you have this fault; for a man without faults is a
+hateful creature. He puts all his friends out of countenance; but I love
+you exceedingly."
+
+As for Strahan, he loved Franklin so exceedingly that in his effort to
+bring Deborah over to England he did not stop short, as we have seen, of
+letting her know that, when she arrived, there would be a ready-made
+son-in-law to greet her. Indeed the idea of fixing Franklin in England
+appears to have been the darling project of his heart if we are to judge by
+the frequency with which Franklin had to oppose Deborah's fear of the sea
+to his importunity. More than once it must have appeared to him as if the
+eloquence on which he prided himself so greatly would bear down all
+difficulties. After Franklin in 1762 had been for two nights on board of
+the ship at Portsmouth which was to take him to America, but was kept in
+port by adverse winds, he wrote to Strahan:
+
+     The Attraction of Reason is at present for the other
+     side of the Water, but that of Inclination will be for
+     this side. You know which usually prevails. I shall
+     probably make but this one Vibration, and settle here
+     forever. Nothing will prevent it, if I can, as I hope I
+     can, prevail with Mrs. F. to accompany me.
+
+That, he said in a subsequent letter, would be the great difficulty. The
+next year, he even wrote to Strahan from America, after his journey of
+eleven hundred and forty miles on the American continent that year, that no
+friend could wish him more in England than he did himself, though, before
+he went, everything, in which he was concerned, must be so settled in
+America as to make another return to it unnecessary. But, in the course of
+his life, Franklin, with his sensibility to social attentions and freedom
+from provincial restrictions, professed his preference for so many parts of
+the world as a place of residence that statements of this kind should not
+be accepted too literally.
+
+In one of his letters to Strahan, before his return to England, on his
+second mission, there is a sly stroke that gives us additional insight
+into the intimate relations which the two men had contracted with each
+other.
+
+     You tell me [Franklin said] that the value I set on
+     your political letters is a strong proof that my
+     judgment is on the decline. People seldom have friends
+     kind enough to tell them that disagreeable truth,
+     however useful it might be to know it; and indeed I
+     learn more from what you say than you intended I
+     should; for it convinces me that you had observed the
+     decline for some time past in other instances, as 'tis
+     very unlikely you should see it first in my good
+     opinion of your writings.
+
+With Franklin's return to England on his second mission, the old friendly
+intercourse between Strahan and himself was resumed, but it came wholly to
+an end during the American Revolution; for Strahan was the King's Printer,
+an inveterate Tory, and one of the ministerial phalanx, which followed
+George III. blindly. When the dragon's teeth sown by the King began to
+spring up in serried ranks, Franklin wrote, but did not send, to Strahan
+the letter, which is so well known as to almost make transcription
+unnecessary.
+
+     MR. STRAHAN,
+
+     You are a Member of Parliament, and one of that
+     Majority which has doomed my Country to
+     Destruction.--You have begun to burn our Towns, and
+     murder our People.--Look upon your Hands! They are
+     stained with the Blood of your Relations!--You and I
+     were long Friends:--You are now my Enemy,--and I am
+
+                                  Yours,
+                                    B. FRANKLIN.
+
+In this instance, also, Franklin was but true to his practice of sometimes
+inserting a quip or a quirk into even the gravest contexts.
+
+Not until December 4, 1781, does the silence between the two friends,
+produced by the Revolution, appear to have been really broken. On that
+date, Franklin wrote to Strahan a formal letter, addressing him no longer
+as "Dear Straney," but as "Dear Sir," and concluding with none of the
+former affectionate terminations, but in the stiffest terms of obsequious
+eighteenth century courtesy. The ostensible occasion for the letter was a
+package of letters which he asked Strahan to forward to Mrs. Strange, the
+wife of Robert Strange, the celebrated engraver, whose address he did not
+remember. He also asked Strahan for a copy of the _Tully on Old Age_, which
+Franklin had printed in Philadelphia many years before, and had endeavored
+to sell in part in London through Strahan. Well maintained as the reserve
+of this letter is, it is plainly enough that of a man, who is feeling his
+way a little cautiously, because he does not know just how his approaches
+will be received. Between the lines, we can see that the real object of the
+requests about the package of letters and the Latin classic was to find out
+whether Franklin's treason had killed all desire on Straney's part to open
+a second bottle with him. There is a by-reference to Didot le Jeune, who
+was bidding fair to carry the art of fine printing to a high pitch of
+perfection, and an expression of pleasure that Strahan had married his
+daughter happily, and that his prosperity continued. "I hope," Franklin
+said, "it may never meet with any Interruption having still, tho' at
+present divided by public Circumstances, a Remembrance of our ancient
+private Friendship." Nor did he fail to present his affectionate respects
+to Mrs. Strahan and his love to Strahan's children. The olive branch was
+distinctly held out, but, just about the time that this letter reached
+Strahan, the ministry, of which he was such an unfaltering adherent,
+suffered a defeat on the American question, and the Tully was transmitted
+by Mrs. Strange's husband with the statement that he really believed that
+Strahan himself would have written to Franklin but for the smart of the
+Parliamentary disaster of that morning. Several years later, there came to
+Franklin an acknowledgment by Strahan of the very friendly and effectual
+patronage which had been afforded to a distant kinswoman of his at
+Philadelphia by Franklin's family. The letter also eagerly urged Franklin
+to come to England once more, and with Franklin's reply, signed "yours ever
+most affectionately," the old _entente_ was fully re-established. In the
+high animal spirits, aroused by the renewal of the former relationship, he
+fell back upon the technical terms of the printing house, so familiar to
+the two friends, for the purpose of illustrating his pet proposition that
+England would never be at rest until all the enormous salaries, emoluments
+and patronage of her great offices were abolished, and these offices were
+made, instead of places of profit, places of expense and burthen.
+
+     Ambition and avarice [he said] are each of them strong
+     Passions, and when they are united in the same Persons,
+     and have the same Objects in view for their
+     Gratification, they are too strong for Public Spirit
+     and Love of Country, and are apt to produce the most
+     violent Factions and Contentions. They should therefore
+     be separated, and made to act one against the other.
+     Those Places, to speak in our old stile (Brother Type)
+     may be for the good of the _Chapel_, but they are bad
+     for the Master, as they create constant Quarrels that
+     hinder the Business. For example, here are near two
+     Months that your Government has been employed _in
+     getting its form to press_; which is not yet fit to
+     _work on_, every Page of it being _squabbled_, and the
+     whole ready to fall into _pye_. The Founts too must be
+     very scanty, or strangely _out of sorts_, since your
+     _Compositors_ cannot find either _upper_ or _lower case
+     Letters_ sufficient to set the word ADMINISTRATION, but
+     are forc'd to be continually _turning for them_.
+     However, to return to common (tho' perhaps too saucy)
+     Language, don't despair; you have still one resource
+     left, and that not a bad one, since it may reunite the
+     Empire. We have some Remains of Affection for you, and
+     shall always be ready to receive and take care of you
+     in Case of Distress. So if you have not Sense and
+     Virtue enough to govern yourselves, e'en dissolve your
+     present old crazy Constitution, and _send members to
+     Congress_.
+
+This is the letter that Franklin said was mere chitchat between themselves
+over the second bottle. Where America was concerned, Strahan was almost
+credulous enough to have even swallowed the statement in Franklin's
+humorous letter "To the Editor of a Newspaper," written about the time of
+the Stamp Act in ridicule of English ignorance respecting America, that the
+grand leap of the whale in his chase of the cod up the Fall of Niagara was
+esteemed by all who had seen it as one of the finest spectacles in Nature.
+In 1783, Captain Nathaniel Falconer, another faithful friend of Franklin,
+wrote to him with the true disregard of an old sea-dog for spelling and
+syntax: "I have been over to your old friends Mr. Strawns and find him just
+the same man, believes every Ly he hears against the United States, the
+French Army and our Army have been killing each other, and that we shall be
+glad to come to this country again." In reply, Franklin said: "I have still
+a regard for Mr. Strahan in remembrance of our ancient Friendship, tho'
+he has as a Member of Parliament dipt his Hands in our Blood. He was always
+as credulous as you find him." And, if what Franklin further says in this
+letter is true, Strahan was not only credulous himself but not above
+publishing mendacious letters about America as written from New York, which
+in point of fact were fabricated in London. A little over a year later,
+when the broken bones of the ancient friendship had reknit, Franklin had
+his chance to remind Strahan of the extent to which he and those of the
+same mind with him had been deceived by their gross misconceptions of
+America. His opportunity came in the form of a reply to a letter from
+Strahan withholding his assent from the idea of Franklin, so utterly
+repugnant to the working principles of Strahan's party associates, that
+public service should be rendered gratuitously. "There are, I make no
+doubt," said Franklin "many wise and able Men, who would take as much
+Pleasure in governing for nothing, as they do in playing Chess for nothing.
+It would be one of the noblest of Amusements." Then, when he has fortified
+the proposition by some real or fancied illustrations, drawn from French
+usages, he proceeds to unburden his mind to Strahan with a degree of candor
+that must have made the latter wince a little at times.
+
+     I allow you [he said] all the Force of your Joke upon
+     the Vagrancy of our Congress. They have a right to sit
+     _where_ they please, of which perhaps they have made
+     too much Use by shifting too often. But they have two
+     other Rights; those of sitting _when_ they please, and
+     as _long_ as they please, in which methinks they have
+     the advantage of your Parliament; for they cannot be
+     dissolved by the Breath of a Minister, or sent packing
+     as you were the other day, when it was your earnest
+     desire to have remained longer together.
+
+     You "fairly acknowledge, that the late War terminated
+     quite contrary to your Expectation." Your expectation
+     was ill founded; for you would not believe your old
+     Friend, who told you repeatedly, that by those Measures
+     England would lose her Colonies, as Epictetus warned in
+     vain his Master that he would break his Leg. You
+     believ'd rather the Tales you heard of our Poltroonery
+     and Impotence of Body and Mind. Do you not remember the
+     Story you told me of the Scotch sergeant, who met with
+     a Party of Forty American Soldiers, and, tho' alone,
+     disarm'd them all, and brought them in Prisoners? A
+     Story almost as Improbable as that of the Irishman, who
+     pretended to have alone taken and brought in Five of
+     the Enemy by _surrounding_ them. And yet, my Friend,
+     sensible and Judicious as you are, but partaking of the
+     general Infatuation, you seemed to believe it.
+
+     The Word _general_ puts me in mind of a General, your
+     General Clarke, who had the Folly to say in my hearing
+     at Sir John Pringle's, that, with a Thousand British
+     grenadiers, he would undertake to go from one end of
+     America to the other, and geld all the Males, partly by
+     force and partly by a little Coaxing. It is plain he
+     took us for a species of Animals, very little superior
+     to Brutes. The Parliament too believ'd the stories of
+     another foolish General, I forget his Name, that the
+     Yankeys never _felt bold_. Yankey was understood to be
+     a sort of Yahoo, and the Parliament did not think the
+     Petitions of such Creatures were fit to be received and
+     read in so wise an Assembly. What was the consequence
+     of this monstrous Pride and Insolence? You first sent
+     small Armies to subdue us, believing them more than
+     sufficient, but soon found yourselves obliged to send
+     greater; these, whenever they ventured to penetrate our
+     Country beyond the Protection of their Ships, were
+     either repulsed and obliged to scamper out, or were
+     surrounded, beaten and taken Prisoners. An America
+     Planter, who had never seen Europe, was chosen by us to
+     Command our Troops, and continued during the whole War.
+     This Man sent home to you, one after another, five of
+     your best Generals baffled, their Heads bare of
+     Laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their
+     Employers.
+
+     Your contempt of our Understandings, in Comparison with
+     your own, appeared to be not much better founded than
+     that of our Courage, if we may judge by this
+     Circumstance, that, in whatever Court of Europe a
+     Yankey negociator appeared, the wise British Minister
+     was routed, put in a passion, pick'd a quarrel with
+     your Friends, and was sent home with a Flea in his Ear.
+
+     But after all, my dear Friend, do not imagine that I am
+     vain enough to ascribe our Success to any superiority
+     in any of those Points. I am too well acquainted with
+     all the Springs and Levers of our Machine, not to see,
+     that our human means were unequal to our undertaking,
+     and that, if it had not been for the Justice of our
+     Cause, and the consequent Interposition of Providence,
+     in which we had Faith, we must have been ruined. If I
+     had ever before been an Atheist, I should now have been
+     convinced of the Being and Government of a Deity! It is
+     he who abases the Proud and favours the Humble. May we
+     never forget his Goodness to us, and may our future
+     Conduct manifest our Gratitude.
+
+It was characteristic of Franklin to open his heart to a friend in this
+candid way even upon sensitive topics, and there can be no better proof of
+the instinctive confidence of his friends in the essential good feeling
+that underlay such candor than the fact that they never took offence at
+utterances of this sort. They knew too well the constancy of affection and
+placability of temper which caused him to justly say of himself in a letter
+to Strahan, "I like immortal friendships, but not immortal enmities."
+
+The retrospective letter from which we have just quoted had its genial
+afterglow as all Franklin's letters had, when he had reason to think that
+he had written something at which a relative or a friend might take
+umbrage.
+
+     But let us leave these serious Reflections [he went
+     on], and converse with our usual Pleasantry. I remember
+     your observing once to me as we sat together in the
+     House of Commons, that no two Journeymen Printers,
+     within your Knowledge, had met with such Success in the
+     World as ourselves. You were then at the head of your
+     Profession, and soon afterwards became a Member of
+     Parliament. I was an Agent for a few Provinces, and now
+     act for them all. But we have risen by different Modes.
+     I, as a Republican Printer, always liked a Form well
+     _plain'd down_; being averse to those _overbearing_
+     Letters that hold their Heads so _high_, as to hinder
+     their Neighbours from appearing. You, as a Monarchist,
+     chose to work upon _Crown_ Paper, and found it
+     profitable; while I work'd upon _pro patria_ (often
+     call'd _Fools Cap_) with no less advantage. Both our
+     _Heaps hold out_ very well, and we seem likely to make
+     a pretty good day's Work of it. With regard to Public
+     Affairs (to continue in the same stile) it seems to me
+     that the Compositors in your Chapel do not _cast off
+     their Copy_ well, nor perfectly understand _Imposing_;
+     their _Forms_, too, are continually pester'd by the
+     _Outs_ and _Doubles_, that are not easy to be
+     corrected. And I think they were wrong in laying aside
+     some _Faces_, and particularly certain _Headpieces_,
+     that would have been both useful and ornamental. But,
+     Courage! The Business may still flourish with good
+     Management; and the Master become as rich as any of the
+     Company.
+
+Less than two years after these merry words were penned, Franklin wrote to
+Andrew Strahan, Strahan's son, saying, "I condole with you most sincerely
+on the Departure of your good Father and Mother, my old and beloved
+Friends."
+
+Equally dear to Franklin, though in a different way, was Jonathan Shipley,
+the Bishop of St. Asaph's, whom he termed in a letter to Georgiana, one of
+the Bishop's daughters, "that most honoured and ever beloved Friend." In
+this same letter, Franklin speaks of the Bishop as the "good Bishop," and
+then, perhaps, not unmindful of the unflinching servility with which the
+Bench of Bishops had supported the American policy of George III.,
+exclaims, "Strange, that so simple a Character should sufficiently
+distinguish one of that sacred Body!"
+
+During the dispute with the Colonies, the Bishop was one of the wise
+Englishmen, who could have settled the questions at issue between England
+and America, to the ultimate satisfaction of both countries, with little
+difficulty, if they had been given a _carte blanche_ to agree with Franklin
+on the terms upon which the future dependence of America was to be based.
+Two productions of his, the "Sermon before the Society for Propagating the
+Gospel in Foreign Parts" and his "Speech intended to have been spoken on
+the Bill for Altering the Charters of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay,"
+were among the compositions which really influenced the course of the
+events that preceded the American Revolution. We know from Franklin's pen
+that the sermon was for a time "universally approved and applauded," and,
+in letters to Thomas Cushing, he said that the speech was admired in
+England as a "Masterpiece of Eloquence and Wisdom," and "had an
+extraordinary Effect, in changing the Sentiments of Multitudes with regard
+to America." For both sermon and speech the Bishop was all the more to be
+honored by Americans, because, as Franklin observed to Galloway of the
+sermon, the Bishop's censure of the mother country's treatment of the
+Colonies, however tenderly expressed, could not recommend him at court or
+conduce in the least to his promotion. On the contrary, it probably cost
+him the most splendid temporal reward that could be conferred upon a
+Churchman, the Archbishopric of Canterbury; for, when Charles James Fox was
+desirous of elevating him to that exalted office, the King defeated his
+intentions by hastily appointing another person to it.
+
+At Chilbolton, by Twyford, the country seat of the Bishop, some of the most
+pleasant days that Franklin spent in England were passed. So fond of
+Franklin were the Bishop and his wife that the latter carried in her memory
+even the ages of all Franklin's children and grandchildren. As he was on
+the point of leaving Twyford, at the end of the three weeks' visit, during
+which he began the _Autobiography_, she insisted on his remaining that day,
+so that they might all celebrate the anniversary of Benjamin Bache's birth
+together. Accordingly, at dinner there was among other things a floating
+island, such as the hosts always had on the several birthdays of their own
+six children; all of whom, with one exception, were present as well as a
+clergyman's widow upwards of one hundred years old. The story is thus told
+by Franklin to his wife:
+
+     The chief Toast of the Day was Master Benjamin Bache,
+     which the venerable old Lady began in a Bumper of
+     Mountain. The Bishop's Lady politely added, _and that
+     he may be as good a Man as his Grandfather_. I said I
+     hop'd he would be _much better_. The Bishop, still more
+     complaisant than his Lady, said, "We will compound the
+     Matter, and be contented, if he should not prove
+     _quite_ so good." This Chitchat is to yourself only,
+     in return for some of yours about your Grandson, and
+     must only be read to Sally, and not spoken of to
+     anybody else; for you know how People add and alter
+     Silly stories that they hear, and make them appear ten
+     times more silly.
+
+The room at the Bishop's home, in which the _Autobiography_ was begun, was
+ever subsequently known as Franklin's room. After his return to America
+from France, Catherine Louisa Shipley, one of the Bishop's daughters, wrote
+to him, "We never walk in the garden without seeing Dr. Franklin's room and
+thinking of the work that was begun in it." In a letter to the Bishop in
+1771, Franklin says:
+
+     I regret my having been oblig'd to leave that most
+     agreeable Retirement which good Mrs. Shipley put me so
+     kindly in possession of. I now breathe with Reluctance
+     the Smoke of London, when I think of the sweet Air of
+     Twyford. And by the Time your Races are over, or about
+     the Middle of next Month (if it should then not be
+     unsuitable to your Engagements or other Purposes) I
+     promise myself the Happiness of spending another Week
+     or two where I so pleasantly spent the last.
+
+Close behind this letter, went also one of his "books," which he hoped that
+Miss Georgiana, another daughter of the Bishop, would be good enough to
+accept as a small mark of his "Regard for her philosophic Genius," and a
+quantity of American dried apples for Mrs. Shipley. A month later, he
+writes to the Bishop that he had been prevented from coming to Twyford by
+business, but that he purposed to set out on the succeeding Tuesday for
+"that sweet Retreat." How truly sweet it was to him a letter that he
+subsequently wrote to Georgiana from Passy enables us in some measure to
+realize. Among other things, it contained these winning and affecting
+words:
+
+     Accept my Thanks for your Friendly Verses and good
+     Wishes. How many Talents you possess! Painting,
+     Poetry, Languages, etc., etc. All valuable, but your
+     good Heart is worth the whole.
+
+     Your mention of the Summer House brings fresh to my
+     mind all the Pleasures I enjoyed in the sweet Retreat
+     at Twyford: the Hours of agreeable and instructive
+     Conversation with the amiable Family at Table; with its
+     Father alone; the delightful Walks in the Gardens and
+     neighbouring Grounds. Pleasures past and gone forever!
+     Since I have had your Father's Picture I am grown more
+     covetous of the rest; every time I look at your second
+     Drawing I have regretted that you have not given to
+     your Juno the Face of Anna Maria, to Venus that of
+     Emily or Betsey, and to Cupid that of Emily's Child, as
+     it would have cost you but little more Trouble. I must,
+     however, beg that you will make me up a compleat Set of
+     your little Profiles, which are more easily done. You
+     formerly obliged me with that of the Father, an
+     excellent one. Let me also have that of the good
+     Mother, and of all the Children. It will help me to
+     fancy myself among you, and to enjoy more perfectly in
+     Idea, the Pleasure of your Society. My little
+     Fellow-Traveller, the sprightly Hetty, with whose
+     sensible Prattle I was so much entertained, why does
+     she not write to me? If Paris affords anything that any
+     of you wish to have, mention it. You will oblige me. It
+     affords everything but _Peace_! Ah! When shall we again
+     enjoy that Blessing.
+
+Previously he had written to Thomas Digges that the portrait of the Bishop
+mentioned by him had not come to hand; nor had he heard anything of it, and
+that he was anxious to see it, "having no hope of living to see again the
+much lov'd and respected original." His request for the little profiles of
+the Shipleys was complied with, we know, because in a letter to the Bishop
+some two years afterwards he said: "Your Shades are all plac'd in a Row
+over my Fireplace, so that I not only have you always in my Mind, but
+constantly before my Eyes." This letter was written in reply to a letter
+from the Bishop which was the first to break the long silence that the war
+between Great Britain and America had imposed upon the two friends. "After
+so long a Silence, and the long Continuance of its unfortunate Causes,"
+Franklin began, "a Line from you was a Prognostic of happier Times
+approaching, when we may converse and communicate freely, without Danger
+from the Malevolence of Men enrag'd by the ill success of their distracted
+Projects."
+
+Among the entries in the desultory Journal that Franklin kept of his return
+from France to America, are these relating to the visit paid him at
+Southampton by the Bishop: "Wrote a letter to the Bishop of St. Asaph,
+acquainting him with my arrival, and he came with his lady and daughter,
+Miss Kitty, after dinner, to see us; they talk of staying here as long as
+we do. Our meeting was very affectionate." For two or three days, the
+reunited friends all lodged at the Star, at Southampton, and took their
+meals together. The day before his ship sailed, Franklin invited the Bishop
+and his wife and daughter to accompany him on board, and, when he retired,
+it was with the expectation that they would spend the night on the ship,
+but, when he awoke the next morning, he found that they had thoughtfully
+left the ship, after he retired, to relieve the poignancy of the farewell,
+and that he was off on his westward course.
+
+In his last letter to the Bishop, Franklin expresses his regret that
+conversation between them at Southampton had been cut short so frequently
+by third persons, and thanks him for the pleasure that he derived from the
+copy of Paley's _Moral Philosophy_, given to him by the Bishop there. Along
+with the usual contradiction of the English and Loyalist view at this time
+of our national condition, and the usual picture of himself encircled by
+his grandchildren, he indulges in these striking reflections about the
+chequered fate of parental expectations:
+
+     He that raises a large Family does, indeed, while he
+     lives to observe them, _stand_, as Watts says, _a
+     broader Mark for Sorrow_; but then he stands a broader
+     Mark for Pleasure too. When we launch our little Fleet
+     of Barques into the Ocean, bound to different Ports, we
+     hope for each a prosperous Voyage; but contrary Winds,
+     hidden Shoals, Storms, and Enemies come in for a Share
+     in the Disposition of Events; and though these occasion
+     a Mixture of Disappointment, yet, considering the
+     Risque where we can make no Insurance, we should think
+     ourselves happy if some return with Success.
+
+Timed as they were, the force of these reflections were not likely to be
+lost upon the Bishop. Some years before, Georgiana had married with his
+bitter disapproval Francis Hare-Naylor, the writer of plays and novels, and
+author of the _History of the Helvetic Republics_, who was so unfortunate
+as to be arrested for debt during his courtship, while in the episcopal
+coach of the Bishop with Georgiana and her parents. After the Bishop
+refused to recognize the husband, the Duchess of Devonshire settled an
+annuity of three hundred pounds a year upon the couple, and among the wise,
+weighty letters of Franklin is one that he wrote from France to Georgiana,
+after her marriage, in which he replies to her inquiries about the opening
+that America would afford to a young married couple, and refers to this
+annuity. The concluding portion of this letter also has its value as
+another illustration of the calm manner in which Franklin looked forward to
+his end. He tells Georgiana that, if he should be in America, when they
+were there, his best counsels and services would not be wanting, and that
+to see her happily settled and prosperous there would give him infinite
+pleasure, but that, of course, if he ever arrived there, his stay could be
+but short.
+
+Franklin survived the Bishop, and his letter to Catherine, in reply to
+hers, announcing the death of her father, is in his best vein.
+
+     That excellent man has then left us! His departure is a
+     loss, not to his family and friends only, but to his
+     nation, and to the world; for he was intent on doing
+     good, had wisdom to devise the means, and talents to
+     promote them. His "Sermon before the Society for
+     Propagating the Gospel," and his "Speech intended to
+     have been spoken," are proofs of his ability as well as
+     his humanity. Had his counsels in those pieces been
+     attended to by the ministers, how much bloodshed might
+     have been prevented, and how much expense and disgrace
+     to the nation avoided!
+
+     Your reflections on the constant calmness and composure
+     attending his death are very sensible. Such instances
+     seem to show, that the good sometimes enjoy in dying a
+     foretaste of the happy state they are about to enter.
+
+     According to the course of years, I should have quitted
+     this world long before him. I shall however not be long
+     in following. I am now in my eighty-fourth year, and
+     the last year has considerably enfeebled me; so that I
+     hardly expect to remain another. You will then, my dear
+     friend, consider this as probably the last line to be
+     received from me, and as a taking leave. Present my
+     best and most sincere respects to your good mother, and
+     love to the rest of the family, to whom I wish all
+     happiness; and believe me to be, while I _do_ live,
+     yours most affectionately.
+
+His friendship in this instance, as usual, embraced the whole family. In a
+letter in 1783 to Sir William Jones, the accomplished lawyer and Oriental
+scholar, who married Anna Maria, one of the Bishop's daughters, he said
+that he flattered himself that he might in the ensuing summer be able to
+undertake a trip to England for the pleasure of seeing once more his dear
+friends there, among whom the Bishop and his family stood foremost in his
+estimation and affection.
+
+To the Bishop himself he wrote from Passy in the letter which mentioned the
+shades of the Shipleys above his fireplace: "Four daughters! how rich! I
+have but one, and she, necessarily detain'd from me at 1000 leagues
+distance. I feel the Want of that tender Care of me, which might be
+expected from a Daughter, and would give the World for one."
+
+And later in this letter he says with the bountiful affection, which made
+him little less than a member of the families of some of his friends,
+"Please to make my best Respects acceptable to Mrs. Shipley, and embrace
+for me tenderly all our dear Children."
+
+At the request of Catherine, he wrote the _Art of Procuring Pleasant
+Dreams_ in which hygiene and the importance of preserving a good conscience
+are so gracefully blended, and received from her a reply, in which, after
+declaring that it flattered her exceedingly that he should employ so much
+of his precious time in complying with her request, she put to him the
+question, "But where do you read that Methusaleh slept in the open air? I
+have searched the Bible in vain to find it."
+
+When Sir William Jones was on the eve of being married to Anna Maria, and
+of sailing away to India, where he was to win so much distinction, Franklin
+wrote to him the letter already mentioned, joining his blessing on the
+union with that of the good Bishop, and expressing the hope that the
+prospective bridegroom might return from that corrupting country with a
+great deal of money honestly acquired, and with full as much virtue as he
+carried out.
+
+The affection that he felt for Catherine and Georgiana, his letters to
+them, from which we have already quoted, sufficiently reveal. Of the four
+daughters, Georgiana was, perhaps, his favorite, and she is an example with
+Mary Stevenson of the subtle magnetism that his intellect and nature had
+for feminine affinities of mind and temperament. It was to Georgiana, when
+a child, that he wrote his well-known letter containing an epitaph on her
+squirrel, which had been dispatched by a dog. The letter and epitaph are
+good enough specimens of his humor to be quoted in full:
+
+
+     DEAR MISS,
+
+     I lament with you most sincerely the unfortunate end of
+     poor Mungo. Few squirrels were better accomplished; for
+     he had had a good education, had travelled far, and
+     seen much of the world. As he had the honor of being,
+     for his virtues, your favourite, he should not go, like
+     common skuggs, without an elegy or an epitaph. Let us
+     give him one in the monumental style and measure,
+     which, being neither prose nor verse, is perhaps the
+     properest for grief; since to use common language would
+     look as if we were not affected, and to make rhymes
+     would seem trifling in sorrow.
+
+
+     EPITAPH
+
+     Alas! poor Mungo!
+     Happy wert thou, hadst thou known
+     Thy own felicity.
+     Remote from the fierce bald eagle,
+     Tyrant of thy native woods,
+     Thou hadst nought to fear from his piercing talons,
+     Nor from the murdering gun
+     Of the thoughtless sportsman.
+     Safe in thy wired castle,
+     GRIMALKIN never could annoy thee.
+     Daily wert thou fed with the choicest viands,
+     By the fair hand of an indulgent mistress;
+     But, discontented,
+     Thou wouldst have more freedom.
+     Too soon, alas! didst thou obtain it;
+     And wandering,
+     Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!
+                             Learn hence,
+     Ye who blindly seek more liberty,
+     Whether subjects, sons, squirrels or daughters,
+     That apparent restraint may be real protection;
+     Yielding peace and plenty
+                             With security.
+
+     You see, my dear Miss, how much more decent and proper
+     this broken style is, than if we were to say, by way of
+     epitaph,
+
+        Here SKUGG
+        Lies snug,
+        As a bug
+        In a rug.
+
+     and yet, perhaps, there are people in the world of so
+     little feeling as to think that this would be a
+     good-enough epitaph for poor Mungo.
+
+     If you wish it, I shall procure another to succeed him;
+     but perhaps you will now choose some other amusement.
+
+Two of Georgiana's letters to Franklin, after his arrival in France, are
+very interesting, and one of them especially could not have been written by
+any but a highly gifted and accomplished woman. In this letter, the first
+of the two, she begins by expressing her joy at unexpectedly receiving a
+letter from him.
+
+     How good you were [she exclaimed] to send me your
+     direction, but I fear I must not make use of it as
+     often as I could wish, since my father says it will be
+     prudent not to write in the present situation of
+     affairs. I am not of an age to be so very prudent, and
+     the only thought that occurred to me was your
+     suspecting that my silence proceeded from other
+     motives. I could not support the idea of your believing
+     that I love and esteem you less than I did some few
+     years ago. I therefore write this once without my
+     father's knowledge. You are the first man that ever
+     received a private letter from me, and in this instance
+     I feel that my intentions justify my conduct; but I
+     must entreat that you will take no notice of my
+     writing, when next I have the happiness of hearing from
+     you.
+
+She then proceeds to tell Franklin all about her father, her mother, her
+sister Emily and Emily's daughter, "a charming little girl, near fifteen
+months old, whom her aunts reckon a prodigy of sense and beauty." The rest
+of her sisters, she said, continued in _statu quo_. Whether that proceeded
+from the men being difficult or from _their_ being difficult, she left him
+to determine.
+
+His friends all loved him almost as much as she did; as much she would not
+admit to be possible. Dr. Pringle had made her extremely happy the
+preceding winter by giving her a print of her excellent friend, which, was
+certainly very like him, although it wanted the addition of his own hair to
+make it complete; but, as it was, she prized it infinitely, now that the
+dear original was absent. She then has a word to say about Smith's _Wealth
+of Nations_, Gibbon's _History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_
+and the _Economics_, which she had read with great attention, as indeed
+everything else she could meet with relative to Socrates; for she fancied
+she could discover in each trait of that admirable man's character a strong
+resemblance between him and her much-loved friend--the same clearness of
+judgment, the same uprightness of intention and the same superior
+understanding. Other words are bestowed on the account which Sir William
+Hamilton had lately given her of a new electrical machine invented in
+Italy, the happiness that she would enjoy, if Franklin were in England to
+explain it to her, and the envy excited in her by the opportunities that
+his grandson had for showing him kindness and attention. "Did my family,"
+she further declares, "know of my writing, my letter would scarce contain
+the very many things they would desire me to say for them. They continue to
+admire and love you as much as they did formerly, nor can any time or event
+in the least change their sentiments."
+
+She then concludes partly in French and partly in English in these words:
+
+     Adieu, mon cher Socrate; conservez-vous pour l'amour de
+     moi, et pour mille autres raisons plus importants. Je
+     ne vous en dirai pas d'advantage pour aujourd'hui, mais
+     je veux esperer de vous entretenir plus a mon aise,
+     avant que soit longue. Pray write whenever a safe
+     conveyance opens, since the receiving letters is
+     reckoned very different from answering them. I must
+     once more repeat nobody knows of this scroll; "a word
+     to the wise,"--as Poor Richard says.
+
+In her second letter, Georgiana speaks of the difficulty she experienced in
+having her letters conveyed safely to Passy. "Strange," she declared, "that
+I should be under the necessity of concealing from the world a
+correspondence which it is the pride and glory of my heart to maintain."
+His _Dialogue with the Gout_, she said, was written with his own cheerful
+pleasantry, and _La belle et la mauvaise Jambe_ recalled to her mind those
+happy hours they once passed in his society, where they were never amused
+without learning some useful truth, and where she first acquired a taste
+_pour la conversation badinante and reflechie_. Her father grew every year
+fonder of the peace of Twyford; having found his endeavors to serve his
+country ineffectual, he had yielded to a torrent which it was no longer in
+his power to control. Sir John Pringle (Franklin's friend) had left London
+and gone to reside in Scotland; she feared that he was much straitened in
+his circumstances; he looked ill and was vastly changed from what he
+remembered him; Dr. Priestley (another friend of Franklin) was then on a
+short visit to his friends in town; good Dr. Price (another friend of
+Franklin) called on them often, and gave them hopes of a visit to Twyford.
+
+The letter also informed Franklin that the first opportunity that they had
+of sending a parcel to Paris he might expect _all_ their shades; and
+expressed her gratitude to Mr. Jones for undertaking the care of her
+letter, and giving her an opportunity of assuring Franklin how much she did
+and ever should continue to love him.
+
+Catherine Ray was not far wrong when she spoke of Franklin as a conjurer.
+Catherine Shipley's letter to him, after she had parted with him at
+Southampton, though without the romantic flush of these two letters, spoke
+the same general language of deep-seated affection. She was quite provoked
+with herself, she said, when she got to Southampton that she had not
+thought of something, such as a pincushion, to leave with him, that might
+have been useful to him during the voyage to remind him of her. "Did you
+ever taste the ginger cake," she asked, "and think it had belonged to your
+fellow-traveller? In short, I want some excuse for asking whether you ever
+think about me." And from this letter it appears that he had a place in the
+hearts of Emily and Betsey too. She had had a letter from Emily, Catherine
+further said, the night after she got home, to inquire whether his stay at
+Southampton would allow time for her coming to see him. Betsey regretted
+much that she had lost that happiness, and the writer had written to dear
+Georgiana a long account of him, for she knew every circumstance would be
+interesting to her. "Indeed, my dear sir," the letter ended, "from my
+father and mother down to their _youngest child_, we all respect and love
+you."[34]
+
+When Franklin was told by Georgiana that Sir John Pringle was pinched by
+poverty, and looked ill, he must have been sorely distressed; for Sir John
+he once described as his "steady, good friend." A pupil of Boerhaave, a
+high authority upon the application of sanitary science to the prevention
+of dysentery and hospital fevers, physician to the Queen, and President of
+the Royal Society, Dr. Pringle was one of the distinguished men of his
+time. What churchmen were to the preservation of classical learning, before
+teaching became a special calling, physicians were to general scientific
+knowledge before science became such; and, among these physicians, he
+occupied an honorable position.[35] "His speech in giving the last medal,
+(of the Royal Society) on the subject of the discoveries relating to the
+air," Franklin wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "did him great honour." He was
+quite unlike the courtiers who sought to convince King Canute that he could
+stay the incoming tide by his command, as George III. found out when he
+asked him, after the outbreak of the American Revolution, to pronounce an
+opinion in favor of the substitution of blunt for pointed lightning rods on
+Kew Palace. The laws of nature, Sir John hinted, were not changeable at
+royal pleasure, but positions of honor and profit he soon learnt, if he did
+not know it before, were; for he fell into such disfavor with the King that
+he had to resign as President of the Royal Society, and was deprived of his
+post as physician to the Queen. The circumstances in which his disgrace
+originated leave us at but little loss to understand why the King should
+have become such a dogged partisan of blunt conductors. Prior to the
+Revolution, Franklin had been consulted by the British Board of Ordnance as
+to the best means of protecting the arsenals at Purfleet from lightning,
+and, after he had visited the powder magazine there, the Royal Society,
+too, was asked by the Board for its opinion. The Society accordingly
+appointed a committee of learned men, including Cavendish and Franklin, to
+make a report on the subject. All of the committee except Benjamin Wilson,
+who dissented, reported in favor of pointed conductors as against blunt
+ones, and Franklin, the inventor of pointed lightning rods, drew up the
+report. The scientific controversy that followed soon assumed a political
+character, when Franklin dropped the philosophical task of snatching the
+lightning from the skies for the rebellious task of snatching the sceptre
+from a tyrant. When he heard that George III. was, like Ajax, obstinate
+enough to defy even the lightning, he wrote to an unknown correspondent:
+
+     The King's changing his _pointed_ conductors for
+     _blunt_ ones is, therefore, a matter of small
+     importance to me. If I had a wish about it, it would be
+     that he had rejected them altogether as ineffectual.
+     For it is only since he thought himself and family safe
+     from the thunder of Heaven, that he dared to use his
+     own thunder in destroying his innocent subjects.
+
+Dr. Ingenhousz, however, was not so self-contained, and made such an angry
+attack on Wilson that Franklin, who invariably relied in such cases upon
+silence and the principle that Truth is a cat with nine lives to defend
+him, laughingly remarked, "He seems as much heated about this _one point_,
+as the Jansenists and Molinists were about the _five_." As for King George,
+he had at least the satisfaction of realizing that his people still had a
+ready fund of wit for timely use. One homely couplet of the period,
+referring to Franklin's famous kite, ran in this way:
+
+    "He with a kite drew lightning from the sky,
+    And like a kite he pecked King George's eye."
+
+Another more polished poet penned these neat lines:
+
+    "While you, great George, for knowledge hunt,
+    And sharp conductors change for blunt,
+    The Empire's out of joint.
+    Franklin another course pursues
+    And all your thunder heedless views
+    By keeping to the point."
+
+If we may believe Franklin, Sir John held the efficacy of the healing art
+in very moderate esteem. The reader has already been told of the humorous
+manner in which he let it be known that, in his opinion, of the two
+classes of practitioners, old women and regular physicians, the former had
+done the most to save the honor of the profession. Franklin also informed
+Dr. Rush that Sir John "once told him 92 fevers out of 100 cured
+themselves, 4 were cured by Art, and 4 proved fatal." But many people must
+have had a more favorable opinion of the professional value of Sir John
+than Sir John himself had, for his "Conversations" were in high repute. On
+this point, there is some evidence in a letter from Franklin to Dr. Thomas
+Bond, who was desirous of giving his son Richard the benefit of a foreign
+medical education. Referring to Sir John, Franklin wrote:
+
+     Every Wednesday Evening he admits young Physicians and
+     Surgeons to a Conversation at his House, which is
+     thought very improving to them. I will endeavour to
+     introduce your Son there when he comes to London. And
+     to tell you frankly my Opinion, I suspect there is more
+     valuable knowledge in Physic to be learnt from the
+     honest candid Observations of an old Practitioner, who
+     is past all desire of more Business, having made his
+     Fortune, who has none of the Professional Interest in
+     keeping up a Parade of Science to draw Pupils, and who
+     by Experience has discovered the Inefficacy of most
+     Remedies and Modes of Practice, than from all the
+     formal Lectures of all the Universities upon Earth.
+
+That Dr. John cured at least one patient, we are told by Dr. Rush on the
+authority of Franklin, but it was Only himself of a tremor, and that by
+simply ceasing to take snuff. Dr. Pringle and himself, Franklin told Dr.
+Rush, observed that tremors of the hands were more frequent in France than
+elsewhere, and probably from the excessive use of snuff. "He concluded,"
+says Dr. Rush, "that there was no great advantage in using tobacco in any
+way, for that he had kept company with persons who used it all his life,
+and no one had ever advised him to use it. The Doctor in the 81st year of
+his age declared he had never snuffed, chewed, or smoked."
+
+Among the persons who sought Sir John's professional advice was Franklin
+himself. It was in relation to a cutaneous trouble which vexed him for some
+fourteen years, and broke out afresh when he was in his eighty-third year.
+But the best medicine that Franklin ever obtained from Sir John was his
+companionship upon two continental tours, one of which was inspired by the
+latter's desire to drink the waters at Pyrmont, and the other by the
+attractions of the French capital. When the news of Sir John's death
+reached Franklin at Passy he paid the usual heartfelt tribute. "We have
+lost our common Friend," he wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "the excellent
+Pringle. How many pleasing hours you and I have pass'd together in his
+Company!"
+
+Another English physician, for whom Franklin entertained a feeling of deep
+affection, was the Quaker Dr. John Fothergill. After the death of this
+friend, in a letter to Dr. John Coakley Lettsom, still another friend of
+his, and one of the famous English physicians of the eighteenth century, he
+expressed this extraordinary opinion of Dr. Fothergill's worth: "If we may
+estimate the goodness of a man by his disposition to do good, and his
+constant endeavours and success in doing it, I can hardly conceive that a
+better man has ever existed." No faint praise to be uttered by the founder
+of the Junto and one who valued above all things the character of a doer of
+good! Like Sir John Pringle, Dr. Fothergill belonged to the class of
+physicians who pursued medicine, as if it were a mistress not to be wooed
+except with the favor of the other members of the scientific sisterhood. He
+was an ardent botanist, and his collection of botanical specimens and
+paintings on vellum of rare plants was among the remarkable collections of
+his age. Two of his correspondents were the Pennsylvania botanists, John
+Bartram and Humphrey Marshall, who brought to his knowledge a flora in
+many shining instances unknown to the woods and fields of the Old World.
+His medical writings were held in high esteem, and were published after his
+death under the editorial supervision of Dr. Lettsom.
+
+As a practitioner, he was eminently successful, and numbered among his
+patients many representatives of the most powerful and exclusive circles in
+London. What the extent of his practice was we can infer from a question
+put to him by Franklin in 1764.
+
+     By the way [he asked], when do you intend to live?--_i.
+     e._, to enjoy life. When will you retire to your villa,
+     give yourself repose, delight in viewing the operations
+     of nature in the vegetable creation, assist her in her
+     works, get your ingenious friends at times about you,
+     make them happy with your conversation, and enjoy
+     theirs: or, if alone, amuse yourself with your books
+     and elegant collections?
+
+     To be hurried about perpetually from one sick chamber
+     to another is not living. Do you please yourself with
+     the fancy that you are doing good? You are mistaken.
+     Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being
+     useless, and almost all the other half ought not to be
+     saved, as being mischievous. Does your conscience never
+     hint to you the impiety of being in constant warfare
+     against the plans of Providence? Disease was intended
+     as the punishment of intemperance, sloth, and other
+     vices, and the example of that punishment was intended
+     to promote and strengthen the opposite virtues.
+
+All of which, of course, except the suggestion about retirement, which was
+quite in keeping with Franklin's conception of a rational life, was nothing
+more than humorous paradox on the part of a man who loved all his
+fellow-creatures too much to despair of any of them.
+
+When Franklin himself was seized with a grave attack of illness shortly
+after his arrival in England on his first mission, Doctor Fothergill was
+his physician, and seems to have cupped and physicked him with drastic
+assiduity. The patient was not a very docile one, for he wrote to Deborah
+that, too soon thinking himself well, he ventured out twice, and both times
+got fresh cold, and fell down again; and that his "good doctor" grew very
+angry with him for acting contrary to his cautions and directions, and
+obliged him to promise more observance for the future. Always to Franklin
+the Doctor remained the "good Doctor Fothergill." Even in a codicil to his
+will, in bequeathing to one of his friends the silver cream pot given to
+him by the doctor, with the motto "Keep bright the chain," he refers to him
+by that designation.
+
+Nor were his obligations as a patient the only obligations that Franklin
+owed to this friend. When his early letters on electricity were sent over
+to England, only to be laughed at in the first instance, they happened to
+pass under the eye of the Doctor. He saw their merit, advised their
+publication, and wrote the preface to the pamphlet in which they were
+published by Cave. But the things for which Franklin valued the Doctor most
+were his public spirit and philanthropy. He was well known in Philadelphia,
+and, when Franklin arrived in London in 1757, he was actively assisted by
+the Doctor in his effort to secure a settlement of the dispute over
+taxation between the Pennsylvania Assembly and the Proprietaries.
+Afterwards, when Franklin's second mission to England was coming to an end,
+the Doctor was drawn deeply into a vain attempt made by Lord Howe and his
+sister and David Barclay, another Quaker friend of Franklin, to compose the
+American controversy by an agreement with Franklin. For this business,
+among other reasons, because of "his daily Visits among the Great, in the
+Practice of his Profession," of which Franklin speaks in his history of
+these negotiations, he would have been a most helpful ally; if the quarrel
+had not become so embittered. But, as it was, the knot, which the
+negotiators were striving to disentangle, was too intricate for anything
+but the edge of the sword. When the negotiations came to nothing, the good
+Doctor, who knew the sentiments of "the Great" in London at that time, if
+any private person did, had no advice to give to Franklin except, when he
+returned to America, to get certain of the Doctor's friends in
+Philadelphia, and two or three other persons together, and to inform them
+that, whatever specious pretences were offered by the English ministry,
+they were all hollow, and that to obtain a larger field, on which to fatten
+a herd of worthless parasites, was all that was regarded. It was a bad day,
+indeed, for England when one of the best men in the land could hold such
+language.
+
+The silk experiment in Pennsylvania furnished still another congenial field
+for the co-operation of Franklin and Doctor Fothergill; and, in a letter to
+Franklin, the latter also declared in startlingly modern terms that, in the
+warmth of his affection for mankind, he could wish to see "the institution
+of a College of Justice, where the claims of sovereigns should be weighed,
+an award given, and war only made on him who refused submission."
+
+"Dr. Fothergill, who was among the best men I have known, and a great
+promoter of useful projects," is the way in which Franklin alludes to the
+Doctor in the _Autobiography_. He then states in the same connection the
+plan that he submitted to the Doctor for "the more effectual cleaning and
+keeping clean the streets of London and Westminster"; but this plan, though
+not unworthy of the public zeal and ingenuity of its author, is too
+embryonic, when contrasted with modern municipal methods, and too tamely
+suggestive of the broom and dust-pan of ordinary domestic housekeeping, to
+deserve detailed attention.
+
+Franklin was eminently what Dr. Johnson called a "clubable" man. When in
+England, he often dined at the London Coffee House in Ludgate Hill with
+the group of scientific men and liberal clergymen, who frequented the
+place, and of whom he spoke on one occasion as "that excellent Collection
+of good Men, the Club at the _London_." He also sometimes dined at St.
+Paul's Coffee House and the Dog Tavern on Garlick Hill, and with the
+Society of Friends to the Cause of Liberty at Paul's Head Tavern, Cateaton
+Street, where, upon every 4th day of November, the landing of King William
+and the Glorious Revolution were enthusiastically toasted. When he ate or
+drank at a club, he liked to do so in an atmosphere of free thought and
+free speech. Religion, spiced with heresy, and Politics flavored with
+liberalism, were the kinds of religion and politics that best suited his
+predilections. It was at St. Paul's Coffee House that he became acquainted
+with Dr. Richard Price, the celebrated clergyman and economist, who was
+then preaching every Sunday afternoon at Newington Green, where Franklin
+advised Sir John Pringle to go to hear in the Doctor a preacher of
+_rational_ Christianity. It is probable that Sir John, in inquiring of
+Franklin where he could go to hear such a preacher, was moved rather by
+curiosity than piety; for Franklin wrote to Dr. Price: "At present I
+believe he has no view of attending constantly anywhere, but now and then
+only as it may suit his convenience."
+
+The acquaintance between Franklin and Doctor Price, once formed, became a
+deeply-rooted friendship, and on Franklin's part it was accompanied by a
+degree of admiration for the Doctor's abilities which hurried him on one
+occasion into language that had little in common with the sober language in
+which his judgments were usually pronounced. Of Doctor Price's _Appeal to
+the Public on the Subject of the National Debt_, he wrote to the author in
+the most enthusiastic terms, "it being in my Opinion," he said,
+"consider'g the profound Study, & steady Application of Mind that the
+Work required, & the sound Judgment with which it is executed, and its
+great and important Utility to the Nation, the foremost Production of human
+Understanding, that this Century has afforded us." And to Franklin on one
+occasion this friend wrote that he considered his friendship one of the
+honors and blessings of his life.
+
+When the American controversy arose, Dr. Price zealously espoused the cause
+of the Colonies, and this still further strengthened the friendship between
+the two. For his _Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy
+of the War with America_, the City of London presented him with the freedom
+of the city in a gold box of fifty pounds value; and so outspoken was he in
+the expression of his political convictions that Franklin wrote to John
+Winthrop in 1777 that "his Friends, on his Acct, were under some
+Apprehensions from the Violence of Government, in consequence of his late
+excellent Publications in favour of Liberty." Indeed, so near was he to
+making the American cause absolutely his own that Congress, while the
+American War was still raging, even invited him to become an American
+citizen and to assist in regulating the American finances, but that was one
+step further than he was willing to go. In a letter to Joseph Priestley,
+shortly after the Battle of Bunker's Hill, Franklin makes an amusing
+allusion to the mathematical genius of Dr. Price which was equal to the
+abstrusest problems involved in the calculation of annuities.
+
+     Britain [he said], at the expense of three millions,
+     has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign,
+     which is twenty thousand pounds a head; and at Bunker's
+     Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she
+     lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During
+     the same time sixty thousand children have been born in
+     America. From these _data_ his (Dr. Price's)
+     mathematical head will easily calculate the time and
+     expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole
+     territory.
+
+Always in the American controversy, Franklin relied upon the loins as well
+as the hands of the Colonists for the final victory.
+
+While mentioning Priestley, we might recall the compliment in a letter from
+Franklin to Dr. Price, in which the former brought the names of Priestley
+and Price into a highly honorable conjunction. Speaking of dissensions in
+the Royal Society, he said, "Disputes even on small Matters often produce
+Quarrels for want of knowing how to differ decently; an Art which it is
+said scarce anybody possesses but yourself and Dr. Priestley." Dr. Price
+was one of the habitues of the London Coffee House, and, in Franklin's
+letters to him from Passy, there are repeated references to the happy hours
+that the writer had spent there. "I never think of the Hours I so happily
+spent in that Company," he said in one letter, "without regretting that
+they are never to be repeated: For I see no Prospect of an End to the
+unhappy War in my Time." In another letter, he concluded with a heartfelt
+wish that he might embrace Dr. Price once more, and enjoy his sweet society
+in peace among his honest, worthy, ingenious friends at the _London_. In
+another letter, after peace was assured, he said that he longed to see and
+be merry with the Club, and, in a still later letter, he told Dr. Price
+that he might "pop" in some Thursday evening when they least expected him.
+In enclosing, on one occasion, to Dr. Price a copy of his Rabelaisian _jeu
+d'esprit_ on "Perfumes," which was intended also for the eye of Priestley,
+Franklin cracks an obscene joke at the expense of Priestley's famous
+researches with regard to gases, but, when Dr. Price states in his reply,
+"We have been entertained with the pleasantry of it, and the ridicule it
+contains," we are again reminded that the eighteenth century was not the
+twentieth.
+
+Dr. Price was one of the correspondents to whom Franklin expounded his
+theory that England's only chance for self-reformation was to render all
+places unprofitable and the King too poor to give bribes and pensions.
+
+     Till this is done [he said], which can only be by a
+     Revolution (and I think you have not Virtue enough left
+     to procure one), your Nation will always be plundered,
+     and obliged to pay by Taxes the Plunderers for
+     Plundering and Ruining. Liberty and Virtue therefore
+     join in the call, _COME OUT OF HER, MY PEOPLE_!
+
+In a later letter, he returns to the same subject in these words so
+pregnant with meaning for a student of the political conditions which
+palsied the influence of Chatham and Burke in their effort to avert the
+American War:
+
+     As it seems to be a settled Point at present, that the
+     Minister must govern the Parliament, who are to do
+     everything he would have done; and he is to bribe them
+     to do this, and the People are to furnish the Money to
+     pay these Bribes; the Parliament appears to me a very
+     expensive Machine for Government, and I apprehend the
+     People will find out in time, that they may as well be
+     governed, and that it will be much cheaper to be
+     governed, by the Minister alone; no Parliament being
+     preferable to the present.
+
+There are also some thoughtful observations in one of Franklin's letters to
+Dr. Price on the limited influence of Roman and Grecian oratory, as
+compared with the influence of the modern newspaper. "We now find," he
+observed, "that it is not only right to strike while the iron is hot, but
+that it may be very practicable to heat it by continually striking."
+
+His last letter to Dr. Price was written less than a year before his own
+death. It refers to the death of the Bishop of St. Asaph's, and once more
+there is a mournful sigh from the Tree of Existence.
+
+     My Friends drop off one after another, when my Age and
+     Infirmities prevent my making new Ones [he groaned], &
+     if I still retained the necessary Activity and Ability,
+     I hardly see among the existing Generation where I
+     could make them of equal Goodness: So that the longer I
+     live I must expect to be very wretched. As we draw
+     nearer the Conclusion of Life, Nature furnishes with
+     more Helps to wean us from it, among which one of the
+     most powerful is the Loss of such dear Friends.
+
+With Dr. Joseph Priestley, the famous clergyman and natural philosopher,
+Franklin was very intimate. The discoveries of Priestley, especially his
+discovery that carbonic acid gas is imbibed by vegetation, awakened
+Franklin's keenest interest, and, some years before Priestley actually
+received a medal from the Royal Society for his scientific achievements,
+Franklin earnestly, though vainly, endeavored to obtain one for him. "I
+find that you have set all the Philosophers of Europe at Work upon Fix'd
+Air," he said in one of his letters to Priestley, "and it is with great
+Pleasure I observe how high you stand in their Opinion; for I enjoy my
+Friend's fame as my own." And no one who knows his freedom from all petty,
+carking feelings of every sort, such as envy and jealousy, can doubt for a
+moment that he did. For a time, fixed air aroused so much speculation that
+it was thought that it might even be a remedy for putrid fevers and
+cancers. The absorption of carbonic acid gas by vegetation is all simple
+enough now, but it was not so simple when Priestley wrote to Franklin that
+he had discovered that even aquatic plants imbibe pure air, and emit it as
+excrementitious to them, in a dephlogisticated state. On one occasion,
+Franklin paid his fellow-philosopher the compliment of saying that he knew
+of no philosopher who started so much good game for the hunters after
+knowledge as he did.
+
+For a time Priestley enjoyed the patronage of Lord Shelburne, who, desirous
+of having the company of a man of general learning to read with him, and
+superintend the education of his children, took Priestley from his
+congregation at Leeds, settled three hundred pounds a year upon him for ten
+years, and two hundred pounds for life, with a house to live in near his
+country seat. So Franklin stated in a letter to John Winthrop, when
+Priestley was engaged in the task of putting Lord Shelburne's great library
+into order. Subsequently patron and client separated amicably, but, before
+they did, Priestley consulted Franklin as to whether he should go on with
+the arrangement. The latter in a few judicious sentences counselled him to
+do so until the end of the term of ten years, and, by way of illustrating
+the frequent and troublesome changes, that human beings make without
+amendment, and often for the worse, told this story of his youth:
+
+     In my Youth, I was a Passenger in a little Sloop,
+     descending the River Delaware. There being no Wind, we
+     were obliged, when the Ebb was spent, to cast anchor,
+     and wait for the next. The Heat of the Sun on the
+     Vessel was excessive, the Company Strangers to me, and
+     not very agreeable. Near the river Side I saw what I
+     took to be a pleasant green Meadow, in the middle of
+     which was a large shady Tree, where it struck my Fancy
+     I could sit and read, (having a Book in my Pocket,) and
+     pass the time agreeably till the tide turned. I
+     therefore prevail'd with the Captain to put me ashore.
+     Being landed, I found the greatest part of my Meadow
+     was really a Marsh, in crossing which, to come at my
+     Tree, I was up to my knees in Mire; and I had not
+     placed myself under its Shade five Minutes, before the
+     Muskitoes in Swarms found me out, attack'd my Legs,
+     Hands, and Face, and made my Reading and my Rest
+     impossible; so that I return'd to the Beach, and
+     call'd for the Boat to come and take me aboard again,
+     where I was oblig'd to bear the Heat I had strove to
+     quit, and also the Laugh of the Company. Similar Cases
+     in the Affairs of Life have since frequently fallen
+     under my Observation.
+
+Deterrent as was the advice, pointed by such a graphic story, Priestley did
+not take it, and, fortunately for him, the pleasant green meadow and large
+shady tree to which he retired did not prove such a deceptive mirage. After
+the separation, Lord Shelburne endeavored to induce him to renew their
+former relation, but he declined.
+
+Priestley was one of the witnesses of the baiting, to which Franklin was
+subjected at the Cockpit, on account of the Hutchinson letters, on the
+famous occasion, of which it could be well said by every thoughtful
+Englishman a little later in the words of the ballad of Chevy-Chase,
+
+    "The child may rue that is unborne
+    The hunting of that day."
+
+Or "the speaking" of that day, as Lord Campbell has parodied the lines.
+
+Priestley was also among those eye-witnesses of the scene, who testified to
+the absolutely impassive countenance with which Franklin bore the ordeal.
+As he left the room, however, he pressed Priestley's hand in a way that
+indicated much feeling. The next day, they breakfasted together, and
+Franklin told Priestley "that, if he had not considered the thing for which
+he had been so much insulted, as one of the best actions of his life, and
+what he should certainly do again in the same circumstances, he could not
+have supported it."
+
+To Priestley also the world was first indebted for knowledge of the fact
+that, when Franklin afterwards came to sign in France the Treaty of
+Alliance between that country and the United States, he took pains to wear
+the same suit of spotted Manchester velvet that he wore when he was
+treated with such indecency at the Cockpit.
+
+From France Franklin wrote to Priestley a letter expressing the horror--for
+no other term is strong enough to describe the sentiment--in which he held
+the unnatural war between Great Britain and her revolted Colonies.
+
+     The Hint you gave me jocularly [he said], that you did
+     not quite despair of the Philosopher's Stone, draws
+     from me a Request, that, when you have found it, you
+     will take care to lose it again; for I believe in my
+     conscience, that Mankind are wicked enough to continue
+     slaughtering one another as long as they can find Money
+     to pay the Butchers. But, of all the Wars in my time,
+     this on the part of England appears to me the
+     wickedest; having no Cause but Malice against Liberty,
+     and the Jealousy of Commerce. And I think the Crime
+     seems likely to meet with its proper Punishment; a
+     total loss of her own Liberty, and the Destruction of
+     her own Commerce.
+
+But Franklin was not too incensed to have his joke in this same letter over
+even such a grim subject for merriment as powder. "When I was at the camp
+before Boston," he declared, "the Army had not 5 Rounds of Powder a Man.
+This was kept a Secret even from our People. The World wonder'd that we so
+seldom fir'd a Cannon; we could not afford it."
+
+Another English friend of Franklin was Benjamin Vaughan, the son of a West
+Indian planter, and at one time the private secretary of Lord Shelburne.
+His family was connected with the House of Bedford, and his wife, Sarah
+Manning, was an aunt of the late Cardinal Manning. To Vaughan the
+reputation of Franklin is doubly indebted. In 1779, he brought out a new
+edition of Franklin's writings, and it was partly the entreaties of Abel
+James and himself which induced Franklin to continue the _Autobiography_,
+after work on it had been long suspended by its author because of the
+demands of the Revolution on his time. The spirit, in which the edition of
+Franklin's writings was prepared, found expression in the preface. "Can
+_Englishmen_," Vaughan asked, "read these things and not sigh at reflecting
+that the _country_ which could produce their author, was once without
+controversy _their own_!"
+
+Before Franklin left France he longed to pay another visit to England, and
+this matter is touched upon in a letter to Vaughan which sheds a sidelight
+upon the intimacy which existed between the two men.
+
+     By my doubts of the propriety of my going soon to
+     London, [he said], I meant no reflection on my friends
+     or yours. If I had any call there besides the pleasure
+     of seeing those whom I love, I should have no doubts.
+     If I live to arrive there, I shall certainly embrace
+     your kind invitation, and take up my abode with you.
+
+Some of the sagest observations ever made by Franklin are found in his
+letters to Vaughan, and several of his happy stories. The following
+reflections, prompted by English restraints upon commerce, were not
+intended to be taken literally, but they contain profound insight enough to
+merit transcription.
+
+     It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of this
+     world are managed. Naturally one would imagine, that
+     the interest of a few individuals should give way to
+     general interest; but individuals manage their affairs
+     with so much more application, industry, and address,
+     than the public do theirs, that general interest most
+     commonly gives way to particular. We assemble
+     parliaments and councils, to have the benefit of their
+     collected wisdom, but we necessarily have, at the same
+     time, the inconvenience of their collected passions,
+     prejudices, and private interests. By the help of
+     these, artful men overpower their wisdom, and dupe its
+     possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, _arrets_,
+     and edicts, all the world over, for regulating
+     commerce, an assembly of great men is the greatest fool
+     upon earth.
+
+When Franklin sat down to write this letter, Vaughan had asked him what
+remedy he had for the growing luxury of his country which gave so much
+offence to all English travellers without exception. In replying to this
+rather tactless question, Franklin's pen ran on until he had completed not
+so much a letter as an economic essay.
+
+     Our People [he begins] are hospitable, and have indeed
+     too much Pride in displaying upon their Tables before
+     Strangers the Plenty and Variety that our Country
+     affords. They have the Vanity, too, of sometimes
+     borrowing one another's Plate to entertain more
+     splendidly. Strangers being invited from House to
+     House, and meeting every Day with a Feast, imagine what
+     they see is the ordinary Way of living of all the
+     Families where they dine; when perhaps each Family
+     lives a Week after upon the Remains of the Dinner
+     given. It is, I own, a Folly in our People to give
+     _such Offence to English Travellers_. The first part of
+     the Proverb is thereby verified, that _Fools make
+     Feasts_. I wish in this Case the other were as true,
+     _and Wise Men eat them_. These Travellers might, one
+     would think, find some Fault they could more decently
+     reproach us with, than that of our excessive Civility
+     to them as Strangers.
+
+With this introduction, he proceeds to say a good word for luxury. "Is not
+the Hope of one day being able to purchase and enjoy Luxuries a great Spur
+to Labour and Industry?" he asked. And this question brought up one of the
+inevitable stories.
+
+     The Skipper of a Shallop, employed between Cape May and
+     Philadelphia, had done us some small Service, for which
+     he refused Pay. My Wife, understanding that he had a
+     Daughter sent her as a Present a new-fashioned Cap.
+     Three Years After, this Skipper being at my House with
+     an old Farmer of Cape May, his Passenger, he mentioned
+     the Cap, and how much his Daughter had been pleased
+     with it. "But," says he, "it proved a dear Cap to our
+     Congregation." "How so?" "When my Daughter appeared in
+     it at Meeting, it was so much admired, that all the
+     Girls resolved to get such Caps from Philadelphia, and
+     my Wife and I computed, that the whole could not have
+     cost less than a hundred Pound." "True," says the
+     Farmer, "but you do not tell all the Story. I think the
+     Cap was nevertheless an Advantage to us, for it was the
+     first thing that put our Girls upon Knitting worsted
+     Mittens for Sale at Philadelphia, that they might have
+     wherewithal to buy Caps and Ribbands there, and you
+     know that that Industry has continued, and is likely to
+     continue and increase to a much greater Value, and
+     answer better Purposes." Upon the whole, I was more
+     reconciled to this little Piece of Luxury, since not
+     only the Girls were made happier by having fine Caps,
+     but the Philadelphians by the Supply of warm Mittens.
+
+Then he argues still further as follows that luxury may not always be such
+an evil as it seems:
+
+     A Shilling spent idly by a Fool, may be picked up by a
+     Wiser Person, who knows better what to do with it. It
+     is therefore not lost. A vain, silly Fellow builds a
+     fine House, furnishes it richly, lives in it
+     expensively, and in few years ruins himself; but the
+     Masons, Carpenters, Smiths, and other honest Tradesmen
+     have been by his Employ assisted in maintaining and
+     raising their Families; the Farmer has been paid for
+     his labour, and encouraged, and the Estate is now in
+     better Hands.
+
+There were exceptional cases, of course. "If there be a Nation, for
+Instance, that exports its Beef and Linnen, to pay for its Importation of
+Claret and Porter, while a great Part of its People live upon Potatoes, and
+wear no Shirts, wherein does it differ from the Sot, who lets his Family
+starve, and sells his Clothes to buy Drink." He meant Ireland, it is
+needless to add. A little in this way, he confessed, was the exchange of
+American victuals for West Indian rum and sugar.
+
+The existence of so much want and misery in the world, he thought, was due
+to the employment of men and women in works that produce neither the
+necessaries nor the conveniences of life. Such people, aided by those who
+do nothing, consume the necessaries raised by the laborious. This idea, he
+developed with his inborn lucidity, ending, however, of course, with the
+reflection that we should naturally expect from a man, who was so
+thoroughly in touch with his kind, that, upon the whole, the quantity of
+industry and prudence among mankind exceeded the quantity of idleness and
+folly.
+
+This "long, rambling Letter" he called it--this "brief, pointed and
+masterly letter," we term it--concludes quite in the style of one of Poor
+Richard's dissertations:
+
+     Almost all the Parts of our Bodies require some
+     Expence. The Feet demand Shoes; the Legs, Stockings;
+     the rest of the Body, Clothing; and the Belly, a good
+     deal of Victuals. _Our_ Eyes, tho' exceedingly useful,
+     ask, when reasonable, only the cheap Assistance of
+     Spectacles, which could not much impair our Finances.
+     But _the Eyes of other People_ are the Eyes that ruin
+     us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither
+     fine Clothes, fine Houses, nor fine Furniture.
+
+Another letter to Vaughan is really an essay on the Criminal Laws and the
+practice of privateering. And a wise, humane and sprightly essay it is,
+fully worthy of a man, who was entirely too far in advance of his age to
+approve the savage English laws, which hanged a thief for stealing a horse,
+and had no better answer to make to the culprit, when he pleaded that it
+was hard to hang a man for _only_ stealing a horse, than the reply of Judge
+Burnet: "Man, thou art not to be hanged _only_ for stealing, but that
+horses may not be stolen." Not unworthy either was this essay of a man
+whose benevolence was too clear-sighted and generous to be cheated by the
+pretence that the practice of privateering has its root in anything better
+than the rapacity of the highwayman. A highwayman, he said, was as much a
+robber, when he plundered in a gang, as when single; and a nation, that
+made an unjust war, was only a great gang. How could England, which had
+commissioned no less than seven hundred gangs of privateering robbers, he
+asked, have the face to condemn the crime of robbery in individuals, and
+hang up twenty criminals in a morning. It naturally put one in mind of a
+Newgate anecdote. "One of the Prisoners complain'd, that in the Night
+somebody had taken his Buckles out of his Shoes; 'What, the Devil!' says
+another, 'have we then _Thieves_ among us? It must not be suffered, let us
+search out the Rogue, and pump him to death."
+
+Vaughan was a prolix correspondent, and in reading his letters we cannot
+but be reminded at times of the question put to him by Franklin, when
+inveighing against the artifices adopted by booksellers for the purpose of
+padding books. After remarking that they were puffed up to such an extent
+that the selling of paper seemed the object, and printing on it, only the
+pretence, he said, "You have a law, I think, against butchers blowing of
+veal to make it look fatter; why not one against booksellers' blowing of
+books to make them look bigger."
+
+Vaughan was among the friends who did not fail to hasten to Southampton
+when Franklin touched there on his return from France to America.
+
+In what affectionate esteem Franklin held his two English friends, Dr. John
+Hawkesworth, the author and writer of oratorios, and John Stanley, the
+blind musician and organist of the Society of the Inner Temple, we have
+already seen. Stanley composed the music for Dr. Hawkesworth's oratorios
+_Zimri_ and _The Fall of Egypt_, and like music and words the two friends
+themselves were blended in the mind of Franklin. Writing in the latter
+years of his life to another English friend of his, Thomas Jordan, the
+brewer, who had recently sent him a cask of porter, he had this to say
+about them, in connection with the two satellites of Georgium Sidus, which
+Herschel had just discovered.
+
+     Let us hope, my friend, that, when free from these
+     bodily embarrassments, we may roam together through
+     some of the systems he has explored, conducted by some
+     of our old companions already acquainted with them.
+     Hawkesworth will enliven our progress with his
+     cheerful, sensible converse, and Stanley accompany the
+     music of the spheres.
+
+Several times, in his letter, Franklin refers to Hawkesworth as the "good
+Doctor Hawkesworth," and it was from him that he learned to call Strahan
+"Straney."
+
+Another English friend of Franklin was John Sargent, a London merchant, a
+director of the Bank of England, and a member of Parliament. The friendship
+was shared by Mrs. Sargent, "whom I love very much," Franklin said in one
+of his letters to her husband. After his return from his second mission to
+England, he wrote to Sargent, asking him to receive the balance due him by
+Messrs. Browns and Collinson, and keep it for him or his children. "It may
+possibly," he declared, "soon be all I shall have left: as my American
+Property consists chiefly of Houses in our Seaport Towns, which your
+Ministry have begun to burn, and I suppose are wicked enough to burn them
+all." In connection with Sargent, it may also be mentioned that he was one
+of the applicants with Franklin for the Ohio grant, and that it was at his
+country seat at Halstead, in Kent, that Lord Stanhope called for the
+purpose of taking Franklin to Hayes, the country seat of Chatham, where
+Chatham and Franklin met for the first time.
+
+Another English friend of Franklin was John Canton, who was, however,
+rather a scientific than a social comrade, though a fellow-tourist of his
+on one of his summer excursions; and still another was Dr. Alexander Small,
+for whom he cherished a feeling of real personal affection. In one letter
+to Small, he tells him that he had found relief from the gout by exposing
+his naked foot, when he was in bed, and thereby promoting the process of
+transpiration. He gave the fact, he said, to Small, in exchange for his
+receipt for tartar emetic, because the commerce of philosophy as well as
+other commerce was best promoted by taking care to make returns. In another
+letter to Small, there is a growl for the American Loyalists.
+
+     As to the Refugees [he observed], whom you think we
+     were so impolitic in rejecting, I do not find that they
+     are miss'd here, or that anybody regrets their Absence.
+     And certainly they must be happier where they are,
+     under the Government they admire; and be better
+     receiv'd among a People, whose Cause they espous'd and
+     fought for, than among those who cannot so soon have
+     forgotten the Destruction of their Habitations, and the
+     spilt Blood of their dearest Friends and near
+     Relations.
+
+Then there is a reference in this letter to the learned and ingenious
+friends, who had left Dr. Small and himself to join the majority in the
+world of spirits.
+
+     Every one of them [he said] now knows more than all of
+     us they have left behind. It is to me a comfortable
+     Reflection, that, since we must live forever in a
+     future State, there is a sufficient Stock of Amusement
+     in reserve for us, to be found in constantly learning
+     something new to Eternity, the present Quantity of
+     human Ignorance infinitely exceeding that of human
+     Knowledge. Adieu, my dear Friend, and believe me, in
+     whatever World, yours most affectionately.
+
+In a subsequent letter, there is a softer word for the Loyalists. He
+believed, he said, that fear and error rather than malice occasioned their
+desertion of their country's cause and the adoption of the King's. The
+public resentment against them was then so far abated that none, who asked
+leave to return, were refused, and many of them then lived in America much
+at their ease. But he thought that the politicians, who were a sort of
+people that loved to fortify themselves in their projects by precedent,
+were perhaps waiting, before they ventured to propose the restoration of
+the confiscated estates of the Loyalists, to see whether the English
+Government would restore the forfeited estates in Scotland to the Scotch,
+those in Ireland to the Irish and those in England to the Welsh! He was
+glad that the Loyalists, who had not returned to America, had received, or
+were likely to receive, some compensation for their losses from England,
+but it did not seem so clearly consistent with the wisdom of Parliament for
+it to provide such compensation on behalf of the King, who had seduced
+these Loyalists by his proclamations. Some mad King, in the future, might
+set up such action on the part of Parliament as a precedent, as was
+realized by the Council of Brutes in the old fable, a copy of which he
+enclosed. The fable, of course, was not an old fable at all, but one of his
+own productions, in which the horse with the "boldness and freedom that
+became the nobleness of his nature," succeeded in convincing the council of
+the beasts, against the views of the wolves and foxes, that the lion should
+bestow no reward upon the mongrels, who, sprung in part from wolves and
+foxes, and corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, had deserted the
+honest dogs, when the lion, notwithstanding the attachment of these dogs to
+him, had, under the influence of evil counsellors, contracted an aversion
+to them, condemned them unheard and ordered his tigers, leopards and
+panthers to attack and destroy them. In this letter, there is another
+reference to the reformed prayer-book which Dr. Small and good Mrs.
+Baldwin had done him the honor, as we have seen, to approve. The things of
+this world, he said, took up too much of the little time left to him for
+him to undertake anything like a reformation in matters of religion. When
+we can sow good seed, we should, however, do it, and await with patience,
+when we can do no better, Nature's time for their sprouting.
+
+A later letter assured Dr. Small that Franklin still loved England, and
+wished it prosperity, but it had only another growl for the Loyalists.
+Someone had said, he declared, that we are commanded to forgive our
+enemies, but that we are nowhere commanded to forgive our friends. The
+Loyalists, after uniting with the savages for the purpose of burning the
+houses of the American Whigs, and murdering and scalping their wives and
+children, had left them for the Government of their King in England and
+Nova Scotia. "We do not miss them," he said, "nor wish their return; nor do
+we envy them their present happiness."[36]
+
+This letter also mildly deprecates the honor that Small did him in naming
+him with Timoleon. "I am like him only in retiring from my public labours,"
+he declared, "which indeed my stone, and other infirmities of age, have
+made indispensably necessary."
+
+The enthusiasm of the French people had drawn so freely upon the heroes of
+antiquity for a parallel to him that Dr. Small, perhaps, had to put up
+with Timoleon in default of a better classical congener.
+
+Other English friends of Franklin were John Alleyne, Edward Bridgen, Edmund
+Burke, Mrs. Thompson, John Whitehurst, Anthony Tissington, Thomas Viny and
+Caleb Whitefoord. Our attention has already been called to his pithy
+reflections on early marriages in one of his letters to John Alleyne.
+
+     Treat your Wife [he said, in the concluding sentences
+     of this admirable letter] always with Respect; it will
+     procure Respect to you, not from her only but from all
+     that observe it. Never use a slighting Expression to
+     her, even in jest, for Slights in Jest, after frequent
+     bandyings, are apt to end in angry earnest. Be studious
+     in your Profession, and you will be learned. Be
+     industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober
+     and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general
+     virtuous, and you will be happy. At least, you will, by
+     such Conduct, stand the best Chance for such
+     Consequences.
+
+In another letter to Alleyne, with his unerring good sense, he makes short
+work of the perverse prejudice against intermarriage with a deceased wife's
+sister which was destined to die so hard in the English mind.
+
+To Edward Bridgen, a merchant of London, Franklin referred in a letter to
+Governor Alexander Martin of North Carolina as "a particular Friend of mine
+and a zealous one of the American Cause." The object of the letter was to
+reclaim from confiscation property in that state belonging to Bridgen. And
+it was to Bridgen that Franklin made the suggestion that, instead of
+repeating continually upon every half penny the dull story that everybody
+knew (and that it would have been no loss to mankind if nobody had ever
+known) that George III. was King of Great Britain, France and Ireland,
+etc., etc., there should be inscribed on the coin some important proverb
+of Solomon, some pious moral, prudential or economical precept, calculated
+to leave an impression upon the mind, especially of young persons, such as
+on some, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom"; on others,
+"Honesty is the best Policy"; on others, "He that by the plow would thrive,
+himself must either hold or drive"; on others, "Keep thy Shop, and thy Shop
+will keep thee"; on others, "A penny saved is a penny got"; on others, "He
+that buys what he has no need of, will soon be forced to sell his
+necessaries"; and on others, "Early to bed and early to rise, will make a
+man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
+
+With Edmund Burke Franklin does not appear to have been intimate, but they
+knew each other well enough for the former in a letter to the latter to
+term the friendship between them an "old friendship." It was Burke who
+remarked, when Franklin was examined before the House of Commons on
+American affairs, that it was as if a school-master was being catechized by
+his pupils. For every reason, the judgment of so great a man about such an
+incident has its value, but among other reasons because Burke was accounted
+one of the best-informed men in England in relation to American affairs.
+
+The only glimpse we obtain of Mrs. Thompson is in a letter written to her
+by Franklin from Paris, shortly after his arrival in France in 1776, but
+the raillery of this letter is too familiar in tone to have marked the
+course of anything but real intimacy.
+
+     You are too early, _Hussy_ [he wrote], (as well as too
+     saucy,) in calling me _Rebel_; you should wait for the
+     Event, which will determine whether it is a _Rebellion_
+     or only a _Revolution_. Here the Ladies are more civil;
+     they call us _les Insurgens_, a Character that usually
+     pleases them: And methinks all other Women who smart,
+     or have smarted, under the Tyranny of a bad Husband,
+     ought to be fixed in Revolution Principles, and act
+     accordingly.
+
+Then Mrs. Thompson is told some gossipy details about a common friend whom
+Franklin had seen during the preceding spring at New York, and these are
+succeeded by some gay sallies with regard to Mrs. Thompson's restlessness.
+
+     Pray learn [he said], if you have not already learnt,
+     like me, to be pleased with other People's Pleasures,
+     and happy with their Happiness, when none occur of your
+     own; and then perhaps you will not so soon be weary of
+     the Place you chance to be in, and so fond of Rambling
+     to get rid of your _Ennui_. I fancy you have hit upon
+     the right Reason of your being Weary of St. Omer's,
+     viz. that you are out of Temper, which is the effect of
+     full Living and Idleness. A Month in Bridewell, beating
+     Hemp, upon Bread and Water, would give you Health and
+     Spirits, and subsequent Cheerfulness and Contentment
+     with every other Situation. I prescribe that Regimen
+     for you, my dear, in pure good will, without a Fee. And
+     let me tell you, if you do not get into Temper, neither
+     Brussels nor Lisle will suit you. I know nothing of the
+     Price of Living in either of those Places; but I am
+     sure a single Woman, as you are, might with Economy
+     upon two hundred Pounds a year maintain herself
+     comfortably anywhere, and me into the Bargain. Do not
+     invite me in earnest, however, to come and live with
+     you; for, being posted here, I ought not to comply, and
+     I am not sure I should be able to refuse.
+
+This letter was written shortly after Franklin's arrival in France, but he
+had already caught the infection of French gallantry. It closes with a
+lifelike portrait of himself.
+
+     I know you wish you could see me [he said], but, as you
+     can't, I will describe myself to you. Figure me in your
+     mind as jolly as formerly, and as strong and hearty,
+     only a few years older; very plainly dress'd, wearing
+     my thin gray strait hair, that peeps out under my only
+     Coiffure, a fine Fur Cap, which comes down my Forehead
+     almost to my Spectacles. Think how this must appear
+     among the Powder'd Heads of Paris! I wish every
+     gentleman and Lady in France would only be so obliging
+     as to follow my Fashion, comb their own Heads as I do
+     mine, dismiss their _Friseurs_, and pay me half the
+     Money they paid to them. You see, the gentry might well
+     afford this, and I could then enlist those _Friseurs_,
+     who are at least 100,000, and with the Money I would
+     maintain them, make a Visit with them to England, and
+     dress the Heads of your Ministers and Privy
+     Counsellors; which I conceive to be at present _un peu
+     derangees_. Adieu, Madcap; and believe me ever, your
+     affectionate Friend and humble Servant.
+
+John Whitehurst, who was a maker of watches and philosophical instruments,
+and the author of an _Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the
+Earth_, and his friend, Anthony Tissington, were residents of Derbyshire.
+Some of Whitehurst's letters to Franklin are still in existence, but none
+from Franklin to Whitehurst are. A letter from Franklin to Tissington has
+preserved one of the writer's characteristic stories. After speaking of the
+rheumatic pains, to which Mrs. Tissington was subject, he said:
+
+     'Tis a most wicked Distemper, & often puts me in mind
+     of the Saying of a Scotch Divine to some of his
+     Brethren who were complaining that their Flocks had of
+     late been infected with _Arianism_ and _Socinianism_.
+     Mine, says he, is infected with a worse ism than either
+     of those.--Pray, Brother, what can that be?--It is, the
+     _Rheumatism_.
+
+Thomas Viny was a wheel manufacturer of Tenterden, Kent. In a letter to
+him, Franklin tells him that he cannot without extreme reluctance think of
+using any arguments to persuade him to remove to America, because of the
+pain that the removal would occasion to Viny's brother. Possibly, however,
+he added, Viny might afterwards judge it not amiss, when the many children
+that he was likely to have, were grown up, to plant one of them in America,
+where he might prepare an asylum for the rest should any great calamity,
+which might God avert, befall England. A man he knew, who had a number of
+sons, used to say that he chose to settle them at some distance from each
+other, for he thought they throve better, as he remarked that cabbages,
+growing too near together, were not so likely to come to a head.
+
+     I shall be asleep before that time [Franklin
+     continued], otherwise he might expect and command my
+     best Advice and Assistance. But as the Ancients who
+     knew not how to write had a Method of transmitting
+     Friendships to Posterity; the Guest who had been
+     hospitably entertain'd in a strange Country breaking a
+     Stick with every one who did him a kindness; and the
+     Producing such a Tally at any Time afterwards, by a
+     Descendant of the Host, to a Son or Grandson of the
+     Guest, was understood as a good Claim to special Regard
+     besides the Common Rights of Hospitality: So if this
+     Letter should happen to be preserv'd, your Son may
+     produce it to mine as an Evidence of the Good will that
+     once subsisted between their Fathers, as an
+     Acknowledgment of the Obligations you laid me under by
+     your many Civilities when I was in your Country and a
+     Claim to all the Returns due from me if I had been
+     living.
+
+Another letter from Franklin to Viny was written at Passy. He joined most
+heartily he said with Viny in his prayers that the Almighty, who had
+favored the just cause, would perfect his work, and establish freedom in
+the New World as an asylum for those of the Old who deserved it. He thought
+the war a detestable one, and grieved much at the mischief and misery it
+was occasioning to many; his only consolation being that he did all in his
+power to prevent it. What a pleasure it would be to him on his return to
+America to see his old friend and his children settled there! "I hope,"
+Franklin concluded, "he will find Vines and Fig-trees there for all of
+them, under which we may sit and converse, enjoying Peace and Plenty, a
+good Government, good Laws, and Liberty, without which Men lose half their
+Value."
+
+Caleb Whitefoord resided at No. 8 Craven Street, London, or next door to
+Mrs. Stevenson's, where Franklin resided during his two missions to
+England, and the friendship between Franklin and himself, though very
+cordial on Whitefoord's part, would seem to have been on Franklin's part,
+though cordial, the friendship mainly of mere propinquity.[37]
+
+Far more significant were the ties which bound Franklin to such English
+friends as Peter Collinson, the Rev. George Whitefield, Lord Le Despencer,
+James Hutton, David Hartley and George Whatley.
+
+Peter Collinson was a London mercer who had a considerable correspondence
+with America. He not only enjoyed an acquaintance with men of prominence
+and influence in the Colonies, but he earnestly interested himself in
+promoting the production of American flax, hemp, silk and wine. He was a
+fellow of the Royal Society, besides being one of the founders of the
+Society of Antiquaries, and it was directly due to the electric tube sent
+over by him to the Library Company of Philadelphia that Franklin entered
+upon those experiments in electricity which he communicated to Collinson in
+a series of memorable letters, that brought lasting renown to their author
+when given to the world by Collinson. In a letter to Michael Collinson,
+Franklin speaks of Peter Collinson as our "dear departed Friend," and pays
+a feeling tribute to his unselfish patronage of the Library at
+Philadelphia. He alludes to the valuable presents made to the Library by
+Collinson and others, whose generosity had been kindled by Collinson's
+zeal, and he states the remarkable fact that for more than thirty years
+successively Collinson had participated in the annual selection of books
+for the Library, and had shouldered the whole burden of buying them in
+London, and shipping them to Philadelphia without ever charging or even
+accepting any consideration for his trouble. Nay more, during the same
+time, he had transmitted to the directors of the Library Company the
+earliest account of every new European improvement in Agriculture and the
+Arts, or discovery in Philosophy. Curious in botany as Collinson may have
+been, it is not hazardous to say that he never gathered or sowed any seed
+more fruitful than these benefactions, and we can readily understand how
+deeply his friendship must have been cherished by a spirit so congenial
+with his as that of Franklin. They were friends before they ever met, but
+it was not until Franklin arrived in London on his first mission to England
+that they greeted each other face to face. Franklin's first letter to
+America, written the day after he reached London, was hastily penned at
+Collinson's house, and, the next day, John Hanbury, the great Virginia
+merchant, by an arrangement with Collinson, called for Franklin in his
+carriage, and conveyed him to the house of Lord Granville for an interview
+with that nobleman. The letters from Franklin to Collinson on the subject
+of electricity are, we hardly need say, the most important of the former's
+letters to him, but very valuable, too, are some of his observations in
+other letters to his correspondent on political conditions in Pennsylvania
+and the relations between the Colonies and the mother country. To the
+scientific letters and to these observations we shall have occasion to
+revert further on. Beyond a reference to some black silk, sent by Collinson
+to Deborah, with a generous disregard of the fact that the fowl meadow
+grass seed that Franklin had sent to him from America never came up, the
+correspondence between Collinson and Franklin is marked by few intimate
+features. It was, however, on the back of a letter from Franklin to
+Collinson, in which the former condoled with the latter on the loss of his
+wife, that this good man, for such we must believe Collinson to have been,
+indorsed these singular comments, the offspring probably of purely morbid
+self-reproach:
+
+     There was no occasion of any Phylosophy on this ever to
+     be lamented occasion. Peter Collinson had few feelings
+     but for Himself. The same Principle that led him to
+     deprive his son of his Birthright when that son lay in
+     the Agonies of Death and knew not what he put his hand
+     to, supported Peter Collinson in the loss of the best
+     of Women in a manner that did no Honour to his
+     Feelings, his Gratitude or his Humanity.
+
+The eye of the reader has already been drawn to the Rev. George Whitefield,
+whose eloquence, we are told by Franklin in the _Autobiography_, "had a
+wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers." After the death
+of Whitefield, Franklin paid this handsome tribute to him in a letter to
+Robert Morris and Thomas Leach. "I knew him intimately upwards of thirty
+years. His Integrity, Disinterestedness, and indefatigable Zeal in
+prosecuting every good Work, I have never seen equalled, I shall never see
+exceeded." To Franklin, too, we are indebted for a striking description of
+his characteristics as an orator, when he came over to Philadelphia from
+Ireland, and, after being at first permitted to preach in some churches,
+was later compelled to preach in the fields, because the clergy took a
+dislike to him, and refused him their pulpits.
+
+     He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his
+     words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be
+     heard and understood at a great distance, especially as
+     his auditories, however numerous, observ'd the most
+     exact silence. He preach'd one evening from the top of
+     the Court-house steps, which are in the middle of
+     Market-Street, and on the west side of Second-Street,
+     which crosses it at right angles. Both streets were
+     fill'd with his hearers to a considerable distance.
+     Being among the hindmost in Market-Street, I had the
+     curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by
+     retiring backwards down the street towards the river;
+     and I found his voice distinct till I came near
+     Front-Street, when some noise in the street obscur'd
+     it. Imagining then a semi-circle, of which my distance
+     should be the radius, and that it were fill'd with
+     auditors, to each of whom I allow'd two square feet, I
+     computed that he might well be heard by more than
+     thirty thousand. This reconcil'd me to the newspaper
+     accounts of his having preach'd to twenty-five thousand
+     people in the fields, and to the antient histories of
+     generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had
+     sometimes doubted.
+
+By experience, Franklin came to distinguish easily between Whitefield's
+newly composed sermons and those which he had often preached in the course
+of his travels.
+
+     His delivery of the latter was so improv'd by frequent
+     repetitions that every accent, every emphasis, every
+     modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turn'd and
+     well plac'd, that, without being interested in the
+     subject, one could not help being pleas'd with the
+     discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that
+     receiv'd from an excellent piece of musick.
+
+Notwithstanding the extraordinary influence of Whitefield's oratory over
+his auditors, to which Franklin testifies so unqualifiedly, it is obvious
+enough, as we have seen, that a nature so little given to extreme forms of
+enthusiasm as that of Franklin could not but regard the hysteria produced
+by it with some degree of contemptuous amusement.
+
+     Who [he asked in his Essay on "Shavers and Trimmers,"
+     in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_], has been more notorious
+     for shaving and fleecing, than that Apostle of
+     Apostles, that Preacher of Preachers, the Rev. Mr. G.
+     W.? But I forbear making farther mention of this
+     spiritual Shaver and Trimmer, lest I should affect the
+     Minds of my Readers as deeply as his Preaching has
+     affected their Pockets.
+
+This was mere jesting on the part of a man to whom everything had its
+humorous as well as its serious side. Very different in spirit are some of
+the passages in Franklin's letters to Whitefield.
+
+     I am glad to hear [he wrote on one occasion] that you
+     have frequent opportunities of preaching among the
+     great. If you can gain them to a good and exemplary
+     life, wonderful changes will follow in the manners of
+     the lower ranks; for _ad exemplum regis_, etc. On this
+     principle, Confucius, the famous Eastern reformer,
+     proceeded. When he saw his country sunk in vice, and
+     wickedness of all kinds triumphant, he applied himself
+     first to the grandees; and having, by his doctrine, won
+     _them_ to the cause of virtue, the commons followed in
+     multitudes. The mode has a wonderful influence on
+     mankind; and there are numbers who, perhaps, fear less
+     the being in hell, than out of the fashion. Our most
+     western reformations began with the ignorant mob; and
+     when numbers of them were gained, interest and party
+     views drew in the wise and great. Where both methods
+     can be used, reformations are likely to be more speedy.
+     O that some method could be found to make them lasting!
+     He who discovers that will, in my opinion, deserve
+     more, ten thousand times, than the inventor of the
+     longitude.
+
+Another letter from Franklin to Whitefield is not only distinguished by the
+same missionary accent but also by the deep-seated loyalty to the English
+Crown which was so slow in yielding first to disillusionment and then to
+detestation. Alluding to Whitefield's desire to be the chaplain of an
+American army, he said that he wished that they could be jointly employed
+by the Crown to settle a colony on the Ohio.
+
+     What a glorious Thing [he exclaimed] it would be, to
+     settle in that fine Country a large strong Body of
+     Religious and Industrious People! What a Security to
+     the other Colonies; and Advantage to Britain, by
+     Increasing her People, Territory, Strength and
+     Commerce! Might it not greatly facilitate the
+     Introduction of pure Religion among the Heathen, if we
+     could, by such a Colony, show them a better Sample of
+     Christians than they commonly see in our Indian
+     Traders, the most vicious and abandoned Wretches of our
+     Nation?... Life, like a dramatic Piece, should not only
+     be conducted with Regularity, but methinks it should
+     finish handsomely. Being now in the last Act, I begin
+     to cast about for something fit to end with. Or if mine
+     be more properly compar'd to an Epigram, as some of its
+     few Lines are but barely tolerable, I am very desirous
+     of concluding with a bright Point. In such an
+     Enterprise I could spend the Remainder of Life with
+     Pleasure; and I firmly believe God would bless us with
+     Success, if we undertook it with a sincere Regard to
+     his Honour, the Service of our gracious King, and
+     (which is the same thing) the Publick Good.
+
+From the joint enterprise of settling a colony on the Ohio with Whitefield
+to the joint enterprise of abridging the Book of English Prayer with Lord
+Le Despencer was a far cry, but not too far for Franklin, as we have seen.
+
+Lord Le Despencer, or Sir Francis Dashwood, as he was known, when he was
+one of the jolly monks of Medmenham Abbey, was numbered by Franklin among
+his best friends, and at West Wycombe, the country seat of this nobleman,
+Franklin spent many happy hours. On one occasion, he writes to his son that
+he has passed sixteen days there most agreeably. On another occasion, he
+tells him that he has just come to West Wycombe to spend a few days and
+breathe a little fresh air. "I am in this House," he said, "as much at my
+Ease as if it was my own; and the Gardens are a Paradise." After a journey
+to Oxford, with Lord Le Despencer, he informed the same correspondent that
+the former was very good to him on all occasions and seemed of late very
+desirous of his company. Whatever else the owner of West Wycombe may have
+been, Franklin's letters leave us no room to doubt that he was a capital
+host.
+
+To a very different type of character in every respect belonged James
+Hutton, another dear friend of Franklin. He was a bookseller at the sign of
+the Bible and Sun, west of Temple Bar, and for fifty-five years a zealous
+member of the Moravian Church. His interest in the missionary labors of
+that Church, his benevolence, which knew no sectarian limitations, his
+sense and simplicity of manners won for him an honorable standing even in
+Court Circles. We are told by William Temple Franklin that he was highly
+esteemed by George III. and his consort, and was well known to many of the
+English nobility and men of letters; not being refused admittance to the
+highest ranks even at Buckingham House, though his ardent benevolence
+inclined him greatly to neglect his own dress that he might better feed the
+hungry and cover the naked. A man of that kind always had easy access to
+the heart of Franklin, open though its hospitable portals were to other
+friends of a very different description. In a letter to David Hartley from
+Passy, Franklin speaks of Hutton in these terms: "An old Friend of mine,
+Mr. Hutton, a Chief of the Moravians, who is often at the Queen's Palace,
+and is sometimes spoken to by the King, was over here lately." In a letter
+to Hutton himself from Passy, Franklin applies to him the term, "My dear
+old friend," which with its different variations meant with him the
+high-water mark of intimacy. Hutton is also brought to our sight, though in
+a droll way, in the Craven Street _Gazette_, the mock Chronicle, in which
+Franklin, with a delicacy and richness of humor all his own, pictures No. 7
+Craven Street as a Court, Mrs. Stevenson as a Queen, with lords and ladies
+in her train, and Hutton and himself as rivals for the good graces of Dolly
+Blount, Polly's friend.
+
+     This Morning [the _Gazette_ notes, under date of
+     Tuesday, Sept. 25], my good Lord Hutton call'd at
+     Craven-Street House and enquir'd very respectfully &
+     affectionately concerning the Welfare of the Queen. He
+     then imparted to the big Man (Franklin himself) a Piece
+     of Intelligence important to them both, and but just
+     communicated by Lady Hawkesworth, viz. that the amiable
+     and delectable Companion, Miss D (orothea) B (lount),
+     had made a Vow to marry absolutely him of the two whose
+     Wife should first depart this Life. It is impossible to
+     express the various Agitations of Mind appearing in
+     both their Faces on this Occasion. _Vanity_ at the
+     Preference given them over the rest of Mankind;
+     _Affection_ to their present Wives, _Fear_ of losing
+     them, _Hope_, if they must lose them, to obtain the
+     proposed Comfort; _Jealousy_ of each other in case both
+     Wives should die together, &c. &c. &c.,--all working at
+     the same time jumbled their Features into inexplicable
+     Confusion. They parted at length with Professions &
+     outward Appearances indeed of ever-enduring Friendship,
+     but it was shrewdly suspected that each of them
+     sincerely wished Health & long Life to the other's
+     Wife; & that however long either of these Friends might
+     like to live himself, the other would be very well
+     pleas'd to survive him.
+
+Hutton was one of the simple and warm-hearted friends of Franklin who
+endeavored by their individual exertions to accelerate the restoration of
+peace between Great Britain and America, and, like all of Franklin's
+English friends, who kept up a correspondence with him, while the war was
+going on, he had to read some scathing fulminations against England.
+
+     You have lost by this mad War [Franklin said in one
+     letter to Hutton], and the Barbarity with which it has
+     been carried on, not only the Government and Commerce
+     of America, and the public Revenues and private Wealth
+     arising from that Commerce, but what is more, you have
+     lost the Esteem, Respect, Friendship, and Affection of
+     all that great and growing People, who consider you at
+     present, and whose Posterity will consider you, as the
+     worst and wickedest Nation upon Earth.
+
+Twelve days later, Franklin annexed a postscript to this letter which must
+have been an even severer trial to Hutton's equanimity than the letter
+itself.
+
+     I abominate with you [he said], all Murder, and I may
+     add, that the Slaughter of Men in an unjust Cause is
+     nothing less than Murder; I therefore never think of
+     your present Ministers and their Abettors, but with the
+     Image strongly painted in my View, of their Hands, red,
+     wet, and dropping with the Blood of my Countrymen,
+     Friends, and Relations.
+
+Franklin's opinion of the King was imparted to Hutton in terms fully as
+indignant. The letter, in which this was done, was prompted by a letter
+from Hutton to a third person giving an account of some abominable murders
+inflicted by American frontiersmen upon the poor Moravian Indians. This
+time it was not English, but American hands that were red with blood, but
+Franklin was resourceful enough all the same to fix the responsibility for
+the murders by a train of indirect reasoning on the King. Why, he asked,
+had a single man in England, who happened to love blood and to hate
+Americans, been permitted to gratify that bad temper by hiring German
+murderers, and joining them with his own to destroy, in a continued course
+of bloody years, near 100,000 human creatures, many of them possessed of
+useful talents, virtues and abilities to which he had no pretension! It was
+he who had furnished the savages with hatchets and scalping knives, and
+engaged them to fall upon defenceless American farmers, and murder them
+with their wives and children, paying for their scalps, of which the
+account kept in America already amounted, he had heard, to near two
+thousand. Perhaps, the people of the frontiers, he declared, exasperated by
+the cruelties of the Indians, had been induced to kill all Indians that
+fell into their hands without distinction; so that even these horrid
+murders of the poor Moravians might be laid to the King's charge.
+
+     And yet [said Franklin] this Man lives, enjoys all the
+     good Things this World can afford, and is surrounded by
+     Flatterers, who keep even his Conscience quiet by
+     telling him he is the best of Princes! I wonder at
+     this, but I can not therefore part with the comfortable
+     Belief of a Divine Providence; and the more I see the
+     Impossibility, from the number & extent of his Crimes,
+     of giving equivalent Punishment to a wicked Man in this
+     Life, the more I am convinc'd of a future State, in
+     which all that here appears to be wrong shall be set
+     right, all that is crooked made straight. In this Faith
+     let you & I, my dear Friend, comfort ourselves; it is
+     the only Comfort, in the present dark Scene of Things,
+     that is allowed us.
+
+The friendship between Franklin and David Hartley had to endure the
+concussion of some knocks even harder than these. Hartley was the son of
+David Hartley, the philosopher, from whom Hartley Coleridge, the poet,
+derived his name. He was a B. A. of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and a fellow of
+Merton College, and represented Hull in Parliament from 1774 to 1780 and
+from 1782 to 1784. An adherent of Lord Rockingham, and a warm friend of
+Franklin, he was naturally enough selected as the British plenipotentiary
+to assist in drawing up the treaty of peace between Great Britain and
+America. Before this time, however, he had been engaged in a protracted
+correspondence with Franklin, marked by a degree of liberality and humane
+feeling on his part which did him great honor. To alleviate the condition
+of American prisoners in England, to promote the exchange of these
+prisoners and British prisoners in America, to bring about a reunion
+between Great Britain and her colonies, and, that failing, a separation
+attended by as little mutual animosity as possible, were the generous
+objects to which his efforts were addressed. In pursuing these objects, he
+must have found it difficult at times to submit meekly to some of the
+ireful invective against his King, Parliament and People, which punctuates
+Franklin's solicitation of his mediatory offices, in behalf of American
+prisoners, and pleas for a peace between Great Britain and America,
+attended by really generous concessions upon the part of Great Britain. The
+year after his arrival in France as our minister, Franklin wrote to
+Hartley:
+
+     As to our submitting to the government of Great
+     Britain, it is vain to think of it. She has given us,
+     by her numberless barbarities in the prosecution of the
+     war, and in the treatment of prisoners, by her malice
+     in bribing slaves to murder their masters, and savages
+     to massacre the families of farmers, with her baseness
+     in rewarding the unfaithfulness of servants, and
+     debauching the virtue of honest seamen, intrusted with
+     our property, so deep an impression of her depravity,
+     that we never again can trust her in the management of
+     our affairs and interests.
+
+As the war went on, leaving its trail of blood and increasing hatred behind
+it, his language at times becomes even more intense. About a year and a
+half later, he wrote to Hartley, "We know that your King hates Whigs and
+Presbyterians; that he thirsts for our Blood, of which he has already drunk
+large Draughts; that his servile unprincipled Ministers are ready to
+execute the Wickedest of his Orders, and his venal Parliament equally ready
+to vote them just." This outburst was evoked by what he conceived to be a
+cunning effort of the English Ministry to divide America and her French
+ally. The next outburst was provoked by the same cause. "The Truth is," he
+said, "we have no kind of Faith in your Government, which appears to us as
+insidious and deceitful as it is unjust and cruel; its Character is that of
+the Spider in Thomson,
+
+     "Cunning and fierce,
+     Mixture abhorr'd!!"
+
+Finally, all the hurrying feelings aroused in him at times by what he
+called "bloody and insatiable Malice and Wickedness" became condensed in an
+abstract term so full of passion as "devilism." Franklin was not the man to
+take hold of the handles of a plough and then turn back. In his
+correspondence with Hartley, as with his other English friends, after he
+entered upon his mission to France, is the clearest recognition of the
+fact, to use his own robust figure of speech, that England had lost limbs
+which would never grow again, and his unwavering resolution to give his
+assent to nothing less than the complete independence of the Colonies. For
+him, for his country, there were never more to be any connecting links
+between Great Britain and America except those of mere international good
+will and commercial comity. Upon propositions of every sort, looking to a
+reconciliation between the two lands, he lingered solely for the purpose of
+obtaining for America, when peace finally came, as large a measure of
+territorial aggrandizement as he could possibly secure. Of a conciliatory
+bill, of which Hartley sent him a copy, he said, "It might have erected a
+Wall of Brass round England, if such a Measure had been adopted, when Fryar
+Bacon's brazen Head cried out, TIME IS! But the wisdom of it was not seen,
+till after the fatal Cry of TIME'S PAST!"
+
+It was the almost pathetic desire of such correspondents of Franklin as
+Hartley to save some sort of organic tie between the two countries from the
+wreckage wrought by the fatal policy of the British Ministry, which makes
+it difficult for us to read Franklin's French letters to men like Hutton
+and Hartley without feeling that the harsh terms, which he often employed
+in these letters about the English King, Parliament and People, were hardly
+fair to that courageous and high-minded band of English patriots, who made
+the American cause almost as much theirs as his own, and stopped only short
+of treason in the assertion of their belief that the immemorial liberties
+of England as well as the liberties of America were staked upon the issue
+of the American contest. It was the extreme outspoken dissatisfaction, with
+which English Whigs regarded the effort of the British Ministry to force
+its own violent and technical views of colonial policy upon America, that
+made it possible for Franklin to write to Englishmen as he did about their
+government without exciting either frank or sullen resentment. But there
+was undoubtedly still another reason with which politics had nothing to do.
+These Whigs not only respected the manly candor, with which Franklin
+expressed convictions that they knew had been formed by a singularly
+enlightened, generous and sober mind, once devotedly attached by the
+strongest ties of tradition and affection to the colonial connection
+between Great Britain and America, but they had been too intimate with him
+personally not to be aware that it was not in his nature to harbor any real
+or lasting malignity of feeling towards anyone. And that this view of his
+character was correct is shown by more than one feature of his
+correspondence with Hartley. In a letter to Hartley, he said that, when
+Hartley's nation was hiring all the cutthroats it could collect of all
+countries and colors to destroy the Americans, it was hard to persuade the
+Americans not to ask, or accept of, aid from any country that might be
+prevailed with to grant it, and this from the hope that, though the British
+then thirsted for their blood, and pursued them with fire and sword, they
+might in some future time treat them kindly. But the outbreak does not seem
+so fierce when he goes on to say, "America has been _forc'd_ and _driven_
+into the Arms of France. She was a dutiful and virtuous Daughter. A cruel
+Mother-in-law turn'd her out of Doors, defam'd her, and sought her Life.
+All the World knows her Innocence, and takes her part; and her Friends hope
+soon to see her honorably married." One of the peculiarities of that kindly
+and facetious nature was that its sense of humor would at times work its
+way even between the lines of formal state papers; to say nothing of
+letters to a familiar friend on the conduct of an enemy. Nor could Hartley
+doubt that the old well-springs of mirth and loving kindness were as full
+as ever to overflowing, when, in response to a letter from him to Franklin,
+containing the Scotch ballad, _Auld Robin Gray_, he received this lively
+application of the ballad to existing conditions:
+
+     I cannot make an entire application of it to present
+     Circumstances; but, taking it in Parts, and changing
+     Persons, some of it is extremely _apropos_. First Jenie
+     may be supposed Old England, and Jamie, America. Jenie
+     laments the loss of Jamie, and recollects with Pain his
+     Love for her, his Industry in Business to promote her
+     Wealth and Welfare, and her own Ingratitude.
+
+        "Young Jamie loved me weel,
+        And sought me for his Bride,
+        But saving ane Crown,
+        He had naithing beside,
+
+    To make that Crown a Pound, my Jamie gang'd to Sea,
+    And the Crown and the Pound were all for me."
+
+     Her grief for this Separation is expressed very
+     pathetically.
+
+
+        "The ship was a Wrack,
+        Why did na Jennie die;
+        O why was I spared
+        To cry, Wae is me!"
+
+     There is no Doubt but that honest Jamie had still so
+     much Love for her as to Pity her in his Heart, tho' he
+     might, at the same time, be not a little angry with
+     her.
+
+     Towards the Conclusion, we must change the Persons, and
+     let Jamie be old England, Jennie, America, and old
+     Robin Gray, the Kingdom of France. Then honest Jenie,
+     having made a Treaty of Marriage with Gray, expresses
+     her firm Resolution of Fidelity, in a manner that does
+     Honour to her good Sense, and her Virtue.
+
+        "I may not think of Jamie,
+        For that would be a Sin,
+        But I maun do my best,
+        A gude wife to be;
+        For auld Robin Gray
+        Is very kind to me."
+
+How was it possible for Hartley to remain angry with a man like this, even
+if he was told by him in another letter that, though there could be but few
+things, in which he would venture to disobey the orders of Congress, he
+would, nevertheless, instantly renounce the commission that he held from
+it, and banish himself forever from so infamous a country as America, if
+Congress were to instruct him to seek a truce of ten years with Great
+Britain, with the stipulation that America was not to assist France during
+that time, if the war between Great Britain and France continued? This was
+trying, though not so trying perhaps as his statement in still another
+letter to Hartley that he thought of his reasonings to show that, if France
+should require of America something unreasonable, America would not be
+obliged by the treaty between them to continue the war as her ally, what
+he supposed an honest woman would think, if a gallant should entertain her
+with suppositions of cases in which infidelity to her husband would be
+justifiable. Nor was the merry adaptation of the ballad of _Auld Robin
+Gray_ the only thing of the kind that tended to relieve the tension of the
+reproaches heaped by Franklin upon Great Britain in his letters to Hartley.
+In the same letter, in which he depicts the King as thirsty for still
+further draughts of American blood, and repels with apparently hot wrath
+the suggestion of Hartley that the alliance between France and America was
+the greatest stumbling-block in the way of peace between Great Britain and
+France, he tells Hartley that the proposition to separate France and
+America puts him in mind of the comic farce entitled _God-send, or The
+Wreckers_. It was not hard, of course, for him to be put in mind of
+something conceived by his own mind. The farce opens with this stage
+introduction: (A Ship riding at anchor in a great Storm. A Lee Shore full
+of Rocks, and lin'd with people, furnish'd with Axes & Carriages to cut up
+Wrecks, knock the Sailors on the Head, and carry off the Plunder; according
+to Custom.) Then, after a lively dialogue between the wreckers, who have
+grown impatient with the staunch way in which the ship is riding out the
+storm, they put off in a boat in the hope of luring her to the shore, and
+come under her stern, and try to persuade her captain, in the course of
+another lively dialogue, that his cable is a damned rotten French cable,
+and will part of itself in half an hour; only to be told by the captain
+that they are rogues, and offer nothing but treachery and mischief, and
+that his cable is good and strong, and would hold long enough to balk their
+projects. The dialogue ends with the exclamation by the spokesman of the
+wreckers, "Come, my Lads, let's be gone. This Fellow is not so great a Fool
+as we took him to be."
+
+Familiar affection glistens in every line of the letters from Franklin to
+George Whatley, and one of them is suffused with the genial warmth of his
+best social hours. After some strictures on an epitaph by Pope, he said in
+this letter:
+
+     I like better the concluding Sentiment in the old Song,
+     call'd _The Old Man's Wish_, wherein, after wishing for
+     a warm house in a country Town, an easy Horse, some
+     good old authors, ingenious and cheerful Companions, a
+     Pudding on Sundays, with stout Ale, and a bottle of
+     Burgundy, &c., &c., in separate Stanzas, each ending
+     with this burthen,
+
+    "May I govern my Passions with an absolute sway,
+    Grow wiser and better as my Strength wears away,
+    Without Gout or Stone, by a gentle Decay";
+
+     he adds,
+
+    "With a courage undaunted may I face my last day,
+    And, when I am gone, may the better Sort say,
+    'In the Morning when Sober, in the Evening when mellow,
+    He's gone, and has not left behind him his Fellow;
+    For he governed his Passions, &c.'"
+
+     But what signifies our Wishing? Things happen, after
+     all, as they will happen. I have sung that _wishing
+     Song_ a thousand times, when I was young, and now find,
+     at Four-score, that the three Contraries have befallen
+     me, being subject to the Gout and the Stone, and not
+     being yet Master of all my Passions. Like the proud
+     Girl in my Country, who wished and resolv'd not to
+     marry a Parson, nor a Presbyterian, nor an Irishman;
+     and at length found herself married to an Irish
+     Presbyterian Parson.
+
+In the course of one of the summer rambles, which he took every year for
+twenty years, for health and recreation, Franklin twice visited Scotland,
+once in 1759, and once in 1771. As the result of civilities received by him
+in that country at the hands of Sir Alexander Dick, the President of the
+College of Physicians at Edinburgh, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, a Judge of
+the Court of Session, and author of _The Elements of Criticism_ and _The
+Sketches of the History of Man_, he became a fast friend of these two
+eminent men. After completing with his son a tour of nearly 1500 miles in
+1759, he wrote to Sir Alexander Dick, whose guests they had been for a
+time, that the many civilities, favors and kindnesses heaped upon them,
+while they were in Scotland, had made the most lasting impression upon
+their minds, and endeared that country to them beyond expression. In the
+same letter, he asked Sir Alexander to assure Lady Dick that he had great
+faith in her parting prayers that the purse she honored him with would
+never be quite empty. His letters to Lord Kames testified in even stronger
+terms to the happy hours that he had spent in Scotland on this visit.
+
+     How unfortunate I was [he wrote to him] that I did not
+     press you and Lady Kames more strongly to favor us with
+     your company farther. How much more agreeable would our
+     journey have been, if we could have enjoyed you as far
+     as York. We could have beguiled the way, by discoursing
+     of a thousand things, that now we may never have an
+     opportunity of considering together; for conversation
+     warms the mind, enlivens the imagination, and is
+     continually starting fresh game, that is immediately
+     pursued and taken, and which would never have occurred
+     in the duller intercourse of epistolary correspondence.
+     So that whenever I reflect on the great pleasure and
+     advantage I received from the free communication of
+     sentiment, in the conversations we had at Kames, and in
+     the agreeable little rides to the Tweed side, I shall
+     forever regret our premature parting.
+
+Even more fervid was the conclusion of this letter:
+
+     Our conversation till we came to York, was chiefly a
+     recollection of what we had seen and heard, the
+     pleasure we had enjoyed, and the kindness we had
+     received in Scotland, and how far that country had
+     exceeded our expectations. On the whole, I must say, I
+     think the time we spent there, was six weeks of the
+     _densest_ happiness I have met with in any part of my
+     life: and the agreeable and instructive society we
+     found there in such plenty, has left so pleasing an
+     impression on my memory, that did not strong connexions
+     draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the
+     country I should choose to spend the remainder of my
+     days in.
+
+In a later letter to Lord Kames, he returns to the same pleasing field of
+association.
+
+     Your invitation to make another jaunt to Scotland, and
+     offer to meet us half way _en famille_, was extremely
+     obliging. Certainly I never spent my time anywhere more
+     agreeably, nor have I been in any place, where the
+     inhabitants and their conversation left such lastingly
+     pleasing impressions on my mind, accompanied with the
+     strongest inclination once more to visit that
+     hospitable, friendly, and sensible people.
+
+When we recall Franklin's distaste for theology and metaphysics, the humor
+that ever lurked about his lips, and Sydney Smith's famous observation that
+it requires a surgical operation to get a joke into a Scotchman's head, we
+may well experience a sensation of momentary surprise when we read these
+earnest tributes to the charm of Scotch social conditions in 1759--a sense
+of surprise increased by the fact that, in the _Autobiography_, Franklin
+ends a little dissertation on the odious nature of disputation with these
+words: "Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it,
+except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at
+Edinborough." But all such sensations of surprise pass away when we
+remember that manly simplicity, practical sagacity, a spirit of enterprise
+and a love of learning, which no discouragements can chill, were also
+Scotch characteristics that Franklin shared with Scotchmen.
+
+When Franklin returned in 1771 to the "odious-smells, barbarous sounds, bad
+suppers, excellent hearts and most enlightened understandings," amid which
+Sydney Smith, with his exaggerated humor, afterwards pictured himself as
+dwelling when he was a resident of Edinburgh, William Franklin did not
+accompany him.
+
+     In Scotland [Franklin wrote to his son after this
+     second visit] I spent 5 Days with Lord Kaims at his
+     Seat, Blair Drummond near Stirling, two or three Days
+     at Glasgow, two Days at Carron Iron Works, and the rest
+     of the Month in and about Edinburgh, lodging at David
+     Hume's, who entertain'd me with the greatest Kindness
+     and Hospitality, as did Lord Kaims & his Lady. All our
+     old Acquaintance there, Sir Alex'r Dick and Lady, Mr.
+     McGowan, Drs. Robertson, Cullen, Black, Ferguson,
+     Russel, and others, enquired affectionately of your
+     Welfare. I was out three Months, and the Journey was
+     evidently of great service to my Health.
+
+The letters from Franklin to Lord Kames cover a great variety of topics;
+and to his observations on some of these topics, which were of a political
+or scientific nature, we shall return in other connections. One letter was
+written, when Franklin was on the eve of sailing from Portsmouth to America
+in 1762, and that the moment of embarkation upon the perilous seas of that
+time was a solemn one is manifest enough in its opening statements:
+
+
+     MY DEAR LORD,
+
+     I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to
+     America, but cannot leave this happy island and my
+     friends in it, without extreme regret, though I am
+     going to a country and a people that I love. I am going
+     from the old world to the new; and I fancy I feel like
+     those, who are leaving this world for the next: grief
+     at the parting; fear of the passage; hope of the
+     future.
+
+But never were votive chaplets woven and gratefully suspended by a voyager
+after a more prosperous passage than this. Franklin left England in
+company with ten sail of merchant ships, under the convoy of a man-of-war,
+touched at the heavenly Madeira Islands, and was then caught up in the
+benign trade winds, and borne safely to the American coast.
+
+     The weather was so favourable [he stated in another
+     letter to Lord Kames] that there were few days in which
+     we could not visit from ship to ship, dining with each
+     other, and on board of the man-of-war; which made the
+     time pass agreeably, much more so than when one goes in
+     a single ship; for this was like travelling in a moving
+     village, with all one's neighbours about one.
+
+Among the things upon which Franklin prided himself was the fact that he
+shaved himself, and in one of his letters to Lord Kames this trivial
+circumstance is brought to our notice in these wise words:
+
+     I have long been of an opinion similar to that you
+     express, and think happiness consists more in small
+     conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in
+     great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to
+     a man in the course of his life. Thus I reckon it among
+     my felicities, that I can set my own razor, and shave
+     myself perfectly well; in which I have a daily
+     pleasure, and avoid the uneasiness one is sometimes
+     obliged to suffer from the dirty fingers or bad breath
+     of a slovenly barber.
+
+There was also a link of friendship between Franklin and David Hume. In a
+letter to Strahan, Franklin, when on his visit to Scotland in 1771, writes
+to him that Hume, agreeably to the precepts of the Gospel, had received the
+stranger, and that he was then living with him at his house in the New Town
+at Edinburgh most happily. In another letter, a week or so later, he
+informed Strahan, after a short excursion from Edinburgh, that he was well
+and again under the hospitable roof of the good Samaritan. Hume was too
+much of a bigoted Tory not to snarl a little at Franklin's "factious"
+spirit, when the Revolution was coming on, but, when Franklin was leaving
+England in 1762, he paid him this handsome compliment:
+
+     I am very sorry, that you intend soon to leave our
+     hemisphere. America has sent us many good things, gold,
+     silver, sugar, indigo, &c; but you are the first
+     philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters
+     for whom we are beholden to her. It is our own fault,
+     that we have not kept him; whence it appears, that we
+     do not agree with Solomon, that wisdom is above gold;
+     for we take care never to send back an ounce of the
+     latter, which we once lay our fingers upon.
+
+It was a dangerous thing to enter into a competition of compliments with
+Franklin, as his reply to this letter showed.
+
+     Your compliment of _gold_ and _wisdom_ [he said] is
+     very obliging to me, but a little injurious to your
+     country. The various value of everything in every part
+     of this world arises, you know, from the various
+     proportions of the quantity to the demand. We are told,
+     that gold and silver in Solomon's time were so plenty,
+     as to be of no more value in his country than the
+     stones in the street. You have here at present just
+     such a plenty of wisdom. Your people are, therefore,
+     not to be censured for desiring no more among them than
+     they have; and if I have _any_, I should certainly
+     carry it where, from its scarcity, it may probably come
+     to a better market.
+
+This was certainly a ponderous compliment, but it does not seem quite so
+much so, when read after the alleviating story which immediately preceded
+it. Referring to a ridiculous dispute, mentioned by his correspondent, he
+said:
+
+     Judges in their decisions often use precedents. I have
+     somewhere met with one, that is what the lawyers call a
+     _case in point_. The Church people and the Puritans in
+     a country town had once a bitter contention concerning
+     the erecting of a Maypole, which the former desired and
+     the latter opposed. Each party endeavoured to
+     strengthen itself by obtaining the authority of the
+     mayor, directing or forbidding a Maypole. He heard
+     their altercation with great patience, and then gravely
+     determined thus; "You, that are for having no Maypole,
+     shall have no Maypole; and you, that are for having a
+     Maypole, shall have a Maypole. Get about your business,
+     and let me hear no more of this quarrel."
+
+Other Scotch friends of Franklin were William Alexander, a connection of
+Lord Stirling, and his two daughters, one of whom, Mariamne, became the
+wife of Franklin's nephew, Jonathan Williams. A letter from Alexander to
+Franklin has its value because of the knowledge that it affords to us of
+the personal bearing of Arthur Lee who was, we shall see, jealous, haughty
+and sensitive enough to curdle even the sweet milk of Franklin's amiable
+nature. "I see," wrote Alexander, "you have made my old friend Lee a
+minister at Madrid, I think he has very much the manners of a Spaniard when
+he is not angry." It was Alexander also whose careful mercantile habits
+impelled him to write to Franklin, when he observed the disorder in which
+the latter kept his papers at Passy, this word of caution:
+
+     Will you forgive me my Dear Sir for noticing, that your
+     Papers seem to me to lye a little loosely about your
+     hands--you are to consider yourself as surrounded by
+     spies and amongst people who can make a cable from a
+     thread; would not a spare half hour per day enable your
+     son to arrange all your papers, useless or not, so that
+     you could come at them sooner, and not one be visible
+     to a prying eye.
+
+The only intimate friend, we believe, that Franklin had in Ireland was Sir
+Edward Newenham, a member of the Irish Parliament, whose sympathy with the
+American cause was so extreme that he appeared in his seat in deep
+mourning when the news of General Montgomery's death reached Ireland.
+Unfortunately, of the many letters, that Franklin wrote to him, only two or
+three, of comparatively meagre interest, survive. But of Ireland itself we
+have some graphic details in his letters to other persons. In one to Thomas
+Cushing, he says of the Irish, after a tour of the island with his friend,
+Richard Jackson, "There are many brave Spirits among them. The Gentry are a
+very sensible, polite, friendly and handsome People. Their Parliament makes
+a most respectable Figure, with a number of very good Speakers in both
+Parties, and able Men of Business." He then tells Cushing in modest terms
+how, when he was on his way to the gallery in the Parliament House at
+Dublin, the whole assembly, upon being informed by the Speaker that there
+was in town an American gentleman of distinguished character and merit, who
+was a member or delegate of some of the Parliaments in America, by a loud,
+unanimous expression of its will voted to admit him to the privileges of
+the floor; whereupon two members came to him without the bar, where he was
+standing, led him in and placed him very honorably.
+
+Other friends of Franklin there were whom it is difficult to classify
+either as Englishmen or Americans, such as General Horatio Gates and
+General Charles Lee, who were born in England but became celebrated in
+America, and Benjamin West, the painter, who was born in America, but
+passed his mature life in England. That Franklin was on very friendly
+relations with Gates there can be no doubt, for in one of his letters to
+him he calls him his "Dear old friend," and that was a term never applied
+by him to any but his intimates. Nor can there be much doubt as to what it
+was that brought and kept Franklin and Gates together as friends. It was
+the game to which Franklin was so much addicted that he even expounded its
+morals in an essay--chess. "When," he wrote to Gates from Passy, "shall we
+meet again in cheerful converse, talk over our adventures, and finish with
+a quiet game of chess?" And on the same day that he addressed to Washington
+the noble letter, declaring that, if the latter were to come to Europe, he
+would know and enjoy what posterity would say of Washington, he wrote to
+Gates, "May God give us soon a good Peace, and bring you and I (_sic_)
+together again over a Chess board, where we may have Battles without
+Bloodshed."
+
+How an eccentric and perfidious man like General Charles Lee, whose temper
+alone was so repugnant to Franklin's dislike of disputation as to win for
+him the nickname of "Boiling Water" from the Indians, could ever have
+passed himself off with Franklin as genuine coin is hard to understand, but
+he appears to have done so. "Yours most affectionately," is the manner in
+which one of Franklin's letters to him ends. In another letter to Lee,
+Franklin gravely sums up in formal numerical sequence his reasons for
+thinking that bows and arrows were good weapons not wisely laid aside. The
+idea is one so little in harmony with his practical turn of mind, and is
+reasoned out so elaborately, that we form a shrewd suspicion as we read
+that this was after all but his humorous way of replying to his erratic
+friend's suggestion that the use of pikes by the American Army might not be
+a bad thing.
+
+A very different kind of friend was Benjamin West. It was he that Franklin
+had in mind when he wrote to Polly Stevenson in 1763, "After the first
+Cares for the Necessaries of Life are over, we shall come to think of the
+Embellishments. Already some of our young Geniuses begin to lisp Attempts
+at Painting, Poetry, and Musick. We have a young Painter now studying at
+Rome." Twenty years later, the lisping attempts of America at painting had
+become so distinctly articulate, and the young painter, who was studying
+at Rome, had become so famous, that Franklin could write to Jan Ingenhousz,
+"In England at present, the best History Painter, West; the best Portrait
+Painter, Copley, and the best Landscape Painter, Taylor, at Bath, are all
+Americans." Benjamin West, and his wife, as Elizabeth Shewell, were friends
+of Franklin and Deborah before West left his native Pennsylvania for
+Europe; and the friendship between the artist and his wife and Franklin was
+kept alive by affectionate intercourse in England. For one of West's sons
+Franklin became godfather. "It gave me great Pleasure," he said in a letter
+to West, referring to a letter from West to him, "as it informed me of the
+Welfare of a Family I so much esteem and love, and that my Godson is a
+promising Boy." The letter concludes with loving words for the godson and
+Raphael, West's oldest son, and "Betsey," West's wife.
+
+We have by no means taken a complete census of Franklin's American and
+British friends. For instance, in a letter to Doctor Cooper from London, he
+refers to a Mr. Mead, first Commissioner of the Customs in England, whom we
+have not mentioned, as a particular and intimate friend of his; to say
+nothing of other persons with whom his intercourse was very friendly but
+either too colorless to arrest our attention in reading his correspondence,
+or to even bring them up in his correspondence at all. But we have
+marshalled quite enough of these friends before the eye of the reader, we
+are sure, to satisfy him that few human beings ever had such a wealth of
+affection heaped on them as Franklin.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[34] "Mrs. Shipley and her daughter Kitty, in their passion for you rival
+Georgiana." Letter from Jonathan Shipley to Franklin, Nov. 27, 1785.
+
+[35] To a series of experiments, conducted by Sir John Pringle, we owe our
+knowledge of the fact that mosquito hawks are so whimsically constituted
+that they live longer with their heads off than on. One of these
+decapitated moths was so tenacious of his existence as to survive for 174
+days.
+
+[36] A letter from Franklin to Francis Maseres, dated Passy, June 26, 1785,
+suggests an additional reason why the antipathy of the American Whigs to
+the American loyalists was so unrelenting. "The war against us was begun by
+a general act of Parliament, declaring all our estates confiscated; and
+probably one great motive to the loyalty of the royalists was the hope of
+sharing in these confiscations. They have played a deep game, staking their
+estates against ours; and they have been unsuccessful. But it is a surer
+game, since they had promises to rely on from your government, of
+indemnification in case of loss; and I see your Parliament is about to
+fulfil those Promises. To this I have no objection, because, though still
+our enemies, they are men; they are in necessity; and I think even a hired
+assassin has a right to his pay from his employer."
+
+[37] The business of Whitefoord as a wine-merchant was carried on at No. 8
+Craven Street, and he enjoyed a considerable reputation for wit in his
+time. He served as Secretary to the Commission that settled the terms of
+peace with the United States. He was, Burke thought, a mere _diseur de bons
+mots_. Goldsmith deemed him of sufficient importance to make him the
+subject of an epitaph intended to be worked into the Retaliation, and
+reading as follows:
+
+    "Here Whitefoord reclines, deny it who can;
+    Tho' he merrily lived, he is now a grave man.
+    What pity, alas! that so lib'ral a mind
+    Should so long be to Newspaper Essays confined!
+    Who perhaps to the summit of science might soar,
+    Yet content if the table he set in a roar;
+    Whose talents to fit any station were fit,
+    Yet happy if Woodfall confessed him a wit."
+
+His intimacy with Franklin, Whitefoord said on one occasion, had been the
+"pride and happiness" of his life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Franklin's French Friends
+
+
+To the host of friends mentioned above, numerous as it was, another great
+addition was to be made when Franklin became one of our envoys to France.
+In the various Colonies of America, so unlike each other in many respects,
+in England, in Scotland, his liberal instincts and quick sympathies ran out
+into new social forms almost with the fluid ease of the melted tallow which
+he had poured, in his boyhood, into his father's candle moulds; but of all
+the impressions that he ever derived from any society, that which was made
+upon him by French society certifies most strikingly to the wonderful
+plasticity of his nature, under the pressure of new conditions. So
+permeated did he--one of the truest progenitors of distinctively American
+ideas and attributes, and one of the truest exponents of the robust
+Anglo-Saxon character--become with the genius of the French People that a
+Frenchman, Henri Martin, the historian, has declared that he was "of a mind
+altogether French in its grace and elasticity."
+
+There was a time, of course, when Franklin, apart from the inveteracy of
+the old English prejudice, which believed that upon every pair of English
+legs marched three Frenchmen, had no good blood for the French because of
+the agony in which they had for so many years, with the aid of their savage
+friends, kept the colonial frontier. "I fancy that intriguing nation would
+like very well to meddle on occasion, and blow up the coals between Britain
+and her colonies; but I hope we shall give them no opportunity." This was
+his quiet comment even as late as 1767 in a letter to William Franklin upon
+the sedulous attentions recently paid to him by Monsieur Durand, the French
+plenipotentiary in London, whose masters were fully awake to the fact that
+the quarrel between Great Britain and her Colonies might be a pretty one
+from the point of view of French interests, and that in duels it is not the
+pistols but the seconds that kill. But this was politics. Long before
+Franklin crossed the Atlantic on his French mission, he had felt, during
+his visits to France in 1767 and 1769, the bewitching influence of social
+conditions perpetually enlivened and refreshed by the vivacity and
+inventive resource which were such conspicuous features of his own
+character. After his return from France in 1767, he wrote to D'Alibard:
+"The Time I spent in Paris, and in the improving Conversation and agreeable
+Society of so many learned and ingenious Men, seems now to me like a
+pleasing Dream, from which I was sorry to be awaked by finding myself again
+at London." These agreeable impressions were confirmed by his return to
+France in 1769. After stating in a letter to Dupont de Nemours in the
+succeeding year that he expected to return to America in the ensuing
+summer, he exclaimed, "Would to God I could take with me Messrs. Dupont, du
+Bourg, and some other French Friends with their good Ladies! I might then,
+by mixing them with my Friends in Philadelphia, form a little happy Society
+that would prevent my ever wishing again to visit Europe."
+
+It was, therefore, to no entirely novel social conditions that Franklin was
+introduced when he found himself again in France in 1776. At any rate, no
+chameleon was ever quicker to absorb the color of his latest background.
+As time elapsed, nothing but his inability to write and speak French with
+the facility of a native-born Frenchman separated him in a social sense
+from the mass of French men and women, by whom he was admired, courted and
+flattered almost from the day that he set foot in France until the day that
+he was conveyed in one of the Queen's litters to the coast on his return to
+America. How far this assimilation was the deliberate achievement of a wise
+man, who never failed to act upon the principle that the best way of
+managing men is to secure their good will first, how far but the
+unconscious self-adjustment of a pliable disposition it is impossible to
+say. But there can be no doubt about the amazing sympathy with which
+Franklin entered into the social life of the French people. Beneath the
+gay, pleasure-loving exterior that he presented to French society, there
+was always the thought of that land over-sea, so singularly blessed by
+Providence with material comfort and equality of fortune, with the general
+diffusion of education and enlightenment, and with political institutions
+bound to the past only by the wisdom of experience. Always beneath that
+exterior, too, was a glowing resentment of the wrongs that England had
+inflicted upon America, an enthusiastic sense of the "glorious cause" in
+which America was engaged, and a resolution as fixed as the eye of Nemesis
+that no hand but the hand of America itself should fill out the outlines of
+the imperial destiny, in which he had once been so eagerly, even
+pathetically, desirous that England should share. But these were thoughts
+and purposes reserved for the hours of business, or of confidential
+intercourse with his American compatriots, or for such moments as the one
+when he heard of the fall of Philadelphia and the surrender of Burgoyne. In
+his purely social relations with the French People, he preserved only
+enough of his republican ideas, dress and manners to give a certain degree
+of piquancy to his _ensemble_.
+
+He adopted French usages and customs; he composed exquisite little stories
+and dialogues in the French manner, and, old as he was, he made love like a
+French _galant_. "As it is always fair Weather in our Parlours, it is at
+Paris always Peace," he wrote to the Chevalier de la Luzerne, and this
+remark comes home to us with full force when we remember with what
+unrestrained gaiety of heart, notwithstanding the shudder sent through him
+at times by the American War, he enjoyed the social life of Paris. Long
+before he left France, he had learnt to love the country and its people
+with a sincere, fervent attachment. After saying in a letter to Josiah
+Quincy, that the French had certainly advanced in politeness and civility
+many degrees beyond the English, he paid them this compliment:
+
+     I find them here a most amiable Nation to live with.
+     The Spaniards are by common Opinion suppos'd to be
+     cruel, the English proud, the Scotch insolent, the
+     Dutch Avaricious, &c., but I think the French have no
+     national Vice ascrib'd to them. They have some
+     Frivolities, but they are harmless. To dress their
+     Heads so that a Hat cannot be put on them, and then
+     wear their Hats under their Arms, and to fill their
+     Noses with Tobacco, may be called Follies, perhaps, but
+     they are not Vices. They are only the effects of the
+     tyranny of Custom. In short, there is nothing wanting
+     in the Character of a Frenchman, that belongs to that
+     of an agreeable and worthy Man. There are only some
+     Trifles surplus, or which might be spared.
+
+These, however, were but frigid words in comparison with those subsequently
+employed by him in relation to a country, where, to use his own language,
+everybody strove to make him happy. "The French are an amiable People to
+live with," he told his old friend, Captain Nathaniel Falconer, "They love
+me, & I love them." In a later letter to William Franklin, he said, "I am
+here among a People that love and respect me, a most amiable Nation to
+live with; and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; for my Friends in
+America are dying off, one after another, and I have been so long abroad,
+that I should now be almost a Stranger in my own Country."
+
+Nor did the love for France that he took back with him to the United States
+grow at all fainter with absence and the flow of time. To the Duc de la
+Rochefoucauld he wrote from Philadelphia, "I love France, I have 1000
+Reasons for doing so: And whatever promotes or impedes her Happiness
+affects me as if she were my Mother." To Madame Lavoisier he used terms
+that communicate to us an even more vivid conception of the ambrosial years
+that he had passed in France.
+
+     These [he said, referring to his good fortune in his
+     old age in its different aspects] are the blessings of
+     God, and depend on his continued goodness; yet all do
+     not make me forget Paris, and the nine years' happiness
+     I enjoyed there, in the sweet society of a people whose
+     conversation is instructive, whose manners are highly
+     pleasing, and who, above all the nations of the world,
+     have, in the greatest perfection, the art of making
+     themselves beloved by strangers. And now, even in my
+     sleep, I find, that the scenes of all my pleasant
+     dreams are laid in that city, or in its
+     neighbourhood.[38]
+
+Mingled with these pleasant dreams, it is safe to say were some of the
+lively and charming women to whose embraces he submitted, if his sister
+Jane was not misinformed, in a spirit quite remote from that of the rigors
+of penance.
+
+     You mention the Kindness of the French Ladies to me [he
+     wrote to Elizabeth Partridge, whose husband was the
+     superintendent of the almshouse in Boston], I must
+     explain that matter. This is the civilest nation upon
+     Earth. Your first Acquaintances endeavour to find out
+     what you like, and they tell others. If 'tis understood
+     that you like Mutton, dine where you will you find
+     Mutton. Somebody, it seems, gave it out that I lov'd
+     Ladies; and then everybody presented me their Ladies
+     (or the Ladies presented themselves) to be _embrac'd_,
+     that is to have their Necks kiss'd. For as to kissing
+     of Lips or Cheeks it is not the Mode here, the first,
+     is reckon'd rude, & the other may rub off the Paint.
+     The French Ladies have however 1000 other ways of
+     rendering themselves agreeable; by their various
+     Attentions and Civilities, & their sensible
+     Conversation. 'Tis a delightful People to live with.
+
+I hope, however [he wrote to another correspondent after denying a story
+about himself], to preserve, while I stay, the regard you mention of the
+French ladies; for their society and conversation, when I have time to
+enjoy them, are extremely agreeable.
+
+And that the French ladies found his society and conversation extremely
+agreeable no one can well doubt who has had occasion to become familiar
+with the scented missives, full of artful coquetry, that were addressed by
+many fair hands to "tres cher papa," or "Dear American papa" or "amiable
+papa," when he was in the land where somebody had been so considerate as to
+give it out that he liked ladies. At times, these notes run along in
+mingled French and English as if the writers were determined to bring to
+bear upon him the blandishments not only of the former language but of his
+own familiar tongue besides. "Je vous envoye a sweet kiss, dear Papa,
+envoyez moi en revanche, un Mot de Reponse," was one languishing request.
+Even Franklin's bad French mattered but little when a woman, Madame
+Brillon, whom the daughter of Abigail Adams pronounced "one of the
+handsomest women in France," could write to him, "It is always very good
+French to say, 'Je vous aime.' My heart always goes out to meet this word
+when you say it to me." From such words as these to his saying that the
+best master of languages is a mistress the transition was not very
+difficult.[39]
+
+It was at Passy, then a suburb of Paris, that Franklin resided during the
+eight and a half years that he was one of our representatives in France.
+His surroundings were thus described by him in reply to a question from
+Mrs. Stevenson:
+
+     You wish to know how I live. It is in a fine House,
+     situated in a neat Village, on high Ground, half a Mile
+     from Paris, with a large Garden to walk in. I have
+     abundance of Acquaintance, dine abroad Six days in
+     seven. Sundays I reserve to dine at home, with such
+     Americans as pass this Way; and I then have my grandson
+     Ben, with some other American Children from his school.
+
+The house mentioned by Franklin was known as the Basse Cour de Monsieur Le
+Ray de Chaumont, and had originally, with the inscription over its door,
+"Se sta bene, non si muove" not been unknown to fame as the Hotel de
+Valentinois. Indeed, John Locke, who visited Paris in 1679, declared that
+it was among the twenty-four _belles maisons_ in Paris that best rewarded
+the curiosity of the stranger at that time. The circumstances, under which
+it passed into the possession of Franklin, were another proof of the
+flaming zeal with which many of the foremost inhabitants of France espoused
+the cause of the Colonies. Chaumont was Grand Maitre des Eaux et Forets de
+France and Intendant Honoraire des Invalides, a friend of the Duc de
+Choiseul, and a man of large wealth, with a chateau on the Loire as well as
+the mansion at Passy, of which the building occupied by Franklin was a
+part. In his generous enthusiasm for American liberty, he declined a post
+in the French Ministry, offered to him by Choiseul, because he thought that
+by declining it he might be a more useful intermediary between America and
+the French Government. When John Adams came to Passy, and found a home
+under the same roof with Franklin, he felt obliged to write to Chaumont
+asking him to consider what rent they should pay to him for the use of his
+house and furniture. Every part of Chaumont's conduct towards him and
+Americans in general, and in all their affairs, he said, had been polite
+and obliging, as far as he had an opportunity of observing, and he had no
+doubt it would continue, but it was not reasonable that they should occupy
+such an elegant mansion without any compensation to the owner, and it was
+not right that they should live at too great or at too uncertain an expense
+to their constituents. The reply of Chaumont was worthy of a paladin of
+Ancient France. "When I consecrated my home to Dr. Franklin and his
+associates who might live with him," he said, "I made it fully understood
+that I should expect no compensation, because I perceived that you had need
+of all your means to send to the succor of your country, or to relieve the
+distresses of your countrymen escaping from the chains of their enemies."
+This is a world, however, in which it is too much to expect an absolutely
+free gift of house rent, and the answer of Chaumont to John Adams does not
+altogether agree with the version of the matter given by Franklin in a
+letter to Robert R. Livingston, in which he said that Chaumont had
+originally proposed to leave the article of rent unsettled until the end of
+the war, and then to accept for it a piece of American land from the
+Congress such as they might judge equivalent. Considering the serious
+uncertainty as to whether there would then be any Congress, this was quite
+generous enough. It is painful to relate, however, that Chaumont engaged so
+recklessly in the hazardous business of shipping supplies to America for
+the patriot army as to become involved in pecuniary embarrassments, which
+produced some degree of temporary constraint in his intercourse with
+Franklin. "I find that in these Affairs with him, a Bargain tho' ever so
+clearly express'd signifies nothing," wrote Franklin in a moment of disgust
+with his volatility to Jonathan Williams. A few months before, Franklin had
+made this entry in a journal kept by him during a brief portion of his
+residence at Passy. "Visit at M. de Chaumont's in the evening; found him
+cold and dry." But before Franklin left France, the old cordiality of
+intercourse appears to have been fully re-established, for we find the two
+dining with each other again, and besides, when Franklin was on his way to
+the seacoast, on his return to America, Chaumont and his daughter
+accompanied him part of the way. The entire restoration of good feeling
+between the two men is also shown in the letters and conduct of Franklin
+after his return to America. Chaumont was one of the group of French
+friends favored by him with gifts of the Franklin Myrtle Wax Soap,
+"thought," he said, "to be the best in the World, for Shaving & for washing
+Chinces, and other things of delicate Colours." In one of his letters from
+Philadelphia, Franklin tells Chaumont that Donatien Le Ray Chaumont, the
+Younger, who had come over to America to press certain claims of the elder
+Chaumont against the United States, was out at that time with his "son
+Bache" and some others on a hunt. It is in this letter, by the way, that he
+said of Finck, his _maitre d' hotel_ at Passy, who was pretending that he
+was not wholly paid, "He was continually saying of himself, Je suis honnete
+homme, Je suis honnete homme. But I always suspected he was mistaken; and
+so it proves." In another letter, he wrote to Chaumont, "I have frequently
+the Pleasure of seeing your valuable Son, whom I love as my own," and in
+this letter he sent his love to all Chaumont's children in France, one of
+whom he was in the habit of addressing as "ma femme," another as "ma chere
+amie," and still another as "mon enfant." "Present my affectionate Respects
+to Madame de Chaumont, and Love to Mad'e Foucault, to ma Femme, ma
+chere Amie, et mon Enfant," was one of his messages to Chaumont. This
+Madame Foucault was the favorite mentioned by William Temple Franklin, when
+he wrote to his grandfather some nine months after the latter found the
+manner of Chaumont "cold and dry," "All the family (the Chaumonts) send
+their love to you, and the beautiful M'e Foucault accompanys hers with an
+English kiss." A challenge of that kind was always promptly caught up by
+Franklin. "Thanks to Mad'e Foucault," he replied, "for her kindness in
+sending me the Kiss. It was grown cold by the way. I hope for a warm one
+when we meet."
+
+An amusing observation of Madame Chaumont, which has its value, as an
+illustration of eighteenth-century manners in France, is quoted in a letter
+from Franklin to John Paul Jones:
+
+     L'Abbe Rochon had just been telling me & Madame
+     Chaumont [wrote Franklin] that the old Gardiner & his
+     Wife had complained to the Curate, of your having
+     attack'd her in the Garden about 7 o'clock the evening
+     before your Departure, and attempted to ravish her
+     relating all the Circumstances, some of which are not
+     fit for me to write. The serious Part of it was yt
+     three of her Sons were determin'd to kill you, if you
+     had not gone off; the Rest occasioned some Laughing;
+     for the old Woman being one of the grossest, coarsest,
+     dirtiest & ugliest that we may find in a thousand,
+     Madame Chaumont said it gave a high Idea of the
+     Strength of Appetite & Courage of the Americans. A Day
+     or two after, I learnt yt it was the femme de
+     Chambre of Mademoiselle Chaumont who had disguis'd
+     herself in a Suit, I think, of your Cloaths, to divert
+     herself under that Masquerade, as is customary the last
+     evening of Carnival: and that meeting the old Woman in
+     the Garden, she took it into her Head to try her
+     Chastity, which it seems was found Proof.
+
+The wit of Madame de Chaumont, however, shows to better advantage in
+connection with another incident. One of Franklin's friends was
+Mademoiselle Passy, a beautiful girl, whom he was in the habit of calling,
+so John Adams tells us, "his favorite, and his flame, and his love," which
+flattered the family, and did not displease the young lady. When her
+engagement to the Marquis de Tonnerre was announced, Madame de Chaumont
+exclaimed to Franklin, "Helas! tous les conducteurs de Monsieur Franklin
+n'ont pas empeche le tonnerre de tomber sur Mademoiselle de Passy."
+Franklin himself was entirely too good a conductor of wit not to pass a
+thing like this on.
+
+     It gives me great Pleasure Madam my respected
+     Neighbour, [he said in a letter to Madame de
+     Boulainvilliers, the mother of the Semele upon whom the
+     Marquis was about to descend] to learn that our lovely
+     Child is soon to be married with your Approbation &
+     that we are not however to be immediately depriv'd of
+     her Company. I assure you I shall make no Use of my
+     Paratonnerre [lightning-rod] to prevent this Match.
+
+Franklin's republican simplicity began and ended with his unpowdered hair,
+worn straight, and covered with a cap of marten fur, and his russet dress.
+At Passy, he lived in a manner that Vergennes, accustomed to the splendor
+and profusion of European Courts, might well call modest, but which was
+quite as lavish as was consistent with the reputation of a plain democrat
+or of a veritable philosopher. Under the terms of his contract with his
+_maitre d'hotel_, the latter was to provide _dejeuner_ and dinner daily for
+five persons. The _dejeuner_ was to consist of bread and butter, honey, and
+coffee or chocolate with sugar, and the dinner of a joint of beef, or veal
+or mutton, followed by fowl or game with "deux plats d'entremets, deux
+plats de legumes, et un plat de Pattisserie, avec hors d'oeuvre, de
+Beurres, cornichons, radis, etc." For dessert, there were to be "deux de
+Fruit en hiver et 4 en Ete." There were also to be at dinner: "Deux
+compottes, un assiette de fromage, un de Biscuits, et un de bonbons," and
+"Des Glaces, 2 fois par Semaine en Ete et un fois en Hyver." The cost of
+this service per month was 720 livres. There was also an allowance of 240
+livres per month for nine domestic servants, and of 400 livres per month
+for extra dinners for guests; making the total monthly cost of Franklin's
+table 1360 livres. And there was no lack of good wine, red or white,
+_ordinaire_ or _extraordinaire_. In 1778, there were 1180 bottles of wine
+and rum in the cellar at Passy, and, some four and one half years later,
+there were 1203. Franklin also maintained a carriage and coachman at a cost
+of 5018 livres per year. By a resolution of Congress, the salaries of the
+different Commissioners of the United States in Europe were fixed at 11,428
+livres tournois per annum, in addition to their reasonable expenses, and
+the total expenses of Franklin in France are computed by Smyth to have been
+about $15,000 per annum, a moderate sum, indeed, in comparison with the
+amount necessary to sustain the dignity of our Minister to France at the
+present time. Nevertheless, the _menage_ at Passy was luxurious enough for
+him to be warned that it had been described at home by some of his guests
+in such terms as to provoke popular censure on the part of his countrymen.
+
+     They must be contented for the future [Franklin said in
+     a letter to John Adams] as I am, with plain beef and
+     pudding. The readers of Connecticut newspapers ought
+     not to be troubled for any more accounts of our
+     extravagance. For my own part, if I could sit down to
+     dinner on a piece of excellent salt pork and pumpkin, I
+     would not give a farthing for all the luxuries of
+     Paris.
+
+After this time, Franklin did not keep such an open house as before,
+considerably to the relief of his gout. Previously, if we may believe John
+Adams, he had made a practice of inviting everybody to dine with him on
+Sunday at Passy. Sometimes, his company was made up exclusively, or all but
+exclusively, of Americans, and sometimes partly of Americans, and partly of
+French, and, now and then, there was an Englishman or so. Miss Adams
+mentions a "sumptuous dinner," at which the members of the Adams family,
+the Marquis de la Fayette and his wife, Lord Mount Morris, an Irish
+Volunteer, Dr. Jeffries, and Paul Jones were guests. Another dinner is
+mentioned by her at which all the guests were Americans, except M. Brillon,
+who had dropped in, he said, "a demander un dine a Pere Franklin." A
+whimsical story is told by Jefferson of still another dinner at which one
+half of the guests were Americans and one half French.
+
+     Among the last [he says] was the Abbe (Raynal). During
+     the dinner he got on his favorite theory of the
+     degeneracy of animals, and even of men, in America, and
+     urged it with his usual eloquence. The Doctor at length
+     noticing the accidental stature and position of his
+     guests, at table, "Come," says he, "M. L'Abbe, let us
+     try this question by the fact before us. We are here
+     one half Americans, and one half French, and it happens
+     that the Americans have placed themselves on one side
+     of the table, and our French friends are on the other.
+     Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side
+     nature has degenerated." It happened that his American
+     guests were Carmichael, Harmer, Humphreys, and others
+     of the finest stature and form; while those of the
+     other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbe
+     himself, particularly, was a mere shrimp. He parried
+     the appeal, however, by a complimentary admission of
+     exceptions, among which the Doctor himself was a
+     conspicuous one.
+
+Not the least interesting of the guests that Franklin drew around his table
+at Passy were lads, who had a claim upon his notice, either because they
+were the sons, or grandsons, of friends of his, or because they were
+friends of his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. In a letter to Doctor
+Cooper, Franklin tells him that his grandson, Samuel Cooper Johonnot
+appeared a very promising lad, in whom he thought that the doctor would
+have much satisfaction, and was well on the preceding Sunday, when he had
+had the pleasure of his company to dinner with Mr. Adams' sons, and some
+other young Americans. There is still in existence a letter from John
+Quincy Adams, then a boy of eleven, to Franklin, which indicates that the
+latter had quite won his heart, though, do what he might, he could never
+win the heart of the elder Adams.
+
+It was a brilliant society, to which Franklin was introduced, after the
+first reserve of the French Court, before its recognition of American
+independence, was laid aside. He had the magpie habit of hoarding every
+scrap of paper or cardboard, that bore the imprint of his existence, and
+Smyth, the latest editor of Franklin's works, has, with his usual
+diligence, compiled the names that appear most frequently on the visiting
+cards, found among Franklin's papers. They are such significant names as
+those of La Duchesse d'Enville, her son Le Duc de la Rochefoucauld, M.
+Turgot, Duc de Chaulnes, Comte de Crillon, Vicomte de Sarsfield, M.
+Brisson, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Comte de Milly, Prince des
+Deuxponts, Comte d'Estaing, Marquis de Mirabeau and M. Beaugeard, Treasurer
+of the State of Brittany.
+
+The Diary of John Adams reveals Franklin and himself dining on one occasion
+with La Duchesse d'Enville, and "twenty of the great people of France," on
+another with M. Chalut, one of the farmers-general, and the old Marshal
+Richelieu, and "a vast number of other great company," on another with the
+Prince de Tingry, Duc de Beaumont, of the illustrious House of Montmorency,
+and on another with La Duchesse d'Enville, along with her daughter and
+granddaughter, and dukes, abbots and the like so numerous that the list
+ends with a splutter of et ceteras. "Dukes, and bishops and counts, etc."
+are the overburdened words with which Adams closes his list of the guests
+at a dinner given by Vergennes, the minister of Louis XVI.
+
+But, after all, it was the circle of intimate friends, to which Franklin
+promised to introduce John Jay on the arrival of Jay in France, that
+constitutes the chief interest of the former's social life in France. Three
+of these friends were Madame Helvetius, Madame Brillon and the Comtesse
+d'Houdetot. With Madame Helvetius, he dined every Saturday at Auteuil, with
+Madame Brillon twice a week at the home of her husband, not far from his,
+and with the Comtesse d'Houdetot frequently at Sanois, in the Valley of
+Montmorency. Madame Helvetius was known to her friends as "Our Lady of
+Auteuil." She was the widow of Helvetius, the philosopher, who had left her
+a handsome fortune, amassed by him when one of the farmers-general. In
+testimony of her affection for him, she kept under glass, on a table in her
+bedroom, a monument erected to his memory, with his picture hung above it.
+Her _salon_ was one of the best-known in France, and it was maintained on
+such a sumptuous scale that, in one of his letters, after his return to
+America, Franklin told her that often in his dreams he placed himself by
+her side on one of her thousand sofas. It was at Auteuil that he passed
+some of his happiest hours in France, plying its mistress with flattery and
+badinage, and enjoying the music of her two daughters, known to the
+household as "the Stars," and the conversation of her friends, the younger
+Cabanis, and the Abbes Morellet and de la Roche. One of the amusements of
+the inner circle at Auteuil was to read aloud to each other little trifles,
+full of point and grace which they had composed. Thus, though after
+Franklin had returned to America, was ushered into the world the Abbe
+Morellet's _Very Humble Petition to Madame Helvetius from her
+Cats_--animals which appear to have had a position in her home as assured
+as that of "the Stars" or the Abbes themselves; and several of the wittiest
+of the productions, which Franklin called his Bagatelles, originated in the
+same way. If homage, seasoned with delightful humor and wit, could have
+kept the mistress of Auteuil, at the age of sixty, from incurring the
+malice of the female contemporary, who, we are told by Miss Adams, compared
+her with the ruins of Palmyra, that of Franklin would assuredly have done
+it. When she complained that he had not been to see her for a long time, he
+evaded the reproach of absence by replying, "I am waiting, Madame, until
+the nights are longer." Whatever others might think, she was to him, "his
+fair friend at Auteuil," who still possessed "health and personal charms."
+What cleverer application could there be than this of the maxim of Hesiod
+that the half is sometimes more than the whole:
+
+     Very dear Friend, we shall have some good music
+     to-morrow morning at breakfast. Can you give me the
+     pleasure of sharing in it. The time will be half past
+     ten. This is a problem that a mathematician will
+     experience some trouble in explaining; In sharing other
+     things, each of us has only one portion; but in sharing
+     pleasures with you, my portion is doubled. The part is
+     more than the whole.
+
+On another occasion, when Madame Helvetius reminded Franklin that she
+expected to meet him at Turgot's, he replied, "Mr. Franklin never forgets
+any party at which Madame Helvetius is expected. He even believes that, if
+he were engaged to go to Paradise this morning, he would pray for
+permission to remain on earth until half-past one, to receive the embrace
+promised him at the Turgots."
+
+Poor Deborah seems altogether lost, and forgotten when we read these lines
+that he wrote to the Abbe de la Roche:
+
+     I have often remarked, when reading the works of M.
+     Helvetius, that, although we were born and reared in
+     two countries so remote from each other, we have
+     frequently had the same thoughts; and it is a
+     reflection very flattering to me that we have loved the
+     same studies, and, as far as we have both known them,
+     the same friends, and the same woman.
+
+But the image of Deborah was not so completely effaced from Franklin's
+memory that he could not conjure up her shade for a moment to excite a
+retaliatory impulse in the breast which he had found insensible to his
+proposals of marriage, serious, or affected. If Madame Helvetius, who was
+illiterate like Deborah, did not appreciate the light, aerial humor of the
+following dream from the pen of the author of _The Art of Procuring
+Pleasant Dreams_, we may be sure that her witty Abbes did:
+
+     Mortified by your cruel resolution, declared by you so
+     positively yesterday evening, to remain single the rest
+     of your life, out of respect for your dear husband, I
+     retired to my home, threw myself upon my bed, and
+     dreamt that I was dead and in the Elysian Fields.
+
+     I was asked whether I wished to see any persons in
+     particular. "Conduct me to the philosophers," I
+     replied. "There are two who live here close by in this
+     garden; they are very good neighbors and very friendly
+     with each other," I was told. "Who are they?" "Socrates
+     and Helvetius." "I esteem them both immensely, but let
+     me see Helvetius first, because I understand a little
+     French, but not a word of Greek." He received me with
+     much courtesy, having known me, he said, by reputation
+     for some time past. He asked me a thousand questions
+     about the war, the present state of religion, of
+     liberty, and politics in France. "You do not ask me
+     then," I said, "anything about your dear _amie_, Madame
+     Helvetius; yet she loves you still exceedingly, and I
+     was at her home only an hour ago." "Ah," said he, "you
+     bring back to me my past happiness, but it must be
+     forgotten to be happy here. During several of my first
+     years here, I thought only of her, but at length I am
+     consoled. I have taken another wife, one as much like
+     her as I could find. She is not, it is true, quite so
+     handsome, but she has as much good sense, and much
+     _esprit_, and she loves me infinitely. Her continuous
+     aim is to please me, and she is at this moment gone to
+     look up the best nectar and ambrosia to regale me with
+     this evening; stay here awhile, and you will see her."
+     "I perceive," said I, "that your former _amie_ is more
+     faithful than you are; for she has had several good
+     offers, but has refused them all. I confess that I
+     myself have loved her to distraction, but she was
+     obdurate, and has rejected me peremptorily for love of
+     you." "I pity your misfortune," said he, "for in truth
+     she is a good and handsome woman, and very lovable."
+     "But are not the Abbe de la R---- and the Abbe M----
+     still some times at her house?" "Yes, to be sure, for
+     she has not lost a single one of your friends." "If you
+     had induced the Abbe M----(with some good coffee and
+     cream) to say a word for you, you would, perhaps, have
+     succeeded; for he is as subtle a reasoner as Duns
+     Scotus or St. Thomas; he marshals his arguments in such
+     good order that they become almost irresistible. And if
+     the Abbe de la R---- had been induced (by some fine
+     edition of an old classic) to say a word against you,
+     that would have been better; for I have always observed
+     that when he advised her to do anything she had a very
+     strong inclination to do the reverse." As he was saying
+     this, the new Madame Helvetius entered with the nectar,
+     and I recognized her instantly as my former American
+     _amie_, Mrs. Franklin. I laid claim to her but she said
+     to me coldly: "I was a good wife to you for forty-nine
+     years and four months, almost a half century; be
+     content with that. I have formed a new connection here
+     which will last to eternity." Indignant at this refusal
+     of my Eurydice, I at once resolved to quit those
+     ungrateful shades, and to return to this good world,
+     and to gaze again upon the sun and you. Here I am; let
+     us avenge ourselves.
+
+It is an animated picture, too, that Franklin strikes off of Our Lady of
+Auteuil in a letter to Cabanis, when the latter had been absent for a time
+from Auteuil:
+
+     We often talk of you at Auteuil, where everybody loves
+     you. I now and then offend our good lady who can not
+     long retain her displeasure, but, sitting in state on
+     her sopha, extends graciously her long, handsome arm,
+     and says "la; baisez ma main: Je vous pardonne," with
+     all the dignity of a sultaness. She is as busy as ever,
+     endeavoring to make every creature about her happy,
+     from the Abbes down thro' all ranks of the family to
+     the birds and Poupon.
+
+Poupon was one of the fair lady's eighteen cats. This letter ends with the
+request that Cabanis present to his father the writer's thanks to him for
+having gotten so valuable a son.
+
+A lively note to Cabanis is in the same vein:
+
+     M. Franklin risen, washed, shaved, combed, beautified
+     to the highest degree, of which he is capable, entirely
+     dressed, and on the point of going out, with his head
+     full of the four Mesdames Helvetius, and of the sweet
+     kisses that he proposes to snatch from them, is much
+     mortified to find the possibility of this happiness
+     being put off until next Sunday. He will exercise as
+     much patience as he can, hoping to see one of these
+     ladies at the home of M. de Chaumont Wednesday. He will
+     be there in good time to see her enter with that grace
+     and dignity which charmed him so much seven weeks ago
+     in the same place. He even plans to seize her there,
+     and to keep her at his home for the rest of her life.
+     His remaining three Mesdames Helvetius at Auteuil can
+     suffice for the canaries and the Abbes.
+
+Another note to Cabanis illustrates how readily pleasantry of this kind ran
+in the eighteenth century into gross license:
+
+     M. Franklin is sorry to have caused the least hurt to
+     those beautiful tresses that he always regards with
+     pleasure. If that Lady likes to pass her days with him,
+     he would like as much to pass his nights with her; and
+     since he has already given many of his days to her,
+     although he had such a small remnant of them to give,
+     she would seem ungrateful to have never given him a
+     single one of her nights, which run continually to pure
+     waste, without promoting the good fortune of any one
+     except Poupon.
+
+When the reader is told that this letter ended with the words, "to be shown
+to our Lady of Auteuil," his mind is not unprepared for the graphic
+description by Abigail Adams of a dinner at which Madame Helvetius was the
+central figure:
+
+     She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air; upon
+     seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled
+     out, "Ah, mon Dieu, where is Franklin? Why did you not
+     tell me there were ladies here?" You must suppose her
+     speaking all this in French. "How I look!" said she,
+     taking hold of a chemise made of tiffany, which she had
+     on over a blue lutestring, and which looked as much
+     upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a
+     handsome woman; her hair was frizzled; over it she had
+     a small straw hat, with a dirty gauze half-handkerchief
+     round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever my maids
+     wore was bowed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf
+     thrown over her shoulders. She ran out of the room;
+     when she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she
+     at the other; upon which she ran forward to him, caught
+     him by the hand, "Helas! Franklin;" then gave him a
+     double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his
+     forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was
+     placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on
+     the chief of the conversation at dinner, frequently
+     locking her hands into the Doctor's, and sometimes
+     spreading her arms upon the backs of both the
+     gentlemen's chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly
+     upon the Doctor's neck.
+
+     I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct,
+     if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I
+     should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from
+     affectation or stiffness of behaviour, and one of the
+     best women in the world. For this I must take the
+     Doctor's word; but I should have set her down for a
+     very bad one, although sixty years of age, and a widow.
+     I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an
+     acquaintance with any ladies of this cast. After
+     dinner, she threw herself upon a settee, where she
+     showed more than her feet. She had a little lapdog, who
+     was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed,
+     and when he wet the floor she wiped it up with her
+     chemise. This is one of the Doctor's most intimate
+     friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she
+     with him. She is rich, and is my near neighbour; but I
+     have not yet visited her. Thus you see, my dear, that
+     manners differ exceedingly in different countries. I
+     hope however, to find among the French ladies manners
+     more consistent with my ideas of decency, or I shall be
+     a mere recluse.
+
+This, of course, in part, was but the New England snowdrop expressing its
+disapproval of the full-blown red rose of France, but it is impossible for
+all the pigments in the picture, painted by the skilful hand of Abigail
+Adams, to have been supplied by the moral austerity of Puritanism. Miss
+Adams, we might add, followed up her mother's impression with a prim ditto
+in her journal: "Dined at Mr. Franklin's by invitation; a number of
+gentlemen and Madame Helvetius, a French lady sixty years of age. Odious
+indeed do our sex appear when divested of those ornaments, with which
+modesty and delicacy adorn us." But we suspect that the Doctor was right in
+saying that Madame Helvetius, free and tawdry as she seemed to Abigail
+Adams and her daughter, was one of the best women in the world; that is to
+say her world. We are told that, when she was convalescing from an illness,
+four hundred persons assembled at Auteuil to express the pleasure they felt
+at the prospect of her recovery. Beneath the noisy, lax manners, which Mrs.
+Adams delineates so mercilessly, there must have been another and a very
+different Madame Helvetius to have won such a tribute as the following from
+a man who had known what it was to be tenderly beloved by more than one
+pure, thoroughly refined and accomplished woman:
+
+     And now I mention your friends, let me tell you, that I
+     have in my way been trying to form some hypothesis to
+     account for your having so many, and of such various
+     kinds. I see that statesmen, philosophers, historians,
+     poets, and men of learning of all sorts are drawn
+     around you, and seem as willing to attach themselves to
+     you as straws about a fine piece of amber. It is not
+     that you make pretensions to any of their sciences; and
+     if you did, similarity of studies does not always make
+     people love one another. It is not that you take pains
+     to engage them; artless simplicity is a striking part
+     of your character. I would not attempt to explain it by
+     the story of the ancient, who, being asked why
+     philosophers sought the acquaintance of kings, and
+     kings not that of philosophers, replied that
+     philosophers knew what they wanted, which was not
+     always the case with kings. Yet thus far the comparison
+     may go, that we find in your sweet society that
+     charming benevolence, that amiable attention to oblige,
+     that disposition to please and be pleased, which we do
+     not always find in the society of one another. It
+     springs from you; it has its influence on us all, and
+     in your company we are not only pleased with you, but
+     better pleased with one another and ourselves.
+
+There can be no doubt that the friendship between the two was a real,
+genuine sentiment. When Franklin was doubting whether he was not too old
+and decrepit to cross the Atlantic, she was one of the three friends who
+urged him to spend his last days in France, and live with them. It was
+hardly fair, therefore, when she exclaimed after the departure of Franklin
+from France, in the presence of Madame Brillon, "Ah, that great man, that
+dear man, we shall see him no more," for Madame Brillon to retort, "It is
+entirely your fault, Madame."
+
+From Havre he sent back tender farewells to his "tres chere amie." They
+were awaiting, he said, their baggage and fellow-voyager, Mr. Houdon, the
+sculptor. "When they come, we shall quit France, the country of the world
+that I love the best; and I shall leave there my dear Helvetia. She can be
+happy there. I am not sure of being happy in America; but it is necessary
+for me to go there. Things seem to me to be badly arranged here below, when
+I see beings so well constituted to be happy together compelled to
+separate." Then after a message of friendship to "the Abbes the good
+Abbes," the _vale_ dies out in these fond words: "I do not tell you that I
+love you. I might be told that there was nothing strange or meritorious in
+that, because the whole world loves you. I only hope that you will always
+love me a little."
+
+Nor did the separation worked by the Atlantic produce any change in these
+feelings. In the letters written by Franklin to Madame Helvetius, and the
+members of her circle, after his return to Philadelphia, there is the same
+spirit of affection for her and for them, as well as a wistful retrospect
+of his chats with her on her thousand sofas, his walks with her in her
+garden, and the repasts at her table, always seasoned by sound sense,
+sprightliness and friendship. One of his commissions seems to have been to
+obtain a cardinal red bird for the "good dame," as he calls her in a letter
+to the Abbe Morellet from Philadelphia. "The good Dame, whom we all love,
+and whose Memory I shall love and honour as long as I have any Existence,"
+were his words. But the commission was difficult of execution. The Virginia
+cardinal, he wrote to the Abbe, was a tender bird that stood the sea but
+poorly. Several sent out to France for their dame by Mr. Alexander, in his
+tobacco ships, had never arrived, he understood, and, "unless a Friend was
+going in the Ship who would take more than common Care of them," he
+supposed, "one might send an hundred without landing one alive."
+
+     They would be very happy, I know [he said], if they
+     were once under her Protection; but they cannot come to
+     her, and she will not come to them. She may remember
+     the Offer I made her of 1,000 Acres of Woodland, out of
+     which she might cut a great Garden and have 1,000
+     Aviaries if she pleased. I have a large Tract on the
+     Ohio where Cardinals are plenty. If I had been a
+     Cardinal myself perhaps I might have prevail'd with
+     her.
+
+In his efforts to transport the Cardinal, Franklin even enlisted the
+services of Mr. Paradise, who, if contemporary gossip is reliable, might
+well have pleaded the preoccupation imposed upon him of protecting himself
+from the beak of his own termagant wife. Madame Helvetius, however, was not
+so eager for a cardinal as not to be willing to wait until one could be
+brought over by a proper escort. "I am in no hurry at all," she wrote to
+Franklin; "I will wait; for I am not willing to be the death of these
+pretty creatures. I will wait." In this same letter, there is an amusing
+mixture of tenderness and banter. Declining health and advancing years, she
+said, would but enable them the sooner to meet again as well as to meet
+again those whom they had loved, she a husband and he a wife; "but I
+believe," she wipes the moisture from her eyes long enough to say, "that
+you who have been a rogue (_coquin_) will be restored to more than one."
+
+From what we have said, it is plain enough that the friendship felt by
+Madame Helvetius for the Abbes Morellet and de la Roche was shared by
+Franklin. When he touched at Southampton, after leaving Havre, on his
+return to America, he wafted another fond farewell to Madame Helvetius; "I
+will always love you," he said, "think of me sometimes, and write sometimes
+to your B. F." This letter, too, contained the usual waggish reference to
+the Abbes. "Adieu, my very, very, very dear amie. Wish us a good voyage,
+and tell the good Abbes to pray for us, since that is their profession."
+The _Very Humble Petition to Madame Helvetius from her Cats_ was long
+ascribed to Franklin, but it was really written by the Abbe Morellet. After
+reading it, Franklin wrote to the Abbe that the rapidity, with which the
+good lady's eighteen cats were increasing, would, in time, make their cause
+insupportable, and that their friends should, therefore, advise them to
+submit voluntarily either to transportation or castration. How deeply the
+Abbe Morellet was attached to Franklin is feelingly revealed in the letters
+which he wrote to him after the latter had arrived safely in America; to
+say nothing of the Abbe's Memoirs.
+
+     May your days [he wrote in one of these letters] be
+     prolonged and be free from pain; may your friends long
+     taste the sweetness and the charm of your society, and
+     may those whom the seas have separated from you be
+     still happy in the thought that the end of your career
+     will be, as our good La Fontaine says, "the evening of
+     a fine day."
+
+Then, after some political reflections, suggested by the liberal
+institutions of America, the Abbe indulges in a series of gay comments on
+the habit that their Lady of Auteuil had, in her excessive love of coffee,
+of robbing him of his share of the cream, on the vicious bulldog brought
+over by Temple to France from England and on the host of cats, that had
+multiplied in the woodhouse and woodyard at Auteuil, under the patronage of
+their mistress, and did nothing but keep their paws in their furred gowns,
+and warm themselves in the sun. Friends of liberty, these cats, the Abbe
+said, were entirely out of place under the governments of Europe. Nothing
+could be more suitable than to load a small vessel with them and ship them
+to America. Another letter from the Abbe concluded with these heartfelt
+words:
+
+     I shall never forget the happiness I have enjoyed in
+     knowing you, and seeing you intimately. I write to you
+     from Auteuil, seated in your arm-chair, on which I have
+     engraved, _Benjamin Franklin hic sedebat_, and having
+     by my side the little bureau, which you bequeathed to
+     me at parting, with a drawer full of nails to gratify
+     the love of nailing and hammering, which I possess in
+     common with you. But believe me, I have no need of all
+     these helps to cherish your endeared _remembrance_, and
+     to love you,
+
+    "Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos reget artus."
+
+During their jolly intercourse in France, the Abbe Morellet and Franklin
+touched glasses in two highly convivial productions. On one of the
+anniversaries of the birth of Franklin, or of American liberty, the Abbe
+could not remember which, the Abbe composed a drinking song in honor of
+Franklin, and among the letters written by Franklin when he was in France
+was one to the Abbe in which wine is lauded in terms of humorous
+exaggeration. One of the verses of the Abbe's production refers to the
+American War, and has been translated in these words by Parton:
+
+    "Never did mankind engage
+    In a war with views more sage;
+    They seek freedom with design,
+    To drink plenty of French wine;
+    Such has been
+    The intent of Benjamin."
+
+The other verses are no better and no worse, and the whole poem is even
+more inferior in wit to Franklin's letter to the Abbe than the _Very Humble
+Petition to Madame Helvetius from her Cats_, clever though it be, is to
+Franklin's _Journey to the Elysian Fields_. If we had nothing but these
+bibulous productions to judge by, we might infer that love of wine, quite
+as much as love of Madame Helvetius was the tie of connection between the
+Abbe Morellet and Franklin. Indeed, in the letter to Franklin with respect
+to the cats, the Abbe was quite as candid about expressing his partiality
+for one form of spirits as Franklin was in his unblushing eulogy of wine.
+He did not know, he said, what duties his cats, in the unsettled condition
+of the commercial relations between France and the United States, would be
+made to pay on arriving at Philadelphia; "and then," he continued, "if my
+vessel should find nothing to load with among you but grain, it could not
+touch at our islands to take in sugar, or to bring me back good rum either,
+which I love much."
+
+When the Abbe de la Roche made a gift to Franklin of a volume of Helvetius'
+poems, Franklin was quick to give him a recompense in the form of a little
+drinking song which he had composed some forty years before. The plan of
+this poem is for the chorus, whenever the singer dwells upon any other
+source of gratification, to insist so vociferously upon friends and a
+bottle as the highest as to finally, so to speak, drown the singer out.
+
+Thus:
+
+    SINGER
+
+    "Fair Venus calls; her voice obey,
+    In beauty's arms spend night and day.
+    The joys of love all joys excel,
+    And loving's certainly doing well.
+
+    CHORUS
+
+    "Oh! no!
+    Not so!
+    For honest souls know,
+    Friends and a bottle still bear the bell."
+
+In a letter to William Carmichael, enclosing his brilliant little
+bagatelle, _The Ephemera_, Franklin described Madame Brillon in these
+terms:
+
+     The person to whom it was addressed is Madame Brillon,
+     a lady of most respectable character and pleasing
+     conversation; mistress of an amiable family in this
+     neighbourhood, with which I spend an evening twice in
+     every week. She has, among other elegant
+     accomplishments, that of an excellent musician; and,
+     with her daughters, who sing prettily, and some friends
+     who play, she kindly entertains me and my grand son
+     with little concerts, a cup of tea, and a game of
+     chess. I call this _my Opera_, for I rarely go to the
+     Opera at Paris.
+
+Madame Brillon was the wife of a public functionary much older than
+herself, who yet, as her own letters to Franklin divulge, did not feel that
+strict fidelity to her was necessary to soften the difference in their
+ages.
+
+     My father [she wrote on one occasion to Franklin],
+     marriage in this country is made by weight of gold. On
+     one end of the scale is placed the fortune of a boy, on
+     the other that of a girl; when equality is found the
+     affair is ended to the satisfaction of the relatives.
+     One does not dream of consulting taste, age,
+     congeniality of character; one marries a young girl
+     whose heart is full of youth's fire and its cravings to
+     a man who has used them up; then one exacts that this
+     woman be virtuous--my friend, this story is mine, and
+     of how many others! I shall do my best that it may not
+     be that of my daughters, but alas, shall I be mistress
+     of their fate?
+
+The correspondence between Madame Brillon and Franklin was very voluminous.
+Among the Franklin papers in the possession of the American Philosophical
+Society, there are no less than 119 letters from her to him, and in the
+same collection there are also the rough drafts of some of his letters in
+French to her. More than one of them are marked with corrections by her
+hand. Repeated statements of hers show that she took a very indulgent view
+of his imperfect mastery of the French language. When he sent to the
+Brillons his French translation of his _Dialogue between the Gout and M.
+Franklin_, she returned it to him, "corrected and made worse in several
+particulars by a savant, and devoted to destruction by the critical notes
+of a woman who is no savant," and she took occasion at the same time to
+say:
+
+     Your dialogue has greatly amused me, but your corrector
+     of French has spoiled your work. Believe me, leave your
+     productions as they are, use words which mean
+     something, and laugh at the grammarians who enfeeble
+     all your phrases with their purisms. If I had the
+     brains, I should utter a dire diatribe against those
+     who dare to touch you up, even if it were the Abbe de
+     la Roche, or my neighbor Veillard.
+
+And after reading _The Whistle_ of Franklin, she wrote to him, "M. Brillon
+has laughed heartily over the Whistle: we find that what you call your bad
+French often gives a piquant flavor to your narrative by reason of a
+certain turn of phraseology and the words you invent."
+
+It may well be doubted whether there is anything more brilliant in literary
+history than the letters which make up the correspondence between Madame
+Brillon and Franklin, and the marvel is that the intellectual quality of
+his letters should, in every respect, be as distinctly French as that of
+hers. His easy, fleeting touch, his unflagging vivacity, his wit, his
+fertility of invention, his amative coloring are all as thoroughly French
+as bonbons or champagne. The tame domesticity of his forty-nine years of
+sober American wedlock, the calm, well-regulated flow of his thoughts and
+habits in conservative England, under the roof of Mrs. Stevenson, and at
+the country seat of the "Good Bishop," the Philosophy of Poor Richard, the
+Art of Virtue, are exchanged for a character which, except when a suitable
+match was to be found for M. Franklinet, as Madame Brillon called William
+Temple Franklin, apparently took no account of anything but the pursuit of
+pleasure, as pleasure was pursued by the people, who have, of all others,
+most nearly succeeded in giving to it the rank of a respectable divinity.
+In all the letters of Franklin to Madame Brillon, there is not a sentiment
+with a characteristic American or English inflection in it. How far his
+approaches to the beautiful and clever wife of M. Brillon were truly
+erotic, and how far merely the conventional courtship of a gifted but aged
+man, who had survived everything, that belongs to passion but its language,
+it is impossible to say. We only know that, if his gallantry was specious
+merely, he maintained it with a degree of pertinacity, which there is only
+too much reason to believe might have had a different issue if it had been
+more youthful and genuine. A handsome, talented Frenchwoman, of the
+eighteenth century, burdened with a faithless husband, not too old for the
+importunity of a heart full, to use her own expression, of youth's fire and
+cravings, and tolerant enough to sit on an admirer's knees, and to write
+responsive replies to letters from him, accompanied by a perpetual refrain
+of sexuality, would, to say the least, have been in considerable danger of
+forgetting her marriage vows if her Colin had been younger. As it was, the
+tenderness of Madame Brillon for her "cher Papa" appears to have produced
+no results worse than a series of letters from her pen, as finished as
+enamel, which show that in every form of defensive warfare, literary or
+amorous, she was quite a match for the great man, who was disposed to
+forget how long he had lingered in a world which has nothing but a laugh
+for the efforts of December to pass itself off as May.
+
+"Do you know, my dear Papa," she wrote to him on one occasion, "that people
+have criticized my pleasant habit of sitting on your lap, and yours of
+asking me for what I always refuse?" In this world, she assured him, she
+would always be a gentle and virtuous woman, and the most that she would
+promise was to be his wife in Paradise, if he did not ogle the maidens
+there too much while waiting for her.
+
+When the hardy resolution is once formed of reviewing the correspondence
+between Franklin and Madame Brillon, the most difficult task is that of
+compression.
+
+     What! [she wrote to "Monsieur Papa" from Nice, after
+     the capitulation of Cornwallis] You capture entire
+     armies in America, you burgoinise Cornwallis, you take
+     cannon, vessels, munitions of war, men, horses, etc.,
+     etc. you capture everything and from everybody, and the
+     gazette alone brings it to the knowledge of your
+     friends, who befuddle themselves with drinking to your
+     health, to that of Washington, of Independence, of the
+     King of France, of the Marquis de la Fayette, of the
+     Mrs: de Rochambault, Chalelux etc., etc. while you
+     do not exhibit a sign of life to them; yet you should
+     be a bon vivant at this time, although you rarely err
+     in that respect, and you are surely twenty years
+     younger because of this good news, which ought to bring
+     us a lasting peace after a glorious war.
+
+To this letter, Franklin replied on Christmas Day of the year 1781, the
+birthday of the Dauphin of Heaven, he called it in the letter. He was very
+sensible, he said, to the greatness of their victory, but war was full of
+vicissitudes and uncertainty, and he played its game with the same evenness
+of temper that she had seen him bring to the good and bad turns of a game
+of chess. That was why he had said so little of the surrender, and had only
+remarked that nothing could make him perfectly happy under certain
+circumstances. The point, of course, was that still another capitulation
+was essential to his happiness. He then proceeds to tell Madame Brillon
+that, everywhere from Paris to Versailles, everyone spoke of her with
+respect, and some with affection and even admiration; which was music to
+his ears.
+
+     I often pass before your house [he adds]. It wears a
+     desolate look to me. Heretofore, I have broken the
+     commandment in coveting it along with my neighbour's
+     wife. Now I do not covet it. Thus I am the less a
+     sinner. But with regard to the wife, I always find
+     these commandments very inconvenient, and I am sorry
+     that we are cautioned to practise them. Should you find
+     yourself in your travels at the home of St. Peter, ask
+     him to recall them, as intended only for the Jews, and
+     as too irksome for good Christians.
+
+These specimens are true to the language of the entire correspondence, but
+further excerpts from it will not be amiss for the purpose of enabling us
+to realize how agreeable the flirtation between the two must have been to
+have produced such a lengthy correspondence despite the fact that Franklin
+visited Madame Brillon at least every Wednesday and Saturday.
+
+On Nov. 2, 1778, she wrote to Franklin as follows:
+
+     The hope that I had of seeing you here, my dear Papa,
+     has kept me from writing to you for Saturday's tea.
+     Hope is the remedy for all our ills. If one suffers,
+     one hopes for the end of the trouble; if one is with
+     friends, one hopes to remain with them always; if one
+     is away from them, one hopes to rejoin them,--and this
+     is the only hope that is left to me. I shall count the
+     days, the hours, the moments; each moment gone brings
+     me nearer to you. We like to grow older when it is the
+     only means of reuniting us to those whom we love. The
+     person, who takes life thus, seeks unceasingly to
+     shorten it; he plans, desires; without the future, it
+     seems to him that he has nothing. When my children are
+     grown up--in ten years--the trees in my garden will
+     shade me. The years slip by, then one regrets them. I
+     might have done such and such a thing, one says then.
+     Had I not been only twenty-five years old, I should not
+     have done the foolish thing of which I now repent. The
+     wise man alone enjoys the present, does not regret the
+     past, and awaits peacefully the future. The wise man,
+     who, like you, my Papa, has passed his youth in
+     acquiring knowledge and enlightening his fellow-men,
+     and his mature years in obtaining liberty for them,
+     brings a complaisant eye to bear on the past, enjoys
+     the present, and awaits the reward of his labors in the
+     future; but how many are wise? I try to become so, and
+     am so in some respects: I take no account of wealth,
+     vanity has little hold upon my heart; I like to do my
+     duty; I freely forgive society its errors and
+     injustices. But I love my friends with an idolatry that
+     often does me much harm: a prodigious imagination, a
+     soul of fire will always get the better of all my plans
+     and thoughts. I see, Papa, that I must never lay claim
+     to any but the one perfection of loving the most that
+     is possible. May this quality make you love your
+     daughter always!... Come, you always know how to
+     combine a great measure of wisdom with a touch of
+     roguishness; you ask Brillon for news of me at the very
+     moment when you are receiving a letter from me; you
+     play the part of the neglected one, just when you are
+     being spoiled, and then you deny it like a madman when
+     the secret is discovered. Oh, I have news of you!
+
+     ... Mama, my children, and Mlle. Jupin present their
+     respects to you. May I venture to beg you to give my
+     kind regards to Mr. Franklinet?
+
+Another letter in the same vein from Madame Brillon to Franklin bears date
+May 11, 1779:
+
+     You are quite right, my good Papa, we should find true
+     happiness only in peace of mind; it is not in our power
+     to change the nature of those with whom we live, nor to
+     check the course of the contradictions that surround
+     us. It is a wise man who speaks, and who tries to
+     comfort his too sensitive daughter by telling her the
+     truth. Oh, my father, I beseech your friendship, your
+     healthy philosophy; my heart hears you and is
+     submissive to you. Give me strength to take the place
+     of an indifference that your child can never feel. But
+     admit, my friend, that for one who knows how to love,
+     ingratitude is a frightful misfortune; that it is hard
+     for a woman who would give her life without hesitation
+     to insure her husband's happiness to see the results of
+     her exertions and her longings wiped out by intrigue,
+     and falsity. Time will make everything right; my Papa
+     has said so, and I believe it. But my Papa has also
+     said that time is the stuff that life is made of. _My_
+     life, my friend, is made of a fine and thin stuff, that
+     grief rends cruelly; if I had anything to reproach
+     myself with, I should long have ceased to exist. My
+     soul is pure, simple, frank. I dare to tell my Papa so;
+     I dare to tell him that it is worthy of him; I dare
+     still to assure him that my conduct, which he has
+     deemed wise, will not belie itself, that I shall await
+     justice with patience, that I shall follow the advice
+     of my worthy friend with steadiness and confidence.
+
+     Adieu, you whom I love so much--my kind Papa. Never
+     call me anything but "my daughter." Yesterday you
+     called me "Madame," and my heart shrank, I examined
+     myself, to see whether I had done you any wrong, or if
+     I had some failings that you would not tell me of.
+     Pardon, my friend; I am not visiting you with a
+     reproach, I am accusing myself of a weakness. I was
+     born much too sensitive for my happiness and for that
+     of my friends; cure me, or pity me; if you can, do one
+     or the other.
+
+     Tomorrow, Wednesday, you will come to tea, will you
+     not? Believe me, my Papa, that the pleasure I feel in
+     receiving you is shared by my husband, my children, and
+     my friends; I cannot doubt it, and I assure you of it.
+
+Franklin's reply to this letter is for a brief moment that of a real father
+rather than Monsieur Papa. This reminds us that, in one of her letters to
+him, she states that in her own father she had lost her first and best
+friend, and recalled the fact that Franklin had told her of the custom of
+certain savages, who adopt the prisoners, that they capture in war, and
+make them take the place of the relations whom they have lost. In answer to
+her statement that ingratitude is a frightful misfortune, he says: "That is
+true--to ingrates--but not to their benefactors. You have conferred
+benefits on those that you have believed worthy of them; you have,
+therefore, done your duty, as it is a part of our duty to be kindly, and
+you ought to be satisfied with that and happy in the reflection." This was
+followed by the advice to his "very dear and always lovable daughter" to
+continue to fulfill all her duties as a good mother, a good wife, a good
+friend, a good neighbor, a good Christian, etc. We shall see a little later
+on what he deemed a part of the duty of a good charitable Christian to be.
+The letter terminates with an apology for his bad French. "It may," he
+said, "disgust you, you who write that charming language with so much
+purity and elegance. But, if you can in the end decipher my awkward and
+improper expressions, you will, at least, perhaps, experience the kind of
+pleasure that we find in solving enigmas or discovering secrets."
+
+His letter transmitting his _Dialogue with the Gout_ to Madame Brillon was
+not so decorous. It was in it that he had a word to say about the other
+kind of Christian conduct that he was in the habit of enjoining upon her. A
+part of this letter was the following:
+
+     One of the characters in your story, namely, the Gout
+     appeared to me to reason well enough, with the
+     exception of his supposition that mistresses have had
+     something to do with producing this painful malady. I
+     myself believe the entire contrary, and this is my
+     method of reasoning. When I was a young man, and
+     enjoyed the favors of the sex more freely than at
+     present, I had no gout. Therefore, if the ladies of
+     Passy had had more of that kind of Christian charity,
+     that I have often recommended to you in vain, I would
+     not have the gout at present. This seems to me to be
+     good logic.
+
+     I am much better. I suffer little pain, but I am very
+     feeble. I can, as you see, joke a little, but I cannot
+     be really gay before I hear that your precious health
+     is re-established.
+
+     I send you my Dialogue in the hope that it may amuse
+     you at times.
+
+     Many thanks for the three last volumes of Montaigne
+     that I return.
+
+     The visit of your ever lovable family yesterday evening
+     has done me much good. My God! how I love them all from
+     the Grandmother and the father to the smallest child.
+
+The reply of Madame Brillon was in kindred terms:
+
+                            Saturday, 18th November, 1780.
+
+     There would be many little things indeed to criticise
+     in your logic, which you fortify so well, my dear Papa.
+     "When I was a young man," you say, "and enjoyed the
+     favors of the sex more freely than at present, I had no
+     gout." "Therefore," one might reply to this, "when I
+     threw myself out of the window, I did not break my
+     leg." Therefore, you could have the gout without having
+     deserved it, and you could have well deserved it, as I
+     believe, and not have had it.
+
+     If this last argument is not so brilliant as the
+     others, it is clear and sure; what is neither clear nor
+     sure are the arguments of philosophers who insist that
+     everything that happens in the world is necessary to
+     the general movement of the universal machine. I
+     believe that the machine would go neither better nor
+     worse if you did not have the gout, and if I were
+     forever rid of my nervous troubles.
+
+     I do not see what help, more or less, these little
+     incidents can give to the wheels that turn this world
+     at random, and I know that my little machine goes very
+     much the worse for them. What I know very well besides,
+     is that pain sometimes becomes mistress of reason, and
+     that patience alone can overcome these two nuisances. I
+     have as much of it as I can, and I advise you, my
+     friend, to have the same amount. When frosts have cast
+     a gloom over the earth, a bright sun makes us forget
+     them. We are in the midst of frosts, and must wait
+     patiently for this bright sun, and, while waiting for
+     it, amuse ourselves in the moments when weakness and
+     pain leave us some rest. _This_, my dear Papa, is _my_
+     logic....
+
+     Adieu, my good Papa. My big husband will take my letter
+     to you; he is very happy to be able to go to see you.
+     For me, nothing remains but the faculty of loving my
+     friends. You surely do not doubt that I shall do my
+     best for you, even to Christian charity, that is to
+     say, with the exception of your Christian charity.
+
+She writes a brief letter to Franklin on New Year's Day of 1781:
+
+     If I had a good head and good legs--if, in short, I had
+     everything that I lack,--I should have come, like a
+     good daughter, to wish a happy New Year to the best of
+     papas. But I have only a very tender heart to love him
+     well, and a rather bad pen to scribble him that this
+     year, as well as last year, and all the years of my
+     life, I shall love him, myself alone, as much as all
+     the others that love him, put together.
+
+     Brillon and the children present their respects to the
+     kind Papa; and we also send a thousand messages for M.
+     Franklinet.
+
+Some four years later, after Franklin had vainly endeavored to marry Temple
+Franklin to a daughter of Madame Brillon, we find him writing a letter of
+congratulation to her upon the happy _accouchement_ of her daughter. It
+elicits a reply in which the cheek of the "beautiful and benignant nature,"
+of which she speaks, undergoes a considerable amount of artificial
+coloring.
+
+                                    2nd December, 1784.
+
+     Your letter, my kind Papa, has given me keen pleasure;
+     but, if you would give me still more, remain in France
+     until you see my sixth generation. I only ask you for
+     fifteen or sixteen years: my granddaughter will be
+     marriageable early; she is fair and strong. I am
+     tasting a new feeling, my good Papa, to which my heart
+     surrenders itself with pleasure, it is so sweet to
+     love. I have never been able to conceive how beings
+     exist who are such enemies to themselves as to reject
+     friendship. They are ingrates, we say; well we are
+     deceived; that is a little hard sometimes, but we are
+     not always so; and to feel oneself incapable of
+     returning the treachery affords a satisfaction of
+     itself that consoles us for it.
+
+     My little nurse is charming and fresh as a morning
+     rose. The first days the child had difficulty,... but
+     patience and the mother's courage overcame it; all goes
+     well now, and nothing could be more interesting than
+     this picture of a young and pretty person nursing a
+     superb child, the father uninterruptedly occupied with
+     the spectacle, and joining his attentions to those of
+     his wife. My eyes are unceasingly moist, and my heart
+     rejoices, my kind Papa. You realize so well the value
+     of all that belongs to beautiful and benignant nature
+     that I owe you these details. My daughter charges me
+     with her thanks and compliments to you; _ma Cadette_
+     and my men present their regards, and as for me, my
+     friend, I beg you to believe that my friendship and my
+     existence will always be one as respects you.
+
+Once Franklin sought to corner Madame Brillon with a story, which makes us
+feel for a moment as if the rod of transformation was beginning to work a
+backward spell, and the Benjamin Franklin of Craven Street and Independence
+Hall to be released from the spell of the French Circe:
+
+     To make you better realize the force of my
+     demonstration that you do not love me, I commence with
+     a little story:
+
+     A beggar asked a rich Bishop for a louis by way of
+     alms. You are wild. No one gives a louis to a beggar.
+     An ecu then. No. That is too much. A liard then,--or
+     your benediction. My benediction! Yes, I will give it
+     to you. No, I will not accept it. For if it was worth a
+     liard, you would not be willing to give it to me. That
+     was how this Bishop loved his neighbor. That was his
+     charity! And, were I to scrutinize yours, I would not
+     find it much greater. I am incredibly hungry for it and
+     you have given me nothing to eat. I was a stranger, and
+     I was almost as love-sick as Colin when you were
+     singing, and you have neither taken me in, nor cured
+     me, nor eased me.
+
+     You who are as rich as an Archbishop in all the
+     Christian and moral virtues, and could sacrifice a
+     small share of some of them without visible loss, you
+     tell me that it is asking too much, and that you are
+     not willing to do it. That is your charity to a poor
+     wretch, who once enjoyed affluence, and is
+     unfortunately reduced to soliciting alms. Nevertheless,
+     you say you love him. But you would not give him your
+     friendship if it involved the expenditure of the least
+     little morsel, of the value of a liard, of your wisdom.
+
+But see how nimbly the coquette eludes her pursuer:
+
+     MY DEAR PAPA: Your bishop was a niggard and your beggar
+     a queer enough fellow. You are a logician all the
+     cleverer because you argue in a charming way, and
+     almost awaken an inclination to yield to your unsound
+     arguments founded on a false principle. Is it of Dr.
+     Franklin, the celebrated philosopher, the profound
+     statesman, that a woman speaks with so much
+     irreverence? Yes, this erudite man, this legislator,
+     has his infirmities (it is the weakness, moreover, of
+     great men: he has taken full advantage of it). But let
+     us go into the matter.
+
+     To prove that I do not love you, my good Papa, you
+     compare yourself to a beggar who asked alms from a
+     bishop. Now, the role of a bishop is not to refuse to
+     give to beggars when they are really in want; he honors
+     himself in doing good. But in truth the kind of charity
+     which you ask of me so amusingly can be found
+     everywhere. You will not grow thin because of my
+     refusals! What would you think of your beggar, if, the
+     bishop having given him the "louis" which he asked, he
+     had grumbled because he did not get two? That, however,
+     is your case, my good friend.
+
+     You adopted me as your daughter, I chose you for my
+     father: what do you expect of me? Friendship! Well, I
+     love you as a daughter should love her father. The
+     purest, the most respectful, the tenderest affection
+     for you fills my soul; you asked me for a "louis"; I
+     gave it to you, and yet you murmur at not getting
+     another one, which does not belong to me. It is a
+     treasure which has been entrusted to me, my good Papa;
+     I guard it and will always guard it carefully. Even if
+     you were like "Colin sick," in truth I could not cure
+     you; and nevertheless, whatever you may think or say,
+     no one in this world loves you more than I.
+
+In this letter she puts him off with the teasing assurance of friendship.
+In another, written from Marseilles, it is with other charming women that
+she mocks him:
+
+     I received on my arrival here, my good Papa, your
+     letter of October 1st. It has given me keen pleasure; I
+     found in it evidences of your friendship and a tinge of
+     that gayety and gallantry which make all women love
+     you, because you love them all. Your proposition to
+     carry me on your wings, if you were the angel Gabriel,
+     made me laugh; but I would not accept it, although I am
+     no longer very young nor a virgin. That angel was a sly
+     fellow and your nature united to his would become too
+     dangerous. I should be afraid of miracles happening,
+     and miracles between women and angels might well not
+     always bring a redeemer....
+
+     I have arranged, my good friend, to write alternately
+     to my "great neighbor" and to you; the one to whom I
+     shall not have written will kindly tell the other that
+     I love him with all my heart, and when your turn comes
+     you will add an embrace for the good wife of our
+     neighbor, for her daughter, for little Mother Caillot,
+     for all the gentle and pretty women of my acquaintance
+     whom you may meet. You see that not being able to amuse
+     you, either by my singing or by chess, I seek to
+     procure you other pleasures. If you had been at Avignon
+     with us, it is there you would have wished to embrace
+     people. The women there are charming; I thought of you
+     every time I saw one of them. Adieu, my good Papa; I do
+     not relate to you the details of my journey, as I have
+     written of them to our neighbor, who will communicate
+     them to you. I limit myself to assuring you of the most
+     constant and the tenderest friendship on my part.
+
+At times the pursuer is too badly afflicted with gout in his legs to
+maintain the pursuit, and the pursued has to come to his assistance to keep
+the flirtation going:
+
+     How are you, my good Papa? Never has it cost me so much
+     to leave you; every evening it seems to me that you
+     would be very glad to see me, and every evening I think
+     of you. On Monday, the 21st, I shall go to meet you
+     again; I hope that you will then be very firm on your
+     feet, and that the teas of Wednesday and Saturday, and
+     that of Sunday morning, will regain all their
+     brilliance. I will bring you _la bonne eveque_. My fat
+     husband will make you laugh, our children will laugh
+     together, our great neighbor will quiz, the Abbes La
+     Roche and Morellet will eat all the butter, Mme. Grand,
+     her amiable niece, and M. Grand will help the company
+     out, Pere Pagin will play _God of Love_ on his violin,
+     I the march on the Piano, and you _Petits Oiseaux_ on
+     the armonica.
+
+     O! my friend, let us see in the future fine and strong
+     legs for you, and think no more of the bad one that has
+     persecuted you so much. After what is bad, one enjoys
+     what is good more; life is sown with both, which she
+     changes unceasingly. What she cannot keep from being
+     equal and uniform is my tenderness for you, that time,
+     place, and events will never alter.
+
+     My mother and all my family wish to be remembered to
+     you.
+
+     I have had some news of you through our neighbor, but I
+     must absolutely have some from you.
+
+Amusingly enough, M. Brillon contributes his part to the restoration of the
+gouty legs to something like normal activity.
+
+     The visits of your good husband during my sickness
+     [wrote Franklin to Madame Brillon] have been very
+     agreeable to me. His conversation has eased and
+     enlivened me. I regret that, instead of seeking it when
+     I have been at your home, I have lost so much time in
+     playing chess. He has many stories and always applies
+     them well. If he has despoiled you of some, you can
+     repeat them all the same, for they will always please
+     me, coming from your mouth.
+
+There is another letter from Madame Brillon to Franklin which drew a reply
+from him, in which he ascended into the Christian heaven with almost as
+much literary facility as marked his entrance into the Pagan Elysium. Her
+letter was written during an absence from home:
+
+     Here I am reduced to writing to you, my good Papa, and
+     to telling you that I love you. It was sweeter no doubt
+     to let you see it in my eyes. How am I going to spend
+     the Wednesdays and Saturdays? No teas, no chess, no
+     music, no hope of seeing or embracing my good papa! It
+     seems to me that the privation which I experience from
+     your absence would suffice to make me change my views,
+     were I inclined to materialism.
+
+     Happiness is so uncertain, so full of crosses, that the
+     deep conviction that we shall be happier in another
+     life can alone tide us over the trials of this one. In
+     Paradise we shall be reunited, never to leave each
+     other again! We shall there live on roasted apples
+     only; the music will be made up of Scotch airs; all
+     parties will be given over to chess, so that no one may
+     be disappointed; every one will speak the same
+     language; the English will be neither unjust nor wicked
+     there; the women will not be coquettes, the men will be
+     neither jealous nor too gallant; "King John" will be
+     left to eat his apples in peace; perhaps he will be
+     decent enough to offer some to his neighbors--who
+     knows? since we shall want for nothing in paradise! We
+     shall never suffer from gout or nervous troubles there.
+     Mr. Mesmer will content himself with playing on the
+     armonica, without wearying us with the electric fluid;
+     ambition, envy, snobbery, jealousy, prejudice, all
+     these will vanish at the sound of the trumpet. A
+     lasting, sweet and peaceful friendship will animate
+     every gathering. Every day we shall love one another,
+     in order that we may love one another still more the
+     day after; in a word, we shall be completely happy. In
+     the meantime, let us get all the good we can out of
+     this poor world of ours. I am far from you, my good
+     Papa; I look forward to the time of our meeting, and I
+     am pleased to think that your regrets and desires equal
+     mine.
+
+     My mother and my children send you a thousand tender
+     messages of respect; we should all like to have you
+     here. May I venture to ask you to remember us to your
+     grandson?
+
+And this was the deft reply of Franklin which has come down to us in French
+corrected by Madame Brillon's hand:
+
+     Since you have assured me that we shall meet each other
+     again, and shall recognize each other, in Paradise, I
+     have reflected continually on our arrangements in that
+     country; for I have great confidence in your
+     assurances, and I believe implicitly what you believe.
+
+     Probably more than forty years will pass away, after my
+     arrival there, before you will follow me. I fear a
+     little that, in the course of such a long time, you may
+     forget me; that is why I have had thoughts of proposing
+     to you that you give me your word that you will not
+     renew your contract with M. Brillon. I would give you
+     mine at the same time to wait for you, but this
+     monsieur is so good, so generous to us--he loves
+     you--and we him--so well--that I can not think of this
+     proposition without some scruples of
+     conscience--however the idea of an eternity, in which I
+     should not be more favored than to be allowed to kiss
+     your hands, or your cheeks occasionally, and to pass
+     two or three hours in your sweet society at Wednesday
+     and Saturday evening parties, is frightful. In fine, I
+     can not make that proposal, but since, like all who
+     know you, I desire to see you happy in every respect,
+     we may agree to say nothing more about it at this time,
+     and to leave you at liberty to decide, when we are all
+     together again: there to determine the question as you
+     deem best for your happiness and ours; but, determine
+     it as you will, I feel that I shall love you eternally.
+     Should you reject me, perhaps, I shall pay my addresses
+     to Madame D'Hardancourt (the mother of Madame Brillon),
+     who might be glad to keep house for me. In that event I
+     should pass my domestic hours agreeably with her; and I
+     should be better prepared to see you. I should have
+     enough time in those forty years there to practise on
+     the armonica, and, perhaps, I should play well enough
+     to be worthy to accompany your pianoforte. We should
+     have little concerts from time to time, good father
+     Pagin would be of the company, your neighbor and his
+     dear family [M. Jupin], M. de Chaumont, M. B., M.
+     Jourdan, M. Grammont, Madame du Tartre, the little
+     mother, and some other select friends will be our
+     audience, and the dear, good girls, accompanied by some
+     other young angels, whose portraits you have already
+     given me, will sing hallelujahs with us; we shall eat
+     together apples of Paradise, roasted with butter and
+     nutmeg; and we shall pity them who are not dead.
+
+In another letter, he complains that she shuts him out from everything
+except a few civil and polite kisses such as she might give to some of her
+small cousins.
+
+All this, however, was but preliminary to the treaty, which the signer of
+the Treaty of Alliance between France and the United States formally
+submitted to her in this letter.
+
+Among the articles of this treaty were to be these:
+
+     Article 6. And the said Mr. F. on his part stipulates
+     and covenants that he is to call at the home of M'de B.
+     as often as he pleases.
+
+     Article 7. That he is to remain there as long as he
+     pleases.
+
+     Article 8. And that when he is with her, he is to do
+     what he pleases.
+
+He did not have much hope, he said, of obtaining her consent to the eighth
+article.
+
+In another letter, the aged lover tells Madame Brillon that she must not
+accuse others of being responsible for his having left her half an hour
+sooner than usual. The truth was that he was very much fatigued for special
+reasons that he mentions, and thought it more decent to leave her than to
+fall asleep, which he was beginning to do on a bench in her garden after
+her descent into it. After all a half-hour with an old man, who could not
+make the best use of it, was a thing of very little importance. Saturday
+evening, he would remain with her until she wished him to go, and, in spite
+of her usual polite phrases, he would know the time by her refusal to give
+him a little kiss.
+
+With another note, he sent to Madame Brillon his Essay on the Morals of
+Chess. It was only proper that it should be dedicated to her, he said, as
+its good advice was copied from her generous and magnanimous way of playing
+the game. In the same letter, he stated that his grandson had inspected the
+house that she had urged him to apply for, but, true still to his adopted
+character, he said, "He finds it too magnificent for simple Republicans."
+
+In another letter, he told Madame Brillon that he loved to live, because it
+seemed to him that there was much more pleasure than pain in existence. We
+should not blame Providence rashly. She should reflect how many even of our
+duties it had made pleasures, and that it had been good enough, moreover,
+to call several pleasures sins to enhance our enjoyment of them.
+
+One more letter from Madame Brillon and we shall let her retire from the
+chess-board with the credit of having proved herself fully a match for
+Franklin in the longest and most absorbing game of chess that he played in
+France:
+
+                                       25th of December at Nice.
+
+     The atonement is adequate, my dear Papa. I shall no
+     longer call you _Monseigneur_ nor even _Monsieur_. My
+     petition succeeded before reaching you; our tears are
+     dried. You love us, you tell us so; you are in good
+     health, and are as roguish as ever, since you are
+     planning to steal me from Brillon, and to take me on a
+     trip to America without letting anyone know it.
+     Everything is as usual. I recognize your fine mask, and
+     I am wholly satisfied. But, my good Papa, why say that
+     you write French badly,--that your pleasantries in that
+     language are only nonsense? To make an academic
+     discourse, one must be a good grammarian; but to write
+     to our friends all we need is a heart, and you combine
+     with the best heart, my lovable Papa, when you wish,
+     the soundest ethics, a lively imagination, and that
+     roguishness, so pleasant, which shows that the wisest
+     man in the world allows his wisdom to be perpetually
+     broken against the rocks of femininity. Write to me,
+     therefore, write to me often and much, or from spite I
+     shall learn English. I should want to know it quickly,
+     and that would hurt me as I have been forbidden all
+     study, and you would be the cause of my ills, for
+     having refused me a few lines of your bad French, which
+     my family and I--and we are not simpletons--consider
+     very good; ask my neighbors, M. d'Estaing, Mme.
+     Helvetius and her abbes, if it would be right for you
+     to prejudice the improvement which the sun here has
+     caused in my health, for the sake of a little _amour
+     propre_ which is beneath My Lord the Ambassador,
+     Benjamin Franklin.
+
+One more letter from Franklin, and we shall cease to walk upon eggs. The
+French drapery is gone and nothing is left but Saxon nudity:
+
+     I am charm'd with the goodness of my spiritual guide,
+     and resign myself implicitly to her Conduct, as she
+     promises to lead me to heaven in so delicious a Road
+     when I could be content to travel thither even in the
+     roughest of all ways with the pleasure of her company.
+
+     How kindly partial to her Penitent in finding him, on
+     examining his conscience, guilty of only one capital
+     sin and to call that by the gentle name of Foible!
+
+     I lay fast hold of your promise to absolve me of all
+     Sins past, present, & future, on the easy & pleasing
+     Condition of loving God, America and my guide above all
+     things. I am in rapture when I think of being absolv'd
+     of the future.
+
+     People commonly speak of Ten Commandments.--I have been
+     taught that there are twelve. The first was increase &
+     multiply & replenish the earth. The twelfth is, A new
+     Commandment I give unto you, _that you love one
+     another_. It seems to me that they are a little
+     misplaced, And that the last should have been the
+     first. However I never made any difficulty about that,
+     but was always willing to obey them both whenever I had
+     an opportunity. Pray tell me dear Casuist, whether my
+     keeping religiously these two commandments tho' not in
+     the Decalogue, may not be accepted in Compensation for
+     my breaking so often one of the ten, I mean that which
+     forbids coveting my neighbour's wife, and which I
+     confess I break constantly God forgive me, as often as
+     I see or think of my lovely Confessor, and I am afraid
+     I should never be able to repent of the Sin even if I
+     had the full Possession of her.
+
+     And now I am Consulting you upon a Case of Conscience I
+     will mention the Opinion of a certain Father of the
+     church which I find myself willing to adopt though I am
+     not sure it is orthodox. It is this, that the most
+     effectual way to get rid of a certain Temptation is, as
+     often as it returns, to comply with and satisfy it.
+
+     Pray instruct me how far I may venture to practice upon
+     this Principle?
+
+     But why should I be so scrupulous when you have
+     promised to absolve me of the future?
+
+     Adieu my charming Conductress and believe me ever with
+     the sincerest Esteem & affection.
+
+                        Your most obed't hum. Serv.
+
+                                               B F
+
+It would be easy enough to treat this correspondence too seriously. When we
+recall the social sympathies and diversions which drew the parties to it
+together, the advanced age of Franklin, the friendly relations sustained by
+him to all the members of the Brillon household, his attempt to bring about
+a matrimonial union between Temple Franklin and the daughter of Madame
+Brillon, the good-humored complaisance of M. Brillon, the usages of
+Parisian society at that time, the instinctive ease with which Franklin
+adopted the tone of any land in which he happened to be, and the sportive
+grace and freedom, brought by his wit and literary dexterity to every
+situation that invited their exercise, we might well infer that, perhaps,
+after all, on his part, as well on that of the clever coquette, whose
+bodkin was quite as keen as his sword, it was understood that the _liaison_
+was to be only a paper one--an encounter of wit rather than of love. From
+first to last, the attitude of Madame Brillon towards Franklin was simply
+that of a beautiful and brilliant woman, to whom coquetry was an art, and
+whose intellectual activity had been stimulated, and vanity gratified, by
+the homage of a brilliant, magnetic and famous man, who possessed to a
+remarkable degree the faculty of rendering his splendid intellectual powers
+subservient to purely social uses. It was no slight thing to a woman such
+as Madame Brillon to be the _Vainqueur du Vainqueur de la Terre_, and
+little less than this did all France at that time insist that Franklin was.
+There is nothing in her letters to Franklin to indicate that she ever
+really had any thought of allowing him any greater degree of intimacy with
+her than he actually enjoyed. On that point she was apparently as firm as
+she was in her courteous and kindly but inflexible opposition to a marriage
+between her daughter and William Temple Franklin.
+
+     I despise slanderers [she wrote to Franklin on one
+     occasion], and am at peace with myself, but that is not
+     enough, one must submit to what is called _propriety_
+     (that word varies in each century in each country) to
+     sit less often on your knees. I shall certainly love
+     you none the less, nor will our hearts be more or less
+     pure; but we shall close the mouth of the malicious,
+     and it is no slight thing even for the sage to silence
+     them.
+
+On the other hand there is much to support the idea that the motive at the
+back of Franklin's letters to Madame Brillon was very much the same as that
+which inspired the _Journey to the Elysian Fields_ and the _Ephemera_. They
+were to a great extent, at any rate, mere literary bagatelles as those
+performances were--the offerings of an opulent wit and fancy at the shrine
+of beauty and fashion, which to be successful in an academic sense had to
+be informed by the spirit, and attuned to the note, of the time and place.
+All the same, the letters from Franklin to Madame Brillon are painful
+reading. Like not a little else in his life, they tend to confirm the
+impression that upright, courageous, public-spirited, benevolent, loving
+and faithful in friendship as he was, on the sensual side of his nature he
+was lamentably callous to the moral laws and conventions and the personal
+and social refinements which legitimize and dignify the physical
+intercourse of the sexes. The pinchbeck glitter, the deceitful vacuity of
+his moral regimen and _Art of Virtue_, assume an additional meaning, when
+we see him mumbling the cheek of Madame Brillon, and month after month and
+year after year writing to her in strains of natural or affected
+concupiscence. It was things of this sort which have assisted in
+strengthening the feeling, not uncommon, that Franklin's _Art of Virtue_
+was a purely counterfeit thing, and the moralist himself an untrustworthy
+guide to righteous conduct.
+
+In a letter to M. de Veillard, Franklin after his return to America from
+France referred to the Brillon family as "that beloved family." Restored to
+his home surroundings, he forgot his French lines, and was again as soberly
+American as ever in thought and speech. Who would recognize the lover of
+Madame Brillon in this russet picture that he paints of himself in his
+eighty-third year in a letter to her?
+
+     You have given me Pleasure by informing me of the
+     Welfare and present agreable Circumstances of yourself
+     and Children; and I am persuaded that your Friendship
+     for me will render a similar Account of my Situation
+     pleasing to you. I am in a Country where I have the
+     happiness of being universally respected and beloved,
+     of which three successive annual Elections to the Chief
+     Magistracy, in which Elections the Representatives of
+     the People in Assembly and the Supreme Court join'd and
+     were unanimous, is the strongest Proof; this is a Place
+     of Profit as well as of Honour; and my Friends
+     chearfully assist in making the Business as easy to me
+     as possible.
+
+After a word more with regard to the dwelling and the dutiful family, so
+often mentioned in his twilight letters, he concludes in this manner:
+
+     My Rents and Incomes are amply sufficient for all my
+     present Occasions; and if no unexpected Misfortunes
+     happen during the time I have to live, I shall leave a
+     handsome Estate to be divided among my Relatives. As to
+     my Health, it continues the same, or rather better than
+     when I left Passy; but being now in my 83rd year, I do
+     not expect to continue much longer a Sojourner in this
+     world, and begin to promise myself much Gratification
+     of my Curiosity in soon visiting some other.
+
+In this letter, Franklin was looking forward, we hardly need say, to a very
+different world from the one where Madame Brillon was to be the second Mrs.
+Franklin, and they were to eat together apples of Paradise roasted with
+butter and nutmeg. And it is only just to the memory of Madame Brillon to
+recall the genuine words, so unlike the tenor of her former letters to
+Franklin, in which she bade him farewell, when he was leaving the shores of
+France:
+
+     I had so full a heart yesterday in leaving you that I
+     feared for you and myself a grief-stricken moment which
+     could only add to the pain which our separation causes
+     me, without proving to you further the tender and
+     unalterable affection that I have vowed to you for
+     always. Every day of my life I shall recall that a
+     great man, a sage, was willing to be my friend; my
+     wishes will follow him everywhere; my heart will regret
+     him incessantly; incessantly I shall say I passed eight
+     years with Doctor Franklin; they have flown, and I
+     shall see him no more! Nothing in the world could
+     console me for this loss, except the thought of the
+     peace and happiness that you are about to find in the
+     bosom of your family.
+
+It was to the Comtesse d'Houdetot of Rousseau's _Confessions_, however,
+that Franklin was indebted for his social apotheosis in France. In a
+letter to her after his return to America, he calls her "ma chere &
+toujours--amiable Amie," and declares that the memory of her friendship and
+of the happy hours that he had passed in her sweet society at Sanois, had
+often caused him to regret the distance which made it impossible for them
+to ever meet again. In her letters to him, after his return to America, she
+seeks in such words as "homage," "veneration" and "religious tenderness" to
+express the feelings with which he had inspired her. In these letters,
+there are also references to the _fete champetre_ which she gave in his
+honor at her country seat at Sanois on the 12th day of April, in the year
+1781, and which was one of the celebrated events of the time. When it was
+announced that Franklin's carriage was approaching the chateau, the
+Countess and a distinguished retinue of her relations set out on foot to
+meet him. At a distance of about half a mile from the chateau, they came
+upon him, and gathered around the doors of his carriage, and escorted it to
+the grounds of the chateau, where the Countess herself assisted Franklin to
+alight. "The venerable sage," said a contemporary account, "with his gray
+hairs flowing down upon his shoulders, his staff in his hand, the
+spectacles of wisdom on his nose, was the perfect picture of true
+philosophy and virtue." As soon as Franklin had descended from the
+carriage, the whole company grouped themselves around him, and the Countess
+declaimed, with proper emphasis we may be sure, these lines:
+
+    "Soul of heroes and wise men,
+    Oh, Liberty! First boon of the Gods!
+    Alas! It is too remotely that we pay thee our vows;
+    It is only with sighs that we render homage
+    To the man who made happy his fellow-citizens."
+
+All then wended their way through the gardens of the Countess to the
+chateau, where they were soon seated at a noble feast. With the first
+glass of wine, a soft air was played, and the Countess and her relations
+rose to their feet, and sang in chorus these lines, which they repeated in
+chorus after every succeeding glass of wine:
+
+    "Of Benjamin let us celebrate the renown,
+    Let us sing the good that he has done to mortals;
+    In America he will have altars,
+    And at Sanois we drink to his fame."
+
+When the time for the second glass of wine came, the Countess sang this
+quatrain:
+
+    "He gives back to human nature its rights,
+    To free it he would first enlighten it,
+    And virtue to make itself adored,
+    Assumed the form of Benjamin."
+
+And at the third glass, the Vicomte d'Houdetot sang these words:
+
+    "William Tell was brave but savage,
+    More highly our dear Benjamin I prize,
+    While shaping the destiny of America,
+    At meat he laughs just as does your true sage."
+
+And at the fourth glass, the Vicomtesse d'Houdetot sang these words:
+
+    "I say, live Philadelphia, too!
+    Freedom has its allurement for me;
+    In that country, I would gladly dwell,
+    Though neither ball nor comedy is there."
+
+And at the fifth glass, Madame de Pernan sang these words:
+
+    "All our children shall learn of their mothers,
+    To love, to trust, and to bless you;
+    You teach that which may reunite
+    All the sons of men in the arms of one father."
+
+And at the sixth glass, the aged Comte de Tressan sang these words:
+
+    "Live Sanois! 'Tis my Philadelphia.
+    When I see here its dear law-giver;
+    I grow young again in the heart of delight,
+    And I laugh, and I drink and list to Sophie."
+
+And at the seventh glass, the Comte d'Apche sang these lines, in which some
+violence was done to the facts of English History, and the French
+Revolution was foreshadowed:
+
+    "To uphold that sacred charter
+    Which Edward accorded to the English,
+    I feel that there is no French Knight
+    Who does not desire to use his sword."
+
+And so quatrain preceded glass and chorus followed quatrain until every
+member of the eulogistic company had sung his or her song. The banqueters
+then rose from the table, and the Countess, followed by her relations,
+conducted Franklin to an arbor in her gardens, where he was presented with
+a Virginia locust by her gardener, which he was asked to honor the family
+by planting with his own hands. When he had done so, the Countess declaimed
+some additional lines, which were afterwards inscribed upon a marble
+pillar, erected near the tree:
+
+    "Sacred tree, lasting monument
+    Of the sojourn deigned to be made here by a sage,
+    Of these gardens henceforth the pride,
+    Receive here the just homage
+    Of our vows and of our incense;
+    And may you for all the ages,
+    Forever respected by time,
+    Live as long as his name, his laws and his deeds."
+
+On their way back to the chateau, the concourse was met by a band which
+played an accompaniment, while the Countess and her kinsfolk sang this
+song:
+
+    "May this tree, planted by his benevolent hand,
+    Lifting up its new-born trunk,
+    Above the sterile elm,
+    By its odoriferous flower,
+    Make fragrant all this happy hamlet.
+    The lightning will lack power to strike it,
+    And will respect its summit and its branches,
+    'Twas Franklin who, by his prosperous labors,
+    Taught us to direct or to extinguish that,
+    While he was destroying other evils,
+    Still more for the earth's sake to be pitied."
+
+This over, all returned to the chateau where they were engaged for some
+time in agreeable conversation. In the late afternoon, Franklin was
+conducted by the Countess and the rest to his carriage, and, when he was
+seated, they gathered about the open door of the vehicle, and the Countess
+addressed her departing guest in these words:
+
+    "Legislator of one world, and benefactor of two!
+    For all time mankind will owe thee its tribute,
+    And it is but my part that I here discharge
+    Of the debt that is thy due from all the ages."
+
+The door of the carriage was then closed, and Franklin returned to Paris
+duly deified but as invincibly sensible as ever.
+
+Another French woman with whom Franklin was on terms of familiar affection
+was the wife of his friend, Jean Baptiste Le Roy. His endearing term for
+her was _petite femme de poche_ (little pocket wife), and, in a letter
+after his return to Philadelphia, she assured him that, as long as his
+_petite femme de poche_ had the breath of life, she would love him.
+
+On one occasion, when he was in France, she wrote to him, asking him to
+dine with her on Wednesday, and saying that she would experience great
+pleasure in seeing and embracing him. Assuredly, he replied, he would not
+fail her. He found too much pleasure in seeing her, and in hearing her
+speak, and too much happiness, when he held her in his arms, to forget an
+invitation so precious.
+
+In another letter to her, after his return to America--the letter which
+drew forth her declaration that her love for him would last as long as her
+breath--he told her that she was very courageous to ascend so high in a
+balloon, and very good, when she was so near heaven, not to think of
+quitting her friends, and remaining with the angels. Competition might well
+have shunned an effort to answer such a flourish as that in kind, but a
+lady, who had been up in a balloon among the angels, was not the person to
+lack courage for any experiment. She only regretted, she said, that the
+balloon could not go very far, for, if it had been but able to carry her to
+him, she _would have been_ among the angels, and would have given him
+proofs of the respect and esteem for him, ineffaceably engraved upon her
+heart. Sad to relate, in the same letter she tells Franklin that her
+husband had proved hopelessly recreant to every principle of honor and good
+feeling. We say, "sad to relate," not for general reasons only, but because
+Franklin, when he had heard in 1772 that Le Roy was well and happily
+married, had felicitated him on the event, and repeated his oft-asserted
+statement that matrimony is the natural condition of man; though he omitted
+this time his usual comparison of celibacy with the odd half of a pair of
+scissors. The estrangement between his little pocket wife and her husband,
+however, did not affect his feeling of devoted friendship for Jean Baptiste
+Le Roy. Some two years and five months later, when the wild Walpurgis night
+of the French Revolution was setting in, he wrote to Le Roy to find out why
+he had been so long silent. "It is now more than a year," he said, "since
+I have heard from my dear friend Le Roy. What can be the reason? Are you
+still living? Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer
+of knowledge, for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets
+upon a pole?" The fact that Le Roy, who was a physicist of great
+reputation, was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the
+Royal Society, led Franklin in one of his letters to address him as his
+"Dear double _Confrere_." Le Roy's three brothers, Pierre, Charles and
+David were also friends of Franklin. Indeed, in a letter to Jean Baptiste,
+Franklin spoke of David, to whom he addressed his valuable paper entitled
+_Maritime Observations_, as "our common Brother."
+
+Other friendships formed by Franklin with women in France were those with
+Madame Lavoisier, Madame de Forbach and Mademoiselle Flainville. Madame
+Lavoisier was first the wife of the famous chemist of that name, and, after
+he was guillotined, during the French Revolution, the wife of the equally
+famous Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. She painted a portrait of
+Franklin, and sent it to him at Philadelphia.
+
+     It is allowed by those, who have seen it [he wrote to
+     her], to have great merit as a picture in every
+     respect; but what particularly endears it to me is the
+     hand that drew it. Our English enemies, when they were
+     in possession of this city (Philadelphia) and my house,
+     made a prisoner of my portrait, and carried it off with
+     them, leaving that of its companion, my wife, by
+     itself, a kind of widow. You have replaced the husband,
+     and the lady seems to smile as well pleased.
+
+So his Eurydice, as soon as the enchantments of the French sorceress lost
+their power, was re-united to him after all.
+
+Among his French friends, Madame de Forbach, the Dowager Duchess of
+Deux-Ponts, was conspicuous for the number of the presents that she made
+to him. Among others, was the fine crab-tree walking stick, surmounted with
+a gold head, wrought in the form of a cap of liberty, which he bequeathed
+to Washington. Other gifts of hers are alluded to in a letter from Franklin
+to her, acknowledging the receipt of a pair of scissors.
+
+     It is true [he said] that I can now neither walk abroad
+     nor write at home without having something that may
+     remind me of your Goodness towards me; you might have
+     added, that I can neither play at Chess nor drink Tea
+     without the same sensation: but these had slipt your
+     Memory. There are People who forget the Benefits they
+     receive, Mad'e de Forbach only those she bestows.
+
+His only letter to Mademoiselle Flainville is addressed to "ma chere
+enfant," and is signed "Your loving Papa." It helps, along with innumerable
+other kindred scraps of evidence, to prove how infirm is the train of
+reasoning which seeks to establish a parental tie between Franklin and
+anyone simply upon the strength of his epistolary assumption of fatherhood.
+He might as well be charged with polygamy because he addressed so many
+persons as "my wife" or "ma femme." This letter also has its interest, as
+exemplifying the natural manner in which he awaited the sedan chair that
+was to bear him away from his fleshly tenement. "I have been harassed with
+Illness this last Summer," he told her, "am grown old, near 83, and find
+myself very infirm, so that I expect to be soon call'd for."
+
+This is far from being a complete list of the French women with whom
+Franklin was on terms of affectionate intimacy. To go no further, we know
+that Madame Brillon, in addition to writing to him on one occasion, "Give
+this evening to my amiable rival, Madame Helvetius, kiss her for yourself
+and for me," granted him on another a power of attorney to kiss for her
+until her return, whenever he saw them, her two neighbors, Le Veillard,
+and her pretty neighbor, Caillot.
+
+The truth is that Franklin had a host of friends of both sexes in France.
+
+When Thomas Paine visited that country, after the return of Franklin to
+America, he wrote to the latter that he found his friends in France "very
+numerous and very affectionate"; and we can readily believe it. Among them
+were Buffon, Condorcet, Lafayette, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Lavoisier,
+Chastellux, Grand, Dupont, Dubourg and Le Veillard.
+
+To Buffon, the great naturalist, Franklin was drawn by common scientific
+sympathies. Like Franklin, he became a sufferer from the stone, and one of
+the results was a letter in which the former, in reply to an inquiry from
+him as to how he obtained relief from the malady, stated that his remedy
+was to take, on going to bed, "the Bigness of a Pigeon's Egg of Jelly of
+Blackberries"; which, in the eyes of modern medical science was, as a
+palliative, hardly more effective than a bread pill.
+
+With Condorcet, the philosopher, Franklin was intimate enough to call him,
+and to be called by him, "My dear and illustrious Confrere"; and it was he,
+it is worthy of mention, who happily termed Franklin "the modern
+Prometheus."
+
+For Lafayette, that winning figure, forever fixed in the American memory,
+despite his visit to America in old age, in immortal youth and freshness,
+like the young lover and the happy boughs on Keats's Grecian Urn, Franklin
+had a feeling not unlike that of Washington. In referring to the expedition
+against England, in which Temple Franklin was to have accompanied
+Lafayette, Franklin said in a letter to the latter, "I flatter myself, too,
+that he might possibly catch from you some Tincture of those engaging
+Manners that make you so much the Delight of all that know you." In another
+letter, he observed in reply to the statement by Lafayette that the writer
+had had enemies in America, "You are luckier, for I think you have none
+here, nor anywhere." When it became his duty to deliver to Lafayette the
+figured sword presented to the latter by Congress, he performed the office,
+though ill-health compelled him to delegate the actual delivery of the gift
+to his grandson, in the apt and pointed language which never failed him
+upon such occasions. "By the help," he said, "of the exquisite Artists
+France affords, I find it easy to express everything but the Sense we have
+of your Worth and our Obligations to you. For this, Figures and even Words
+are found insufficient." Through all his letters to Lafayette there is a
+continuous suggestion of cordial attachment to both him and his wife. When
+Lafayette wrote to him that Madame de Lafayette had just given birth to a
+daughter, and that he was thinking of naming her Virginia, he replied, "In
+naming your Children I think you do well to begin with the most antient
+State. And as we cannot have too many of so good a Race I hope you & Mme
+de la Fayette will go thro the Thirteen." This letter was written at Passy.
+In a later letter to Lafayette, written at Philadelphia, he concluded by
+saying, "You will allow an old friend of four-score to say he _loves_ your
+wife, when he adds, and children, and prays God to bless them all."
+
+For the Duc de la Rochefoucauld he entertained the highest respect as well
+as a cordial feeling of friendship. "The good Duke," he terms him in a
+letter to Dr. Price. And it was to the judgment of the Duke and M. le
+Veillard in France, as it was to that of Vaughan and Dr. Price in England,
+as we shall see, that he left the important question as to whether any of
+the _Autobiography_ should be published, and, if so, how much. Among the
+many tributes paid to his memory, was a paper on his life and character
+read by the Duke before the Society of 1789. One of the Duke's services to
+America was that of translating into French, at the request of Franklin,
+for European circulation all the constitutions of the American States.
+
+Lavoisier was a member with Franklin of the commission which investigated
+the therapeutic value of mesmerism, and exposed the imposture of Mesmer.
+There are no social incidents in the intercourse of the two men, friendly
+as it was, so far as we know, worthy of mention; but, in a passage in one
+of Franklin's letters to Jan Ingenhousz, we have a glimpse of the master,
+of whom, when guillotined, after the brutal declaration of Coffinhal, the
+President of the Revolutionary Tribunal, that the Republic had no need for
+_savants_, Lagrange remarked, "They needed but a moment to lay that head
+low, and a hundred years, perhaps, will not be sufficient to reproduce its
+like." Speaking of an experiment performed by Lavoisier, Franklin wrote to
+Jan Ingenhousz, "He kindled a hollow Charcoal, and blew into it a Stream of
+dephlogisticated Air. In this Focus, which is said to be the hottest fire
+human Art has yet been able to produce, he melted Platina in a few
+Minutes."
+
+Franklin's friend, the Chevalier (afterwards Marquis) de Chastellux, who
+served with the Comte de Rochambeau in America, and was the author of the
+valuable _Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 81 and 82_, succeeded
+in making himself as agreeable to American women as Franklin succeeded in
+making himself to French women. There is an echo of this popularity in one
+of Franklin's letters to him. "Dare I confess to you," he said, when he was
+still at Passy, and the Chevalier was still in America, "that I am your
+rival with Madame G----? (Franklin's Katy). I need not tell you, that I am
+not a dangerous one. I perceive that she loves you very much; and so does,
+dear Sir, yours, &c."
+
+Through the influence of Leray de Chaumont, Ferdinand Grand, who was a
+Swiss Protestant, became the banker of our representatives in France, and,
+after Franklin's return to America, he remained entrusted with some of
+Franklin's private funds upon which the latter was in the habit of drawing
+from time to time. The correspondence between Franklin and himself is
+almost wholly lacking in social interest, but it indicates a deep feeling
+of affection upon Franklin's part.
+
+For Dupont de Nemours, the distinguished economist, and the founder of the
+family, which has been so conspicuous in the industrial, military and naval
+history of the United States, Franklin cherished a feeling distinctly
+friendly. His acquaintance with Dupont as well as with Dubourg, who, like
+Dupont, was a member of the group of French Economists, known as the
+Physiocrats, was formed, as we have seen, before his mission to France. The
+correspondence between Franklin and Dupont, however, like that between
+Franklin and Grand, has but little significance for the purposes of this
+chapter.[40]
+
+This, however, is not true of the relations between Dr. Barbeu Dubourg, a
+medical practitioner of high standing, and Franklin. They not only opened
+their minds freely to each other upon a considerable variety of topics, but
+their intercourse was colored by cordial association. Of all the men who
+came under the spell of Franklin's genius, Dubourg, who was, to use
+Franklin's own words, "a man of extensive learning," was one of the
+American philosopher's most enthusiastic pupils. "My dear Master," was the
+term that he habitually used in speaking of him, and his reverence for the
+object of his admiration led him to translate into French, with some
+additions, the edition of Franklin's scientific papers, brought out in
+London by David Henry in 1769. Nothing that he had ever written, he told
+his master, had been so well received as the preface to this compilation.
+"So great," he declared, "is the advantage of soaring in the shadow of
+Franklin's wings." We pass by the communications from Franklin to Dubourg
+on purely scientific subjects. One letter from the former to him brings to
+our knowledge a curious habit into which Franklin was drawn by the
+uncompromising convictions that he entertained in regard to the origin of
+bad colds and the virtues of ventilation, of which we shall hereafter speak
+more particularly.
+
+     You know [he said] the cold bath has long been in vogue
+     here as a tonic; but the shock of the cold water has
+     always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too
+     violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my
+     constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold
+     air. With this view I rise almost every morning, and
+     sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an
+     hour or an hour, according to the season, either
+     reading or writing. This practice is not in the least
+     painful, but, on the contrary, agreeable; and, if I
+     return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as
+     sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night's
+     rest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep
+     that can be imagined. I find no ill consequences
+     whatever resulting from it, and that at least it does
+     not injure my health, if it does not in fact contribute
+     much to its preservation.
+
+Another letter from Franklin to Dubourg is a dissertation on swimming--the
+only form of outdoor exercise, to which he was addicted--but in which he
+was, throughout his life, such an adept that he could even make the
+following entry in his Journal, when he was at Southampton on his return to
+America from France: "I went at noon to bathe in Martin's salt-water
+hot-bath, and, floating on my back, fell asleep, and slept near an hour by
+my watch without sinking or turning! a thing I never did before, and should
+hardly have thought possible. Water is the easiest bed that can be!" In the
+letter to Dubourg, he recalls the assertion of a M. Robinson that fat
+persons with small bones float most easily upon the water, makes a passing
+reference to the diving bell and the swimming waist-coat, now known as the
+life-preserver, and suggests the comfort of varying the progressive motion
+of swimming by turning over occasionally upon one's back, and otherwise. He
+also states that the best method of allaying cramp is to give a sudden
+vigorous and violent shock to the affected region; which may be done in the
+air as the swimmer swims along on his back, and recalls an incident
+illustrative of the danger of throwing one's self, when thoroughly heated,
+into cold spring water.
+
+     The exercise of swimming [he declared] is one of the
+     most healthy and agreeable in the world. After having
+     swam for an hour or two in the evening, one sleeps
+     coolly the whole night, even during the most ardent
+     heat of summer. Perhaps, the pores being cleansed, the
+     insensible perspiration increases and occasions this
+     coolness. It is certain that much swimming is the means
+     of stopping a diarrhoea, and even of producing a
+     constipation.
+
+In this letter, too, Franklin tells Dubourg how, when he was a boy, he
+quickened his progress in swimming by aiding the stroke of his hands with
+oval palettes, and attempted to do so by attaching a kind of sandals to the
+soles of his feet; and also how in his boyhood, on one occasion, he lay on
+his back in a pond and let his kite draw him across it without the least
+fatigue, and with the greatest pleasure imaginable. He thought it not
+impossible to cross in this manner from Dover to Calais.
+
+Another letter from Franklin to Dubourg on what he calls the doctrines of
+life and death is a delightful example of both his insatiable
+inquisitiveness and the readiness with which he could give a pleasant
+fillip to any subject however grave. He is speaking of some common flies
+that had been drowned in Madeira wine, apparently about the time when it
+was bottled in Virginia to be sent to London, where the writer was:
+
+     At the opening of one of the bottles, at the house of a
+     friend where I then was [he said], three drowned flies
+     fell into the first glass that was filled. Having heard
+     it remarked that drowned flies were capable of being
+     revived by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the
+     experiment upon these; they were therefore exposed to
+     the sun upon a sieve, which had been employed to strain
+     them out of the wine. In less than three hours, two of
+     them began by degrees to recover life. They commenced
+     by some convulsive motions of the thighs, and at length
+     they raised themselves upon their legs, wiped their
+     eyes with their fore feet, beat and brushed their wings
+     with their hind feet, and soon after began to fly,
+     finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how
+     they came thither. The third continued lifeless till
+     sunset, when, losing all hopes of him, he was thrown
+     away.
+
+     I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent
+     a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner
+     that they may be recalled to life at any period,
+     however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see
+     and observe the state of America a hundred years hence,
+     I should prefer to any ordinary death, the being
+     immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends,
+     till that time, to be then recalled to life by the
+     solar warmth of my dear country! But since in all
+     probability we live in an age too early and too near
+     the infancy of science, to hope to see such an art
+     brought in our time to its perfection, I must for the
+     present content myself with the treat, which you are so
+     kind as to promise me, of the resurrection of a fowl or
+     turkey cock.
+
+The friendship of Dubourg for Franklin bore good fruit for America, when
+the American Revolution came on; for a sanguine letter from him exerted a
+determining influence in inducing Congress to send Franklin to France.
+
+Le Veillard, who was a neighbor of Franklin at Passy, was one of the
+friends whom Franklin loved as he loved Hugh Roberts or John Hughes,
+Strahan or Jan Ingenhousz. And this feeling, as usual, included the members
+of his friend's family. Public cares, he wrote to Le Veillard, after his
+return to America, could not make him forget that he and Le Veillard loved
+one another. In the same letter, he spoke of Madame Le Veillard, as "the
+best of good women," and of her daughter as the amiable daughter, who, he
+thought, would tread in her footsteps. In a later letter, he told Le
+Veillard that he could not give him a better idea of his present happiness
+in his family than by informing him that his daughter had all the virtues
+of a certain good lady whom Le Veillard allowed him to love; the same
+tender affections and intentions, ingenuity, industry, economy, etc.
+"Embrace that good dame for me warmly, and the amiable daughter," he added.
+"My best wishes attend the whole family, whom I shall never cease to love
+while I am B. Franklin." This wealth of affection was richly repaid. The
+closest relations existed between Franklin and the Le Veillard family,
+while he was in France, and, when he left that country, Le Veillard was not
+content to accompany him simply to the seacoast, but was his companion as
+far as Southampton. To him, Abel James, Benjamin Vaughan and the Shipleys
+we are beholden for the fact that the _Autobiography_ was brought down to
+the year 1757; there to stop like the unfinished tower which tantalized the
+world with a haunting sense of its rare worth and incompleteness. Like a
+faithful, good wife, who avails herself of her intimacy with her husband to
+bring the continuous pressure of her influence to bear upon him for the
+purpose of arousing him to a proper sense of his duty, Le Veillard spared
+neither entreaty nor reproach to secure additions to the precious sibylline
+leaves of the _Autobiography_. "You blame me for writing three pamphlets
+and neglecting to write the little history," Franklin complained. "You
+should consider they were written at sea, out of my own head; the other
+could not so well be written there for want of the documents that could
+only be had here." After this bit of self-defense, Franklin goes on to
+describe his physical condition. He realized that the stone in his bladder
+had grown heavier, he said, but on the whole it did not give him more pain
+than when he was at Passy, and, except in standing, walking or making
+water, he was very little incommoded by it. Sitting or lying in bed, he was
+generally quite easy, God be thanked, and, as he lived temperately, drank
+no wine, and used daily the exercise of the dumb-bell, he flattered himself
+that the stone was kept from augmenting so much as it might otherwise do,
+and that he might still continue to find it tolerable. "People who live
+long," the unconquerable devotee of human existence declared, "who will
+drink of the cup of life to the very bottom, must expect to meet with some
+of the usual dregs."
+
+The view taken by Franklin in this letter of his physical condition was
+entirely too cheerful to work any alteration in the resolution of Le
+Veillard that the _Autobiography_ should be completed, if the unremitting
+appeal of an old friend could prevail. In a subsequent letter, Franklin
+tells him that in Philadelphia his time was so cut to pieces by friends and
+strangers that he had sometimes envied the prisoners in the Bastile. His
+three years of service as President, however, would expire in the
+succeeding October, and he had formed the idea of retiring then to Temple's
+farm at Rancocas, where he would be free from the interruption of visits,
+and could complete the work for Le Veillard's satisfaction. In the
+meantime, in view of the little remnant of life left to him, the accidents
+that might happen before October, and Le Veillard's earnest desire, he had
+resolved to proceed with the _Autobiography_ the very next day, and to go
+on with it daily until finished. This, if his health permitted, might be
+in the course of the ensuing summer.
+
+In a still later letter, Franklin declared that Le Veillard was a hard
+taskmaster to his friend. "You insist," he said, "on his writing _his
+life_, already a long work, and at the same time would have him continually
+employed in augmenting the subject, while the time shortens in which the
+work is to be executed." Some months later, he is able to send to Le
+Veillard the joyful intelligence that he had recently made great progress
+in the work that his friend so urgently demanded, and that he had come as
+far as his fiftieth year. Indeed, he even stated that he expected to have
+the work finished in about two months, if illness, or some unforeseen
+interruption, did not prevent. This expectation was not realized, and the
+reason for it is stated in painful terms in a subsequent letter from
+Franklin to Le Veillard.
+
+     I have a long time [he said] been afflicted with almost
+     constant and grevious Pain, to combat which I have been
+     obliged to have recourse to Opium, which indeed has
+     afforded me some Ease from time to time, but then it
+     has taken away my Appetite and so impeded my Digestion
+     that I am become totally emaciated, and little remains
+     of me but a Skeleton covered with a Skin. In this
+     Situation I have not been able to continue my Memoirs,
+     and now I suppose I shall never finish them. Benjamin
+     has made a Copy of what is done, for you, which shall
+     be sent by the first safe Opportunity.
+
+The copy was subsequently sent to Le Veillard, and, after the death of
+Franklin, was given by him to William Temple Franklin, to whom Franklin
+bequeathed most of his papers, in exchange for the original manuscript of
+the _Autobiography_. The motive for the exchange was doubtless the desire
+of Temple to secure the most legible "copy" that he could find for the
+printer of his edition of his grandfather's works. The original manuscript
+finally became the property by purchase of the late John Bigelow. There is
+reason to believe that, even after the receipt of the copy of the
+_Autobiography_, Le Veillard still cherished the hope that the work might
+be brought down to a later date. Writing to Le Veillard only a few days
+before Franklin's death, Jefferson said:
+
+     I wish I could add to your happiness by giving you a
+     favourable account of the good old Doctor. I found him
+     in bed where he remains almost constantly. He had been
+     clear of pain for some days and was chearful and in
+     good spirits. He listened with a glow of interest to
+     the details of your revolution and of his friends which
+     I gave him. He is much emaciated. I pressed him to
+     continue the narration of his life and perhaps he will.
+
+That Le Veillard had a lively mind we may well infer from an amusing
+paragraph in one of his letters to Franklin in which he pictures the
+jealousy with which Madame Helvetius and Madame Brillon regarded each other
+after the departure of Franklin from France.
+
+     You had two good friends here [he said] who might have
+     lived harmoniously enough with each other, because they
+     almost never saw each other, and you assured each of
+     them privately that it was she that you loved the best;
+     but do you venture to write to one and keep silent to
+     the other? The first does not fail to brag and show her
+     letter everywhere; what do you wish to become of the
+     other? Two women draw their knives, their friends take
+     sides, the war becomes general, now see what you have
+     done. You set fire with a bit of paper to one half of
+     the world, you who have so effectively aided in
+     pacifying the other half!
+
+It was a singularly unhappy prophecy that Franklin, after his return to
+Philadelphia, made to this friend whose lips were so soon to be dyed with
+the red wine of the guillotine. "When this fermentation is over," he wrote
+to him with regard to the popular tumults in which France was then
+involved, "and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and
+good, and cheer the hearts of those who drink it."
+
+A bright letter from the daughter of Le Veillard merits a passing word. In
+reply to the statement of Franklin that she did not embrace him with a good
+grace, she says:
+
+     You know doubtless a great number of things; you have
+     travelled much; you know men, but you have never
+     penetrated the head of a French girl. Well! I will tell
+     you their secret: When you wish to embrace one and she
+     says that it does not pain her, that means that it
+     gives her pleasure.
+
+Very dear, too, to Franklin, was Dr. Jan Ingenhousz, the eminent scientist
+and physician to Maria Theresa. Many years after Franklin made his
+acquaintance, he received from Franklin the assurance that he had always
+loved him ever since he knew him, with uninterrupted affection, and he
+himself in a previous letter to Franklin styled him in his imperfect
+English "the most respectful" of all his friends. Only a few of the
+numerous letters that Franklin must have written to this friend are known
+to be in existence, and these are not particularly interesting from a
+social point of view. In one respect, however, they strikingly evince the
+kindness of heart which made Franklin so lovable. As was true of many other
+Europeans of his time, Ingenhousz incurred considerable pecuniary loss in
+American business ventures, and, like King David, who in his haste called
+all men liars, he was disposed at one time to call all Americans knaves.
+One of his American debtors, as we have already stated, was Samuel Wharton,
+of Philadelphia.
+
+     I know we should be happy together [wrote Franklin to
+     Ingenhousz when the writer was about to return to
+     America], and therefore repeat my Proposition that you
+     should ask Leave of the Emperor to let you come and
+     live with me during the little Remainder of Life that
+     is left me. I am confident his Goodness would grant
+     your Request. You will be at no expence while with me
+     in America; you will recover your Debt from Wharton,
+     and you will make me happy.
+
+And the letter concludes with the request that Ingenhousz, who shared his
+enthusiasm for electrical experiments, would let him know soon whether he
+would make him happy by accepting his invitation. "I have Instruments," he
+declared, in terms that remind us of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, when
+they were planning their future military diversions together, "if the Enemy
+did not destroy them all, and we will make Plenty of Experiments together."
+
+Such were the more conspicuous of the friendships which clustered so
+thickly about the life of Franklin.[41] When we remember that all these
+men and women have with him said "good-night" to his Landlord of Life and
+Time, and gone off to their still chambers, we experience a feeling
+something like that of Xerxes when he gazed upon his vast army and
+reflected that not a man in it might return from Greece. The thought that
+there might never again be any movement in those cheerless rooms, nor any
+glimmer of recurring day was well calculated to make one, who loved his
+friends as Franklin did, exclaim, "I too with your Poet trust in God." The
+wide sweep of his sympathies and charities, the open prospect ever
+maintained by his mind, are in nothing made clearer to us than in the
+extent and variety of his friendships. They were sufficiently elastic, as
+we have seen, to include many diverse communities, and such extremes as
+Joseph Watson and James Ralph, George Whitefield and Lord le Despencer,
+John Jay and General Charles Lee, Polly and Madame Brillon. The natural,
+instinctive side of his character is brought to our attention very plainly
+in a letter from him to David Hartley, which reveals in an engaging manner
+the profound effect worked upon his imagination by a poor peasant, but
+_veritable philosophe_, who had walked all the way to Paris from one of the
+French provinces for the purpose of communicating a purely benevolent
+project to the world. But, at the same time, he never found any difficulty
+in accommodating himself to aberrant or artificial types of character, or
+to alien usages, customs and modes of thought. He belonged to the _genus
+homo_ not to the species _homo Americanus_ or _Britannicus_. Like the
+politic and much-experienced Ulysses of Tennyson, familiar with
+
+    "Cities of men
+    And manners, climates, councils, governments,"
+
+he could say,
+
+    "I am a part of all that I have met."
+
+Wherever he went into the world, he realized his own aspiration that the
+time might come when a philosopher could set his foot on any part of the
+earth, and say, "This is my Country." Wherever he happened to be, he was
+too exempt from local bias, thought thoughts, cherished feelings, and spoke
+a language too universal not to make a strong appeal to good will and
+friendship.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] In a letter to Count de Moustiers, dated Philadelphia, Feb. 10, 1788,
+Franklin termed Louis XVI. and France "the best of Kings & the most beloved
+of Nations."
+
+[39] Franklin was too old when he entered upon the French mission to
+acquire a real mastery of the French language. On one occasion, when at the
+theatre with Madame de Boufflers, from whom he took his cue in helping to
+swell the plaudits of the evening, he was chagrined to find that his most
+vigorous applause had been bestowed on flattering allusions to himself.
+
+[40] No humanitarian levels were too high for the aspirations of Franklin,
+but he always took care, to use one of the sayings that he conceived or
+borrowed, not to ride before the horse's head. There is just a suspicion of
+unconscious sarcasm in a letter from him to Dupont in which he expresses
+the wish that the Physiocratic philosophy may grow and increase till it
+becomes the governing philosophy of the human species, "as it must be that
+of superior beings in better worlds."
+
+[41] Franklin had many intimate friends besides those mentioned in our
+text. In two letters to Samuel Rhoads he refers to his "dear old Friend
+Mrs. Paschal." In a letter to Thomas Mifflin, congratulating him upon his
+election as President of Congress, he speaks of their "ancient friendship."
+William Hunter he addresses in 1786 as "my dear old friend." In a letter to
+him in 1782, Thomas Pownall, the former Colonial Governor, says: "Permett
+me to say how much I have been your old invariable friend of four or five
+and twenty years standing." Jean Holker and his wife, of Rouen, were "dear
+friends" of his, and he was on terms of intimacy with John Joseph Monthieu,
+a Paris merchant, and Turgot, the French statesman. He writes to Miss
+Alexander from Passy that he has been to pay his respects to Madame La
+Marck, "not merely," he says, "because it was a Compliment due to her, but
+because I love her; which induces me to excuse her not letting me in." One
+of Franklin's friends, Dr. Edward Bancroft, a native of Massachusetts, who
+kept one foot in London and one foot in Paris during the Revolution, for
+the purpose, as was supposed by those of our envoys who were on good terms
+with him, of collecting, and imparting to our mission, information about
+the plans of the British Ministry, has come to occupy an equivocal position
+in the judgment of history. George Bancroft, the American historian, has
+set him down as "a double spy," and the view of Bancroft has been followed
+by others, including Henri Doniol, in his work on the participation of
+France in the establishment of the United States. But it would seem
+difficult for anyone to take this view after reading the acute and vigorous
+discussion of the subject by Dr. Francis Wharton in the _Diplomatic
+Correspondence of the Revolution_. In a letter to David Hartley of Feb. 22,
+1779, Franklin pronounced Bancroft a "Gentleman of Character and Honour."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed,
+Volume I (of 2), by Wiliam Cabell Bruce
+
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