Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings

by Wiliam Cabell Bruce

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'Amérique, et de l'humanité."

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 manœ]uvres," 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-nomawée 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 Deûm 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 ægis 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 Cæsar 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.