After reading the long account Franklin has given of these negotiations, and the innumerable letters and proposals that were exchanged, one may see many causes of the break with the colonies,—ignorance, blindness, the infatuation of the king or of North or of Townsend,—but the primary cause of all is the one given at the end by Franklin,—corruption. The whole British government of that time was penetrated through and through with a vast system of bribery. Statesmen and politicians cared for nothing and would do nothing that did not give them offices to distribute. That was one of the objects of Lord Howe’s scheme. Dr. Fothergill was intimate with all the governing class, and he said to Franklin, “Whatever specious pretences are offered, they are hollow; to get a larger field on which to fatten a herd of worthless parasites is all that is regarded.” England lost her colonies by corruption, and she could not have built up her present vast colonial empire unless corruption had been abolished.
At the end of April Franklin set out on his return to Philadelphia, and there was some question whether he would not be arrested before he could start. He used some precautions in getting away as quietly as possible, and sailed from Portsmouth unmolested.
He still believed that there would be no war, and fully expected to return in October with instructions from the Continental Congress that would end the controversy. His ground for this belief seems to have been the old one that the hostility in England towards America was purely a ministerial or party question, and would be overthrown by the refusal of the colonists to buy British goods. But on his arrival in Philadelphia on the 5th of May he heard of the battle of Lexington, and never after that entertained much hope of a peaceful accommodation.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Pennsylvania: Colony and Commonwealth, p. 314.
[27] Hosmer’s Life of Samuel Adams, p. 117.
VIII
AT HOME AGAIN
Franklin’s wife had died while he was in England, and his daughter, Mrs. Sarah Bache, was now mistress of his new house, which had been built during his absence. The day after his arrival the Assembly made him one of its deputies in the Continental Congress which was soon to meet in Philadelphia. For the next eighteen months (from his arrival on the 5th of May, 1775, until October 26, 1776, when he sailed for France) every hour of his time seems to have been occupied with labors which would have been enough for a man in his prime, but for one seventy years old were a heavy burden.