From an engraving by Levy, owned by Clarence W. Bowen, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Franklin as a Pennsylvanian
On his arrival in Philadelphia in 1723, Benjamin Franklin began to make himself a commonwealth builder, and for more than thirty years he was one of the motive forces in that colony. From the first he found himself more at home in Philadelphia than in Boston. A man never overdisposed to self-denial, he enjoyed the comfort, the good dinners, the pleasant associations, the building up of social forces. Still, at that time Franklin had a much greater interest in Benjamin Franklin than in the community around him. He even showed the unusual enterprise of going abroad in 1725, a practice commonly reserved for wealthy Colonials who wanted to spend their money like gentlemen.
Returning in 1727, he, first of all, laid the foundations of a printing business large and profitable for the time. In 1729, then only twenty-three years old, he started a newspaper for himself, which speedily made him a force in the community. Once launched as a publisher, Franklin extended his ventures more and more widely; and in 1740 he founded a General Magazine, and was one of the first Americans to discover how much money can be sunk in a literary periodical and in how short a time.
MRS. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Born Deborah Reed. From a portrait painted by Matthew Pratt, and now owned by the Rev. F. B. Hodge, Wilkesbarre, Pa.
In 1732, he began the most popular and the most effective of all his publications—Poor Richard’s Almanac, an annual which sold the incredible number of ten thousand a year, and which applied the sagacity and humor of the writer to setting forth a standard of morals, which, however utilitarian and self-seeking, had a powerful influence upon a crude and growing people. Indeed, it is almost the only bit of American literature that circulated throughout the Colonies and infused a national spirit into the half century preceding the Revolution.
Once established as a man of property and influence, Franklin bent his energies to setting up a new standard of education. In 1743, he issued proposals for an academy of learning, and in 1744 founded the American Philosophical Society. In 1749, he raised the great sum of five thousand pounds for the new school, and secured an excellent building for it. This far-reaching plan also included a “Free School—for the Instruction of Poor Children in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic”—apparently the first suggestion of a free school in his commonwealth. In 1755, his school developed into a college which subsequently became the University of Pennsylvania. No man in America had such solid and thorough-going views as to the value of education.
