After having bequeathed his books, a most voluminous and valuable collection, partly to his family, and partly to the Boston and Philadelphia philosophical societies; and, after having divided a handsome competence among his children, and grand children, he goes on as follows:
"I. Having owed my first instructions in literature to the free grammar schools in Boston, I give one hundred pounds sterling to the free schools in that town, to be laid out in silver medals as honorary rewards for the encouragement of scholarship in those schools.
"II. All the debts to my post-office establishment, which I held many years, I leave to the Philadelphia hospital.
"III. Having always been of opinion, that in democratical governments, there ought to be no offices of great profit, I have long determined to give a part of my public salary to public uses; and being chiefly indebted to Massachusetts, my native state, and Pennsylvania, my adopted state, for lucrative employments, I feel it my duty to remember them; and having from long observation, and my own early experience, discovered that the best objects for assistance are indigent young persons, and the best modes of assistance, a plain education, a good trade, and a little money to set them up; and having been set up in business, while a poor boy, in Philadelphia, by kind loans of money from two friends there, which was the foundation of my fortune and all the usefulness that the world ascribed to me, I feel a wish to be useful, after my death, to others, in the loans of money; I therefore devote, from the savings of my salaries, the following sums, to the following persons and uses:
"1. To the inhabitants of Boston and Philadelphia, one thousand pounds sterling to each city, to be let out by the oldest divines of different churches, on a five per cent. interest and good security, to indigent young tradesmen, not bachelors, (as they have not deserved much from their country and the feebler sex,) but married men."
"2. No borrower to have more than sixty pounds sterling, nor less than fifteen."
"3. And in order to serve as many as possible in their turn, as well as to make the payment of the principal borrowed more easy, each borrower shall be obliged to pay, with the yearly interest, one tenth part of the principal; which sums of principal and interest, so paid, shall be again lent out to fresh borrowers.
"B. FRANKLIN."
In a late Boston paper, the friends of humanity have read with much pleasure that doctor Franklin's legacy to the indigent young married tradesmen of that town, of $4444 44 cents, is now increased to $10,902 28 cents, after having been the means of setting up 206 poor young men, besides 75 others, who are now in the use of the capital.
CHAPTER XLV.