Benjamin Franklin

by Paul Elmer More

I forged the letter, I disposed the picture;

I hated, I despised, and I destroy.'

I ask, my Lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed, by poetic fiction only, to the bloody African is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy of the wily American?"

The picture of Franklin standing unmoved under this torrent of abuse is, I think, the most dramatic incident of his life. It was a victory of glorious endurance; it was the crown of unmerited infamy which was needed to give depth of interest to his successful career. An eyewitness thus described the scene: "Dr. Franklin's face was directed towards me, and I had a full, uninterrupted view of it, and his person, during the whole time in which Mr. Wedderburn spoke. The Doctor was dressed in a full dress suit of spotted Manchester velvet, and stood conspicuously erect without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed, so as to afford a placid, tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear during the continuance of the speech, in which he was so harshly and improperly treated. In short, to quote the words which he employed concerning himself on another occasion, he kept his 'countenance as immovable as if his features had been made of wood.'"

Fortunately, to sustain him in these trials, Franklin had a cheerful home and the society of the best men in England. He was living at the old house on Craven Street, where Mrs. Stevenson did all in her power to make him forget that he was an exile. Indeed, were it not that Mrs. Franklin had an unconquerable dread of crossing the water, it is quite possible that our philosopher might have carried his family to England and lived permanently among his new friends; and in estimating the services of Franklin to America we should never forget to give due credit to his loyal wife who stayed quietly at home, managing his affairs for him in Philadelphia and keeping warm his attachment for his adopted city. Besides the eminent statesmen, such as Pitt and Burke, with whom Franklin's business brought him naturally in contact, he associated much with liberal clergymen,—with Priestley particularly, the discoverer of oxygen, and with the family of the good Bishop of St. Asaph's, at whose house he had almost a second home. To one of the bishop's daughters he sent the inimitable epitaph on the squirrel Mungo which he had given her as a present from America. The influence for good is almost incalculable which Franklin thus exercised by the noble type of American character he displayed to the liberal party in England.

Nor did he ever lose an opportunity to accomplish what he could with the pen. At one time, to lay bare the suicidal policy of the government, he published in a newspaper a satirical squib quite in the vein of Dean Swift, entitled "Rules for reducing a Great Empire to a Small One." The opening sentences were as follows: "An ancient sage valued himself upon this, that, though he could not fiddle, he knew how to make a great city of a little one. The science that I, a modern simpleton, am about to communicate, is the very reverse;" and with this introduction the author proceeds to give a detailed account of the treatment of the colonies by Parliament.

In another paper Franklin reduced certain arguments of the ministry to the absurd. This was a pretended "Edict of the King of Prussia," in which Frederick was supposed to announce the same sovereignty over England, which had been originally settled by Germans, as Parliament now claimed over America. Speaking of these two papers Franklin says, in a letter to his son: "I sent you one of the first, but could not get enough of the second to spare you one, though my clerk went the next morning to the printer's, and wherever they were sold.... I am not suspected as the author, except by one or two friends; and have heard the latter spoken of in the highest terms, as the keenest and severest piece that has appeared here a long time. Lord Mansfield, I hear, said of it, that it was very able and very artful indeed; and would do mischief by giving here a bad impression of the measures of government; and in the colonies, by encouraging them in their contumacy.... What made it the more noticed here was, that people in reading it were, as the phrase is, taken in, till they had got half through it, and imagined it a real edict, to which mistake I suppose the King of Prussia's character must have contributed. I was down at Lord Le Despencer's, when the post brought that day's papers. Mr. Whitehead was there, too (Paul Whitehead, the author of "Manners"), who runs early through all the papers, and tells the company what he finds remarkable. He had them in another room, and we were chatting in the breakfast parlor, when he came running in to us, out of breath, with the paper in his hand. 'Here!' says he, 'here's news for ye! Here's the King of Prussia, claiming a right to this kingdom!' All stared, and I as much as anybody; and he went on to read it. When he had read two or three paragraphs, a gentleman present said, 'Damn his impudence, I dare say we shall hear by next post, that he is upon his march with one hundred thousand men to back this.' Whitehead, who is very shrewd, soon after began to smoke it, and looking in my face, said, 'I'll be hanged if this is not some of your American jokes upon us.' The reading went on, and ended with abundance of laughing, and a general verdict that it was a fair hit."

After the Privy Council outrage there was very little for Franklin to do. Lord Chatham consulted with him before introducing in Parliament a liberal bill for conciliating the colonies, and Franklin himself was present in the House of Lords when the old statesman, despite the protests of his gout, plead for fairer measures. It may very well be that if these troubles had occurred in Chatham's vigorous days he might have been able to preserve the integrity of the empire. But now he was crippled by the gout and debarred from active life; and in the interesting "Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout" the philosopher might have retorted upon that exacting lady the mischief she had done his people by laming Pitt. Again Franklin had to stand the bitter denunciation of the Tories, while Lord Sandwich held him up as "one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies this country had ever known;" but he also had the satisfaction of hearing a noble eulogy of his character pronounced by the great Chatham.

Then, after a good deal of secret negotiation with Lord Howe, Franklin reluctantly abandoned the situation and turned homeward. His last day in London was passed with Dr. Priestley, who has left an interesting record of their conversation. He says of Franklin that "the unity of the British empire in all its parts was a favorite idea of his. He used to compare it to a beautiful china vase, which, if ever broken, could never be put together again; and so great an admirer was he of the British constitution that he said he saw no inconvenience from its being extended over a great part of the globe. With these sentiments he left England."

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