Grenville saw, too late, the storm he had aroused. Franklin was now, as he wrote to a friend, "extremely busy, attending members of both houses, informing, explaining, consulting, disputing, in a continual hurry from morning till night." His examination before the House of Commons filled England with amazement and America with joy. When asked, "If the Stamp Act should be repealed, would it induce the Assemblies of America to acknowledge the rights of Parliament to tax them, and would they erase their resolutions?" he replied, "No, never!"
"What used to be the pride of the Americans?"
"To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain."
"What is now their pride?"
"To wear their old clothes over again, till they can make new ones," said the fearless Franklin.
The great commoners William Pitt and Edmund Burke were our stanch friends. A cry of distress went up from the manufacturers of England, who needed American markets for their goods, and in 1766 the Stamp Act was repealed.
America was overjoyed, but her joy was of short duration; for in the very next year a duty was placed on glass, tea, and other articles. Then riots ensued. The duty was repealed on all save tea. When the tea arrived in Boston Harbor, the indignant citizens threw three hundred and forty chests overboard; in Charlestown, the people stored it in cellars till it mildewed; and from New York and Philadelphia they sent it home again to Old England.
In 1774, the Boston Port Bill, which declared that no merchandise should be landed or shipped at the wharves of Boston, was received by the colonists with public mourning. September 5 of this year, the First Continental Congress met at Philadelphia, and again a manly protest was sent to George III. Again the great Pitt, Earl of Chatham, poured out his eloquence against what he saw was close at hand—"a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unjust, and diabolical war." But George III. was immovable.
The days for Franklin were now bitter in the extreme. Ten thousand more troops had been sent to General Gage in Boston, to compel obedience. Franklin's wife was dying in Philadelphia, longing to see her husband, who had now been absent ten years, each year expecting to return, and each year detained by the necessities of the colonies. At last he started homeward, landing May 5, 1775. His daughter had been happily married to Mr. Richard Bache, a merchant, but his wife was dead, and buried beside Franky. The battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought; the War for Freedom was indeed begun.
Franklin was now almost seventy, but ready for the great work before him. He loved peace. He said: "All wars 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 die, it would be better than by fighting and destroying each other." But now war was inevitable. With the eagerness of a boy he wrote to Edmund Burke: "General Gage's troops made a most vigorous retreat,—twenty miles in three hours,—scarce to be paralleled in history; the feeble Americans, who pelted them all the way, could scarce keep up with them."