"Great frugality and great industry are now become fashionable here: gentlemen, who used to entertain with two or three courses, pride themselves now in treating with simple beef and pudding. By these means, and the stoppage of our consumptive trade with Britain, we shall be better able to pay our voluntary taxes for the support of our troops. Our savings in the article of trade, amount to near five millions of sterling per annum.—Yours, most affectionately,
"B. FRANKLIN."
In another letter to the same, dated October 3d, he says:
"Tell our dear good friend, doctor Price, who sometimes has his doubts and despondencies about our firmness, that America is determined and unanimous: a very few tories and placemen excepted, who will probably soon export themselves. Britain, at the expense of three millions has killed in this campaign, one hundred and fifty yankees! which is 20,000 pounds sterling a head; and at Bunker's hill she gained half a mile of ground! During the same time she lost, at one place, near one thousand men, and we have had a good sixty thousand children born in America. From these data, with the help of his mathematical head, lord North will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.—
"I am yours, B. FRANKLIN."
In another letter to the same, and of the same date, he says:
"Britain still goes on to goad and exasperate. She despises us too much; and seems to forget the Italian proverb, that 'there is no little enemy.' I am persuaded the body of the British people are our friends; but your lying gazettes may soon make them our enemies—and I see clearly that we are on the high road to mutual enmity, hatred, and detestation. A separation will of course be inevitable. It is a million of pities so fair a plan, as we have hitherto been engaged in for increasing strength and empire with public felicity, should be destroyed by the mangling hands of a few blundering ministers. It will not be destroyed: God will protect and prosper it: you will only exclude yourselves from any share of it. We hear that more ships and troops are coming out. We know you may do us a great deal of mischief, but we are determined to bear it patiently; but if you flatter yourselves with beating us into submission, you know neither the people nor the country.
"I am ever your's, most affectionately,
"B. FRANKLIN."
This letter of Doctor Franklin's is the first thing I have seen that utters a whisper about Independence. It was, however, a prophetical whisper, and soon found its accomplishment in the source that Franklin predicted—the barbarity of Britain. To see war waged against them by a power whom they had always gloried in as their Mother Country—to see it waged because as the children of Englishmen, they had only asked for the common rights of Englishmen—to see it waged with a savageness unknown among civilized nations, and all the powers of earth and hell, as it were, stirred up against them—the Indians with their bloody tomahawks and scalping knives—the negroes with their midnight hoes and axes—the merciless flames let loose on their midwinter towns—with prisons, chains, and starvation of their worthiest citizens. "Such miserable specimens," as Franklin termed them, "of the British government," produced every where in the colonies a disposition to detest and avoid it as a complication of robbery, murder, famine, fire and pestilence.