BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
It is considered advisable by the historian at this time to say a word regarding Dr. Franklin, our fellow-townsman, and a journalist who was the Charles A. Dana of his time. Franklin's memory will remain green when the names of millionaires of to-day are forgotten.
But let us proceed to more fully work out the life and labors of this remarkable man.
Benjamin Franklin, formerly of Boston, came very near being an only child. If seventeen children had not come to bless the home of Benjamin's parents, they would have been childless. Think of getting up in the morning and picking out your shoes and stockings from among seventeen pairs of them!
And yet Benjamin Franklin never murmured or repined. He decided to go to sea, and to avoid this he was apprenticed to his brother James, who was a printer.
His paper was called the New England Courant. It was edited jointly by James and Benjamin Franklin, and was started to supply a long-felt want.
Benjamin edited it a part of the time, and James a part of the time. The idea of having two editors was not for the purpose of giving volume to the editorial page, but it was necessary for one to run the paper while the other was in jail.
In those days you could not sass the king, and then, when the king came in the office the next day and stopped his paper and took out his ad, put it off on 'our informant' and go right along with the paper. You had to go to jail, while your subscribers wondered why their paper did not come, and the paste soured in the tin dippers in the sanctum, and the circus passed by on the other side.
How many of us today, fellow-journalists, would be willing to stay in jail while the lawn festival and the kangaroo came and went? Who of all our company would go to a prison-cell for the cause of freedom while a double-column ad of sixteen aggregated circuses, and eleven congresses of ferocious beasts, fierce and fragrant from their native lair, went by us?