CHAPTER III

Franklin as a Statesman

The career of Franklin as a public official began in 1736, when he was appointed Clerk of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania. In this position, he remained until his retirement from business precipitated so many political demands upon him that he had to give it up for still higher responsibilities.

The publick [he says in the _Autobiography_] now considering me as a man of leisure, laid hold of me for their purposes, every part of our civil government, and almost at the same time, imposing some duty upon me. The Governor put me into the commission of the peace; the corporation of the city chose me of the common council, and soon after an alderman; and the citizens at large chose me a burgess to represent them in Assembly.[10]

His legislative seat was all the more agreeable to him because he had grown tired as clerk of listening to debates in which he could take no part, and which were frequently so lifeless that for very weariness he had to amuse himself with drawing magic squares or circles, or what not, as he sat at his desk. The office of justice of the peace he withdrew from by degrees, when he found that, to fill it with credit, more knowledge of the common law was requisite than he possessed, and, in this connection, the belief maybe hazarded that his influence in Congress and the Federal Convention of 1787 would have been still greater, if he had been a better lawyer, and, therefore, more competent to cope in debate with contemporaries fitter than he was to discuss questions which, true to the time-honored Anglo-Saxon traditions, turned largely upon the provisions of charters and statutes. That he was lacking in fluency of speech we have, as we have seen, his own admission--a species of evidence, however, by no means conclusive in the case of a man so little given to self-praise as he was. But there is testimony to convince us that, as a debater, Franklin was, at least, not deficient in the best characteristic of a good debater, that of placing the accent upon the truly vital points of his case.

I served [declares Jefferson] with General Washington in the legislature of Virginia, before the revolution, and, during it, with Dr. Franklin in Congress. I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point, which was to decide the question. They laid their shoulders to the great points, knowing that the little ones would follow of themselves.

What John Adams has to say about Franklin as a legislator is manifestly the offspring of mere self-love. After taking a view of his own legislative activity through the highly magnifying lens, which he brought to bear upon everything relating to himself, he pictures Franklin in Congress as "from day to day, sitting in silence, a great part of his time fast asleep in his chair."

But whatever were the demerits of Franklin as a speaker, his influence was very great in every legislative assembly in which he ever sat. To begin with, he had the kind of eloquence that gives point to his own saying, "Whose life lightens, his words thunder." Commenting in the latter part of his career to Lord Fitzmaurice upon the stress laid by Demosthenes upon action as the point of first importance in oratory, he said that he

thought another kind of action of more importance to an orator, who would persuade people to follow his advice, viz. such a course of action in the conduct of life, as would impress them with an opinion of his integrity as well as of his understanding; that, this opinion once established, all the difficulties, delays, and oppositions, usually occasioned by doubts and suspicions, were prevented; and such a man, though a very imperfect speaker, would almost always carry his points against the most flourishing orator, who had not the character of sincerity.

In the next place, Franklin's rare knowledge and wisdom made him an invaluable counsellor for any deliberative gathering. He was the protagonist in the Pennsylvania Assembly of the Popular Party, in its contest with the Proprietary Party, and was for a brief time its Speaker. As soon as he returned from Europe, at the beginning of the Revolution, he was thrice honored by being elected to the Continental Congress, the Pennsylvania Assembly, and the Convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania. Besides appointing him Postmaster-General, Congress placed him upon many of its most important committees; the Assembly made him Chairman of its Committee of Safety, a post equivalent, for all practical purposes, to the executive headship of the Province; and the Convention made him its President. It is safe to say that, had there not been a Washington, even his extreme old age and physical infirmities would not have kept him from being the presiding officer of the Federal Convention of 1787 and the first President of the United States. The intellect of Franklin was too solid to be easily imposed upon by mere glibness of speech. "Here comes the orator, with his flood of words and his drop of reason," remarks Poor Richard. Equally pointed is that other saying of his, "The worst wheel of the cart makes the most noise." But Franklin was fully alive to the splendid significance of human eloquence, when enlisted in the service of high-minded and far-seeing statesmanship. Speaking in a letter to Lord Stanhope of Lord Chatham's speech in support of his motion for the removal of the King's troops from Boston, he said, "Dr. F. is fill'd with admiration of that truly great Man. He has seen, in the course of Life, sometimes Eloquence without Wisdom, and often Wisdom without Eloquence; in the present Instance he sees both united; and both, as he thinks, in the highest Degree possible."

When Franklin took his seat in the Assembly, William Franklin was elected its clerk in his place; for heredity as well as consanguinity was a feature of the Franklin system of patronage. Once elected to the Assembly, he acquired a degree of popularity and influence that rendered his re-election for many years almost a matter of course. "My election to this trust," he says in the _Autobiography_, "was repeated every year for ten years, without my ever asking any elector for his vote, or signifying, either directly or indirectly, any desire of being chosen." So eager were his constituents to confer the honor upon him that they kept on conferring it upon him year after year, even when he was abroad.[11] He proved himself eminently worthy of this confidence. By nature and training, he was a true democrat, profoundly conservative at the core, but keenly sensitive to every rational and wholesome appeal to his liberal or generous instincts. He loved law and order, stable institutions, and settled forms and tendencies, rooted in the soil of transmitted wisdom and experience. He was too much of an Englishman to have any sympathy with hasty changes or rash innovations. Much as he loved France he could never have been drawn into such a delirious outburst as the French Revolution. He loved liberty as Hampden loved it, as Chatham loved it, as Gladstone loved it. John Wilkes, though in some respects an ignoble, was in other respects an indubitable champion of English freedom; yet Franklin utterly failed to see in him even a case for the application of his reminder to his daughter that sweet and clear waters come through very dirty earth. His happy nature and his faith in individual thrift sometimes made him slow to believe that masses of men had as much cause for political discontent as they claimed, and for such mob violence, as attended the career of Wilkes, of whom he speaks in one of his letters to his son as "an outlaw and an exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing," it was impossible for his deep-seated respect for law and order to have any toleration; though he did express on one occasion the remarkable conviction that, if George the Third had had a bad private character, and John Wilkes a good one, the latter might have turned the former out of his kingdom.

It is certain, however, that few men have ever detested more strongly than he did the baseness and meanness of arbitrary power. And he had little patience at the same time with conditions of any sort that rested upon mere precedent, or prescription. He welcomed every new triumph of science over inert matter, every fresh victory of truth over superstition, bigotry, or the unseeing eye, every salutary reform that vindicated the fitness of the human race for its destiny of unceasing self-advancement. His underlying instincts were firmly fixed in the ground, but his sympathies reached out on every side into the free air of expanding human hopes and aspirations. In his faith in the residuary wisdom and virtue of the mass of men, he is more like Jefferson than any of his Revolutionary compeers. "The People seldom continue long in the wrong, when it is nobody's Interest to mislead them," he wrote to Abel James. The tribute, it must be confessed, is a rather equivocal one, as it is always somebody's interest to mislead the People, but the sanguine spirit of the observation pervades all his relations to popular caprice or resentment. Less equivocal was his statement to Galloway: "The People do not indeed always see their Friends in the same favourable Light; they are sometimes mistaken, and sometimes misled; but sooner or later they come right again, and redouble their former Affection." Few were the public men of his age who looked otherwise than askance at universal suffrage, but he was not one of them.

Liberty, or freedom [he declared in his _Some Good Whig Principles_], consists in having _an actual share_ in the appointment of those who frame the laws, and who are to be the guardians of every man's life, property, and peace; for the _all_ of one man is as dear to him as the _all_ of another; and the poor man has an _equal_ right, but _more_ need, to have representatives in the legislature than the rich one.

For similar reasons he was opposed to entails, and favored the application of the just and equal law of gavelkind to the division of intestate estates.

It was impossible for such a man as this not to ally himself with the popular cause, when he became a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. At that time, the Proprietary Government of Pennsylvania had proved as odious to the people of the Province as the proprietary governments of South Carolina and the Jerseys had proved to the people of those Colonies. Almost from the time of the original settlement, the relations between the Assembly and the Penns had been attended by mutual bickerings and reproaches. First William Penn had scolded the Assembly in a high key, then his sons; and, in resolution after resolution, the Assembly had, in true British fashion, stubbornly asserted the liberties and privileges of their constituents, and given the Proprietary Government, under thinly veiled forms of parliamentary deference, a Roland for its every Oliver. The truth was that a Proprietary Government, uniting as it did governmental functions, dependent for their successful exercise upon the popular faith in the disinterestedness of those who exercised them, with the selfish concerns of a landlord incessantly at loggerheads with his vendees and tenants over purchase money and quitrents, was utterly incompatible with the dignity of real political rule,[12] and hopelessly repugnant to the free English spirit of the Pennsylvanians. Under such circumstances, there could be no such thing as a true commonwealth; nor anything much better than a feudal fief. Political sovereignty lost its aspect of detachment and legitimate authority in the eyes of the governed, and wore the appearance of a mere organization for the transaction of private business. Almost as a matter of course, the Proprietaries came to think and speak of the Province as if it were as much their personal property as one of their household chattels, refusing, as Franklin said, to give their assent to laws, unless some private advantage was obtained, some profit got or unequal exemption gained for their estate, or some privilege wrested from the people; and almost, as a matter of course, the disaffected people of the Province sullenly resented a situation so galling to their pride and self-respect. Franklin saw all this with his usual clearness. After conceding in his _Cool Thoughts_ that it was not unlikely that there were faults on both sides, "every glowing Coal being apt to inflame its Opposite," he expressed the opinion that the cause of the contentions was

radical, interwoven in the Constitution, and so become of the very Nature, of Proprietary Governments. And [he added] as some Physicians say, every Animal Body brings into the World among its original Stamina the Seeds of that Disease that shall finally produce its Dissolution; so the Political Body of a Proprietary Government, contains those convulsive Principles that will at length destroy it.

The Proprietary Government of Pennsylvania was bad enough in principle; it was made still worse by the unjust and greedy manner in which it was administered by Thomas and Richard Penn, who were the Proprietaries, when Franklin became a member of the Assembly. The vast estate of William Penn in Pennsylvania, consisting of some twenty-six million acres of land, held subject to the nominal obligation of the owner to pay to the King one fifth of such gold and silver as the Province might yield, descended upon the death of Penn to his sons John, Thomas and Richard, in the proportion of one half to John, as the eldest son, and in the proportion of one fourth each to Thomas and Richard. John died in 1746, after devising his one half share to Thomas; thus making Thomas the owner of three out of the four shares.[13] The political powers of the Proprietaries were exercised by a deputy-governor whose position was in the highest degree vexatious and perplexing. He held his office by appointment of the Proprietaries, who resided in England, and the mode in which he was to discharge his duties was prescribed by rigid "instructions," issued to him by them. His salary, however, was derived from the Assembly, which was rarely at peace with the Proprietary Government. If he obeyed his instructions, he ran the risk of losing his salary; if he disobeyed them, he was certain to lose his place. Incredible as it may now seem, the main duty imposed upon him by his instructions was that of vetoing every tax bill enacted by the Assembly which did not expressly exempt all the located, unimproved and unoccupied lands of the Proprietaries, and all the quitrents, fines and purchase money out at interest, to which they were entitled, that is to say, the greater part of their immense estate. This was the axis about which the bitter controversy between the Popular and Proprietary parties, in which Franklin acquired his political training and reputation, revolved like one of the lurid waterspouts with which a letter that his correspondent John Perkins received from him has been illustrated. The Assembly insisted that they should not be required to vote money for the support of the Proprietary Government, unless the proprietary estate bore its proper share of the common burden. The Governor did not dare to violate his instructions for fear of being removed by his masters, and of being sued besides on the bond by which he had bound himself not to violate them. At times, the feud was so intense and absorbing, that, like a pair of gamecocks, too intent on their own deadly encounter to hear an approaching footstep, the combatants almost lost sight of the fact that, under the shelter of their dissensions, the Indian was converting the frontiers of Pennsylvania into a charred and blood-stained wilderness. Occasionally the Assembly had to yield the point with a reservation asserting that its action was not to be taken as a precedent, and once, when England as well as America was feeling the shock of Braddock's defeat, the pressure of public opinion in England was sufficient to coerce the Proprietaries into adding five thousand pounds to the sum appropriated by the Assembly for the defence of the Province. But, as a general thing, there was little disposition on either side to compromise. The sharpness of the issue was well illustrated in the bill tendered by the Assembly to Governor Morris for his signature after Braddock's defeat. Both before, and immediately after that catastrophe, he had, in reliance upon the critical condition of the public safety, endeavored to drive the Assembly into providing for the defence of the Province without calling upon the proprietary estate for a contribution. The bill in question declared "that all estates, real and personal, were to be taxed, those of the proprietaries _not_ excepted." "His amendment," says Franklin in his brief way, "was, for _not_ read _only_; a small, but very material alteration."[14]

This dependence of the Governor upon the Assembly for his salary and the dependence of the Assembly upon the Governor for the approval of its enactments brought about a traffic in legislation between them which was one of the most disgraceful features of the Proprietary regime; though it became so customary that even the most honorable Governor did not scruple to engage in it. This traffic is thus described by Franklin in his stirring "Preface to the Speech of Joseph Galloway, Esq.":

Ever since the Revenue of the Quit-rents first, and after that the Revenue of Tavern-Licenses, were settled irrevocably on our Proprietaries and Governors, they have look'd on those Incomes as their proper Estate, for which they were under no Obligations to the People: And when they afterwards concurr'd in passing any useful Laws, they considered them as so many Jobbs, for which they ought to be particularly paid. Hence arose the Custom of Presents twice a Year to the Governors, at the close of each Session in which Laws were past, given at the Time of Passing. They usually amounted to a Thousand Pounds per Annum. But when the Governors and Assemblies disagreed, so that Laws were not pass'd, the Presents were withheld. When a Disposition to agree ensu'd, there sometimes still remain'd some Diffidence. The Governors would not pass the Laws that were wanted, without being sure of the Money, even all that they call'd their Arrears; nor the Assemblies give the Money without being sure of the Laws. Thence the Necessity of some private Conference, in which mutual Assurances of good Faith might be receiv'd and given, that the Transactions should go hand in hand.

This system of barter prevailed even before Franklin became a member of the Assembly, and how fixed and ceremonious its forms sometimes were we can infer from what happened on one of the semi-annual market days during Governor Thomas' administration. Various bills were lying dormant in his hands. Accordingly the House ordered two of its members to call upon him and acquaint him that it had long "waited for his Result" on these bills, and desired to know when they might expect it. They returned and reported that the Governor was pleased to say that he had had the bills long under consideration, and "_waited the Result_" of the House. Then, after the House had resolved itself into a committee of the whole, for the purpose of taking the "Governor's support" into consideration, there was a further interchange of communications between the House and the Governor; the former reporting "some progress" to the Governor, and the Governor replying that, as he had received assurances of a "_good disposition_," on the part of the House, he thought it incumbent upon him to show _the like_ on his part by sending down the bills, which lay before him, without any amendment. The manifestation of a good disposition was not the same thing as an actual promise to approve the bills; so the wary assembly simply resolved that, on the passage of such bills as then lay before the Governor, and of the Naturalization Bill, and such other bills as might be presented to him during the pending session, there should be paid to him the sum of five hundred pounds; and that, on the passage of the same bills, there should be paid to him the further sum of one thousand pounds for the current year's support. Agreeably with this resolution, orders were drawn on the Treasurer and Trustees of the Loan-Office, and, when the Governor was informed of the fact, he appointed a time for passing the bills which was done with one hand, while he received the orders in the other. Thereupon with the utmost politeness he thanked the House for the fifteen hundred pounds as if it had been a free gift, and a mere mark of respect and affection. "_I thank you_, Gentlemen," he said, "for this _Instance_ of _your Regard_; which I am the more pleased with, as it gives an agreeable Prospect of _future Harmony_ between me and the Representatives of the People."

Despicably enough, while this treaty was pending, the Penns had a written understanding with the Governor, secured by his bond, that they were to receive a share of all money thus obtained from the people whom they sought to load with the entire weight of taxation. Indeed, emboldened as Franklin said by the declining sense of shame, that always follows frequent repetitions of sinning, they later in Governor Denny's time had the effrontery to claim openly, in a written reply to a communication from the Assembly, with respect to their refusal to bear any part of the expenses entailed on the Province by the Indians, that the excess of these donatives over and above the salary of the Governor should belong to them. By the Constitution, they said, their consent was essential to the validity of the laws enacted by the People, and it would tend the better to facilitate the several matters, which had to be transacted with them, for the representatives of the People to show a regard to them and their interest. The Assembly hotly replied that they hoped that they would always be able to obtain needful laws from the goodness of their sovereign without going to the market for them to a subject. But the hope was a vain one, and to that market, directly or indirectly, the People of Pennsylvania still had to go, for some time to come. To use Franklin's language, there was no other market that they could go to for the commodity that they wanted.

Do not, my courteous Reader [he exclaims with fine scorn in the "Preface to the Speech of Joseph Galloway, Esq."] take Pet at our Proprietary Constitution, for these our Bargain and Sale Proceedings in Legislation. 'Tis a happy Country where Justice, and what was your own before, can be had for Ready Money. 'Tis another Addition to the Value of Money, and of Course another Spur to Industry. Every Land is not so bless'd. There are Countries where the princely Proprietor claims to be Lord of all Property; where what is your own shall not only be wrested from you, but the Money you give to have it restor'd, shall be kept with it, and your offering so much, being a Sign of your being too Rich, you shall be plunder'd of every Thing that remain'd. These Times are not come here yet: Your present Proprietors have never been more unreasonable hitherto, than barely to insist on your Fighting in Defence of their Property, and paying the Expences yourselves; or if their estates must, (ah! _must_) be tax'd towards it, that the _best_ of their Lands shall be tax'd no higher than the _worst_ of yours.

Governor Hamilton, who succeeded Governor Thomas, so far departed from the vicious practice of buying and selling laws as to sign them without prepayment, but, when he observed that the Assembly was tardy in making payment, and yet asked him to give his assent to additional laws, before prior ones had been paid for, he stated his belief to it that as many useful laws had been enacted by him as by any of his predecessors in the same space of time, and added that, nevertheless, he had not understood that any allowance had been made to him for his support, as had been customary in the Province. The hint proved effective, the money was paid and the bills were approved.

From the time that Franklin became a member of the Assembly until the time that the minor controversy between the Proprietary Party and the Popular Party in Pennsylvania was obscured by the larger controversy between the Crown and all the American Colonies, he was engaged in an almost uninterrupted struggle with the Proprietaries, first, for the annulment of their claim to exemption from taxation, and, secondly, for the displacement of their government by a Royal Government. If there was ever an interlude in this struggle, it was only because, in devising measures for the defence of the Province, a Proprietary Governor found it necessary, at some trying conjuncture, to rely upon the management of Franklin to quiet the Quakers, who constituted a majority of the Assembly and detested both war and the Proprietaries, or upon the general abilities and popularity of Franklin to strengthen his own feeble counsels. If there was any political tranquillity in the Province during this time, it was, to employ one of Franklin's own comparisons, only such tranquillity as exists in a naval engagement between two broadsides. On the one hand were ranged the official partisans and dependents of the Proprietary Government and other adherents of the kind, whose allegiance is likely to be won by the social prestige and political patronage of executive authority. To this faction, in the latter stages of the conflict, was added a large body of Presbyterians whose sectarian sympathies had been excited by the Scotch-Irish uprising against the Indians, of which we have previously spoken. On the other hand were ranged the Quakers, upon whom the burden of resisting the Proprietary encroachments upon the popular rights had mainly rested from the origin of the Province, and middle-class elements of the population whose views and sympathies were not highly colored by any special influences. The task of preparing resolutions, addresses and remonstrances, voicing the popular criticism of the Proprietaries, was mainly committed to Franklin by the Assembly. It was with him, too, as the ablest and most influential representative of the popular interest that the various Proprietary Governors usually dealt.

We first find him high in favor with Governor Thomas and his Council at the time of the Association because of his activity, when still only Clerk of the Assembly, in providing for the defence of the Province and arousing a martial spirit in its people. This was the period when the Quaker found it necessary to help his conscience out a little with his wit, and when Franklin made good use of the principle that men will countenance many things with their backs that they will not countenance with their faces. The Quaker majority in the Assembly did not relish his intimacy at this time with the members of the Council who had so often trod on their punctilio about military expenditures, and it might have been pleased, he conjectured, if he had voluntarily resigned his clerkship; "but," he declares in the _Autobiography_, "they did not care to displace me on account merely of my zeal for the association, and they could not well give another reason."

Governor Hamilton became so sick of the broils, in which he was involved by the Proprietary instructions, that he resigned. His successor was the Governor Morris whose father loved disputation so much that he encouraged his children to practise it when he was digesting his dinner. Franklin met him at New York when he was on his way to Boston, and Morris was on his way to Philadelphia to enter upon his duties as Governor. So ready for a war of words was the new Governor that, when Franklin returned from Boston to Philadelphia, he and the House had already come to blows, and the conflict never ceased as long as he remained Governor. In the conflict, Franklin was his chief antagonist. Whenever a speech or message of the Governor was to be answered, he was made a member of the Committee appointed to answer it, and by such committees he was invariably selected to draft the answer. "Our answers," he says, "as well as his messages, were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive." But the Governor was at heart an amiable man, and Franklin, resolute as he was, when his teeth were fairly set, had no black blood in his veins. Though one might have imagined, he says, that he and the Governor could not meet without cutting throats, so little personal ill-will arose between them that they even often dined together.

One afternoon [he tells us in the _Autobiography_] in the height of this public quarrel, we met in the street. "Franklin," says he, "you must go home with me and spend the evening; I am to have some company that you will like"; and, taking me by the arm, he led me to his house. In gay conversation over our wine, after supper, he told us, jokingly, that he much admir'd the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give him a government, requested it might be a government of _blacks_, as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them. One of his friends, who sat next to me, says, "Franklin, why do you continue to side with these damn'd Quakers? Had you not better sell them? The Proprietor would give you a good price." "The Governor," says I, "has not yet _blacked_ them enough." He, indeed, had laboured hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wip'd off his colouring as fast as he laid it on, and plac'd it, in return, thick upon his own face; so that, finding he was likely to be negrofied himself, he, as well as Mr. Hamilton, grew tir'd of the contest, and quitted the Government.

All these disputes originated in the instructions given by the Proprietaries to their Governors not to approve any tax measure enacted by the Assembly that did not expressly exempt their estates; conduct which Franklin justly terms in the _Autobiography_ "incredible meanness."

The ability of Governor Morris to keep on good terms with Franklin in spite of the perpetual wrangling between the Assembly and himself Franklin sometimes thought was due to the fact that the Governor was bred a lawyer and regarded him as simply the advocate of the Assembly and himself as simply the advocate of the Proprietaries. However this was, he sometimes called upon Franklin in a friendly way to advise with him on different points; and occasionally, though not often, Franklin tells us, took his advice. But when the miserable fugitives, who escaped from the _Aceldama_ on the Monongahela, brought back to the settlements their awful tale of carnage and horror, and Dunbar and his rout were cravenly seeking the protection of those whom they should have protected, Governor Morris was only too glad to consult, and take the advice of, the strongest man on the American Continent, except the gallant Virginian, young in years, but from early responsibilities and hardships, as well as native wisdom and intrepidity, endowed with a calm judgment and tempered courage far beyond his years, whom Providence almost seemed to have taken under its direct guardianship for its future purposes on the day that Braddock fell. Later, when it appeared as if the Indians would carry desolation and death into the very bowels of Pennsylvania, the Governor was equally glad to place Franklin in charge of its Northwestern Frontier, and to thrust blank military commissions into his hands to be filled up by him as he pleased. And later still, when the desire of the Governor to consult with Franklin about the proper measures for preventing the desertion of the back counties of Pennsylvania had brought the latter home from the Northwestern Frontier, the Governor did not hesitate, in planning an expedition against Fort Duquesne, to offer Franklin a commission as general. If Franklin had accepted the offer, we are justified, we think, in assuming that he would have won at least as high a degree of credit as that which he accorded to Shirley. "For tho' Shirley," he tells us in the _Autobiography_, "was not a bred soldier, he was sensible and sagacious in himself, and attentive to good advice from others, capable of forming judicious plans, and quick and active in carrying them into execution." No mean summary of the military virtues of Franklin himself as a citizen soldier. But Franklin knew the limitations of his training too well to be allured by such a deceitful honor. There were few civil tasks to which he was not equal, but, when it came to being a military commander, he had the good sense to make an admission like that which Shirley made to him. When a banquet was given to Lord Loudon by the city of New York, Shirley was present, though the occasion was due to the fact that the command previously held by him had just been transferred to Loudon. Franklin noticed that he was sitting in a very low seat. "They have given you, sir, too low a seat," he said. "No matter, Mr. Franklin," replied Shirley, "I find _a low seat_ the easiest." When Governor Morris saw that, disputatious as he was, he was no match in that respect for the Assembly, he was succeeded by Governor Denny, who brought over with him from England the gold medal awarded by the Royal Society to Franklin for his electrical discoveries. This honor as well as the political experience of his predecessors was calculated to impress upon the Governor the importance of being on good terms with Franklin. At all events, when the medal was delivered by him to Franklin at a public dinner given to himself, after his arrival at Philadelphia, he added to the gift some very polite expressions of his esteem, and assured Franklin that he had long known him by reputation. After dinner, he left the diners with their wine, and took Franklin aside into another room, and told him that he had been advised by his friends in England to cultivate a friendship with him as the man who was best able to give him good advice, and to make his task easy. Much also was said by the Governor about the good disposition of the Proprietary towards the Province and the advantage that it would be to everyone and to Franklin particularly if the long opposition to the Proprietary was abandoned, and harmony between him and the people restored. No one, said the Governor, could be more serviceable in bringing this about than Franklin himself, who might depend upon his services being duly acknowledged and recompensed. "The drinkers," the _Autobiography_ goes on, "finding we did not return immediately to the table, sent us a decanter of Madeira, which the Governor made liberal use of, and in proportion became more profuse of his solicitations and promises."

To these overtures Franklin replied in a proper strain of mingled independence and good feeling, and concluded by expressing the hope that the Governor had not brought with him the same unfortunate instructions as his predecessors. The only answer that the Governor ever gave to this inquiry was given when he settled down to the duties of his office. It then became plain enough that he was under exactly the same instructions as his predecessors; the old ulcer broke out afresh, and Franklin's pen was soon again prodding Proprietary selfishness. But through it all he contrived to maintain the same relations of personal amity with Governor Denny that he had maintained with Governor Morris. "Between us personally," he says, "no enmity arose; we were often together; he was a man of letters, had seen much of the world, and was very entertaining and pleasing in conversation." But the situation, so far as the Province was concerned, was too grievous to be longer borne without an appeal for relief to the Crown. The Assembly had enacted a bill, appropriating the sum of sixty thousand pounds for the King's use, ten thousand pounds of which were to be expended on Lord Loudon's orders, and the Governor, in compliance with his instructions, had refused to give it his approval. This brought things to a head, the House resolved to petition the King to override the instructions and Franklin was appointed its agent to go over to England and present the petition. His passage was engaged, his sea-stores were actually all on board, when Lord Loudon himself came over to Philadelphia for the express purpose of bringing about an accommodation between the jarring interests. The Governor and Franklin met him at his request, and opened their minds fully to him; Franklin revamping all the old popular arguments, so often urged by him, and the Governor pleading his instructions, the bond that he had given and the ruin that awaited him if he disregarded it. "Yet," says Franklin, "seemed not unwilling to hazard himself if Lord Loudon would advise it." This his Lordship did not choose to do, though Franklin once thought that he had nearly prevailed on him to do it; and finally he entreated Franklin to use his influence with the Assembly to induce it to yield, promising, if it did, to employ unsparingly the King's troops for the defence of the frontiers of Pennsylvania, but stating that, if it did not, those frontiers must remain exposed to hostile incursion. The result was that the packet, in which Franklin engaged passage, sailed off with his sea-stores, while the parties were palavering, and the Assembly, after entering a formal protest against the duress, under which it gave way, abandoned its bill, and enacted another with the hateful exemption in it which was promptly approved by the Governor.

Franklin was now free to embark upon his voyage, whenever he could find a ship ready to sail, but, unfortunately for him, all the packets by which he could sail were at the beck of Lord Loudon, who was the most vacillating of human beings. When Franklin, before leaving Philadelphia, inquired of him the precise time at which a packet boat, that he said would be off soon, would sail, he replied: "I have given out that she is to sail on Saturday next; but I may let you know, _entre nous_, that if you are there by Monday morning, you will be in time, but do not delay longer." Because of detention at a ferry, Franklin did not reach New York before noon on Monday, but he was relieved, when he arrived, to be told that the packet would not sail until the next day. This was about the beginning of April. In point of fact, it was near the end of June when it got off. At the time of Franklin's arrival in New York, it was one of the two packets, that were being kept waiting in port for the dispatches, upon which his Lordship appeared to be always engaged. While thus held up, another packet arrived only to be placed under the same embargo. Each had a list of impatient passengers, and many letters and orders for insurance against war risks from American merchants, but, day after day, his Lordship, entirely unmindful of the impatience and anxiety that he was creating, sat continually at his desk, writing his interminable dispatches. Calling one morning to pay his respects, Franklin found in his ante-chamber Innis, a Philadelphia messenger, who had brought on a batch of letters to his Lordship from Governor Denny, and who told Franklin that he was to call the next day for his Lordship's answer to the Governor, and would then set off for Philadelphia at once. On the strength of this assurance, Franklin the same day placed some letters of his own for delivery in that city in Innis' hands. A fortnight afterwards, he met the messenger in the same ante-chamber. "So, you are soon return'd, Innis" he said. "_Return'd!_" replied Innis, "No, I am not _gone_ yet." "How so?" "I have called here by order every morning these two weeks past for his lordship's letter, and it is not yet ready." "Is it possible, when he is so great a writer? for I see him constantly at his escritoire." "Yes," says Innis, "but he is like St. George on the signs, _always on horseback, and never rides on_." Indeed, so purely rotatory was all his Lordship's epistolary energy, unremitting as it seemed to be, that one of the reasons given by William Pitt for subsequently removing him was that "_the minister never heard from him, and could not know what he was doing_." Finally, the three packets dropped down to Sandy Hook to join the British fleet there. Not knowing but that they might make off any day, their passengers thought it safest to board them before they dropped down. The consequence was that they found themselves anchored at Sandy Hook for about six weeks, "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean," and driven to the necessity of consuming all their sea-stores and buying more. At length, when the fleet did weigh anchor, with his Lordship and all his army on board, bound for the reduction of Louisburg, the three packets were ordered to attend it in readiness to receive the dispatches which the General was still scribbling upon the element that was not more mutable than his own purposes. When Franklin had been five days out, his packet was finally released, and stood off beyond the reach of his Lordship's indefatigable pen, but the other two packets were still kept in tow by him all the way to Halifax, where, after exercising his men for some time in sham attacks on sham forts, he changed his mind about besieging Louisburg, and returned to New York with all his troops and the two packets and their passengers. In the meantime, the French and their savage friends had captured Fort George, and butchered many of the garrison after its capitulation. The captain of one of the two packets, that were brought back to New York, afterwards told Franklin in London that, when he had been detained a month by his Lordship, he requested his permission to heave his ship down and clear her bottom. He was asked how long that would require. He answered three days. His Lordship replied, "If you can do it in one day, I give leave; otherwise not; for you must certainly sail the day after tomorrow." So he never obtained leave, though detained afterwards, from day to day, during full three months. No wonder that an irate passenger, who represented himself as having suffered considerable pecuniary loss, swore after he finally reached London in Franklin's presence, that he would sue Lord Loudon for damages.

As Oxenstiern's son was enjoined by his father to do, Franklin had gone out into the world and seen with what little wisdom it is ruled. "On the whole," he says in the _Autobiography_, "I wonder'd much how such a man came to be intrusted with so important a business as the conduct of a great army; but, having since seen more of the great world, and the means of obtaining, and motives for giving places, my wonder is diminished."

The _Autobiography_ makes it evident enough that for Loudon Franklin came to entertain the heartiest contempt.[15] His Lordship's movements in 1757 he stigmatized as frivolous, expensive and disgraceful to the nation beyond conception. He was responsible, Franklin thought, for the loss of Fort George, and for the foundering of a large part of the Carolina fleet, which, for lack of notice from him, remained anchored in the worm-infested waters of Charleston harbor for three months, after he had raised his embargo on the exportation of provisions. Nor does Franklin hesitate to charge that this embargo, while laid on the pretence of cutting off the enemy from supplies, was in reality laid for the purpose of beating down the price of provisions in the interest of the contractors, in whose profits, it was suspected, that Loudon had a share. Not only did his Lordship decline, on the shallow pretext that he did not wish to mix his accounts with those of his predecessors, to give Franklin the order that he had promised him for the payment of the balance, still due him on account of Braddock's expedition, though liquidated by his own audit, but, when Franklin urged the fact that he had charged no commission for his services, as a reason why he should be promptly paid, his Lordship cynically replied, "O, Sir, you must not think of persuading us that you are no gainer; we understand better those affairs, and know that everyone concerned in supplying the army finds means, in the doing it, to fill his own pockets."

Franklin and his son arrived in London on July 27, 1757. Shortly after he had settled down in his lodgings, he called upon Dr. Fothergill, whose counsel he had been advised to obtain, and who thought that, before an application was made to the British Government, there should be an effort to reach an understanding with the Penns themselves. Then took place the interview between Franklin and Lord Granville, at which his Lordship, after some preliminary discourse, expressed this alarming opinion:

You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution; you contend that the King's instructions to his governors are not laws, and think yourselves at liberty to regard or disregard them at your own discretion. But those instructions are not like the pocket instructions given to a minister going abroad, for regulating his conduct in some trifling point of ceremony. They are first drawn up by judges learned in the laws; they are then considered, debated, and perhaps amended in Council, after which they are signed by the king. They are then, so far as they relate to you, the _law of the land_, for the King is the LEGISLATOR OF THE COLONIES.

The correctness of this opinion was combated by Franklin. He told his Lordship that this was new doctrine to him, and that he had always understood from the American charters that the colonial laws were to be enacted by the assemblies of the Colonies, and that, once enacted and assented to by the King, the King could not repeal or alter them, and that, as the colonial assemblies could not make laws for themselves without his assent, so he could not make laws for them without their assent. The great man's reply was as brief as a great man's reply is only too likely to be when his opinions are questioned by his inferiors. It was merely that Franklin was totally mistaken. Franklin did not think so, and, concerned for fear that Lord Granville might be but expressing the sentiment of the Court, he wrote down what had been said to him as soon as he returned to his lodgings. The utterance reminded him that some twenty years before a bill had been introduced into Parliament by the ministry of that time containing a clause, intended to make the King's instructions laws in the Colonies, but that the clause had been stricken out of it by the House of Commons. For this, he said, the Colonies adored the Commons, as their friends and the friends of liberty, until it afterwards seemed as if they had refused the point of sovereignty to the King only that they might reserve it for themselves.

A meeting between the Proprietaries and Franklin was arranged by Doctor Fothergill. It assumed the form that such meetings are apt to assume, that is of mutual professions of an earnest desire to agree, repetition of the old antagonistic reasonings and a disagreement as stubborn as before. However, it was agreed that Franklin should reduce the complaints against the Proprietaries to writing, and that the Proprietaries were to consider them. When the paper was drawn, they submitted it to their solicitor, Ferdinand John Paris, who had represented them in the celebrated litigation between the Penns and the Lords Baltimore over the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and had written all their papers and messages in their disputes with the Pennsylvania Assembly. "He was," says Franklin, "a proud, angry man, and as I had occasionally in the answers of the Assembly treated his papers with some severity, they being really weak in point of argument and haughty in expression, he had conceived a mortal enmity to me." With Paris, Franklin refused to discuss the points of his paper, and the Proprietaries then, on the advice of Paris, placed it in the hands of the Attorney- and Solicitor-Generals for their opinion and advice. By them no answer was given for nearly a year, though Franklin frequently called upon the Proprietaries for an answer only to be told that they had not yet received the opinion of their learned advisers. What the opinion was when it was finally rendered the Proprietaries did not let Franklin know, but instead addressed a long communication, drawn and signed by Paris, to the Assembly, reciting the contents of Franklin's paper, complaining of its lack of formality as rudeness, and justifying their conduct. They would be willing, they said, to compose the dispute, if the Assembly would send out _some person of candor_ to treat with them. Franklin supposed that the incivility imputed to him consisted in the fact that he had not addressed the Proprietaries by their assumed title of True and Absolute Proprietaries of the Province of Pennsylvania.

The letter of the Proprietaries was not answered by the Assembly. While they were pretending to treat with Franklin, Governor Denny had been unable to withstand the pressure of his situation, and, at the request of Lord Loudon, had approved an act subjecting the estates of the Penns to taxation. When this Act was transmitted to England, the Proprietaries, upon the advice of Paris, petitioned the King to withhold his assent from it, and, when the petition came on for hearing, the parties were represented by counsel. On the one hand it was contended that the purpose of the Act was to impose an oppressive burden upon the Proprietary estates, and that the assessment under it would be so unequal because of the popular prejudice against the Penns that they would be ruined. To this it was replied that the Act was not conceived with any such purpose, and would not have any such effect, that the assessors were honest and discreet men under oath, and that any advantage that might inure to them individually from over-assessing the property of the Proprietaries would be too trifling to induce them to perjure themselves. It was also urged in opposition to the petition that the money, for which the Act provided, had been printed and issued, and was now in the hands of the inhabitants of the Province, and would be deprived of all value, to their great injury, if the Act did not receive the royal assent merely because of the selfish and groundless fears of the Proprietaries. At this point, Lord Mansfield, one of the counsel for the Proprietaries, led Franklin off into a room nearby, while the other lawyers were still pleading, and asked him if he was really of the opinion that the Proprietary estate would not be unfairly taxed if the Act was executed. "Certainly," said Franklin. "Then," said he, "you can have little objection to enter into an engagement to assure that point." "None at all," replied Franklin. Paris was then called in, and, after some discussion, a paper, such as Lord Mansfield suggested, was drawn up and signed by Franklin and Mr. Charles, who was the agent of Pennsylvania for ordinary purposes, and the law was given the royal assent with the further engagement, upon the part of Franklin and Mr. Charles, that it should be amended in certain respects by subsequent legislation. This legislation, however, the Assembly afterwards declined to enact when a committee, appointed by it, upon which it was careful to place several close friends of the Proprietaries, brought in an unanimous report stating that the yearly tax levied before the order of the Council reached Pennsylvania had been imposed with perfect fairness as between the Proprietaries and the other tax-payers.

In the most important respect, therefore, Franklin's mission to England had resulted in success. The principle was established by the Crown that the estate of the Proprietaries was subject to taxation equally with that of the humblest citizen of Pennsylvania; and the credit of the paper money, then scattered throughout the province, was saved. The Assembly rewarded its servant, when he returned to Pennsylvania, with its formal thanks and the sum of three thousand pounds. He responded in the happy terms which he always had at his command on occasions of this sort. "He made answer," says the official report, "that he was thankful to the House, for the very handsome and generous Allowance they had been pleased to make him for his Services; but that the Approbation of this House was, in his Estimation, far above every other kind of Recompense."

The Proprietaries punished their servant, Governor Denny, by removing him and threatening him with suit for the breach of his bond, but it is a pleasure to be told in the _Autobiography_ that his position was such that he could despise their threats.

While the duel was going on between the Proprietaries and the Assembly, Franklin had some significant things at times to say about it in his familiar letters. As far as we can see, his political course, during this period, was entirely candid and manly. He was on agreeable personal terms with all the colonial governors, he seems to have cherished an honest desire to be helpful to the Proprietaries, so far as their own illiberality and folly would allow him to be, and it is very plain that he was not without the feeling that the demands of the Popular Party itself were occasionally immoderate. He was quite willing for the sake of peace to concede anything except the essential points of the controversy, but when it came to these he was immovable as men of his type usually are when they realize that a claim upon them is too unjust or exorbitant even for their pacific temper.

I am much oblig'd to you for the favourable Light you put me in, to our Proprietor, as mention'd in yours of July 30 [he wrote to Peter Collinson in 1754], I know not why he should imagine me not his Friend, since I cannot recollect any one Act of mine that could denominate me otherwise. On the contrary if to concur with him, so far as my little Influence reach'd in all his generous and benevolent Designs and Desires of making his Province and People flourishing and happy be any Mark of my Respect and Dutyful Regard to him, there are many who would be ready to say I could not be suppos'd deficient in such Respect. The Truth is I have sought his _Interest_ more than his _Favour_; others perhaps have sought both, and obtain'd at least the latter. But in my Opinion great Men are not always best serv'd by such as show on all Occasions a blind Attachment to them: An Appearance of Impartiality in general gives a Man sometimes much more Weight when he would serve in particular instances.

To the friend to whom these words were written Franklin was disposed to unbosom himself with unusual freedom, and, in the succeeding year, in another letter to Collinson, he used words which showed plainly enough that he thought that the Assembly too was at times inclined to indulge in more hair-splitting and testiness than was consistent with the public welfare.

You will see [he said] more of the same Trifling in these Votes in both sides. I am heartily sick of our present Situation; I like neither the Governor's Conduct, nor the Assembly's; and having some Share in the Confidence of both, I have endeavour'd to reconcile 'em but in vain, and between 'em they make me very uneasy. I was chosen last Year in my Absence and was not at the Winter Sitting when the House sent home that Address to the King, which I am afraid was both ill-judg'd and ill-tim'd. If my being able now and then to influence a good Measure did not keep up my Spirits I should be ready to swear never to serve again as an Assembly Man, since both Sides expect more from me than they ought, and blame me sometimes for not doing what I am not able to do, as well as for not preventing what was not in my Power to prevent. The Assembly ride restive; and the Governor tho' he spurs with both heels, at the same time reins in with both hands, so that the Publick Business can never move forward, and he remains like St. George on the Sign, Always a Horseback and never going on. Did you never hear this old Catch?

_Their was a mad Man--He had a mad Wife, And three mad Sons beside; And they all got upon a mad Horse And madly they did ride._

Tis a Compendium of our Proceedings and may save you the Trouble of reading them.

In a still later letter to the same correspondent, Franklin asserted that there was no reason for excluding Quakers from the House, since, though unwilling to fight themselves, they had been brought to unite in voting the sums necessary to enable the Province to defend itself. Then, after referring to the defamation, that was being heaped upon him by the Proprietary Party, in the place of the court paid to him when he had exerted himself to secure aids from the House for Braddock and Shirley, he said, "Let me know if you learn that any of their Slanders reach England. I abhor these Altercations and if I did not love the Country and the People would remove immediately into a more quiet Government, Connecticut, where I am also happy enough to have many Friends."

However, there was too much fuel for the fire to die down. The claim of the Proprietaries to exemption from taxation was only the most aggravated result of their efforts, by their instructions to their Governors, to shape the legislation of the Province in accordance with their own personal aims and pecuniary interests instead of in the spirit of the royal charter, which gave to William Penn, and his heirs, and his, or their, deputies or lieutenants, free, full and absolute power, for the good and happy government of Pennsylvania, to make and enact any laws, according to their best discretion, by and with the advice, assent and approbation of the freemen of the said country, or of their delegates or deputies. In the report of the Committee of Aggrievances of the Assembly, drawn by Franklin, the case of the freemen of the Province against the Penns, which led to Franklin's first mission to England, is clearly stated. They are arraigned not only for seeking to exempt the bulk of their estate from the common burden of taxation, but also, apart from this, for stripping, by their instructions, their governors, and thereby the People themselves, of all real discretion in fixing by legislation the measure and manner in which, and the time at which, aids and supplies should be furnished for the defence of the Province. They had even, the report charged, prohibited their governors, by their instructions, from assenting to laws disposing of interest arising from the loan of bills of credit or money raised by excise taxes--forms of revenue to which the Proprietary estate did not contribute at all--unless the laws contained a clause giving their governors the right to negative a particular application of the sums. Another grievance was the issuance by the governor of commissions to provincial judges, to be held during the will and pleasure of the governors instead of during good behavior, as covenanted by William Penn--a practice which gave the Proprietaries control of the judicial as well as the executive Branch of the provincial government.

For a time, after Franklin returned to Pennsylvania in 1762, there was something like peace between the Proprietaries and the people. When a nephew of Thomas Penn was appointed governor, the Assembly accepted him as a family pledge of restored good feeling.

The Assembly [Franklin wrote to Dr. Fothergill] received a Governor of the Proprietary family with open arms, addressed him with sincere expressions of kindness and respect, opened their purses to them, and presented him with six hundred pounds; made a Riot Act and prepared a Militia Bill immediately, at his instance, granted supplies, and did everything that he requested, and promised themselves great happiness under his administration.

And no governor was ever so dependent upon the good will of the Assembly. It was during his administration that the Scotch-Irish inhabitants of the frontier, inflamed by Indian outrages, imbrued their hands in the blood of the Conestoga Indians, and, so far from being intimidated by the public proclamations issued by the Governor for their arrest and punishment, marched to the very threshold of Philadelphia itself with the purpose of destroying the Moravian Indians huddled there in terror of their lives. The whole Province outside of the City of Philadelphia was given over to lawlessness and disorder. In the contagious excitement of the hour, a considerable portion of its population even believed that the Quakers had gained the friendship of the Indians by presents, supplied them secretly with arms and ammunition, and engaged them to fall upon and kill the whites on the Pennsylvania frontier. Under these circumstances, the Governor simply did what Governor Morris and Governor Denny had been compelled to do before him, namely, call in the aid of the man who could in a letter to Peter Collinson truthfully sum up all that there was in the military demonstration which angered Thomas Penn so deeply with the simple utterance, "The People happen to love me." The whole story was told by Franklin to Dr. Fothergill in the letter from which we have just quoted.

More wonders! You know that I don't love the Proprietary and that he does not love me. Our totally different tempers forbid it. You might therefore expect that the late new appointments of one of his family would find me ready for opposition. And yet when his nephew arrived, our Governor, I considered government as government, and paid him all respect, gave him on all occasions my best advice, promoted in the Assembly a ready compliance with everything he proposed or recommended, and when those daring rioters, encouraged by general approbation of the populace, treated his proclamation with contempt, I drew my pen in the cause; wrote a pamphlet (that I have sent you) to render the rioters unpopular; promoted an association to support the authority of the Government and defend the Governor by taking arms, signed it first myself, and was followed by several hundreds, who took arms accordingly. The Governor offered me the command of them, but I chose to carry a musket and strengthen his authority by setting an example of obedience to his order. And would you think it, this proprietary Governor did me the honour, in an alarm, to run to my house at midnight, with his counsellors at his heels, for advice, and made it his head-quarters for some time. And within four and twenty hours, your old friend was a common soldier, a counsellor, a kind of dictator, an ambassador to the country mob, and on his returning home, nobody again. All this has happened in a few weeks.

With the retirement of the backwoodsmen from Philadelphia to their homes, sprang up one of the angriest factional contests that Pennsylvania had ever known. Every malignant passion, political or sectarian, that lurked in the Province was excited into the highest degree of morbid life. The Presbyterians, the Churchmen, even some of the Quakers, acclaimed the Paxton Boys as instruments of a just vengeance, and they constituted a political force, which the Governor was swift to utilize for the purpose of strengthening his party. He dropped all efforts to apprehend the murderers of the Conestoga Indians, granted a private audience to the insurgents, and accused the Assembly of disloyalty, and of encroaching upon the prerogatives of the Crown, only because it had been presumptuous enough to make an appointment to a petty office in a bill tendered to him for his assent. It was during his administration, too, that the claim was made that, even if the Proprietary estate had been subjected to taxation by the Lords in Council, under the terms of one of the amendments, proposed by them, "_the best and most valuable_," of the Proprietary lands "should be tax'd no higher than the _worst and least valuable_ of the People's."

When the conflict was reopened, the Assembly boldly brought it to an issue. One of its committees, with Franklin at its head, reported a series of resolutions censuring the proprietaries, condemning their rule as too weak to maintain its authority and repress disorder, and petitioning the King to take over the Government of the Province, after such compensation to the Proprietaries as was just. The Assembly then adjourned to sound the temper of their constituents, and their adjournment was the signal for a pamphlet war attended by such a hail of paper pellets as rarely marked any contest so early in the history of the American Colonies. Among the best of them was the pamphlet written by Franklin, and entitled _Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of our Public Affairs_, which has already been mentioned, and which denounced in no uncertain terms the "insolent Tribunitial VETO," with which the Proprietaries were in the habit of declaring that nothing should be done, unless their private interests in certain particulars were served.

On May 14, 1764, the Assembly met again, and was soon deeply engaged in a debate as to whether an address should be sent to the King, praying the abolition of the Proprietary Government. Long did the debate last; Joseph Galloway making the principal argument in support of the proposition, and John Dickinson the principal one against it. When the vote was taken, the affirmative prevailed, but, as Isaac Norris, who had been a member of the body for thirty years, and its speaker for fifteen, was about to be bidden by it to sign the address, he stated that, since he did not approve it, and yet would have to sign it as speaker, he hoped that he might have time to draft his objections to it. A short recess ensued, and when the members convened again, Norris sent word that he was too sick to be present, and requested that another person should be chosen as speaker. The choice of the body then fell upon Franklin, who immediately signed the paper.

The next sitting of the Assembly was not to be held until the succeeding October, and before that time the annual election for members of the Assembly was to take place. For the purpose of influencing public opinion, Dickinson, upon its adjournment, published his speech with a long preface by Dr. William Smith. Galloway followed suit by publishing his speech with a long preface by Franklin. This preface is one of Franklin's masterpieces, marked it is true by some quaint conceits and occasional relaxations of energy, but full of power and withering sarcasm. Preceded by such a lengthy and brilliant preface, Galloway must have felt that his speech had little more than the secondary value of an appendix. With the consummate capacity for pellucid statement, which was one of Franklin's most remarkable gifts, it narrated the manner in which the practice of buying legislation from the Proprietaries had been pursued. With equal force and ingenuity, it demonstrated that five out of the six amendments, proposed by the Lords in Council to the Act, approved by Governor Denny, did not justify the charge that the circumstances, in which they originated, involved any real injustice to the Proprietaries, and that the sixth, which forbade the tender to the Proprietaries of paper bills of fluctuating value, in payment of debts payable to them, under the terms of special contracts, in coin, if a measure of justice to them, would be also a measure of justice to other creditors in the same situation, who were not mentioned in the amendment.

Referring to the universal practice in America of making such bills a legal tender and the fact that the bills in question would have been a legal tender as respects the members of the Assembly and their constituents as well as the Proprietaries, Franklin's preface glows like an incandescent furnace in these words:

But if he (the reader) can not on these Considerations, quite excuse the Assembly, what will he think of those _Honourable_ Proprietaries, who when Paper Money was issued in their Colony for the Common Defence of their vast Estates, with those of the People, and who must therefore reap, at least, equal Advantages from those Bills with the People, could nevertheless _wish_ to be exempted from their Share of the unavoidable Disadvantages. Is there upon Earth a Man besides, with any Conception of what is honest, with any Notion of Honor, with the least Tincture in his Veins of the Gentleman, but would have blush'd at the Thought; but would have rejected with Disdain such undue Preference, if it had been offered him? Much less would he have struggled for it, mov'd Heaven and Earth to obtain it, resolv'd to ruin Thousands of his Tenants by a Repeal of the Act, rather than miss of it, and enforce it afterwards by an audaciously wicked Instruction, forbidding Aids to his King, and exposing the Province to Destruction, unless it was complied with. And yet,--these are _Honourable Men_.... Those who study Law and Justice, as a Science [he added in an indignant note] have established it a Maxim in Equity, "Qui sentit commodum, sentire debet et onus." And so consistent is this with the _common_ Sense of Mankind, that even our lowest untaught Coblers and Porters feel the Force of it in their own Maxim, (which _they_ are _honest enough_ never to dispute) "Touch Pot, touch Penny."

Other passages in the Preface were equally scorching. Replying to the charge of the Proprietaries that the Quaker Assembly, out of mere malice, because they had conscientiously quitted the Society of Friends for the Church, were wickedly determined to ruin them by throwing the entire burden of taxation on them, Franklin had this to say:

How foreign these Charges were from the Truth, need not be told to any Man in _Pennsylvania_. And as the Proprietors knew, that the Hundred Thousand Pounds of paper money, struck for the defence of their enormous Estates, with others, was actually issued, spread thro' the Country, and in the Hands of Thousands of poor People, who had given their Labor for it, how base, cruel, and inhuman it was, to endeavour by a Repeal of the Act, to strike the Money dead in those Hands at one Blow, and reduce it all to Waste Paper, to the utter Confusion of all Trade and Dealings, and the Ruin of Multitudes, merely to avoid paying their own just Tax!--Words may be wanting to express, but Minds will easily conceive, and never without Abhorrence!

But fierce as these attacks were, they were mild in comparison with the shower of stones hurled by Franklin at the Proprietaries in the Preface in one of those lapidary inscriptions which were so common in that age. The prefacer of Dickinson's Speech had inserted in his introduction a lapidary memorial of William Penn made up of tessellated bits of eulogy, extracted from the various addresses of the Assembly itself. This gave Franklin a fine opportunity to retort in a similar mosaic of phrases and to contrast the meanness of the sons with what the Assembly had said of the father.

That these Encomiums on the Father [he said] tho' sincere, have occurr'd so frequently, was owing, however, to two Causes; first, a vain Hope the Assemblies entertain'd, that the Father's Example, and the Honors done his Character, might influence the Conduct of the Sons; secondly, for that in attempting to compliment the Sons on their own Merits, there was always found an extreme Scarcity of Matter. Hence _the Father, the honored and honorable Father_, was so often repeated, that the Sons themselves grew sick of it; and have been heard to say to each other with Disgust, when told that A, B, and C. were come to wait upon them with Addresses on some public Occasion, "_Then I suppose we shall hear more about our Father._" So that, let me tell the Prefacer, who perhaps was unacquainted with this Anecdote, that if he hop'd to curry more Favor with the Family, by the Inscription he has fram'd for that great Man's Monument, he may find himself mistaken; for,--there is too much in it of _our Father_.

If therefore, he would erect a Monument to the Sons, the Votes of Assembly, which are of such Credit with him, will furnish him with ample Materials for his Inscription.

To save him Trouble, I will essay a Sketch for him, in the Lapidary Style, tho' mostly in the Expressions, and everywhere in the Sense and Spirit of the Assembly's Resolves and Messages.

Be this a Memorial Of T-- and R-- P--, P-- of P,-- Who, with Estates immense, Almost beyond Computation, When their own Province, And the whole _British_ Empire Were engag'd in a bloody and most expensive War, Begun for the Defence of those Estates, Could yet meanly desire To have those very Estates Totally or Partially Exempted from Taxation, While their Fellow-Subjects all around them, Groan'd Under the Universal Burthen. To gain this Point, They refus'd the necessary Laws For the Defence of their People, And suffer'd their Colony to welter in its Blood, Rather than abate in the least Of these their dishonest Pretensions. The Privileges granted by their Father Wisely and benevolently To encourage the first Settlers of the Province, They, Foolishly and cruelly, Taking Advantage of public Distress, Have extorted from the Posterity of those Settlers; And are daily endeavouring to reduce them To the most abject Slavery: Tho' to the Virtue and Industry of those People In improving their Country, They owe all that they possess and enjoy. A striking Instance Of human Depravity and Ingratitude; And an irrefragable Proof, That Wisdom and Goodness Do not descend with an Inheritance; But that ineffable Meanness May be connected with unbounded Fortune.

It may well be doubted whether any one had ever been subjected to such overwhelming lapidation as this since the time of the early Christian martyrs.

There are many other deadly thrusts in the Preface, and nowhere else are the issues between the Proprietaries and the People so clearly presented, but the very completeness of the paper renders it too long for further quotation.

Franklin, however, was by no means allowed to walk up and down the field, vainly challenging a champion to come out from the opposing host and contend with him. At his towering front the missiles of the Proprietary Party were mainly directed. Beneath one caricature of him were these lines:

"Fight dog, fight bear! You're all my friends: By you I shall attain my ends, For I can never be content Till I have got the government. But if from this attempt I fall, Then let the Devil take you all!"

Another writer strove in his lapidary zeal to fairly bury Franklin beneath a whole cairn of opprobrious accusations, consuming nine pages of printed matter in the effort to visit his political tergiversation, his greed for power, his immorality and other sins, with their proper deserts, and ending with this highly rhetorical apostrophe:

"Reader, behold this striking Instance of Human Depravity and Ingratitude; An irrefragable Proof That neither the Capital services of _Friends_ Nor the attracting Favours of the Fair, Can fix the Sincerity of a Man, _Devoid of Principles_ and Ineffably mean: Whose ambition is POWER, And whose intention is TYRANNY."

The illegitimacy of William Franklin, of course, was freely used during the conflict as a means of paining and discrediting Franklin. In a pamphlet entitled, _What is sauce for a Goose is also Sauce for a Gander_, the writer asserted that the mother of William was a woman named Barbara, who worked in Franklin's house as a servant for ten pounds a year, that she remained in this position until her death and that Franklin then stole her to the grave in silence without pall, tomb or monument. A more refined spirit, which could not altogether free itself from the undertow of its admiration for such an extraordinary man, penned these lively lines entitled, "Inscription on a Curious Stove in the Form of An Urn, Contrived in such a Manner As To Make The Flame Descend Instead of Rising from the Fire, Invented by Dr. Franklin."

"Like a Newton sublimely he soared To a summit before unattained, New regions of science explored And the palm of philosophy gained.

"With a spark which he caught from the skies He displayed an unparalleled wonder, And we saw with delight and surprise That his rod could secure us from thunder.

"Oh! had he been wise to pursue The track for his talents designed, What a tribute of praise had been due To the teacher and friend of mankind.

"But to covet political fame Was in him a degrading ambition, The spark that from Lucifer came And kindled the blaze of sedition.

"Let candor then write on his urn, Here lies the renowned inventor Whose fame to the skies ought to burn But inverted descends to the centre."

The election began at nine o'clock in the morning on October 1, 1764. Franklin and Galloway headed the "Old Ticket," and Willing and Bryan the "New." The latter ticket was supported by the Dutch Calvinists, the Presbyterians and many of the Dutch Lutherans and Episcopalians; the former by the Quakers and Moravians and some of the McClenaghanites. So great was the concourse of voters that, until midnight, it took fifteen minutes for one of them to work his way from the end of the line of eager electors to the polling place. Excitement was at white heat, and, while the election was pending, hands were busy scattering squibs and campaign appeals in English and German among the crowd. Towards three the next morning, the new-ticket partisans moved that the polls be closed, but the motion was opposed by their old-ticket foes, because they wished to bring out a reserve of aged or lame retainers who could not stand long upon their feet. These messengers were dispatched to bring in such retainers from their homes in chairs and litters, and, when the new-ticket men saw the success, with which the old-ticket men were marshalling their recruits, they, too, began to scour the vicinage for votes, and so successful were the two parties in mobilizing their reserves that the polls did not close until three o'clock in the afternoon of the second day. Not until the third day were the some 3900 real and fraudulent votes cast counted; and, when the count was over, it was found that Franklin and Galloway had been defeated. "Franklin," said an eye-witness of the election, "died like a philosopher. But Mr. Galloway agonized in death like a mortal deist, who has no hopes of a future life."

As for Franklin, his enemies had simply kicked him upstairs. A majority of the persons returned as elected belonged to his faction, and, despite the indignant eloquence of Dickinson, who declared him to be the most bitterly disliked man in Pennsylvania, the Assembly, by a vote of nineteen to eleven, selected him as the agent of the Province to go over to England, and assist Richard Jackson, its standing agent, in "representing, soliciting and transacting the affairs" of the Province for the ensuing year.

The minority protested; and moved that its protest be spread upon the minutes, and, when this motion was denied, it published its remonstrance in the newspapers. This act provoked a pamphlet in reply from Franklin entitled _Remarks on a Late Protest_. Though shorter it is as good, as far as it goes, as the preface to Galloway's speech. He tosses the protestants and their reasons for believing him unfit for the agency on his horns with astonishing ease and strength, calls attention to the trifling majority of some twenty-five votes by which he was returned defeated, and chills the habit that we often indulge of lauding the political integrity and decorum of our American ancestors at our own expense by inveighing against the "many Perjuries procured among the wretched Rabble brought to swear themselves intitled to a Vote" and roundly saying to the protestants to their faces, "Your Artifices did not prevail everywhere; nor your double Tickets, and Whole Boxes of Forged Votes. A great Majority of the new-chosen Assembly were of the old Members, and remain uncorrupted."

Apart from the reference to the illegitimacy of William Franklin, Franklin had passed through the heated contest with the Proprietaries without the slightest odor of fire upon his garments. With his hatred of contention, it is natural enough that he should have written to Collinson, when the pot of contention was boiling so fiercely in Pennsylvania in 1764: "The general Wish seems to be a King's Government. If that is not to be obtain'd, many talk of quitting the Province, and among them your old Friend, who is tired of these Contentions & longs for philosophic Ease and Leisure." But he did not overstate the case when he wrote to Samuel Rhoads in the succeeding year from London, "The Malice of our Adversaries I am well acquainted with, but hitherto it has been Harmless; all their Arrows shot against us, have been like those that Rabelais speaks of which were headed with Butter harden'd in the Sun."

Franklin was a doughty antagonist when at bay, but he had few obdurate resentments, and was quick to see the redeeming virtues of even those who had wronged him. He assisted in the circulation of John Dickinson's famous Farmer's Letters, and curiously enough when Dickinson was the President of the State of Pennsylvania at the close of the Revolution, and the 130,000 pounds which that State had agreed to pay for the vacant lots and unappropriated wilderness lands of the Penns was claimed to be an inadequate consideration by some of them, he gave to John Penn, the son of Thomas Penn, a letter of recommendation to "the Civilities and Friendship" of Dickinson.

I would beg leave to mention it to your Excellency's Consideration [he said], whether it would not be reputable for the Province, in the cooler Season of Peace to reconsider that Act, and if the Allowance made to the Family should be found inadequate, to regulate it according to Equity, since it becomes a Virgin State to be particularly careful of its Reputation, and to guard itself not only against committing Injustice, but against even the suspicion of it.

But nothing better proves what a selfish cur Thomas Penn was than the fact that, more than twenty years after the election, of which we have been speaking, so magnanimous a man as Franklin could express this sober estimate of his conduct and character in a letter to Jan Ingenhousz:

In my own Judgment, when I consider that for near 80 Years, viz., from the Year 1700, William Penn and his Sons receiv'd the Quit-rents which were originally granted for the Support of Government, and yet refused to support the Government, obliging the People to make a fresh Provision for its Support all that Time, which cost them vast Sums, as the most necessary Laws were not to be obtain'd but at the Price of making such Provision; when I consider the Meanness and cruel Avarice of the late Proprietor, in refusing for several Years of War, to consent to any Defence of the Frontiers ravaged all the while by the Enemy, unless his Estate should be exempted from paying any Part of the Expence, not to mention other Atrocities too long for this letter, I can not but think the Family well off, and that it will be prudent in them to take the Money and be quiet. William Penn, the First Proprietor, Father of Thomas, the Husband of the present Dowager, was a wise and good Man, and as honest to the People as the extream Distress of his Circumstances would permit him to be, but the said Thomas was a miserable Churl, always intent upon Griping and Saving; and whatever Good the Father may have done for the Province was amply undone by the Mischief received from the Son, who never did anything that had the Appearance of Generosity or Public Spirit but what was extorted from him by Solicitation and the Shame of Backwardness in Benefits evidently incumbent on him to promote, and which was done at last in the most ungracious manner possible. The Lady's Complaints of not duly receiving her Revenues from America are habitual; they were the same during all the Time of my long Residence in London, being then made by her Husband as Excuses for the Meanness of his Housekeeping and his Deficiency in Hospitality, tho' I knew at the same time that he was then in full Receipt of vast Sums annually by the Sale of Lands, Interest of Money, and Quit-rents. But probably he might conceal this from his Lady to induce greater Economy as it is known that he ordered no more of his Income home than was absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, but plac'd it at Interest in Pennsylvania & the Jerseys, where he could have 6 and 7 per Cent, while Money bore no more than 5 per cent in England. I us'd often to hear of those Complaints, and laugh at them, perceiving clearly their Motive. They serv'd him on other as well as on domestic Occasions. You remember our Rector of St. Martin's Parish, Dr. Saunders. He once went about, during a long and severe Frost, soliciting charitable Contributions to purchase Coals for poor Families. He came among others to me, and I gave him something. It was but little, very little, and yet it occasion'd him to remark, "You are more bountiful on this Occasion than your wealthy Proprietary, Mr. Penn, but he tells me he is distress'd by not receiving his Incomes from America." The Incomes of the family there must still be very great, for they have a Number of Manors consisting of the best Lands, which are preserved to them, and vast Sums at Interest well secur'd by Mortgages; so that if the Dowager does not receive her Proportion, there must be some Fault in her Agents. You will perceive by the length of this Article that I have been a little _echauffe_ by her making the Complaints you mention to the Princess Dowager of Lichtenstein at Vienna. The Lady herself is good & amiable, and I should be glad to serve her in anything just and reasonable; but I do not at present see that I can do more than I have done.

And Thomas Penn, too, like St. Sebastian, will never be drawn without _that_ arrow in _his_ side.

When Franklin was appointed agent, the provincial treasury was empty, but so deeply aroused was public sentiment, in favor of the substitution of a royal for the proprietary government, that the merchants of Philadelphia in a few hours subscribed a sum of eleven hundred pounds, to defray his expenses. Of this amount, however, he refused to accept but five hundred pounds, and, after a trying passage of thirty days, he found himself again at No. 7 Craven Street.

So far as the immediate object of his mission was concerned, it proved a failure. Before he left Pennsylvania, George Grenville, the Prime Minister of England, had called the agents of the American Colonies, resident at London, together and informed them that a debt of seventy-three millions sterling had been imposed upon England by the recent war, and that he proposed to ask Parliament to place a part of it upon the American Colonies. In the stream of events, which began with this proposal, the proprietary government in Pennsylvania and the royal governments in other American Colonies were alike destined to be swept away.

After the arrival of Franklin in England, the local struggle in Pennsylvania was of too secondary importance to command serious attention; and, beyond a few meagre allusions to it, there is no mention made of it in his letters. The temper of the English Ministry was not friendly to such a revolutionary change as the abolition of the proprietary government, and Franklin, after he had been in England a few years, had too many matters of continental concern to look after to have any time left for a single phase of the general conflict between the Colonies and the mother country.

Before passing to his share in this conflict, a word should be said about the Albany Congress, in which he was the guiding spirit. In 1754, when another war between England and France was feared, a Congress of Commissioners from the several Colonies was ordered by the Lords of Trade to be held at Albany. The object of the call was to bring about a conference between the Colonies and the Chiefs of the Six Nations as to the best means of defending their respective territories from invasion by the French. When the order reached Pennsylvania, Governor Hamilton communicated it to the Assembly, and requested that body to provide proper presents for the Indians, who were to assemble at Albany; and he named Franklin and Isaac Norris, the Speaker of the Assembly, as the Commissioners from Pennsylvania, to act in conjunction with Thomas Penn and Richard Peters, the Secretary of the Proprietary Government. The presents were provided, and the nominations confirmed by the Assembly, and Franklin and his colleagues arrived at Albany in the month of June, 1754.

He brought his usual zeal to the movement. Before he left Philadelphia, with a view to allaying the jealousies, which existed between the different colonies, he published an article in his _Gazette_ pointing out the importance of unanimity, which was accompanied by a woodcut representing a snake severed into as many sections as there were colonies. Each section bore the first letter of the name of a colony, and beneath the whole, in capital letters, were the words, "Join or die." On his way to Albany, he drafted a plan of union, looking to the permanent defence of the colonies, which closely resembled a similar plan of union, put forward thirty-two years before by Daniel Coxe in a tract entitled _A Description of the English Province of Carolina_. The Congress was attended by Commissioners from all the Colonies except New Jersey, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. One of its members was Thomas Hutchinson, of Massachusetts, who was to bring down on Franklin's head the most trying crisis in his career. James De Lancey, the Lieutenant-Governor of New York, was chosen to be its presiding officer. Mingled with the Commissioners and the inhabitants of Albany, as they walked its streets, were the representatives of the Iroquois, whose tribes had cherished an unappeasable hatred for the French ever since the fatal day when Frontenac had thrown in his fortunes with those of their traditional enemies, the Hurons. Much time had to be expended by the Commissioners in distributing among them the presents that they had brought for them, and in conducting with ceremonious and tedious formality the long powwows in which the Indian heart, if there was such a thing, so dearly delighted. When the assembly entered upon its deliberations, a committee of seven was appointed by it to consider the objects of the Congress, and it was composed of one commissioner from each colony; Franklin being the member from Pennsylvania, and Thomas Hutchinson the member from Massachusetts. After the Commissioners gathered at Albany, it was found that plans of union had been framed by other members of the Congress besides Franklin. All the plans were compared and considered by the committee, and Franklin's was adopted, amended and reported to the Congress, and was by it, after a long debate, approved, and recommended to the favorable consideration of Parliament and the King whose assent, it was conceded, was essential to its efficacy.

It was a simple but comprehensive scheme of government. The several colonies were to remain independent except so far as they surrendered their autonomy for purposes of mutual defence; there were to be a President-General, appointed and paid by the King, who was to be the executive arm of the Union, and a Grand Council of forty-eight members, elected by the different Colonial Assemblies, which was to be its legislative organ. The first meeting of the Council was to be at Philadelphia[16]; it was to meet once a year or oftener, if there was need, at such times and places as it should fix on adjournment, or as should be fixed, in case of an emergency, by the call of the President-General, who was authorized to issue such a call, with the consent of seven members of the Council; the tenure of members of the Council was to be for three years, and, on the death or resignation of a member, the vacancy was to be filled by the Assembly of his colony at its next sitting; after the election of the first members of the Council, the representation of the colonies in it was to be in proportion to their respective contributions to the Treasury of the Union, but no colony was to be represented by more than seven nor less than two members; the Council was to have the power to choose its Speaker, and was to be neither dissolved, prorogued nor continued in session longer than six weeks at one time without its consent, or the special command of the Crown; its members were to be allowed for their services ten shillings sterling a day, whether in session or journeying to or from the place of meeting; twenty-five members were to constitute a quorum, provided that among this number was at least one member from a majority of the Colonies; the assent of the President General was to be essential to the validity of all acts of the Council, and it was to be his duty to see that they were carried into execution, and the President-General and Council were to negotiate all treaties with the Indians, declare war and make peace with them, regulate all trade with them, purchase for the Crown from them all lands sold by them, and not within the limits of the old Colonies; and make and govern new settlements on such lands until erected into formal colonies. They were also to enlist and pay soldiers, build forts and equip vessels for the defence of the Colonies, but were to have no power to impress men in any colony without the consent of its assembly; all military and naval officers of the Union were to be named by the President-General with the approval of the Council, and all civil officers of the Union were to be named by the Council with the approval of the President-General; in case of vacancies, resulting from death or removal, in any such offices, they were to be filled by the Governors of the Provinces in which they occurred until appointments could be made in the regular way; and the President-General and Council were also to have the power to appoint a General Treasurer for the Union and a Local Treasurer for the Union in each colony, when necessary. All funds were to be disbursed on the joint order of the President-General and the Council, except when sums had been previously appropriated for particular purposes, and the President-General had been specially authorized to draw upon them; the general accounts of the Union were to be each year communicated to the several Colonial Assemblies; and, for the limited purposes of the Union, the President-General and the Council were authorized to enact laws, and to levy general duties, imposts and taxes; the laws so enacted to be transmitted to the King in Council for his approbation, and, if not disapproved within three years, to remain in force. A final feature of the plan was the provision that each Colony might in a sudden emergency take measures for its own defence, and call upon the President-General and Council for reimbursement.

The Albany plan of union was one of the direct lineal antecedents of the Federal Constitution. In other words, it was one of the really significant things in our earlier history that tended to foster the habit of union, without which that constitution could never have been adopted. But, when considered in the light of the jealousy with which the mother country then regarded the Colonies, and with which the Colonies regarded each other, it is not at all surprising that the plan recommended by it should have to come to nothing. "Its fate was singular," says Franklin in the _Autobiography_. "The assemblies did not adopt it, as they all thought there was too much _prerogative_ in it, and in England it was judg'd to have too much of the _democratic_." Even in Pennsylvania, though the Governor laid it before the Assembly with a handsome tribute to "the great clearness and strength of judgment," with which it had been drawn up, that body, when Franklin was absent, condemned it without giving it any serious consideration. In England it met with the disapproval of the Board of Trade, and "another scheme," to recur to the _Autobiography_, "was form'd, supposed to answer the same purpose better, whereby the governors of the provinces, with some members of their respective councils, were to meet and order the raising of troops, building of forts, etc., and to draw on the treasury of Great Britain for the expense, which was afterwards to be refunded by an act of Parliament laying a tax on America."

The Albany plan was an eminently wise one, and Franklin was probably justified in forming the favorable view of it which he expressed in these words in the _Autobiography_:

The different and contrary reasons of dislike to my plan makes me suspect that it was really the true medium; and I am still of opinion it would have been happy for both sides the water if it had been adopted. The colonies, so united, would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves; there would then have been no need of troops from England; of course, the subsequent pretence for taxing America, and the bloody contest it occasioned, would have been avoided. But such mistakes are not new; history is full of the errors of states and princes.

"Look round the habitable world, how few Know their own good, or, knowing it, pursue!"

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom _adopted from previous wisdom, but forc'd by the occasion_.

In the autumn of 1754, Franklin made a journey to Boston. There he met Shirley, and was apprised by him of the plan formed in England for the defence of the Colonies. This intelligence elicited three notable letters from him to Shirley in which he succinctly but luminously and vigorously stated his objections to the plan. In the first letter, he deprecated in brief but grave general terms a scheme of colonial administration, in which the people of the Colonies were to be excluded from all share in the choice of the Grand Council contemplated by the scheme, and were to be taxed by a Parliament in which they were to have no representation. Where heavy burdens are laid on the people, it had been found useful, he said, to make such burdens as much as possible their own acts. The people bear them better when they have, or think they have, some share in the direction; and, when any public measures are generally grievous, or even distasteful to the people, the wheels of government move more heavily.

In the second letter, Franklin states what in his opinion the people of the Colonies were likely to say of the proposed plan, namely, that they were as loyal as any other subjects of the King; that there was no reason to doubt their readiness to grant such sums as they could for the defence of the Colonies; that they were likely to be better judges of their own military necessities than the remote English Parliament; that the governors, who came to the Colonies, often came merely to make their fortunes, and to return to England, were not always men of the best abilities or integrity, had little in common with the colonists, and might be inclined to lavish military expenditures for the sake of the profit to be derived from such expenditures by them for themselves and their friends and dependents; that members of colonial councils being appointed by the Crown, on the recommendation of colonial governors, and being often men of small estates, and dependent on such governors for place, were too subject to influence; that Parliament was likely to be misled by such governors and councils; and yet their combined influence would probably shield them against popular resentment; that it was deemed an unquestionable right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent, given through their representatives, and that the Colonies had no representation in Parliament; that to tax the people of the Colonies without such representation, and to exclude them altogether from the proposed plan was a reflection on their loyalty, or their patriotism, or their intelligence, and that to tax them without their consent, was, indeed, more like raising contributions in an enemy's country than the taxation of Englishmen. Such were some of the objections stated in this letter to the imposition of taxes on the Colonies by the British Parliament. There were others of a kindred nature, and still others, based upon the claim that the Colonies were already paying heavy secondary taxes to England. Taxes, paid by landholders and artificers in England, Franklin declared, entered into the prices paid in America for their products, and were therefore really taxes paid by America to Britain. The difference between the prices, paid by America for these products, and the cheaper prices, at which they could be bought in other countries, if America were allowed to trade with them, was also but a tax paid by America to Britain and, where the price was paid for goods which America could manufacture herself, if allowed by Great Britain to do so, the whole of it was but such a tax. Such a tax, too, was the difference between the price that America received for its own products in Britain, after the payment of duties, and the price that it could obtain in other countries, if allowed to trade with them. In fine, as America was not permitted to regulate its trade, and restrain the importation and consumption of British superfluities, its whole wealth ultimately found its way to Great Britain, and, if the inhabitants of Great Britain were enriched in consequence, and rendered better able to pay their taxes, that was nearly the same thing as if America itself was taxed. Of these kinds of indirect taxes America did not complain, but to pay direct taxes, without being consulted as to whether they should be laid, or as to how they should be applied, could not but seem harsh to Englishmen, who could not conceive that by hazarding their lives and fortunes in subduing and settling new countries, and in extending the dominion and increasing the commerce of the mother country, they had forfeited the native rights of Britons; which they thought that, on these accounts, might well be given to them, even if they had been before in a state of slavery. Another objection to the scheme, the letter asserted, was the likelihood that the Governors and Councillors, not being associated with any representatives of the people, to unite with them in their measures, and to render these measures palatable to the people, would become distrusted and odious; and thus would embitter the relations between governors and governed and bring about total confusion. The letter, short as it is, sums up almost all the main points of the more copious argument that was, in a few years, to be made with so much pathos as well as power by the Colonies against the resolve of the British Ministry to tax them without their consent.

Franklin's third letter to Shirley is but the statement in embryo of the sagacious and enlarged views of the policy of Great Britain, with respect to the Colonies, which he subsequently expressed in so many impressive forms. The letter is, first of all, interesting as showing that the subject of promoting a closer union between Great Britain and her colonies by allowing the latter to be represented in Parliament had already been discussed by Shirley and Franklin in conversation. It is also an indication, for all that was said later about the submissive loyalty of the Colonies, that the sense of injustice and hardship worked by the repressive effects of the existing British restrictions on American commerce and manufactures was widely diffused in America. The proposal to allow America representatives in Parliament would, Franklin thought, be very acceptable to the Colonies, provided the presentation was a reasonable one in point of numbers, and provided all the old acts of Parliament, limiting the trade, or cramping the manufactures, of the Colonies, were, at the same time, repealed and the cis-Atlantic subjects of Great Britain put on the same footing of commercial and industrial freedom as its trans-Atlantic subjects, until a Parliament, in which both were represented, should deem it to be to the interest of the whole empire that some or all of the obnoxious laws should be revived. Franklin also was too much of a latter-day American not to believe that laws, which then seemed to the colonists to be unjust to them, would be acquiesced in more cheerfully by them, and be easier of execution, if approved by a Parliament in which they were represented. The letter ended with a series of original reflections, highly characteristic of the free play, which marked the mental operations of the writer in dealing with any subject, encumbered by short-sighted prejudices. Of what importance was it, he argued, whether manufacturers of iron lived at Birmingham or Sheffield, or both, since they were still within the bounds of Great Britain? Could the Goodwin Sands be laid dry by banks, and land, equal to a large county thereby gained to England, and presently filled with English inhabitants, would it be right to deprive such inhabitants of the common privileges enjoyed by other Englishmen, the right of vending their produce in the same ports, or of making their own shoes, because a merchant or a shoemaker, living on the old land, might fancy it more for his advantage to trade or make shoes for them? Would this be right even if the land was gained at the expense of the State? And would it seem less right if the charge and labor of gaining the additional territory to Great Britain had been borne by the settlers themselves?

Now I look on the colonies [Franklin continued] as so many counties gained to Great Britain, and more advantageous to it than if they had been gained out of the seas around its coasts, and joined to its land: For being in different climates, they afford greater variety of produce, and being separated by the ocean, they increase much more its shipping and seamen; and since they are all included in the British Empire, which has only extended itself by their means; and the strength and wealth of the parts are the strength and wealth of the whole; what imports it to the general state, whether a merchant, a smith, or a hatter, grow rich in Old or New England?

To this question, of course, the nineteenth or twentieth century could only have had one answer; but the eighteenth, blinded by economic delusions, had many.

In the opinion of Franklin, expressed in his letters to Peter Collinson, until the Albany plan of union, or something like it, was adopted, no American war would ever be carried on as it should be, and Indian affairs would continue to be mismanaged. But he was fair-minded and clear-sighted enough to see that, if some such plan was not adopted, the fault would lie with the Colonies rather than with Great Britain. In one of his letters to Peter Collinson, he declared that, in his opinion, it was not likely that any of them would agree to the plan, or even propose any amendments to it.

Every Body [he said] cries, a Union is absolutely necessary; but when they come to the Manner and Form of the Union, their weak Noddles are perfectly distracted. So if ever there be an Union, it must be form'd at home by the Ministry and Parliament. I doubt not but they will make a good one, and I wish it may be done this winter.

The essential features of the Albany plan of union were all outlined by Franklin three or four years before the Albany Congress met, in a letter to James Parker, his New York partner. A union of the colonies, under existing conditions, was, he thought, impracticable. If a governor became impressed with the importance of such a union, and asked the other colonial governors to recommend it to their assemblies, the request came to nothing, either because the governors were often on ill terms with their assemblies, and were seldom the men who exercised the most influence over them, or because they threw cold water on the request for fear that the cost of such a union might make the people of their colonies less able or willing to give to them, or simply because they did not earnestly realize the necessity for it. Besides, under existing conditions, there was no one to back such a request or to answer objections to it. A better course would be to select half a dozen men of good understanding and address, and send them around, as ambassadors to the different colonies, to urge upon them the expediency of the union. It would be strange, indeed, Franklin thought, if the six Iroquois tribes of ignorant savages could be capable of forming a union which had lasted for ages, and yet ten or a dozen English colonies be incapable of forming a similar one. These views were elicited by a pamphlet on the importance of gaining and preserving the friendship of the Indians, which had been sent to Franklin by Parker, and they constitute a natural introduction to a brief review of the relations sustained by one of the most reasonable of the children of men to perhaps the most unreasonable of all the children of men, the Indian of the American forest.

With the Indians, their habits, characteristics, polity and trade Franklin was very conversant. Repeatedly, during his lifetime, the frontiers of Pennsylvania were harried by the tomahawk and scalping-knife. In a letter, written a few months after Braddock's defeat to Richard Partridge, he mentions, for instance, that the savages had just surprised and cut off eight families near Shamokin, killing and scalping thirteen grown persons and kidnapping twelve children. In another letter to Peter Collinson, written the next year, he made this appalling summary of what, with the aid of the French, the revenge of the Delawares for the imposition practised upon them in the Walking Purchase was supposed to have cost the Province. "Some Hundreds of Lives lost, many Farms destroy'd and near L100,000 spent, yet," he added, "the Proprietor refuses to be taxed except for a trifling Part of his Estate." During the incursions of this period, the Indian war-parties pushed their outrages to a point only eighty miles from Philadelphia. A diarist, Thomas Lloyd, who accompanied Franklin on his expedition to Gnadenhutten, gives us this ghastly description of what they found there:

Here all round appears nothing but one continued scene of horror and destruction. Where lately flourished a happy and peaceful village, it is now all silent and desolate; the houses burnt; the inhabitants butchered in the most shocking manner; their mangled bodies, for want of funerals, exposed to birds and beasts of prey; and all kinds of mischief perpetrated that wanton cruelty can invent.

Not even a Rizpah left to brood over the scalpless forms, and to drive away the buzzard and the wild things of the forest! In this scene, and the pettier but similarly tragic scenes of death and havoc, furnished, from time to time, over a wide range of frontier territory, by lonely fields and cabins, upon which the tomahawk had ruthlessly descended, is to be found the psychology of the furious passions, which hurried the wretched Conestoga Indians out of existence, and of the outspoken or covert sympathy, which made a mockery of the attempt to bring their butchers to justice. Even men cooler than the Paxton Boys, hardened by revolting cruelties, not distinguishable from those inflicted by talon or tooth, except in their atrocious refinements of torture, and yet brought home in some form or other to almost every fireside in Pennsylvania, came to think of killing and mutilating an Indian with no more compunction than if he were a rattlesnake. James Parton mentions with a natural shudder the fact that Governor John Penn, after the retirement of the Paxton Boys from Philadelphia, offered the following bounties: For every captive male Indian of any hostile tribe one hundred and fifty dollars; for every female captive one hundred and thirty-eight dollars, for the scalp of a male Indian one hundred and thirty-four dollars, for the scalp of a female Indian fifty dollars. To Franklin himself, when on the Gnadenhutten expedition, fell the duty of instructing a Captain Vanetta, who was about to raise a company of foot-soldiers for the protection of upper Smithfield, while its inhabitants were looking after their corn, that forty dollars would be allowed and paid by the Provincial Government for each Indian scalp produced by one of his men with the proper attestations. How accustomed even Franklin became to the ever-repeated story of Indian barbarities, and to occasional reprisals by the whites, hardly less shocking, is revealed by a brief letter from him to Peter Collinson in 1764, in which, with the dry conciseness of an old English chronicler, he reports the narratives of a British soldier, Owens, who had deserted to the Indians, and a white boy, whom Owens had brought back with him from captivity, together with five propitiatory Indian scalps, when he returned to his former allegiance.

The Account given by him and the Boy [wrote Franklin] is, that they were with a Party of nine Indians, to wit, 5 men, 2 Women, and 2 Children, coming down Susquehanah to fetch Corn from their last Year's Planting Place; that they went ashore and encamp'd at Night and made a Fire by which they slept; that in the Night Owens made the White Boy get up from among the Indians, and go to the other side of the Fire; and then taking up the Indians' Guns, he shot two of the Men immediately, and with his Hatchet dispatch'd another Man together with the Women and Children. Two men only made their escape. Owens scalp'd the 5 grown Persons, and bid the White Boy scalp the Children; but he declin'd it, so they were left.

Franklin, however, was not the man to say, as General Philip Sheridan was many years afterwards to be reputed to have said, that the only good Indian is a dead Indian. In the course of his varied life, he had many opportunities for becoming familiarly acquainted with the history and character of the Indians, and forming a just judgment as to how far their fiendish outbreaks were due to sheer animal ferocity, and how far to the provocation of ill-treatment by the whites; and he was too just not to know and declare that almost every war between the Indians and the whites in his time had been occasioned by some injustice of the latter towards the former. As far back as 1753, he and Isaac Norris, the Speaker of the Assembly, were appointed commissioners by it to unite with Richard Peters, the Secretary of the Proprietary Government, in negotiating a treaty with the western Indians at Carlisle, and the manner, in which this treaty was conducted, is told in the _Autobiography_ in his lively way. In 1756, he again served as a commissioner, this time with William Logan and Richard Peters, two members of the Governor's Council, and Joseph Fox, William Masters and John Hughes, three members of the Assembly, for the purpose of negotiating a treaty at Easton with Teedyuscung, the King of the Delawares. At this conference, Governor Denny himself was likewise present. In 1763, he was appointed one of the commissioners to expend the money appropriated by the Assembly for levying a military force to defend the Pennsylvania frontier against the Indians. The Albany Congress, as we have seen, brought him into direct personal contact with the Iroquois who, to a fell savagery only to be compared with that of the most ferocious beasts of the jungle, united a capacity for political cohesion and the rudiments of civilized life which gave them quite an exceptional standing in the history of the American Indian. By virtue of these circumstances, to say nothing of other sources of knowledge and information, Franklin obtained an insight, at once shrewd and profound, into everything that related to the American Indian, including the best methods by which his good will could be conciliated and his trade secured. The following remarks in his Canada Pamphlet give us a good idea of the mobility and special adaptation to his physical environment which made the Indian, in proportion to his numbers, the most formidable foe that the world has ever seen:

They go to war, as they call it, in small parties, from fifty men down to five. Their hunting life has made them acquainted with the whole country, and scarce any part of it is impracticable to such a party. They can travel thro' the woods even by night, and know how to conceal their tracks. They pass easily between your forts undiscovered; and privately approach the settlements of your frontier inhabitants. They need no convoys of provisions to follow them; for whether they are shifting from place to place in the woods, or lying in wait for an opportunity to strike a blow, every thicket and every stream furnishes so small a number with sufficient subsistence. When they have surpriz'd separately, and murder'd and scalp'd a dozen families, they are gone with inconceivable expedition through unknown ways, and 'tis very rare that pursuers have any chance of coming up with them. In short, long experience has taught our planters, that they cannot rely upon forts as a security against _Indians_: The inhabitants of _Hackney_ might as well rely upon the tower of _London_ to secure them against highwaymen and housebreakers.

This is the Indian seen from the point of view of the soldier and colonial administrator. He is fully as interesting, when considered by Franklin in a letter to Richard Jackson from the point of view of the philosopher:

They visit us frequently, and see the advantages that arts, sciences, and compact societies procure us. They are not deficient in natural understanding; and yet they have never shown any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our arts. When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our customs, yet, if he goes to see his relatives, and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. And that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons, of either sex, have been taken prisoners by the Indians, and lived a while with them, though ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no redeeming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was brought home to possess a good estate; but, finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-coat, with which he took his way again into the wilderness.

So that I am apt to imagine that close societies, subsisting by labour and art, arose first not from choice but from necessity, when numbers, being driven by war from their hunting grounds, and prevented by seas, or by other nations, from obtaining other hunting grounds, were crowded together into some narrow territories, which without labour could not afford them food.

A man had to be humorous, indeed, to see anything humorous in the American Indian, but Franklin's sense of the ludicrous was equal to even that supreme achievement. We have already referred to the image of hell that he saw in the nocturnal orgies of the drunken Indians at Carlisle. Prudently enough, they were not allowed by the Provincial Commissioners to have the rum that was in store for them until they had ratified the treaty entered into on that occasion; an artifice that doubtless proved quite as effective in hastening its consummation as the one adopted by Chaplain Beatty of distributing the rum before, instead of after, prayers, did in securing the punctual attendance of Franklin's soldiers at them. But diabolical as were the gestures and yells of the drink-crazed Indians, men and women, at Carlisle, Franklin contrived to bring away a facetious story from the conference for the _Autobiography_. The orator, who called on the Commissioners the next day, after the debauch, for the purpose of apologizing for the conduct of himself and his people,

laid it upon the rum; and then endeavoured to excuse the rum by saying, "_The Great Spirit, who made all things, made everything for some use, and whatever use he design'd anything for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with'; and it must be so._"... And indeed [adds Franklin] if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the seacoast.

There is another good Indian story in the letter from Franklin to Richard Jackson from which we have recently quoted. When everything had been settled at a conference between the Six Nations and some of the Colonies, and nothing remained to be gone through with but a mutual exchange of civilities, the English Commissioners told the Indians that they had in their country a college for the instruction of youth in the various languages, arts and sciences, and that, if the Indians were willing, they would take back with them a half-dozen of their brightest lads and bring them up in the best manner. The Indians, after weighing the proposal, replied that they remembered that some of their youths had formerly been educated at that college, but that it had been observed that for a long time, after they returned to their friends, they were absolutely good for nothing; being neither acquainted with the true methods of killing deer, catching beaver, or surprising an enemy. The proposition, however, they regarded as a mark of kindness and good will on the part of the English, which merited a grateful return, and therefore, if the English gentlemen would send a dozen or two of their children to Opondago, the Great Council would take care of their education, bring them up in what was really the best manner, and make men of them.[17]

That the whites had much to answer for in their intercourse with the Indians Franklin saw clearly. The Canada Pamphlet speaks of the goods sold to them by French and English traders as loaded with all the impositions that fraud and knavery could contrive to enhance their value, and in one of Franklin's notes on the Albany plan of union he referred many Indian wars to cheating, practised by Indian traders on Indians, whom they had first made drunk. These traders he termed on another occasion, "the most vicious and abandoned Wretches of our Nation." "I do not believe we shall ever have a firm peace with the Indians," he wrote to Thomas Pownall in 1756, "till we have well drubbed them." This was the natural language of a man who had no toleration for wanton applications of force but did not shrink from applying it, when nothing else would answer. But no man could have been more fearless than he in denouncing outrages committed by the whites upon inoffensive Indians, or Indians of any sort, when not on the war path. "It grieves me," he wrote to Sir William Johnson in 1766, "to hear that our Frontier People are yet greater Barbarians than the Indians, and continue to murder them in time of peace."

His views about the proper methods of controlling the Indians and securing their trade were worthy of his liberal and enlightened mind. Their friendship he deemed to be of the greatest consequence to the Colonies, and the best way to make sure of it, he thought, was to regulate trade between the whites and the Indians in such a way as to convince the latter that, as between France and England, the English goods were the best and cheapest, and the English merchants the most honorable, and to form a union between the Colonies strong enough to make the Indians feel that they could depend on it for protection against the French, or that they would suffer at its hands if they should break with it. The Indian trade, for which the colonists had sacrificed so much blood and treasure, was, he boldly reminded his auditors, in his famous examination before the House of Commons, not an American but a British interest, maintained with British manufactures for the profit of British merchants and manufacturers. In a letter to Cadwallader Colden, he even suggested that the Government should take it over, and furnish goods to the Indians at the cheapest prices, without regard to profit, as Massachusetts had done.

Other suggestions of Franklin with respect to the conduct of the Indian trade were hardly less interesting. Pittsburg, he contended, after the restoration of peace in 1759, should be retained by the English, with a small tract of land about it for supplying the fort with provisions, and with sufficient hunting grounds in its vicinity for the peculiar needs of their Indian friends. A fort, and a small population of sober, orderly people there, he thought, would help to preserve the friendship of the Indians by bringing trade and the arts into close proximity to them, and would bridle them, if seduced from their allegiance by the French, or would, at least, stand in the gap, and be a shield to the other American frontiers.

Another suggestion of his was that, in time of peace, parties should be allowed to issue from frontier garrisons on hunting expeditions, with or without Indians, and enjoy the profits of the peltry that they brought back. In this way, a body of wood-runners would be formed, well acquainted with the country and of great value in time of war as guides and scouts. Every Indian was a hunter, every Indian was a disciplined soldier. They hunted in precisely the same manner as they made war. The only difference was that in hunting they skulked, surprised and killed animals, and, in making war, men. It was just such soldiers that the colonies needed; for the European military discipline was of little use in the woods. These words were penned four or five years before the battle of the Monongahela confirmed so bloodily their truth. Franklin also thought that a number of sober, discreet smiths should be encouraged to reside among the Indians. The whole subsistence of Indians depended on their keeping their guns in order. They were a people that thought much of their temporal, but little of their spiritual interests, and, therefore, a smith was more likely to influence them than a Jesuit. In a letter to his son, he mentions that he had dined recently with Lord Shelburne, and had availed himself of the occasion to urge that a colony should be planted in the Illinois country for furnishing provisions to military garrisons more cheaply, clinching the hold of the English upon the country, and building up a strength which, in the event of a future war, might easily be poured down the Mississippi upon the lower country, and into the Bay of Mexico, to be used against Cuba or Mexico itself.

The reader has already had brought to his attention the provisions of the Albany plan of union which were intended to vest in the government sketched by it the control of Indian treaties, trade and purchases.

The ignorance of the Indian character, which prevailed in England, often, we may be sure, brought a smile to the face of Franklin. Among his writings are remarks made at the request of Lord Shelburne on a plan for regulating Indian affairs submitted to him by the latter. It is to be regretted that the circumstances of the case were such that it was impossible for Franklin to escape the restraints of official gravity even when he was assigning the rambling habits of the Indians as his reason for believing that an Indian chief would hardly be willing to reside permanently with one of the functionaries, who was to aid in carrying the plan into effect, or when he was giving the high value, that the Indian attached to personal liberty, and the low value, that he attached to personal property, as his reason for thinking that imprisonment for debt was scarcely consistent with aboriginal ideas of equity. The plan was of a piece with the suggestion attributed to Dean Tucker that the colonies should be protected from Indian incursions by clearing away the trees and bushes from a tract of land, a mile in width, at the back of the colonies. As Benjamin Vaughan said, this brilliant idea not only involved a first cost (not to mention the fact that trees and bushes grow again when cut down) of some L128,000 for every hundred miles but quite overlooked the fact that the Indians, like other people, knew the difference between day and night. He forgot, said Franklin, "that there is a night in every twenty-four hours."

The distinction, which Franklin enjoyed in England, during his first mission to that country, was due to his philosophical and literary reputation, but his second mission to England and the colonial agencies, held by him while it lasted, afforded him an opportunity for playing a conspicuous part in the stirring transactions, which ushered in the American Revolution. Apart from all other considerations, his place in the history of these transactions will always be an extraordinary one because of the consummate wisdom and self-restraint exhibited by him in his relations to the controversy that finally ended in a fratricidal war between Great Britain and her colonies, which should never have been kindled. To the issues, involved in this controversy, he brought a vision as undimmed by political bigotry and false economic conceptions of colonial dependence as that of a British statesman of the present day. It is easy to believe that, if his counsels had been heeded, Great Britain and the communities, which make up the American Union, would now be connected by some close organic or federative tie. It is, at least, certain that no other Englishman on either side of the Atlantic saw as clearly as he did the true interests of both parties to the fatal conflict, or strove with such unerring sagacity and sober moderation of purpose to avert the breach between the two great branches of the English People. In no way can the extreme folly, which forced independence upon the colonies, be better measured than by contrasting the heated vehemence of Franklin's later feelings about the King and Parliament with his earlier sentiments towards the country that he did not cease to call "home" until to call it so would have been mockery. Devoted attachment to England, the land endeared to him by so many ties of family, intellectual sympathy and friendship, profound loyalty to the British Crown, deep-seated reverence for the laws, institutions and usages of the noble people, in whose inheritance of enlightened freedom he vainly insisted upon having his full share as an Englishman, were all characteristics of his, before the alienation of the colonies from Great Britain.[18]

His earlier utterances breathe a spirit of ingrained loyalty to the British Crown. The French were "mischievous neighbors," France "that perfidious nation." "I congratulate you on the defeat of Jacobitism by your glorious Duke," he wrote to Strahan in 1746, after the Duke of Cumberland had earned his title of "The Butcher" at Culloden. "I pray God to preserve long to Great Britain the English Laws, Manners, Liberties, and Religion," was an exclamation seven years later in one of his letters to Richard Jackson. "Wise and good prince," "the best of Kings," "Your good King," are some of the terms in which he expressed his opinion of his royal master. In the light of later events, there is something little short of amusing about the horoscope which he framed of the reign of George the Third in a letter to Strahan a year or so before the passage of the Stamp Act. Replying to forebodings of Strahan, Franklin said of the Prince, whom he styled "Our virtuous young King":

On the contrary, I am of Opinion that his Virtue and the Consciousness of his sincere Intentions to make his People happy will give him Firmness and Steadiness in his Measures and in the Support of the honest Friends he has chosen to serve him; and when that Firmness is fully perceiv'd, Faction will dissolve and be dissipated like a Morning Fog before the rising Sun, leaving the rest of the Day clear with a Sky serene and cloudless. Such after a few of the first Years will be the future course of his Majesty's Reign, which I predict will be happy and truly glorious.

In his letter to Polly about the French King and Queen, whom he had seen dining in state, which was written the year after the repeal of the Stamp Act, he declared, in his fear that he might seem to be too well pleased with them, that no Frenchman should go beyond him in thinking his own King and Queen, "the very best in the World, and the most amiable." The popular commotions in the succeeding year, with their watch cry of Wilkes and Liberty, seemed to him to indicate that some punishment was preparing for a people, who were ungratefully abusing the best Constitution and the best King that any nation was ever blessed with. As late as 1770, he wrote to Dr. Samuel Cooper, "Let us, therefore, hold fast our Loyalty to our King, who has the best Disposition towards us, and has a Family Interest in our Prosperity." Indeed, even two years later than this, he complacently wrote to his son, "The King, too, has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard." Strangely enough it was not until two years before the battle of Bunker Hill that he awoke sufficiently from his fool's paradise to write to his son, "Between you and I, the late Measures have been, I suspect, very much the King's own, and he has in some Cases a great Share of what his Friends call _Firmness_." Even then he hazarded the opinion that by painstaking and proper management the wrong impression of the colonists that George the Third had received might be removed. Down to this time so secretly had the King pursued the insidious system of corruption by which he kept his Parliamentary majority unmurmuringly subservient to his system of personal government, that Franklin does not appear to have even suspected that his was the master hand, or rather purse, which shaped all its proceedings against America. When the whole truth, however, was made manifest to Franklin, his awakening was correspondingly rude and unforgiving. How completely reversed became the current of all his feelings towards George the Third, after the Revolution began, we have already seen in some of our references to letters written by him to his English friends, in which the King, whom he once revered, was scored in terms of passionate reprobation.

Tenacious, too, was the affection with which Franklin clung to England and the English people. Some years before the passage of the Stamp Act, he wrote to Lord Kames from London that he purposed to give form to the material that he had been gathering for his _Art of Virtue_ when he returned to his _other_ country, that is to say, America.

Of all the enviable Things England has [he wrote a few years later to Polly], I envy it most its People. Why should that petty Island, which compar'd to America, is but like a stepping Stone in a Brook, scarce enough of it above Water to keep one's Shoes dry; why, I say, should that little Island enjoy in almost every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous, and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests?

How eagerly even when he was in the New World he relished the observations of his friend Strahan on current English politics, we have already seen. We have also already seen how seriously he entertained even the thought of transferring his family for good to England. Indeed his intense loyalty to English King and People, together with his remoteness from the contagious excitement of the Colonies over the passage of the Stamp Act, caused him for a time, with a curious insensibility to the real state of public opinion in America, to lag far behind the revolutionary movement in that country. Not only, before he was fully aroused to the stern purpose of his fellow-countrymen to resist the collection of the stamp tax to the last extremity, did he recommend his friend John Hughes to the British Ministry as a stamp-tax collector, and send to his partner Hall a large quantity of paper for the use of the _Gazette_, of such dimensions as to secure a saving in stamps for its issues, but he wrote to Hughes in these terms besides:

If it (the Stamp Act) continues, your undertaking to execute it may make you unpopular for a Time, but your acting with Coolness and Steadiness, and with every Circumstance in your Power of Favour to the People, will by degrees reconcile them. In the meantime, a firm Loyalty to the Crown & faithful Adherence to the Government of this Nation, which it is the Safety as well as Honour of the Colonies to be connected with, will always be the wisest Course for you and I to take, whatever may be the Madness of the Populace or their blind Leaders, who can only bring themselves and Country into Trouble and draw on greater Burthens by Acts of Rebellious Tendency.

The rashness of the Virginia Assembly in relation to the Stamp Act he thought simply amazing.

Much better known is the letter that he wrote about the same time to Charles Thomson. After stating that he had done everything in his power to prevent the passage of the Stamp Act, he said:

But the Tide was too strong against us. The nation was provoked by American Claims of Independence, and all Parties joined in resolving by this act to settle the point. We might as well have hindered the sun's setting. That we could not do. But since 'tis down, my Friend, and it may be long before it rises again, let us make as good a night of it as we can. We may still light candles. Frugality and Industry will go a great way toward indemnifying us. Idleness and Pride tax with a heavier hand than Kings and Parliaments; if we can get rid of the former, we may easily bear the latter.

Six months later, when the loud and fierce protest of his fellow-countrymen against the Stamp Act had reached his ear, and convinced him that they were more likely to light camp-fires than candles, he held a very different language. Asked, during his famous examination before the House of Commons, whether he thought that the people of America would submit to pay the Stamp Tax, if it were moderated, he replied, "No, never, unless compelled by force of arms." Public leaders, after all, to use Gladstone's happy image with regard to the orator, do little more than give back in rain what they receive in mist from the mass of men. But with the repeal of the Stamp Act, and part of the duties imposed upon America, Franklin would readily have lapsed in every respect into his old affectionate relations to England, if Parliament had not, by its unwise reservation of its right to tax America, fallen into the bad surgery, to use his own words, of leaving splinters in the wound that it had inflicted. It now seems strange enough that, after the turbulent outbreak in America, which preceded the repeal, he should have been willing to accept a post under the Duke of Grafton, and to remain in England for some time longer if not for the rest of his life; yet such is the fact. When he heard through a friend that the Duke had said that, if he chose rather to reside in England than to return to his office as Deputy Postmaster-General for America, it would not be the Duke's fault, if he was not well provided for, he declared in the polished phrases of a courtier that there was no nobleman, to whom he could from sincere respect for his great abilities and amiable qualities so cordially attach himself, or to whom he should so willingly be obliged for the provision mentioned, as to the Duke of Grafton, if his Grace should think that he could in any station, where he might be placed, be serviceable to him and to the public. To any one who knows what a profligate the Duke was, during the most scandalous part of his career, this language sounds not a little like the conventional phrases in which Franklin, during his mission to France, assured Crocco, the blackmailing emissary of the piratical emperor of Morocco that he had no doubt but that, as soon as the affairs of the United States were a little settled, they would manifest equally good dispositions as those of his master and take all the proper steps to cultivate and secure the friendship of a monarch, whose character, Franklin knew, they had long esteemed and respected.

But in the same letter to his son, in which the declaration about the Duke of Grafton was recalled, Franklin made it clear that he was unwilling, by accepting office, to place himself in the power of any English Minister committed to the fatuous policy of taxing America. It was not until forbearance had ceased to be a virtue, and an American Whig could no longer hold an English office without reproach, that his innate conservatism of character yielded to the forces which were slowly but certainly rending the two countries apart. Three years after the repeal of the Stamp Act, which he dubbed "the mother of mischief," he wrote to Jean Baptiste Le Roy of the popular disturbances in Boston as "sudden, unpremeditated things, that happened only among a few of the lower sort." A month later, he wrote to Dr. Cooper:

I have been in constant Pain since I heard of Troops assembling at Boston, lest the Madness of Mobs, or the Insolence of Soldiers, or both, should, when too near each other, occasion some Mischief difficult to be prevented or repaired, and which might spread far and wide. "I hope however," he added, "that Prudence will predominate, and keep all quiet."

A little later still, in another letter to the same correspondent, after saying that he could scarcely conceive a King of better dispositions, of more exemplary virtues, or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of all his subjects than was George the Third, he further and truly said: "The Body of this People, too, is of a noble and generous Nature, loving and honouring the Spirit of Liberty, and hating arbitrary Power of all sorts. We have many, very many, friends among them."

As late as the autumn of 1774 he was grieved to hear of mobs and violence and the pulling down of houses in America, which the friends of America in England could not justify, and which gave a great advantage to the enemies of America in that country. He was in perpetual anxiety, he wrote Thomas Cushing, lest the mad measures of mixing soldiers among a people whose minds were in such a state of irritation might be attended with some mischief, for an accidental quarrel, a personal insult, an imprudent order, an insolent execution of even a prudent one, or twenty other things might produce a tumult, unforeseen, and, therefore, impossible to be prevented, in which such a carnage might ensue as to make a breach that could never afterwards be healed. That the insults of Wedderburn, heaped upon Franklin in the Privy Council Chamber, under circumstances, calculated to make him feel as if all England were pillorying him, and his subsequent dismissal from the office of Deputy Postmaster-General for America, exerted some degree of corrosive influence upon his mind cannot be denied; but he still kept up his counsels of patience to his people upon the other side of the Atlantic until patience no longer had any meaning, and, when his last efforts, just before he left England for Independence Hall, to bring about a satisfactory adjustment of the quarrel between Great Britain and her colonies finally came to nothing, the tears that Priestley tells us wet his cheeks, as he was leaving England, were proof enough that even a nature, little given to weakness, might well grow faint at the thought of such a tragic separation as that of England and the thirteen colonies nurtured at her breast. But no one can read the life of Franklin without feeling that there never was a time when his heart was not wholly true to the just rights of America. In America, he might miss the companionship of the learned and distinguished friends from whose conversation he derived so much profit and pleasure in England and France. Only such a capital as London or Paris could fully gratify the social and intellectual wants of a man whose survey of human existence was so little subject to cramping restrictions of any kind. But it was the very breadth of Franklin's character which made him first of all an American, instinct with the free spirit of the New World, and faithful to the democratic institutions and ideals, which throve on its freshness and exemption from inherited complications. Over and over again, when he is abroad, he compares the economic and political conditions of his own country with those of foreign countries to the marked disadvantage of the latter. The painful impression, left upon his mind by the squalor and misery of the lower orders of the Irish people, is manifest enough in his correspondence.

Ireland is in itself [he declared in a letter to Thomas Cushing] a poor Country, and Dublin a magnificent City; but the appearances of general extreme poverty among the lower people are amazing. They live in wretched hovels of mud and straw, are clothed in rags, and subsist chiefly on potatoes. Our New England farmers, of the poorest sort, in regard to the Enjoyment of all the Comforts of life, are princes when compared to them. Such is the effect of the discouragements of industry, the non-residence not only of pensioners, but of many original landlords, who lease their lands in gross to undertakers that rack the tenants and fleece them skin and all to make estates to themselves, while the first rents, as well as most of the pensions, are spent out of the country. An English gentleman there said to me, that by what he had heard of the good grazing in North America, and by what he saw of the plenty of flax-seed imported in Ireland from thence, he could not understand why we did not rival Ireland in the beef and butter trade to the West Indies, and share with it in its linen trade. But he was satisfied when I told him that I supposed the reason might be, _our people eat beef and butter every day, and wear shirts themselves_.

In short, the chief exports of Ireland seem to be pinched off the backs and out of the bellies of the miserable inhabitants.

Darker and more forbidding still glooms the background of the joyous hours spent by Franklin in Ireland, Scotland and England in these painful words which he wrote to Dr. Joshua Babcock in the early part of 1772:

I have lately made a Tour thro' Ireland and Scotland. In those Countries a small Part of the Society are Landlords, great Noblemen, and Gentlemen, extreamly opulent, living in the highest Affluence and Magnificence: The Bulk of the People Tenants, extreamly poor, living in the most sordid Wretchedness, in dirty Hovels of Mud and Straw, and cloathed only in Rags.

I thought often of the Happiness of New England, where every Man is a Freeholder, has a Vote in publick Affairs, lives in a tidy, warm House, has plenty of good Food and Fewel, with whole cloaths from Head to Foot, the Manufacture perhaps of his own Family. Long may they continue in this Situation! But if they should ever envy the Trade of these Countries, I can put them in a Way to obtain a Share of it. Let them with three fourths of the People of Ireland live the Year round on Potatoes and Buttermilk, without shirts, then may their Merchants export Beef, Butter, and Linnen. Let them, with the Generality of the Common People of Scotland, go Barefoot, then may they make large exports in Shoes and Stockings: And if they will be content to wear Rags, like the Spinners and Weavers of England, they may make Cloths and Stuffs for all Parts of the World.

Farther, if my Countrymen should ever wish for the honour of having among them a gentry enormously wealthy, let them sell their Farms & pay rack'd Rents; the Scale of the Landlords will rise as that of the Tenants is depress'd, who will soon become poor, tattered, dirty, and abject in Spirit. Had I never been in the American Colonies, but was to form my Judgment of Civil Society by what I have lately seen, I should never advise a Nation of Savages to admit of Civilization: For I assure you, that, in the Possession & Enjoyment of the various Comforts of Life, compar'd to these People every Indian is a Gentleman: And the Effect of this kind of Civil Society seems only to be, the depressing Multitudes below the Savage State that a few may be rais'd above it.

America on the other hand, as Franklin pictured it, was the land of neither the very rich nor the very poor, but one in which "a general happy mediocrity" prevailed. It was not a Lubberland, nor a Pays de Cocagne, where the streets were paved with half-peck loaves, and the houses tiled with pancakes, and where the fowls flew about ready roasted, crying Come eat me! These were all wild imaginations. On the contrary, it was a land of labor, but also a land where multitudes of emigrants from foreign lands, who would never have emerged from poverty, if they had remained at home, had, with savings out of the wages, earned by them, after they arrived in America, acquired land, and, in a few years, become wealthy farmers. It was a land, too, where religious infidelity was unknown, and where all the means of education were plenteous, the general manners simple and pure, and the temptations to vice and folly fewer than in England.

The contrast between political conditions in Great Britain and political conditions in America was in Franklin's opinion equally unfavorable to Great Britain. Loyal as he was to the King, attached as he was to the English people, he harbored a deep feeling of aversion and contempt for the Parliament which he did not realize was but the marionette of the King. When certain residents of Oxford, after being confined for some days in Newgate for corrupt practices, knelt before the Speaker of the House of Commons, and received his reprimand, Franklin wrote to Galloway:

The House could scarcely keep countenances, knowing as they all do, that the practice is general. People say, they mean nothing more than to _beat down the price_ by a little discouragement of borough jobbing, now that their own elections are all coming on. The price indeed is grown exorbitant, no less than _four thousand pounds_ for a member.

In the same letter, a grim story is told of the callous levity with which the Parliamentary majority regarded its own debasement. It was founded upon a bill brought in by Beckford for preventing bribery and corruption at elections, which contained a clause obliging every member to swear, on his admission to the House, that he had not directly or indirectly given any bribe to any elector. This clause was so generally opposed as answering no end except that of inducing the members to perjure themselves that it was withdrawn. Commenting on the incident, Franklin said:

It was indeed a cruel contrivance of his, worse than the gunpowder plot; for that was only to blow the Parliament up to heaven, this to sink them all down to ----. Mr. Thurlow opposed his bill by a long speech. Beckford, in reply, gave a dry hit to the House, that is repeated everywhere. "The honourable gentleman," says he, "in his learned discourse, gave us first one definition of corruption, then he gave us another definition of corruption, and I think he was about to give us a third. Pray does that gentleman imagine _there is any member of this House that does not_ KNOW what corruption is?" which occasioned only a roar of laughter, for they are so hardened in the practice, that they are very little ashamed of it.

Later Franklin wrote to Galloway that it was thought that near two million pounds would be spent in the Parliamentary election then pending, but that it was computed that the Crown had _two millions a year in places and pensions to dispose of_. On the same day, he wrote to his son, "In short, this whole venal nation is now at market, will be sold for about two millions, and might be bought out of the hands of the present bidders (if he would offer half a million more) by the very Devil himself." To Thomas Cushing he wrote that luxury brought most of the Commons as well as Lords to market, and that, if America would save for three or four years the money she spent in the fashions and fineries and fopperies of England, she might buy the whole Parliament, minister and all.

Over against these depraved electoral conditions he was in the habit of placing the simpler and purer conditions of his native land. In most of the Colonies, he declared in his _Rise and Progress of the Differences between Great_ _Britain and her American Colonies_, there was no such thing as standing candidate for election. There was neither treating nor bribing. No man expressed the least inclination to be chosen. Instead of humble advertisements, entreating votes and interest, one saw before every new election requests of former members, acknowledging the honor done them by preceding elections, but setting forth their long service and attendance on the public business in that station, and praying that in consideration thereof some other person might be chosen in their room. After a dissolution, the same representatives might be and usually were re-elected without asking a vote or giving even a glass of cider to an elector. On the eve of his return to America in 1775, the contrast between the extreme corruption prevalent in the old rotten state and the glorious public virtue, so predominant in rising America, as he expressed it, assumed a still more aggravated form. After mentioning in his last letter to his friend Galloway the "Numberless and needless Places, enormous Salaries, Pensions, Perquisites, Bribes, groundless Quarrels, foolish Expeditions, false Accounts or no Accounts, Contracts and Jobbs," which in England devoured all revenue, and produced continual necessity in the midst of natural plenty, he said:

I apprehend, therefore, that to unite us intimately will only be to corrupt and poison us also. It seems like Mezentius's coupling and binding together the dead and the living.

"Tormenti genus, et sanie taboque fluentes, Complexu in misero, longa sic morte necabat."

However [he added with his readily re-awakened loyalty to the mother country], I would try anything, and bear anything that can be borne with Safety to our just Liberties, rather than engage in a War with such near relations, unless compelled to it by dire Necessity in our own Defence.

Nor was any American of Franklin's time more profoundly conscious than he of the growing power and splendid destiny of the Colonies. His familiarity with America was singularly minute and accurate. He had supped at its inns and sojourned in its homes, been delayed at its ferries and crippled on its roads. In one way or another, he had acquired a correct and searching insight into almost everything that related to its political, social and industrial life. His answers to the questions put to him during his famous examination before the House of Lords have been justly reputed to be among the most striking of all the proofs of ability that he ever gave, marked as they were by great wisdom and acuteness, marvellous conciseness as well as clearness of statement, invincible tact and dexterity. But in no respect are these answers more remarkable than in the knowledge that they display of colonial America in all its relations. Accompanying this knowledge, too, was unquestionably a powerful feeling of affection for the land of his birth which renders us more or less skeptical as to whether he was at all certain of himself on the different occasions when he expressed his willingness to die in some other land than his own.

I have indeed [he wrote to his son from England in 1772] so many good kind Friends here, that I could spend the Remainder of my Life among them with great Pleasure, if it were not for my American connections, & the indelible Affection I retain for that dear Country, from which I have so long been in a State of Exile.

At all times the tread of those coming millions of human beings, which the family fecundity of America made certain, sounded majestically in his ears. Referring to America in a letter to Lord Kames in the year after the repeal of the Stamp Act, he employed these significant words:

She may suffer at present under the arbitrary power of this country; she may suffer for a while in a separation from it; but these are temporary evils that she will outgrow. Scotland and Ireland are differently circumstanced. Confined by the sea, they can scarcely increase in numbers, wealth and strength, so as to overbalance England. But America, an immense territory, favoured by Nature with all advantages of climate, soil, great navigable rivers, and lakes, &c. must become a great country, populous and mighty; and will, in a less time than is generally conceived, be able to shake off any shackles that may be imposed on her, and perhaps place them on the imposers. In the mean time, every act of oppression will sour their tempers, lessen greatly, if not annihilate the profits of your commerce with them, and hasten their final revolt; for the seeds of liberty are universally found there, and nothing can eradicate them.

Even, if confined westward by the Mississippi and northward by the St. Lawrence and the Lakes, he thought that, in some centuries, the population of America would amount to one hundred millions of people.

Such were the prepossessions brought by Franklin to the controversy between Great Britain and her colonies. In his view he was none the less an Englishman because he was an American, and, as the controversy gained in rancor, his dual allegiance to the two countries led to no little misconstruction. To an unknown correspondent he wrote several years after the repeal of the Stamp Act that he was becoming weary of talking and writing about the quarrel, "especially," he said, "as I do not find that I have gained any point, in either country, except that of rendering myself suspected by my impartiality; in England of being too much an American, and in America, of being too much an Englishman."

His view of the legal tie between England and the Colonies was very simple. How, he wrote to William Franklin, the people of Boston could admit that the General Court of Massachusetts was subordinate to Parliament, and yet, in the same breath, deny the power of Parliament to enact laws for them, he could not understand; nor could he understand what bounds the Farmer's Letters set to the authority in Parliament, which they conceded, to "regulate the trade of the Colonies." It was difficult, he thought, to draw lines between duties for regulation and those for revenue; and, if Parliament was to be the judge, it seemed to him that the distinction would amount to little. Two years previously, however, when examined before the House of Commons; he had stated that, while the right of a Parliament in which the colonies were not represented to impose an internal tax upon them was generally denied in America, he had never heard any objection urged in America to duties laid by Parliament to regulate commerce; and, when he was asked whether there was any kind of difference between the two taxes to the colonies on which they might be laid, he had a prompt answer:

I think the difference is very great. An external tax is a duty laid on commodities imported; that duty is added to the first cost and other charges on the commodity, and, when it is offered to sale, makes a part of the price. If the people do not like it at that price, they refuse it; they are not obliged to pay it. But an internal tax is forced from the people without their consent, if not laid by their own representatives.

And then, when asked immediately afterwards whether, if the external tax or duty was laid on the necessaries of life imported into Pennsylvania, that would not be the same thing in its effects as an internal tax, he doubtless filled the minds of his more insular auditors with astonishment by replying, "I do not know a single article imported into the Northern Colonies, but what they can either do without, or make themselves."

Another neat answer in the examination was his answer when asked whether there was any kind of difference between a duty on the importation of goods and an excise on their consumption:

Yes, a very material one; an excise, for the reasons I have just mentioned, they (the colonists) think you can have no right to lay within their country. But the sea is yours; you maintain, by your fleets, the safety of navigation in it, and keep it clear of pirates; you may have therefore a natural and equitable right to some toll or duty on merchandizes carried through that part of your dominions, towards defraying the expence you are at in ships to maintain the safety of that carriage.

Finally he grew weary of the repeated effort to fix the reproach of inconsistency upon the colonies because of their acquiescence in Parliamentary regulation of their commerce; and, when asked whether Pennsylvania might not, by the same interpretation of her charter, object to external as well as internal taxation without representation, he replied:

They never have hitherto. Many arguments have been lately used here to show them, that there is no difference, and that, if you have no right to tax them internally, you have none to tax them externally, or make any other law to bind them. At present they do not reason so; but in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments.

Nearly ten years later, Franklin had in a conversation with Lord Chatham at his country seat a notable opportunity to say something further with respect to Parliamentary regulations of American commerce. On this occasion, the great English statesman, then earnestly engaged in a last effort to avert the approaching rupture, observed that the opinion prevailed in England that America aimed at setting up for itself as an independent state; or at least getting rid of the Navigation Acts; and Franklin assured him that, having more than once travelled almost from one end of the continent to the other, and kept a great variety of company, eating, drinking and conversing with them freely, he never had heard in any conversation from any person, drunk or sober, the least expression of a wish for a separation, or hint that such a thing would be advantageous to America. And, as to the Navigation Act, he said that the main material part of it, that of carrying on trade in British or Plantation bottoms, excluding foreign ships from colonial ports, and navigating with three fourths British seamen was as acceptable to America as it could be to Britain. Indeed, he declared, America was not even against regulations of the general commerce by Parliament, provided such regulations were _bona fide_ for the benefit of the whole empire, not for the small advantage of one part to the great injury of another, such as obliging American ships to call in England with their wine and fruit from Portugal or Spain, the restraints on American manufactures in the woollen and hat-making branches, the prohibiting of slitting-mills, steel-works and the like.

In the opinion of Franklin, Great Britain and America were legally connected as England and Scotland were before the Union by having one common sovereign. He denied that the instructions of the King had the force of law in the Colonies, as Lord Granville had contended, or that the King and Parliament had any legislative authority over them. "Something," he told his son, "might be made of either of the extremes; that Parliament has a power to make _all laws_ for us, or that it has a power to make _no laws_ for us; and I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the former." The King with his Plantation Parliaments was, in his opinion, the sole legislator of his American subjects, and, in that capacity, was, and ought to be, free to exercise his own judgment, unrestrained and unlimited by the English Parliament.[19] That the Colonies were originally constituted distinct states and intended to be continued such, was clear to him, he wrote to Dr. Cooper, from a thorough consideration of their first charters and the whole conduct of the crown and nation towards them until the Restoration. Since that time Parliament had usurped an authority of making laws for them which before it had not, and America had for some time submitted to the usurpation partly through ignorance and inattention and partly from its weakness and inability to contend. He wished therefore that such expressions as "the supreme authority of Parliament," "the subordinacy of our Assemblies to the Parliament" and the like were no longer employed in the colonies. These opinions were formed at a time when he labored under the egregious error of supposing that, in spite of the wicked machinations of his Parliament, the King regarded his colonies with the eye of mild paternal favor; but they remained his opinions long after he ceased to be the cheat of this delusion.

How far Franklin's idea of the legal bond between Great Britain and the Colonies was a correct one is a technical inquiry that we need not discuss; but his conception of the solidarity of interests which should exist between all parts of the British Empire was as generous and glowing as any federal rhapsodist of the present day could form. When he expounded it to Lord Chatham at Hayes, the latter in his grand way declared that it was a sound one, worthy of a great, benevolent and comprehensive mind. And such it was. The truth is that Franklin was an Imperialist, and the union which he saw was that of a vast English-speaking empire, made up of parts, held in harmony with each other not only by their common English heritage but also by a measure of self-government liberal enough to assure to each of them an intelligent and sympathetic administration of its particular interests. Until the colonial history of England began, all great empires, he told Lord Chatham, had crumbled first at their extremities, because

Countries remote from the Seat and Eye of Government which therefore could not well understand their Affairs for want of full and true Information, had never been well governed but had been oppress'd by bad Governors, on Presumption that Complaint was difficult to be made and supported against them at such a distance.

Had this process of disintegration not been invited in recent years by wrong politics (which would have Parliament to be omnipotent, though it ought not to be so unless it could at the same time be omniscient) they might have gone on extending their Western Empire, adding Province to Province, as far as the South Sea.

It has long appeared to me [he said in his _Tract relative to the Affair of Hutchinson's Letters_], that the only true British Politicks were those which aim'd at the Good of the _Whole British Empire_, not that which sought the Advantage of _one Part_ in the Disadvantage of the others; therefore all Measures of procuring Gain to the Mother Country arising from Loss to her Colonies, and all of Gain to the Colonies arising from or occasioning Loss to Britain, especially where the Gain was small and the Loss great, every Abridgment of the Power of the Mother Country, where that Power was not prejudicial to the Liberties of the Colonists, and every Diminution of the Privileges of the Colonists, where they were not prejudicial to the Welfare of the Mo. Country, I, in my own Mind, condemned as improper, partial, unjust, and mischievous; tending to create Dissensions, and weaken that Union, on which the Strength, Solidity, and Duration of the Empire greatly depended; and I opposed, as far as my little Powers went, all Proceedings, either here or in America, that in my Opinion had such Tendency.

But in no words of Franklin is his inspiring idea of British unity more strikingly expressed than in one of his letters to Lord Howe during the Revolutionary War.

Long did I endeavour, with unfeigned and unwearied Zeal [was his touching language] to preserve from breaking that fine and noble China Vase, the British Empire; for I knew, that, being once broken, the separate Parts could not retain even their Shares of the Strength and Value that existed in the Whole, and that a perfect Reunion of those Parts could scarce ever be hoped for. Your Lordship may possibly remember the tears of Joy that wet my Cheek, when, at your good Sister's in London, you once gave me Expectations that a Reconciliation might soon take place.

That there was only one way in which the fair vase upon which his eye lingered so fondly and proudly could for certainty be preserved from irreparable ruin, namely, by admitting the colonies to representation in the British Parliament, Franklin saw with perfect clearness. Repeatedly the thought of such a union emerges from his correspondence only to be dismissed as impracticable. As far back as 1766, he wrote from London to Cadwallader Evans these pregnant words:

My private opinion concerning a union in Parliament between the two countries is, that it would be best for the whole. But I think it will never be done. For though I believe, that, if we had no more representatives than Scotland has, we should be sufficiently strong in the House to prevent, as they do for Scotland, anything ever passing to our disadvantage; yet we are not able at present to furnish and maintain such a number, and, when we are more able, we shall be less willing than we are now. The Parliament here do at present think too highly of themselves to admit representatives from us, if we should ask it; and, when they will be desirous of granting it, we shall think too highly of ourselves to accept of it. It would certainly contribute to the strength of the whole, if Ireland and all the dominions were united and consolidated under one common council for general purposes, each retaining its particular council or parliament for its domestic concerns. But this should have been more early provided for. In the infancy of our foreign establishments it was neglected, or was not thought of. And now the affair is nearly in the situation of Friar Bacon's project of making a brazen wall round England for its eternal security. His servant, Friar Bungey, slept while the brazen head, which was to dictate how it might be done, said _Time is_, and _Time was_. He only waked to hear it say, _Time is past_. An explosion followed, that tumbled their house about the conjuror's ears.

In a subsequent letter to his son in 1768, Franklin again indulges the same day dream, and again reaches the conclusion that such a union would be the best for the whole, and that, though particular parts might find particular disadvantages in it, they would find greater advantages in the security arising to every part from the increased strength of the whole. But such a union, he concluded, was not likely to take place, while the nature of the existing relation was so little understood on both sides of the water, and sentiments concerning it remained so widely different.

Nothing, therefore, remained for Franklin to do except to fall back upon this relation and to make the best of it, to insist that the only constitutional tie between England and the Colonies was the King, and that Parliament had no more right to tax America than to tax Hanover, though the legislative assemblies of the colonies would always be ready in the future as they had been in the past to honor the requisitions for pecuniary aids made upon them by the King, through his Secretary of State; to combat the political and economic dogmas and the national prejudices which stood in the way of the full recognition by England of the fact that her true interest was to be found in the liberal treatment of the Colonies; to warn the Colonies that their connection with England was attended with too many obligations and advantages to be hastily or prematurely forfeited by rash resentments, so long as there was any definite prospect of their appeal to English self-interest and good-feeling not proving in vain; and finally to couple the warning with the suggestion that they should unceasingly keep up the assertion of their just rights, and be prepared, all else failing, to maintain them with an unabated military spirit. It was not to be expected of a man so conservative and constant in nature, and bound to England by so many strong and endearing associations, that he should wage a solitary combat for American rights on English soil before he or any man had reason to know how bitterly the Stamp Act would be returned upon the head of Parliament by America, but never, after the temper of his countrymen in regard to it, was made manifest to him, were his elbows again out of touch with those of his compatriots in America. To their assistance and to the assistance as well of the great body of wise and generous Englishmen, who loved liberty too much at home to begrudge it to Englishmen in America, he brought his every resource, his scientific fame, his social gifts, his personal popularity, his knowledge of the world and the levers by which it is moved, the sane, searching mind, too full of light for bigotry, superstition, or confusion, the pen that enlisted satirical point as readily as grave dissertation in the service of instruction. It cannot be doubted that his exertions should be reckoned among the potent influences that secured the repeal of the Stamp Act. To Charles Thomson he wrote that he had reprinted everything from America that he thought might help their common cause. His examination before the House of Commons was published and had a great run. "You guessed aright," he wrote to Lord Kames with regard to the repeal, "in supposing that I would not be a _mute in that play_. I was extremely busy, attending Members of both Houses, informing, explaining, consulting, disputing, in a continual hurry from morning to night, till the affair was happily ended."

Some years after the repeal of the Stamp Act, he wrote to Jane Mecom that, at the time of the repeal, the British Ministry were ready to hug him for the assistance that he had afforded them in bringing it about. From the time of the repeal until he returned to America in 1775, his one absorbing object was to create a better understanding between England and her colonies, and to avert the possibility of war between them. Among the things with which he had to contend in accomplishing his aims was the haughty spirit in which the English people were disposed to look down upon the colonists, and to resent any manifestation of independence upon their part as insolent. It was this spirit which made him feel that the assent of England would never be obtained to the representation of America in Parliament.

I am fully persuaded with you [he wrote to Lord Kames], that a _Consolidating Union_, by a fair and equal representation of all the parts of this Empire in Parliament, is the only firm basis on which its political grandeur and prosperity can be founded. Ireland once wished it, but now rejects it. The time has been, when the colonies might have been pleased with it; they are now _indifferent_ about it; and if it is much longer delayed, they too will _refuse it_. But the pride of this people can not bear the thought of it, and therefore it will be delayed. Every man in England seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America; seems to jostle himself into the throne with the King, and talks of _our subjects in the Colonies_.

This was the sentiment of England in general. In the guard-room and barracks, it assumed at times the grosser form of such contempt as that which led General Clarke to believe as we have seen that the emasculation of all the male Americans would be little more than a holiday task for a handful of British grenadiers. Along with this haughty spirit went a crass ignorance of America and Americans which Franklin despaired of ever enlightening except by good-natured ridicule. An illustration of the manner in which he employed this agency is found in his letter to the Editor of a Newspaper. It had been claimed, he said, that factories in America were impossible because American sheep had but little wool, and the dearness of American labor rendered the profitable working of iron and other materials, except in some few coarse instances, impracticable.

Dear Sir [was his reply], do not let us suffer ourselves to be amus'd with such groundless Objections. The very Tails of the American Sheep are so laden with Wooll, that each has a little Car or Waggon on four little Wheels, to support & keep it from trailing on the Ground. Would they caulk their Ships, would they fill their Beds, would they even litter their Horses with Wooll, if it were not both plenty and cheap? And what signifies Dearness of Labour, when an English shilling passes for five and Twenty? Their engaging 300 Silk Throwsters here in one Week, for New York, was treated as a Fable, because, forsooth, they have "no Silk there to throw." Those, who made this Objection, perhaps did not know, that at the same time the Agents from the King of Spain were at Quebec to contract for 1000 Pieces of Cannon to be made there for the Fortification of Mexico, and at New York engaging the annual Supply of woven Floor-Carpets for their West India Houses, other Agents from the Emperor of China were at Boston treating about an Exchange of raw Silk for Wooll, to be carried in Chinese Junks through the Straits of Magellan.

Another thing, with which Franklin had to contend, was the misrepresentations that the colonial governors were constantly making about American conditions. These misrepresentations were in keeping with the unworthy character of some of them and with the transitory relation that almost all of them bore to the Colonies, of which they were the executives. What the Americans truly thought of them is pointedly expressed in Franklin's _Causes of the American Discontents_.

They say then as to Governors [he declared], that they are not like Princes whose posterity have an inheritance in the Government of a nation, and therefore an interest in its prosperity; they are generally strangers to the Provinces they are sent to govern, have no estate, natural connexion, or relation there, to give them an affection for the country; that they come only to make money as fast as they can; are sometimes men of vicious characters and broken fortunes, sent by a Minister merely to get them out of the way; that as they intend staying in the country no longer than their government continues, and purpose to leave no family behind them, they are apt to be regardless of the goodwill of the people, and care not what is said or thought of them after they are gone.

That such men were biased and untrustworthy witnesses touching American conditions goes without saying, but, when discontent became deeply implanted in the breasts of the colonists, their partisan and perverted reports to the English Government as to the state of America did much to mislead their masters. The burden of these reports as a rule was that the disaffected were few in numbers and persons of little consequence, that the colonists of property and social standing were satisfied, and inclined to submit to Parliamentary taxation, that it was impossible to establish manufacturing industries in America, and that, if Parliament would only steadily persist in the exercise of its legislative authority over America, the non-importation agreements and other defensive measures adopted by its people would be abandoned.

But the most intractable of all the obstacles with which Franklin had to contend was the policy of commercial and industrial restriction, partly the result of economic purblindness, peculiar to the time, and partly the result of sheer selfishness, which England relentlessly pursued in her relations to the colonies. Every suggestion that this policy should be relaxed was met by its more extreme champions, such as George Grenville, with the statement that the Acts of Navigation were the very Palladium of England. On no account were the Colonies to be allowed to import wine, oil and fruit directly from Spain and Portugal, or to even import iron directly from foreign countries. Enlarged as was the understanding of Lord Chatham himself, it could not tolerate the thought that America should be permitted to convert any form of crude material into manufactured products. Every hat made in America, every shipload of emigrants that left the shores of England for America, was jealously regarded as signifying so much pecuniary loss to England. The colonists were to be mere _adscripti glebae_, mere tillers of the American soil for the purpose of wringing from it the price of the manufactured commodities, with which they were to be exclusively supplied by the factories and shops of the mother country. The idea that, in any other sense, the expanding numbers and wealth of America could inure to the benefit of England, was one that seemed to be wholly foreign to its consciousness. To this Little England Franklin steadfastly opposed his conception of an Imperial England, based upon the freedom of all its parts to contribute to the wealth and importance of the whole by the full enjoyment of all their peculiar natural gifts and advantages.

No one can more sincerely rejoice than I do [he wrote to Lord Kames in 1760], on the reduction of Canada; and this is not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton. I have long been of opinion, that the _foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America_; and though, like other foundations, they are low and little seen, they are, nevertheless, broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure human wisdom ever yet erected.

These words, splendid as was the vision by which they were illumined, were but the utterance in another form of the thought that he had expressed nine years before in America in his essay on the _Increase of Mankind_. Speaking of the population of the colonies at that time he said:

This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 years, will, in another Century, be more than the People of _England_, and the greatest Number of _Englishmen_ will be on this Side the Water. What an Accession of Power to the _British Empire_ by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of Trade and Navigation! What Numbers of Ships and Seamen! We have been here but little more than 100 years, and yet the Force of our Privateers in the late War, united, was greater, both in Men and Guns, than that of the whole _British_ Navy in Queen _Elizabeth's_ time.

Indeed so fully possessed was he even as late as 1771 with the federative spirit, which has brought recruits from Canada and Australia to the side of England in recent wars that, after urging upon Thomas Cushing the importance of a well-disciplined militia being maintained by Massachusetts, for her protection against invasion by a foreign foe, he added, "And what a Glory would it be for us to send, on any trying Occasion, ready and effectual Aid to our Mother Country!" It is only by reading such words as these that we can begin to divine what the divulsion of England and America has really meant to the vast host of human beings throughout the world who speak the English tongue.

To all the shallow sophistries or sottish errors, that tended to falsify his glorious dream of world-wide British unity, Franklin presented a merciless intellect. With regard to the intention of Parliament to tax the colonies, he had these pointed words to say in a letter to Peter Collinson in 1764: "What we get above a Subsistence we lay out with you for your Manufactures.

"Therefore what you get from us in Taxes you must lose in Trade. The Cat can yield but her skin."

Even more acute was his letter to the _Public Advertiser_ on a proposed Act to prevent emigration from England. Such an Act, he declared, was unnecessary, impracticable, impolitic and unjust. What is more, with an insight into the laws governing population, superior to that of any man of his time, he made his assertions good. To illustrate this claim in part, we need go no further than what he had to say about the necessity of the Act.

As long as the new situation shall be _far_ preferable to the old [he said], the emigration may possibly continue. But when many of those, who at home interfered with others of the same rank (in the competition for farms, shops, business, offices, and other means of subsistence), are gradually withdrawn, the inconvenience of that competition ceases; the number remaining no longer half starve each other; they find they can now subsist comfortably, and though perhaps not quite so well as those who have left them, yet, the inbred attachment to a native country is sufficient to overbalance a moderate difference; and thus the emigration ceases naturally. The waters of the ocean may move in currents from one quarter of the globe to another, as they happen in some places to be accumulated, and in others diminished; but no law, beyond the law of gravity, is necessary to prevent their abandoning any coast entirely. Thus the different degrees of happiness of different countries and situations find, or rather make, their level by the flowing of people from one to another; and where that level is once found, the removals cease. Add to this, that even a real deficiency of people in any country, occasioned by a wasting war or pestilence, is speedily supplied by earlier and more prolific marriages, encouraged by the greater facility of obtaining the means of subsistence. So that a country half depopulated would soon be repeopled, till the means of subsistence were equalled by the population. All increase beyond that point must perish, or flow off into more favourable situations. Such overflowings there have been of mankind in all ages, or we should not now have had so many nations. But to apprehend absolute depopulation from that cause, and call for a law to prevent it, is calling for a law to stop the Thames, lest its waters, by what leave it daily at Gravesend, should be quite exhausted.

Twenty-three years before he had stated the same truths more sententiously in his essay on the _Increase of Mankind_.

In fine [he said in that essay] a Nation well regulated is like a Polypus; take away a Limb, its Place is soon supply'd; cut it in two, and each deficient Part shall speedily grow out of the Part remaining. Thus if you have Room and Subsistence enough, as you may by dividing, make ten Polypes out of one, you may of one make ten Nations, equally populous and powerful; or rather increase a Nation ten fold in Numbers and Strength.

Franklin clearly saw that, with the increase of population in the colonies, the demand for British manufactures would increase _pari passu_, and that, with the increased demand for them, the population of Great Britain would increase, perhaps, tenfold. Much as he made of the economic conditions that tended to give a purely agricultural direction to the energies of America, he laughed to scorn the idea that America would always remain in a state of industrial subjection to England.

Only consider _the rate of our Increase_ [he wrote to Peter Collinson, after stating that it was folly to expect that America would always be supplied with cloth by England] and tell me if you can increase your Wooll in that Proportion, and where, in your little Island you can feed the Sheep. Nature has put Bounds to your Abilities, tho' none to your Desires. Britain would, if she could, manufacture & trade for all the World; England for all Britain;--London for all England;--and every Londoner for all London. So selfish is the human Mind! But 'tis well there is One above that rules these Matters with a more equal Hand.

The agency that Franklin held for Pennsylvania in the first instance, and the agencies that he afterwards held for Massachusetts, New Jersey and Georgia, too, afforded him a solid standing for influencing public opinion both in England and America. He was actually in England, and, at the same time, in incessant correspondence with the popular leaders in America. With the beginning of the agitation for the repeal of the Stamp Act he entered upon a course of political activity which added greatly, in another form, to the reputation already acquired by him as a man of science. For his services in securing the repeal, including the flood of light that his answers, when examined before the House of Commons, shed upon the points at issue between the two countries, he was repaid by the English Ministry with attentions which he describes by a term as strong as "caress." Even when the dust of the conflict had thickened, and popular sentiment in England had ranged itself more and more on the side of the King and Parliament, his advice was still eagerly sought by Chatham, Camden, Shelburne and Burke and other liberal and sagacious English statesmen, when they were vainly striving in opposition to restore sanity to the distracted counsels that were menacing the security of the Empire.[20] Those must have been proud moments for Franklin, when the elder Pitt, whom he had come to regard in the earlier stages of his maturer life in England as an "inaccessible," received him as an honored guest under his roof at Hayes, or conferred with him at No. 7 Craven Street, or delivered him to the doorkeepers in the House of Lords, saying aloud, "This is Dr. Franklin, whom I would have admitted into the House." There have been few men who might not have envied the privilege of intimate communion with a man not greater, when he was making his country the mistress of the world, than, when decrepit, and in a hopeless minority, he rose in the House of Lords to plead with a voice, inspired not only by his own matchless eloquence but by all that was best in the history and temper of England for the removal of His Majesty's troops from the town of Boston. On the other side of the Atlantic, too, as the final catastrophe drew nearer, Franklin acquired a position, as the champion of the Colonies, which led Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts to say of the memorable report, made by a committee to the town meeting, held in Boston on November 20, 1772, that "although at its first appearance it was considered as their own work, yet they had little more to do than to make the necessary alterations in the arrangement of materials prepared for them by their great director in England, whose counsels they obeyed, and in whose wisdom and dexterity they had an implicit faith."

And with entire truth it can be said that, until war became inevitable, Franklin used his influence in both countries with the unwavering purpose of promoting the best interests of both. The representation of America in Parliament at that time he saw was impracticable, and it is hard to believe, though the imbecility of a government without a sanction had not yet been forced upon his attention by the Articles of Confederation, that so practical a man could have had much faith in the steady efficacy of mere requisitions for aids by the Crown on the colonial assemblies. But, within the limits set him by the insurmountable barriers of the hour, it can not be doubted, bold as such an assertion may be, that the wisest thing that both England and the Colonies could have done, if such an idea is conceivable, would have been to leave the controversy between them to his sole arbitration. The most striking tribute that can be paid to the wisdom and open-mindedness of Franklin is to say that, if this had been done, an accommodation would unquestionably have been reached with due regard to the honor, dignity and essential interests of both countries. His attitude in England was that of a loyal friend to both parties to the controversy, who, as he viewed it, had no cause for disagreement that a temperate and sensible man would not know how to readily remove. To the British public he addressed with numerous variations the following arguments: Notwithstanding the rapid increase of population in America, its area was so vast, and contained so much vacant land, that even such artisans as it had soon drifted into the possession and cultivation of land. The danger, therefore, of industrial competition between the two countries was very remote. The people of America, however, would multiply so rapidly that, in the course of a brief time, the demand for manufactures would increase to such an extent that Great Britain would be powerless alone to supply it. He had satisfied himself by an inspection of the cloth factories in Yorkshire that, with a population doubling as did that of America every twenty-five years, Great Britain would in the future be unable to keep the Americans clothed. It was not right that the interests of a particular class of British merchants, tradesmen or artificers should outweigh those of all the King's subjects in the Colonies. Iron was to be found everywhere in America, and beaver furs were the natural productions of that country; hats, nails and steel were wanted there as well as in England. It was of no importance to the common welfare of the empire whether a subject of the King got his living by making hats on one or the other side of the water, whether he grew rich on the Thames or the Ohio, in Edinburgh or Dublin. Yet the hatters of England had obtained an act in their own favor, restraining that manufacture in America in order to oblige the Americans to send their beaver to England to be manufactured, and to purchase back the hats loaded with the charges of a double transportation. In the same manner, had a few nail-makers and a still smaller body of steel-makers (perhaps there were not a half-dozen of these in England) been able to totally forbid by an Act of Parliament the erecting of slitting mills or steel-furnaces in America. All money made by America in trade, or derived by it from fisheries, the produce of the soil or commerce, finally centred in England; yet, though America was drained of all its specie in the purchase of English goods, often mere luxuries and superfluities, she was not even allowed to issue paper money, however carefully safeguarded, to take its place. The idea that the numerous and separate colonies might become dangerous to the mother country was visionary. They were so jealous of each other that they had been wholly unable to agree upon a union for their common defence or to unite in requesting the mother country to establish one for them. The truth was that they loved England much more than they loved each other. There remained among them so much respect, veneration and affection for Britain, that, if cultivated prudently, with kind usage, and tenderness for their privileges, they might be easily governed still for ages, without force, or any considerable expense. Parliament had no constitutional right to levy a direct tax of any kind on America. The King was the only bond between America and Great Britain. In the beginning, no claim had been made by Parliament of a right to even regulate American commerce, but the power had long been exercised by it without any objection on the part of the colonies, and could, at any rate, be reasonably defended on the ground that Great Britain was put to a great expense in policing the seas over which American commerce moved. If England felt that she could not rely upon the voluntary grants of America, to defray the charges imposed upon her by America, then the logical and proper thing to do before she levied direct taxes upon America was to provide for the representation of the Colonies in Parliament. Until that was done, if it was practicable to do it, she should confine herself to the old constitutional practice of requisitions for pecuniary aid, issued by the Secretary of State, at the instance of the Crown, to the Legislative Assemblies of America. These requisitions of a gracious King had been freely honored in the past. Indeed, the pecuniary burden of the wars, which had been carried on in America, though they were not of her kindling, had been borne by America in a larger proportion to her means than England. But to impose a stamp or tea duty upon America by Act of Parliament was simple madness. No taxes of that sort would ever be collected in America except such as were stained with blood. If Parliament, in which America was not represented, had the right to take from her a penny in a pound, what was there to hinder it from calling, whenever it pleased, for the other nineteen shillings and eleven pence? The only result of a continued attempt to tax America would be the complete loss of her respect and affection, and all the political and commercial advantages that accompanied them. It was a mistake to heed the statements of the Colonial Governors as to the limited extent of popular disaffection in America and the inability of the Colonies to dispense with English manufactures. Their dependence was such as to render them more eager to conciliate court than colonial favor. It was also a mistake to suppose that America could not either make or forego any articles whatsoever that she was in the habit of buying from England. Men would tax themselves as heavily to gratify their resentment as their pride. The Americans had resolved to wear no more mourning, and it was now totally out of fashion with near two millions of people. They had resolved to eat no more lamb, and not a joint of lamb had since been seen on any of their tables, but the lambs themselves were all alive with the prettiest of fleeces on their backs imaginable. Look, too, at the pitiful sum of eighty pounds which was all that the odious tea duty banned by America had produced in a year to defray the expense of some hundreds of thousands of pounds incurred by England in maintaining armed ships and soldiers to support the innumerable officeholders charged with the duty of enforcing the tax.

The argument addressed by Franklin to America was equally earnest. The protection that England could afford her, the office of umpire that England could perform for her, in case of disputes between the Colonies, so that they could go on without interruption with their improvements, and increase their numbers, were the advantages that America enjoyed in her connection with England.

By the Exercise of prudent Moderation on her part, mix'd with a little Kindness [Franklin wrote to Thomas Cushing], and by a decent Behaviour on ours, excusing where we can excuse from a Consideration of Circumstances, and bearing a little with the Infirmities of her Government, as we would with those of an aged Parent,[21] tho' firmly asserting our Privileges, and declaring that we mean at a proper time to vindicate them, this advantageous Union may still be long continued. We wish it, and we may endeavour it; but God will order it as to His Wisdom shall seem most suitable. The Friends of Liberty here, wish we may long preserve it on our side the Water, that they may find it there if adverse Events should destroy it here. They are therefore anxious and afraid, lest we should hazard it by premature Attempts in its favour. They think we may risque much by violent Measures and that the Risque is unnecessary, since a little Time must infallibly bring us all we demand or desire, and bring it us in Peace and Safety. I do not presume to advise. There are many wiser men among you, and I hope you will be directed by a still superior Wisdom.

Every personal difference Franklin contended did not justify a quarrel nor did every act of oppression on the part of the mother country justify a war. The policy, which he laid down for the Colonies, was to exercise patience and forbearance, and to look to political changes in England and their own rapidly increasing numbers and wealth for the ultimate redress of their grievances, but, in the meantime, to reaffirm fearlessly their constitutional rights on every proper occasion. This policy is again and again recommended in his letters to his friends and political correspondents over-sea. Even before the Stamp Act was actually repealed, he wrote to Charles Thomson expressing the hope that, when that happened, the behavior of America would be so prudent, decent and grateful that their friends in England would have no reason to be ashamed, and their enemies in England, who had predicted that Parliamentary indulgence would only make them more insolent and ungovernable, would find themselves, and be found, false prophets. After the repeal of the Stamp Act, in a letter to Galloway, he expressed deep regret that the English merchants, who had helped to secure that result, and to communicate the knowledge of it, at their expense to America, should feel that the Americans had proved themselves ingrates, and he accordingly said that he hoped that some decent acknowledgments or thanks would be sent to these merchants by the colonial assemblies. When the idea of taxing America was subsequently revived, he wrote to the same correspondent that he knew not what to advise, but that they should all do their endeavors on both sides the water to lessen the present unpopularity of the American cause, conciliate the affections of the British towards them, increase by all possible means the number of their friends, and be careful not to weaken their hands, and strengthen their enemies, by rash proceedings on their side; the mischiefs of which were inconceivable. In a letter to the printer of the _Gazetteer_, signed "New England," he said: "I only hate calumniators and boutefeus on either side the water, who would for the little dirty purposes of faction, set brother against brother, turn friends into mortal enemies, and ruin an empire by dividing it." In a letter to Cadwallader Evans, in 1768, he even approved the idea that America should manufacture only such things as England neglected.

These are but scant gleanings from the numerous letters in which, down to the very last, Franklin unweariedly repeated his counsels of self-restraint to his fellow-countrymen. Accompanying them was every word of good cheer that he thought might tend to make this self-restraint easier. Several times he assured his American correspondents that, in the debate with the mother country, America had the sympathy of all Europe. For a long time, he endeavored to allay the resentment of his countrymen, under the sting of parliamentary injustice, by voicing the delusion that the King did not share the sentiments of the corrupt legislature which, as a matter of fact, he was all the time corrupting for the purpose of fostering such sentiments. Every indication of a favorable disposition towards the Colonies upon the part of the English People, during the alternations of anxiety and confidence that his mind underwent with the rise and fall of English ministries, friendly or unfriendly to America, was promptly observed by him and reported to America. At times, it is plain enough that he thought a war it would be; yet as late as 1775, when he believed that the adverse ministry of that time was tottering, his sanguine nature reached the conclusion in a letter to James Bowdoin that the redoubled clamor of the trading, manufacturing and Whig interests in England would infallibly overthrow all the enemies of America, and produce an acknowledgment of her rights and satisfaction for her injuries. Parliament rarely gave him any occasion to speak of it except in terms of mingled amazement and indignation; but it is agreeable to remember that, in a letter in 1774 to Jane Mecom, he made grateful mention of "the generous and noble friends of America" in both houses, whose names, dear to the highest traditions of human genius and public spirit, should never be forgotten in any movement to reintegrate in some form the broken fragments of the china vase in which Franklin saw a symbol of the unity of the British Empire.

Accompanying Franklin's counsels of patience, however, was also an unceasing warning to America not to alter for a moment her posture of resistance and protest. "If under all the Insults and Oppressions you are now exposed to," he told Dr. Cooper, "you can prudently, as you have lately done, continue quiet, avoiding Tumults, but still resolutely keeping up your Claim and asserting your Rights, you will finally establish them, and this military Cloud that now blusters over you will pass away, and do no more Harm than a Summer Thunder Shower." "The Colonies," he wrote subsequently to Robert Morris and Thomas Leach, "have Adversaries enow to their common Privileges: They should endeavour to agree among themselves, and avoid everything that may make ill-Blood and promote Divisions, which must weaken them in their common Defence." To Thomas Cushing he wrote that America should continue from time to time to assert its rights in occasional solemn resolves and other public acts, never yielding them up, and avoiding even the slightest expressions that seemed confirmatory of the claim that had been set up against them. As the end of it all became more and more obvious, his note of warning assumed an additional significance. In a letter to Thomas Cushing in 1773, he wrote:

But our great Security lies, I think, in our growing Strength, both in Numbers and Wealth; that creates an increasing Ability of assisting this Nation in its Wars, which will make us more respectable, our Friendship more valued, and our Enmity feared; thence it will soon be thought proper to treat us not with Justice only, but with Kindness, and thence we may expect in a few Years a total Change of Measures with regard to us; unless, by a Neglect of military Discipline, we should lose all martial Spirit, and our Western People become as tame as those in the Eastern Dominions of Britain, when we may expect the same Oppressions; for there is much Truth in the Italian saying, _Make yourselves Sheep_, _and the Wolves will eat you_.

Indeed the almost miraculous way in which the population and wealth of America were increasing from year to year was one of the facts which entered most deeply into Franklin's calculation of the resources upon which she could rely not for the purpose of breaking away from the British connection but for the purpose of preventing it from being abused by England. No one saw more clearly than he that the day would come when some descendant, such as Gladstone, of one of his British contemporaries might well apostrophize America as a daughter that, at no very distant time, would, whether fairer or less fair, be unquestionably stronger than the mother.[22] To Thomas Cushing he wrote in 1773 that the longer England delayed the accommodation, which finally for her own sake she must obtain, the worse terms she might expect, since the inequality of power and importance that then subsisted between her and America was daily diminishing; while the latter's sense of her own rights and of England's injustice was continually increasing.

Optimistic on the whole, however, as was Franklin's outlook during the interval of political strife which preceded the American Revolution, intently as he watched every ebb and flow of English feeling, while this period lasted, it is manifest that in its later stages he realized that the currents upon which he was being borne were steadily moving towards the jaws of the maelstrom. This is apparent enough in his perspicacious letter of May 15, 1771, to the Committee of Correspondence in Massachusetts.

I think one may clearly see, in the system of customs to be exacted in America by act of Parliament, the seeds sown of a total disunion of the two countries, though, as yet, that event may be at a considerable distance. The course and natural progress seems to be, first, the appointment of needy men as officers, for others do not care to leave England; then, their necessities make them rapacious, their office makes them proud and insolent, their insolence and rapacity make them odious, and, being conscious that they are hated, they become malicious; their malice urges them to a continual abuse of the inhabitants in their letters to administration, representing them as disaffected and rebellious, and (to encourage the use of severity), as weak, divided, timid, and cowardly. Government believes all; thinks it necessary to support and countenance its officers; their quarreling with the people is deemed a mark and consequence of their fidelity; they are therefore more highly rewarded, and this makes their conduct still more insolent and provoking.

The resentment of the people will, at times and on particular incidents, burst into outrages and violence upon such officers, and this naturally draws down severity and acts of further oppression from hence. The more the people are dissatisfied, the more rigor will be thought necessary; severe punishments will be inflicted to terrify; rights and privileges will be abolished; greater force will then be required to secure execution and submission; the expense will become enormous; it will then be thought proper, by fresh exactions, to make the people defray it; thence, the British nation and government will become odious, the subjection to it will be deemed no longer tolerable; war ensues, and the bloody struggle will end in absolute slavery to America, or ruin to Britain by the loss of her colonies; the latter most probable, from America's growing strength and magnitude.

But, as the whole empire must, in either case, be greatly weakened, I cannot but wish to see much patience and the utmost discretion in our general conduct, that the fatal period may be postponed, and that, whenever this catastrophe shall happen, it may appear to all mankind that the fault has not been ours.

Franklin's written comments upon the American controversy between the passage of the Stamp Act and his return to America in 1775 are usually marked by a sobriety and dignity of expression worthy of their wisdom. It is only at times that the strong character, habitually held in leash by innate prudence and severely disciplined self-control, breaks out into impatience. Naturally enough now and then he has a word of scorn for the graceless venality which made Westminster almost as much a market as Smithfield, and was, after all, the real thing that rendered England deaf to the warning "Time is" of Friar Bacon's brazen mouth-piece.

Many think the new Parliament will be for reversing the late proceedings [he wrote to Galloway in 1774], but that depends on the Court, on which every Parliament seems to be dependent; so much so, that I begin to think a Parliament here of little Use to the People: For since a Parliament is always to do as a ministry would have it, why should we not be govern'd by the Ministry in the first Instance? They could afford to govern us cheaper, the Parliament being a very expensive Machine, that requires a vast deal of oiling and greasing at the People's Charge; for they finally pay all the enormous Salaries of Places, the Pensions, and the Bribes, now by Custom become necessary to induce the Members to vote according to their Consciences.

Franklin would have been more than human if he had not had a resentful word to say too, when, as the result of the refusal of the Americans to drink any tea, except such as was smuggled into America, free of the detested duty, by the commercial rivals of England, the East India Company could no longer meet its debts, let alone pay dividends and the annuity of four hundred thousand pounds, payable by it to the British Government, and bankruptcy was following bankruptcy like a series of falling bricks, and thousands of Spitalfield and Manchester weavers were starving, or subsisting upon charity. "Blessed Effects of Pride, Pique, and Passion in Government, which should have no Passions," was the caustic observation of Franklin in one of his letters to his son. Bitterness welled up again in his throat when, after he had been bayed by the Privy Council, and dismissed from his office, a special instruction was issued to the Governor of Massachusetts not to sign any warrant on the Treasury for the purpose of paying him any salary as the agent of Massachusetts or reimbursing him for any expenses incurred on her behalf.

The Injustice [he said in his _Tract Relative to the Affair of Hutchinson's Letters_] of thus depriving the People there of the Use of their own Money, to pay an Agent acting in their Defence, while the Governor, with a large Salary out of the Money extorted from them by Act of Parliament, was enabled to pay plentifully Maudit and Wedderburn to abuse and defame them and their Agent, is so evident as to need no Comment. But this they call GOVERNMENT!

Indecent, however, as was the treatment accorded by the Privy Council to the man, who had striven so loyally, so zealously and so wisely to promote the greatness and glory of England, it hardly conveyed a ruder shock to his mind than that which it received later when he saw the plan for the settlement of the American Controversy drafted by Lord Chatham rejected by the House of Lords, with as much contempt he told Charles Thomson, "as they could have shown to a Ballad offered by a drunken Porter."

To hear so many of these _Hereditary_ Legislators [he said in his _Account of Negotiations in London_], declaiming so vehemently against, not the Adopting merely, but even the _Consideration_ of a Proposal so important in its Nature, offered by a Person of so weighty a Character, one of the first Statesmen of the Age, who had taken up this Country when in the lowest Despondency, and conducted it to Victory and Glory, thro' a War with two of the mightiest Kingdoms in Europe; to hear them censuring his Plan, not only for their own Misunderstandings of what was in it, but for their Imaginations of what was not in it, which they would not give themselves an Opportunity of rectifying by a second Reading; to perceive the total Ignorance of the Subject in some, the Prejudice and Passion of others, and the wilful Perversion of Plain Truth in several of the Ministers; and upon the whole to see it so ignominiously rejected by so great a Majority, and so hastily too, in Breach of all Decency, and prudent Regard to the Character and Dignity of their Body, as a third Part of the National Legislature, gave me an exceeding mean Opinion of their Abilities, and made their Claim of Sovereignty over three Millions of Virtuous, sensible People in America seem the greatest of Absurdities, since they appear'd to have scarce Discretion enough to govern a Herd of Swine. _Hereditary Legislators_! thought I. There would be more Propriety, because less Hazard of Mischief, in having (as in some University of Germany) _Hereditary Professors of Mathematicks_.

Yet this is the Government [Franklin declared in the letter to Charles Thomson, in which he used the simile of the ballad and the drunken porter, and also referred to equally rash conduct upon the part of the House of Commons], by whose Supreme Authority, we are to have our Throats cut, if we do not acknowledge, and whose dictates we are implicitly to obey, while their conduct hardly entitles them to Common Respect.

But it was only after he had been shamelessly and publicly proscribed, under circumstances which gave him good reason to believe that he was but the vicarious victim of a People unfeelingly doomed to the cruel alternatives of fratricidal resistance or vassalage, that he gave way, though still engaged in a last effort to stave off the evil day of separation, to such reproachful or denunciatory utterances as these. Indeed, as it is a satisfaction to a stupid man to know that Homer sometimes nodded, and to a vicious man to know that the character of Washington is supposed to have been at last successfully fly-specked by some petty scandal-monger, so it ought to be a relief to a hasty man to know that Franklin was once on the point of succumbing entirely to a sudden flaw of anger. Goaded beyond endurance by the reflections, which he had just heard in the House of Lords on everything American, including American courage, honesty and intelligence, reflections as contemptuous, he said, as if his countrymen were the lowest of mankind, and almost of a different species from the English of Britain, he drew up a heated protest, as the agent of Massachusetts, demanding from Great Britain present satisfaction for the blockade of Boston, and stating that satisfaction for the proposed exclusion of Massachusetts from the Newfoundland and other fisheries, if carried into effect, would probably also some day be demanded. When he showed the paper to his friend, Thomas Walpole, a member of the House of Commons, Walpole, we are told by him, looked at it and him several times alternately, as if he apprehended him to be out of his senses. However, Franklin asked him to lay it before Lord Camden, which he undertook to do. When it came back to Franklin, it was with a note from Walpole telling him simply that it was thought that it might be attended with dangerous consequences to his person, and contribute to exasperate the nation. The caution that Franklin exhibited before permitting the protest to pass from his possession suggests the idea that, in writing it, he was merely seeking a safe vent for the mental ferment of the moment. It was doubtless well for him that the paper got no further; for it is painful to relate that the disposition was not wanting in England to construe some of his letters to Thomas Cushing as treasonable. In a letter to Cushing, he said that he was not conscious of any treasonable intention, but that, after the manner in which he had recently been treated in the matter of the Hutchinson letters, he was not to wonder if less than a small lump in his forehead was voted a horn. Six months later, he wrote to Galloway that it was thought by many that, if the British soldiers and the New Englanders should come to blows, he would probably be taken up; for the ministerial people affected everywhere to represent him as the cause of all the misunderstanding. We know nothing better calculated to show how hopeless it is for the lamb downstream to convince the wolf upstream that the water flowing by him was not muddied from below than the fact that, during the debate over Lord Chatham's conciliatory Plan, Lord Sandwich referred to Franklin as one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies that England had ever known. That is to say, Franklin, the loyal Englishman who, in one of his early papers on electricity, could not even mention the King without adding, "God preserve him," who had shrunk in the beginning from the agitation against the Stamp Act as little less than treason, who had deprecated the Boston tea-party as lawless violence, and had, from first to last, condemned mob-license in every form in America as steadfastly as tyranny in England.

The wonder is that he should not have reached the decision sooner than he did that there was nothing to be gained for his country by his longer sojourn in England. His intercourse, as an American agent with Lord Hillsborough, when Secretary of State for America and First Commissioner to the Board of Trade, was alone enough to bring him to such a decision.[23] As an Irishman, familiar with the repressive policy of England in Ireland, Hillsborough could not well approve of British restrictions upon American commerce and manufactures; but there his sympathy with America ceased. Franklin truly said that the agents of the Colonies in England were quite as useful to England as to the Colonies, since they had more than once by timely advice kept the English Government from making mistakes arising out of ignorance of special conditions peculiar to America. But this view was not shared by Hillsborough. He insisted that no agent from Massachusetts should be recognized in England, who was not appointed, from year to year, by the General Court of Massachusetts by an act, to which the Governor of that colony had given his assent. As the Governor was dependent for his appointment upon the British Ministry, and would hardly fail to name any one as agent, who might be selected by it, such a tenure was equivalent to vesting the selection of the agent in Hillsborough himself, whose wishes, when selected, the agent was not likely to oppose. Under such conditions, an agent would be of no value to the colony, Franklin declared, and, under such conditions, he further declared, he would not be willing himself to hold the post. "His Character is Conceit, Wrongheadedness, Obstinacy, and Passion." Such were the terms in which Franklin summed up the moral attributes of Hillsborough to Dr. Cooper, after he had vainly striven for several years to give the former some salutary conception of the importance of ascertaining the real sentiments and wants of America. The letter, in which these terms were employed, was accompanied by minutes of a spirited dialogue between Franklin and Hillsborough, which almost makes us regret that the former, among his other literary ventures, had not tested his qualifications as a playwright. The part of Hillsborough in the colloquy was to let Franklin fully know in language of mixed petulance and contempt that he declined to recognize him as an agent.

No such appointment shall be entered [he is minuted as declaring]. When I came into the administration of American affairs, I found them in great disorder. By _my firmness_ they are now something mended; and, while I have the honour to hold the seals, I shall continue the same conduct, the same _firmness_. I think my duty to the master I serve, and to the government of this nation, requires it of me. If that conduct is not approved, _they_ may take my office from me when they please. I shall make them a bow, and thank them; I shall resign with pleasure. That gentleman knows it, (_pointing to Mr. Pownall_), but, while I continue in it, I shall resolutely persevere in the same FIRMNESS. (_Spoken with great warmth, and turning pale in his discourse, as if he was angry at something or somebody besides the agent, and of more consequence to himself._)

Then follows Franklin's reply:

B. F. (_Reaching out his hand for the paper, which his Lordship returned to him_). I beg your Lordship's pardon for taking up so much of your time. It is, I believe, of no great importance whether the appointment is acknowledged or not, for I have not the least conception that an agent can _at present_ be of any use to any of the colonies. I shall therefore give your Lordship no further trouble. (Withdrew.)

As the dialogue discloses, Hillsborough had quite enough enemies already to render it prudent for him to abstain from making another of a man who had declared in the letter, with which it was enclosed, that, if there was to be a war between them, he would do his best to defend himself, and annoy his adversary little, regarding the story of the Earthen Pot and Brazen Pitcher.

One encouragement I have [Franklin said in his letter], the knowledge, that he is not a whit better lik'd by his Colleagues in the Ministry, than he is by me, that he can not probably continue where he is much longer, and that he can scarce be succeeded by anybody, who will not like me the better for his having been at Variance with me.

Later, Franklin wrote to Thomas Cushing:

This Man's Mandates have been treated with Disrespect in America, his Letters have been criticis'd, his Measures censur'd and despis'd; which has produced in him a kind of settled Malice against the Colonies, particularly ours, that would break out into greater Violence if cooler Heads did not set some Bounds to it. I have indeed good Reason to believe that his Conduct is far from being approved by the King's other Servants, and that he himself is so generally dislik'd by them that it is not probable he will continue much longer in his present Station, the general Wish here being to recover (saving only the Dignity of Government) the Good-Will of the Colonies, which there is little reason to expect while they are under his wild Administration. Their permitting so long his Eccentricities (if I may use such an Expression) is owing, I imagine, rather to the Difficulty of knowing how to dispose of or what to do with a man of his wrong-headed bustling Industry, who, it is apprehended, may be more mischievous out of Administration than in it, than to any kind of personal Regard for him.

The Earthen Pot and the Brazen Pitcher _did_ collide, and, contrary to every physical law, it was not the Earthen Pot that suffered. Certain Americans, including Franklin himself, and certain Englishmen had applied to the Crown for a tract of land between the Alleghanies and the Ohio River, and their petition was referred to the Board of Trade of which Hillsborough was President. It asked for the right to settle two million, five hundred thousand acres. Hillsborough, who was secretly hostile to the grant, for the purpose of over-loading the application, deceitfully suggested that the applicants should ask for enough land to constitute a province; whereupon Franklin took him at his word and changed the acreage petitioned for to twenty-three million acres. When the report of the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, drafted by Hillsborough, was made, it opposed the grant.

If a vast territory [said His Majesty's Governor of Georgia, in a letter to the Commissioners, which is quoted in the Report], be granted to any set of gentlemen, who really mean to people it, and actually do so, it must draw and carry out a great number of people from Great Britain; and I apprehend they will soon become a kind of separate and independent people, and who will set up for themselves; that they will soon have manufactures of their own; that they will neither take supplies from the mother country, nor from the provinces, at the back of which they are settled; that, being at a distance from the seat of government, courts, magistrates, &c., &c., they will be out of the reach and control of law and government; that it will become a receptacle and kind of asylum for offenders, who will fly from justice to such new country or colony.

To this report, which sought to confine America to practically the same limits as those fixed by the French, Franklin, with his knowledge of American conditions, and breadth of vision, made such a crushing reply that, when the report and the reply came before the Privy Council, the application for the grant, partly because of the strength of Franklin's reply, and, partly from dislike to Hillsborough, was approved. Mortified by this action, Hillsborough resigned his office, and was succeeded by Lord Dartmouth, the nobleman described by Cowper as "One who wears a coronet, and prays."

In keeping with the deceit, practiced by Hillsborough, in endeavoring to give an extravagant turn to the Ohio petition, was his previous bearing towards Franklin after the interview with the latter, at which he paid such a fulsome tribute to his own firmness. During the year preceding the action of the Privy Council, Franklin had heard that Hillsborough had expressed himself about him in very angry terms, calling him a Republican, a factious, mischievous fellow, and the like. Nevertheless, a few weeks later, when he was in Ireland, Hillsborough pressed him so warmly to call upon him at his country-seat, upon his way to the North of Ireland, that he did so, and was detained there no less than four days, in the enjoyment of a hospitality so assiduous that his host, Franklin tells us, even put his oldest son, Lord Kilwarling, into his phaeton with him, to drive him a round of forty miles, that he might see the country, the seats, manufactures, etc., and moreover covered him with his own great coat lest he should take cold. Later, after both Franklin and Hillsborough had returned to London, the former called upon the latter repeatedly for the purpose of thanking him for his civilities in Ireland. On each day, he was told that his Lordship was not at home, although on two of them he had good reason to know the contrary. On the last of the two, which was one of his Lordship's levee days, the porter, seeing Franklin, came out and surlily chid the latter's coachman for opening the door of his coach before he had inquired whether his Lordship was at home. Then, turning to Franklin, he said, "My Lord is not at home." "I have never since been nigh him," Franklin wrote to his son, "and we have only abused one another at a distance."

During the year succeeding the action of the Privy Council, when Franklin was with his friend Lord Le Despencer at Oxford, Lord Hillsborough, upon being told by Lord Le Despencer, as they were descending the stairs in Queen's College, that Franklin was above, reascended them immediately, and, approaching Franklin in the pleasantest manner imaginable, said, "Dr. Franklin, I did not know till this Minute that you were here, and I am come back _to make you my Bow_! I am glad to see you at Oxford, and that you look so well," &c.

In Return for this Extravagance [Franklin said in a letter to his son], I complimented him on his Son's Performance in the Theatre, tho' indeed it was but indifferent, so that Account was settled. For as People say, when they are angry, _If he strikes me_, _I'll strike him again_; I think sometimes it may be right to say, _If he flatters me_, _I'll flatter him again_. This is _Lex Talionis_, returning Offences in kind. His Son however (Lord Fairford), is a valuable young Man, and his Daughters, Ladys Mary and Charlotte, most amiable young Women. My Quarrel is only with him, who, of all the Men I ever met with, is surely the most unequal in his Treatment of People, the most insincere, and the most wrong-headed.

Such was the man, to whom the oversight of American affairs was committed at a highly critical period in the relations of England and the Colonies. Speaking of Hillsborough's successor, Lord Dartmouth, Franklin said, "he is truly a good Man, and wishes sincerely a good Understanding with the Colonies, but does not seem to have Strength equal to his Wishes." This minister was wise enough to recognize the agents of the American colonies, including Franklin, again, despite the stand taken by Hillsborough against them. But, when Lord Chatham's conciliatory plan was so summarily rejected by the House of Lords, Dartmouth, though he had, when the motion was first made, suggested that it should be deliberately considered, was later swept along unresistingly by the majority. In his account of the incident, Franklin said, "I am the more particular in this, as it is a Trait of that Nobleman's Character, who from his Office is suppos'd to have so great a Share in American affairs, but who has in reality no Will or Judgment of his own, being with Dispositions for the best Measures, easily prevail'd with to join in the worst."

But it is in the history of the Hutchinson letters that we find the most convincing proof of the hopelessness of Franklin's task in his endeavor to bring public opinion in England over to his generous views of her true interests. On one occasion, when speaking in terms of warm resentment of the conduct of the ministry in dispatching troops to Boston, he was to his great surprise, to use his own words, assured by a gentleman of character and distinction that the action of the ministry in this, and the other respects, obnoxious to America, had been brought about by some of the most reputable persons among the Americans themselves. He was skeptical, and the gentleman, whose name he never revealed, being desirous of establishing the truth of his statement to the satisfaction of both Franklin and Franklin's countrymen, called upon Franklin a few days afterwards, and exhibited to him letters from Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson and Secretary Andrew Oliver of Massachusetts, and other residents of that colony which only too conclusively confirmed what had been said. The gentleman would not permit copies to be taken of the letters, but he delivered the originals to Franklin with the express understanding that they were not to be printed, that no copies were to be taken of them, that they were to be shown only to a few leading men in Massachusetts, and were to be carefully returned. Franklin transmitted them, subject to these conditions, to Thomas Cushing of the Committee of Correspondence at Boston. He did so, he tells us, because he thought that to shift the responsibility for the recent ministerial measures from England to America would tend to restore good feeling between the people of Massachusetts and England, and, moreover, because he felt that intelligence of such importance should not be withheld from the constituents whose agent he was. In his communication, accompanying the letters, Franklin stipulated that they were to be read only by the members of the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence, Messrs. Bowdoin and Pitts of the Council, Drs. Chauncey, Cooper and Winthrop, and a few such other persons as Cushing might select; and were to be returned in a few months to him; but it is not true, as was afterwards alleged by his enemies, that his communication was attended by any effort to conceal his personal relations to the letters. A part of the communication is too good a specimen of the precision that Franklin always brought to the language of rebuke or condemnation not to be quoted at length.

As to the writers [he said], I can easily as well as charitably conceive it possible, that a Man educated in Prepossessions of the unbounded Authority of Parliament, &c. may think unjustifiable every Opposition even to its unconstitutional Exactions, and imagine it their Duty to suppress, as much as in them lies, such Opposition. But when I find them bartering away the Liberties of their native Country for Posts, and negociating for Salaries and Pensions extorted from the People; and, conscious of the Odium these might be attended with, calling for Troops to protect and secure the Enjoyment of them: When I see them exciting Jealousies in the Crown, and provoking it to Wrath against so great a Part of its most faithful Subjects; creating Enmities between the different Countries of which the Empire consists; occasioning a great Expence to the _Old_ Country for Suppressing or Preventing imaginary Rebellions in the _New_, and to the new Country for the Payment of needless Gratifications to useless Officers and Enemies; I can not but doubt their Sincerity even in the political Principles they profess, and deem them mere Time-servers seeking their own private Emolument, thro' any Quantity of Publick Mischief; Betrayers of the Interest, not of their native Country only, but of the Government they pretend to serve, and of the whole English Empire.

Later, after strong representations had been made to Franklin by Cushing that the letters could be put to no effective use, unless they could be retained or copied, Franklin obtained leave from the gentleman, who had entrusted them to him, to authorize Cushing to show them to any persons that he chose. The fact that the letters were in Boston was soon noised abroad, whereupon the Assembly required them to be laid before it, though under its promise that they would not be printed. An occasion or pretext for disregarding this promise soon arose, when copies were produced in the House by a member who was said to have received them from England. Then the Assembly adopted a series of indignant resolutions, declaring, among other things, that the authors of the letters were justly chargeable with the great corruption of morals, and all the confusion, misery and bloodshed which had been the natural effects of the introduction of troops into the Province, and that it was its bounden duty to pray that his Majesty would be pleased to remove Hutchinson and Oliver forever from the Government thereof. These resolutions were duly followed by a petition for the removal which was transmitted to Franklin and by him transmitted to Lord Dartmouth, who laid it before the King.

When the news reached England that the letters had been published in Massachusetts, there was great curiosity to know who had transmitted them. Thomas Whately, a London banker, and the brother of William Whately, then deceased, to whom they were written, was suspected; he suspected John Temple, a former Governor of New Hampshire, who had had access to the papers of the decedent, and, his suspicions having been brought to the attention of Temple, the latter called upon him, denied all knowledge of the letters, and demanded a public exoneration. The written statement from Whately which followed was not satisfactory to Temple, and he challenged the former to a duel in which Whately was severely wounded. Up to this time, it was not known except to a few persons that Franklin had forwarded the letters to America; nor even for a time after the duel did he feel that it was incumbent upon him to tell the world that he had done so. But, when he heard that the duel would probably be renewed, as soon as Whately recovered his strength, he felt discharged from the obligation of silence that he had previously recognized to the person from whom he had received the letters, and published a communication in the _Public Advertiser_ stating that it was impossible for Whately to have sent the letters to Boston, or for Temple to have purloined them from Whately, because they had never been in Whately's possession, and that he, Franklin alone, was the person who "obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question."[24]

Franklin had put his head into the lion's jaws. While he was preparing for his return to America, for the purpose of attending to a matter arising out of the operations of the American Post-office Department, he received a notice from the Clerk of the Privy Council, informing him that the Lords of the Committee for Plantation Affairs would meet at the Cockpit on Tuesday, January 11, 1774, at noon, for the purpose of considering the petition for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver, which had been referred to the Council by the King, and requiring him to be present. A similar notice was sent to Bollan, the London Agent of the Massachusetts Council. When the petition came on for hearing, at the request of Franklin, its consideration was postponed for some three weeks, so that he could retain counsel to face Alexander Wedderburn, the Solicitor-general, who had been retained by Israel Mauduit, the agent of the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts.

The counsel retained by Franklin were John Dunning, a former Solicitor-general, and subsequently Lord Ashburton, and John Lee, who later became the Solicitor-general under the administration of Charles James Fox. When the hearing did take place, it proved for every reason a memorable one. Edmund Burke could not recollect that so many Privy Councillors had ever attended a meeting of the Council before. There were no less than thirty-five in attendance. The Lord President Gower presided. In the audience, among other persons, were the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord North, the Prime Minister, Lord Shelburne, Edmund Burke, Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, Arthur Lee, of Virginia, then a law student in London, who had been selected by the Legislature of Massachusetts to act as its agent, in the event of the absence or death of Franklin, Ralph Izard, of South Carolina, who had borne Temple's challenge to Thomas Whately, and Dr. Edward Bancroft, who was afterwards at Paris with Franklin. The hearing was opened by the reading of the letter written by Franklin to Lord Dartmouth, when transmitting the petition to him, the petition itself, the resolutions of the Massachusetts Assembly and the letters upon which they were based. In Franklin's opinion, Dunning and Lee in their pleas "acquitted themselves very handsomely." Dunning's points, Burke thought, were "well and ably put." The appeal of the Massachusetts Assembly, Dunning argued was to the wisdom and goodness of his Majesty; they were asking a favor, not demanding justice. As they had no impeachment to make, so they had no evidence to offer. Of similar tenor was the address of John Lee. The reply of Wedderburn was pointed and brilliant, and as rabid as if he had been summing up against an ordinary criminal at an ordinary assize.

The letters, could not have come to Dr. Franklin [he argued], by fair means. The writers did not give them to him; nor yet did the deceased correspondent, who, from our intimacy, would otherwise have told me of it. Nothing, then, will acquit Dr. Franklin of the charge of obtaining them by fraudulent or corrupt means, for the most malignant of purposes, unless he stole them from the person who stole them. This argument is irrefragable. I hope, my lords, you will mark and brand the man, for the honor of this country, of Europe, and of mankind. Private correspondence has hitherto been held sacred in times of the greatest party rage, not only in politics but religion.... He has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men [the orator went on]. Into what companies will he hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoirs. He will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a _man of letters_; _homo TRIUM literarum_! [_Trium litterarum homo_, a man of three letters, was a fur, or thief]. But [continued Wedderburn], he not only took away the letters from one brother; but kept himself concealed till he nearly occasioned the murder of the other. It is impossible to read his account, expressive of the coolest and most deliberate malice, without horror. Amidst these tragical events, of one person nearly murdered, of another answerable for the issue, of a worthy governor hurt in his dearest interests, the fate of America in suspense; here is a man, who, with the utmost insensibility of remorse, stands up and avows himself the author of all. I can compare it only to Zanga, in Dr. Young's _Revenge_:

"Know then 'twas--I; 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?

More than one bystander has recorded the impressions left upon his mind by this savage philippic.

I was not more astonished [Jeremy Bentham tells us] at the brilliancy of his lightning, than astounded at the thunder that accompanied it. As he stood, the cushion lay on the council table before him; his station was between the seats of two of the members, on the side of the right hand of the Lord President. I would not for double the greatest fee the orator could on that occasion have received, been in the place of that cushion; the ear was stunned at every blow.

"At the sallies of his sarcastic wit," Priestley declares, "all the members of the Council, the President himself not excepted, frequently laughed outright. No person belonging to the Council behaved with decent gravity, except Lord North, who, coming late, took his stand behind the chair opposite to me." Burke spoke of the attack on "Poor Dr. Franklin" as "beyond all bounds and decency," and the language, used by Lord Shelburne, in describing it to Lord Chatham, was hardly, if any, less emphatic. "The behavior of the Judges," he said, "exceeded, as was agreed on all hands, that of any committee of elections." Dunning's rejoinder to Wedderburn was wholly ineffective. His voice, always thick, was, from illness, feebler and huskier than usual even in his first address, and, exhausted as he was by standing for three hours in a room, in which no one was allowed to sit but the Privy Councillors themselves, who were supposed on such occasions to be the immediate representatives of the King, his second address was hardly audible. Lee was equally ineffective. Wedderburn's speech, therefore, which from a purely forensic point of view was really a masterpiece, was left to assert its full effect, to become the sensation of every Club in London, and to win the plaudit of every bigoted or unreflecting Englishman. "All men," Fox said, "tossed up their hats and clapped their hands in boundless delight at it."

What of Franklin during the malignant assault? The apartment, in which the hearing took place, was a small one. At one end, was an open fireplace, with a recess on each side of it. The Council table stretched from a point near this fireplace to the other end of the room. The Lord President sat at its head, and the other councillors were ranged in seats down its sides. Such spectators as had been able to secure the highly-prized privilege of being present remained standing throughout the session. In the chimney recess to the left of the President, stood Franklin with Burke and Priestley nearby. The dialectical ability and skill, which made his examination before the House of Commons so famous, he now had no opportunity to display; and unfailing fortitude was all that he could oppose to the outrage for which he had been singled out. With that, however, his uncommon strength of character abundantly supplied him.

The Doctor was dressed in a full dress suit of spotted Manchester velvet [Dr. Edward Bancroft wrote years afterwards to William Temple Franklin], 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."

Alone, in the recess on the left hand of the president, stood Benjamin Franklin [is the account of Bentham], in such position as not to be visible from the situation of the president, remaining the whole time like a rock, in the same posture, his head resting on his left hand; and in that attitude abiding the pelting of the pitiless storm.

Nothing but Jedburgh justice, of course, was to be expected from such a Committee in such a case, represented by such an advocate. Its report, dated the same day as its sitting, and as likely as not drafted beforehand, found that the letters had been surreptitiously obtained, and contained "nothing reprehensible"; that the petition was based on resolutions, formed on false and erroneous allegations; and was groundless, vexatious and scandalous; and calculated only for the seditious purpose of keeping up a spirit of clamor and discontent in the province; and that nothing had been laid before the Committee which did, or could, in their opinion, in any manner, or in any degree, impeach the honor, integrity, or conduct of the Governor or Lieutenant-Governor. Wherefore, the Lords of the Committee were humbly of the opinion that the petition ought to be dismissed. This recommendation was approved by the King, and an order was issued by him that the petition be dismissed, as answering the character imputed to it by the Committee. Nor did vengeance stop here. On the second day, after the Committee rose, Franklin was handed a communication from the Postmaster-General, informing him in brief terms that the King had "found it necessary" to dismiss him from the office of Deputy Postmaster-General in America.

In reporting the manner in which he had been affronted by the Privy Council to his Massachusetts constituents, Franklin used language in keeping with the sober spirit in which he had striven from the beginning to bring about an understanding between England and her Colonies.

What I feel on my own account [he said], is half lost in what I feel for the public. When I see, that all petitions and complaints of grievances are so odious to government, that even the mere pipe which conveys them becomes obnoxious, I am at a loss to know how peace and union are to be maintained or restored between the different parts of the empire. Grievances cannot be redressed unless they are known; and they cannot be known but through complaints and petitions. If these are deemed affronts, and the messengers punished as offenders, who will henceforth send petitions? And who will deliver them? It has been thought a dangerous thing in any state to stop up the vent of griefs. Wise governments have therefore generally received petitions with some indulgence, even when but slightly founded. Those, who think themselves injured by their rulers, are sometimes, by a mild and prudent answer, convinced of their error. But where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair.

His fellow-Americans were not so self-restrained. The American Post Office was shunned by its former patrons, and letters were delivered largely by private agencies, effigies of Wedderburn and Hutchinson were carried about the streets of Philadelphia, and, at night, were burnt, we are told, by Joseph Reed, "with the usual ceremonies, amidst the acclamations of the multitude." "Nothing can exceed," the same narrator adds, "the veneration in which Dr. Franklin is now held, but the detestation we have of his enemies." Wedderburn, who had complained in his speech of the attention paid by the press to the movements of Franklin, as though he were a great diplomatic character, had more occasion than ever to sneer at his public prominence. Hutchinson was compelled to resign his office, and to retire from execration in America to a slender pension and obscurity in England. Even in England, Horace Walpole stayed the pen, to which we are indebted for so many charming letters, long enough to write:

"Sarcastic Sawney, swol'n with spite and prate, On silent Franklin poured his venal hate, The calm philosopher, without reply, Withdrew, and gave his country liberty."[25]

Lord John Russell has said that it is "impossible to justify the conduct of Franklin" in the matter of the Hutchinson letters, and from time to time the same idea has been more or less hesitatingly advanced by others. Its justice, we confess, has never been apparent to us. That the letters did pass into the possession of Franklin, under the circumstances stated by him, which certainly do not reflect in any manner upon his honor, can hardly be doubted, unless mere suspicion is to give the lie to a life of uniform integrity. The mode, in which they were transmitted to America, under the restrictions imposed by him, was attended with so little regard to secrecy, so far as his connection with them was concerned, that Dr. Cooper wrote to him, "I can not, however, but admire your honest openness in this affair, and noble negligence of any inconveniences that might arise to yourself in this essential service to our injured country." It was not until the letters had been printed in America, contrary to his engagement with the gentleman, who had handed them to him, that he expressed the wish to Dr. Cooper that the fact of his having sent them should be kept secret, and not then until his inclinations on the subject were pointedly sounded by Dr. Cooper. As soon as they threatened to cause bloodshed, which he had a chance to avert, he made his connection with them public, and assumed the full responsibility for his act. Moreover, he truly said of the letters, when he assumed this responsibility in his communication to the _Public Advertiser_, "They were not of the nature of _private_ letters between friends. They were written by public officers to persons in public stations, on public affairs, and intended to procure public measures; they were therefore handed to other public persons, who might be influenced by them to produce those measures." Little can be added to this convincing statement. If a political agent of England in Boston had, under the same circumstances, come into possession of letters from English officials in England to Cushing or Dr. Cooper, revealing a deliberate intent on the part of the writers to initiate measures aimed at the just prerogatives of the Crown or Parliament, who would have thought the worse of him if he had transmitted them to King or Parliament? Were letters designed to help along the introduction of a military force into Boston for the purpose of abridging the political liberties of its people entitled to any higher degree of privacy? The accusation that Franklin had violated the confidence of private correspondence came with but poor grace, to say the least, from a Government which made a practice of breaking the seals of letters, and of no letters oftener than of those of Franklin, entrusted to its care. Indeed, not only were the seals of Franklin's letters frequently broken, and the letters read, but, in some instances, the letters were permanently retained by the English Government.

It was the fashion in England for a long time to ascribe the intense resentment felt by Franklin against England, after war broke out between that country and the colonies, to the indignity to which he was subjected by the Privy Council, and his dismission from office. The statement is not supported by the facts. That these circumstances made a deep impression upon his mind is undeniable, but it was really not until he found himself in America in 1775 that he gave himself up to the conclusion that nothing was to be gained by his remaining longer in England. After his removal from office, he still counselled his correspondents in America to adhere to a policy of patience and self-restraint, and in a letter to Thomas Cushing and others, written only a few days after the hearing at the Cockpit, he termed the destruction of the tea at Boston an unwarrantable destruction of private property and "an Act of violent Injustice." To all the efforts of Lord Chatham and his high-minded associates, after this hearing, to bring about a reconciliation between England and America, he lent the full weight of his advice and experience. And, when some of the members of the British Ministry, after it, ashamed to deal with him directly, covertly opened up an interchange of proposals with him through David Barclay, Dr. Fothergill and Lord Howe, in regard to the terms upon which a reconciliation might still be reached, he entered into the negotiations with a spirit singularly free from personal bitterness. There are few things more pathetic in the history of sundered ties than the account that Priestley has given us of the last days that Franklin spent in England in 1775. "A great part of the day above-mentioned that we spent together," Priestley tells us, "he was looking over a number of American newspapers, directing me what to extract from them for the English ones; and in reading them, he was frequently not able to proceed for the tears literally running down his cheeks." These, however, were not womanish tears, but rather such iron tears as ran down Pluto's cheeks. Never was there a time after the heart of America was laid bare to Franklin by the remonstrance against the Stamp Act when he was not unflinchingly prepared, if the painful necessity was forced upon him, to unite with his countrymen in defying the armed power of England. As the fateful issue of the protracted controversy approached nearer and nearer, his language became bolder and bolder.

The eyes of all Christendom [he wrote to James Bowdoin a few days before he left England in 1775], are now upon us, and our honour as a people is become a matter of the utmost consequence to be taken care of. If we tamely give up our rights in this contest, a century to come will not restore us in the opinion of the world; we shall be stamped with the character of dastards, poltrons and fools; and be despised and trampled upon, not by this haughty, insolent nation only, but by all mankind. Present inconveniences are, therefore, to be borne with fortitude, and better times expected.

"Informes hyemes reducit Jupiter; idem Summovet. Non si male nunc, et olim Sic erit."[26]

When he reached the shores of his native land, it was to hear that, while he was at sea, the battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought, and that the veins of the two countries, which he had striven so hard to keep closed, were already open and running.[27]

From that day, Franklin took his place with Washington, the Adamses, Jefferson and Patrick Henry as an inflexible champion of armed resistance to England. If he humored the more timid patriots, who were disposed to make still further appeals to English generosity, it was not because he shared their fallacious hopes but because he did not wish one column of the revolutionary movement to get too far in advance of the other. At this period of his life, his reputation was already very great. The English Tories believed or affected to believe that he was the father of all the mischief responsible for the American crisis. The English Whigs leaned upon his advice and assistance as those of a man who had the welfare of the entire British Empire deeply at heart. How he was regarded at home, is well illustrated in what General Nathanael Greene and Abigail Adams had to say of him when he subsequently visited Washington's head-quarters during the siege of Boston as a member of the Committee appointed by Congress to confer with Washington and delegates from the New England Colonies as to the best plan for raising, maintaining and disciplining the continental army. Recalling an occasion at this time, when Franklin had been brought under his observation, Greene wrote, "During the whole evening, I viewed that very great man with silent admiration." The language of Abigail Adams was not less intense.

I had the pleasure of dining with Dr. Franklin [she said], and of admiring him, whose character from my infancy I had been taught to venerate. I found him social but not talkative; and, when he spoke, something useful dropped from his tongue. He was grave, yet pleasant and affable. You know I make some pretensions to physiognomy, and I thought I could read in his countenance the virtues of his heart, among which, patriotism shone in its full lustre: and with that is blended every virtue of a Christian.

Those were dramatic hours when highly wrought feelings readily ran into hyperbole; nor had any Madame Helvetius come along yet with her "Helas! Franklin," and disordered skirts.

The reputation, which called forth these tributes, brought Franklin at once to the very forefront of the American Revolution, when he arrived at Philadelphia. The morning after his arrival, he, Thomas Willing and James Wilson, were elected by the Assembly of Pennsylvania as additional deputies to the Continental Congress that was to meet in Philadelphia in a few days, and he was re-elected to Congress at every succeeding election until his departure for France. By the first Congress, he was appointed Chairman of a Committee to devise a postal system for America; and when this Committee recommended the appointment of a Postmaster-General and various postal subordinates, and the establishment of a line of posts from Falmouth (now Portland) in Maine to Savannah, with as many cross posts as the Postmaster-General might think fit, Franklin was elected by Congress the Postmaster-General for the first year. He was also appointed by Congress one of the members of a committee to draw up a declaration, to be published by Washington when he took command of the American army, but the paper drafted by him does not appear to have ever been presented by him to Congress. At any rate, it adds nothing to his literary reputation, and is disfigured by one of the unseasonable _facetiae_ into which he had a way of wandering at times on grave occasions, after he found his feet again in the easy slippers of his old American environment.

Franklin also made some wise suggestions to Congress with respect to the best method of preventing the depreciation of the paper money issued by it. His first suggestion was that the bills should bear interest. This suggestion was rejected. His next was that, instead of the issuance of any more paper money, what had already been issued should be borrowed back upon interest. His last was that the interest should be paid in hard money, but both of the latter suggestions, though approved by Congress, were approved too late to accomplish their objects. After due tenderness had been exhibited by him to John Dickinson and the other members of Congress, who still clung to the hope of a reconciliation with England, Franklin brought forward a plan for the permanent union and efficient government of the Colonies. Under this plan each colony was to retain its internal independence, but its external relations, especially as respected resistance to the measures of the English Ministry, were committed to an annually-elected Congress. The supreme executive authority of the union was to be vested in a council of twelve, to be elected by the Congress. Ireland, Canada, the West Indies, Bermuda, Nova Scotia and Florida as well as the thirteen colonies within the present limits of the United States, were to be invited to join the confederacy. The union was to last until British oppression ceased, and reparation was made to the Colonies for the injuries inflicted upon them; which, of course, under the circumstances, meant until the Greek Calends. The plan was referred to a committee, but it was never acted upon by the House; being too bold a project to suit the cautious scruples of John Dickinson and the other moderate members of the Continental Congress, who dreaded the effect of a project of union upon the mind of the King, while the petition of Congress to him was pending. Among other important committees upon which Franklin served, when a member of the first Continental Congress, was one to investigate the sources of saltpetre; another to treat with the Indians; another to look after the engraving and printing of the continental paper money; another to consider Lord North's conciliatory resolution; another on salt and lead; and still another to report a plan for regulating and protecting the commerce of the Colonies. At the next session of the Congress, he was equally active. Among the things in which we find him engaged at this session, are the arrangement of a system of posts and expresses for the rapid transmission of dispatches; the establishment of a line of packets between America and Europe; an effort to promote the circulation of the continental money; and the preparation of instructions for the American generals. It was at this session of Congress, too, that Thomas Lynch, of South Carolina, Benjamin Harrison, of Virginia, and himself were appointed the committee to visit Washington's camp before Boston. The journey to Boston consumed thirteen days, and the conference, which followed with the American Commander-in-Chief and the delegates from the New England Colonies, resulted in many judicious conclusions with regard to the organization of the American army, and the conduct of the war, and, moreover, was an additional assurance to Washington and New England that, in the military operations before Boston, they could count upon the support of all America. It is obvious enough from writings, found among the papers of Franklin in his handwriting, that months before the Declaration of Independence was signed he was fully ready to renounce all allegiance to Great Britain. When the more conservative members of Congress so far yielded to their fears as to adopt, with the aid of some of the members from New England, a declaration that independence was not their aim, Franklin approved a plan then formed by Samuel Adams of bringing at least all the New England provinces together in a confederacy. "If you succeed," he said to Adams, "I will cast in my lot among you." This was six months before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin also served with John Jay and Thomas Jefferson upon a committee to interview a mysterious foreigner who had repeatedly expressed a desire to make a confidential communication to Congress. The stranger, who possessed a military bearing and spoke with a French accent, assured the committee that his most Christian Majesty, the King of France, had heard with pleasure of the exertions made by the American Colonies in defence of their rights and privileges, wished them success, and would, when necessary, manifest in a more open manner his friendly sentiments towards them. But, as often as he was asked by the committee for his authority for conveying such flattering assurances, he contented himself with drawing his hand across his throat, and saying, "Gentlemen, I shall take care of my head."

When the report of this committee was made to Congress, a motion on the strength of it to send envoys to France was defeated, but later a committee composed of Benjamin Harrison, John Dickinson, Thomas Johnson, John Jay and Franklin was appointed "to correspond secretly with friends in Great Britain, Ireland, and other parts of the world." The duties of this committee were mainly discharged by Franklin, who had, as we have seen, contracted many durable friendships abroad with men whose aid might mean much to America. To Charles W. F. Dumas, a native of Switzerland, residing at The Hague, he wrote, asking him to sound secretly the ambassadors of the different Powers, other than Great Britain, there for the purpose of ascertaining whether any of their courts were inclined to aid the Colonies or to form alliances with them, to let the mercantile world know that America was prepared to pay very high prices for arms, gunpowder and saltpetre, to send to America two engineer officers qualified to direct siege operations, construct forts and field-works and command artillery, and to receive and forward all letters that passed between the committee and its friends and agents abroad. A draft for one hundred pounds sterling accompanied the letter, together with an assurance from the committee that Dumas' services would be "considered and honorably rewarded by Congress." A similar letter was sent to Arthur Lee in London, accompanied by a remittance of two hundred pounds as his compensation. By the same ship went a letter from Franklin to Don Gabriel de Bourbon of Spain, in which, after thanking the Prince for the copy which he had sent him of the handsome Sallust, printed several years before at the royal press at Madrid, Franklin cleverly leads the attention of the Prince on to the consideration of a rising state which seemed likely soon to act a part of some importance on the stage of human affairs, and to furnish materials for a future Sallust. This letter, in which literary sympathy, the high-bred courtesy of a Spanish hidalgo and political address are mingled with the happiest effect, is a good example of what it meant to America to have such a man as Franklin as her world-interpreter. These letters were all entrusted to the care of a special messenger, Thomas Story. Soon after he left America, M. Penet, a merchant of Nantes, sailed for France with a contract from the committee for furnishing arms, ammunition and clothing to the American army and various letters from Franklin to friends of his in France, including his devoted pupil, Dr. Dubourg. Subsequently, before a reply had been received to any of the letters written by Franklin on its behalf, the committee decided to send an agent to Paris duly empowered to treat with the French King. Silas Deane, a Yale graduate, and a man, who might have left an unblemished reputation as an American patriot behind him, if Arthur Lee had not hounded him out of France and America into England, was selected for this mission. He was selected, Adams is so unkind as to intimate, because he was a Congressman who had lost his seat in Congress. For him Franklin drew up a letter of instruction, fixing the character that he was to assume, that of a merchant, when he reached France, mentioning the persons friendly to America with whom he was to establish a familiar intercourse, and prescribing the manner in which he was to approach M. de Vergennes, the French Minister, for the purpose of soliciting the friendship and assistance of France.

Another important call was made upon the services of Franklin, when with Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, as his colleagues, he was appointed by Congress to visit Canada, and to endeavor to rescue our affairs in that country from the lamentable condition of confusion and distress into which they had fallen. Quebec had been assaulted by Montgomery and Arnold, and had repelled the assault, Montgomery being killed and Arnold wounded in the attempt, and the American army was wasting away in the face of the intense cold, hunger and the small-pox. For the Continental paper money the Canadians had come to entertain a supreme contempt, and their attitude towards the Americans, with whom they had so often been at war in their earlier history, was in every respect that of distrust and aversion. With the committee went John Carroll, the brother of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who had been educated for the priesthood in France, and spoke its language with perfect fluency. It was thought at the time that for the Commission to take with it to Catholic and French Canada such a companion was a masterly stroke of policy. The powers, with which the Commission were clothed, were of a plenary description; to admit Canada into the union of the Colonies, when brought over to the American cause by the appeals of the Commissioners, and to admit it with a republican form of government, to settle disputes between the civil and military authorities in Canada, and to exercise an extraordinary degree of authority in one form or another with respect to the military forces of America there. They were even to take steps to establish a newspaper in Canada to help along the American propaganda.

Of all the episodes in the life of Franklin, this is the one upon which the reader dwells with the least satisfaction. He was entirely too old for the fatigues and hardships of the long April journey of five hundred miles from Philadelphia to New York, and up the Hudson, and over Lakes George and Champlain, and across the country at the head of Lake Champlain to Montreal. The distance between Philadelphia and New York was covered by the party in two days, the journey up the Hudson to Albany was made in a sloop, engaged for them by Lord Stirling, and from Albany to the country seat of General Philip Schuyler at Saratoga, thirty-two miles from Albany, they were conveyed over deep roads in a large country-wagon furnished by the General. Here it was that Franklin, debilitated by the exposure and shocks, to which his frame had been subjected, began to apprehend that he had undertaken a fatigue which, at his time of life, might prove too much for him, and sat down to write to some of his friends by way of farewell. After a few days' rest at Saratoga, the party, preceded by General Schuyler, went forward to Lake George. Though it was the middle of April, the lakes of that country were still covered with ice, and the roads with six inches of snow. After two days and a half of further travel, the southern end of the lake was reached. So encumbered with ice was it that the batteau, equipped with an awning for a cabin, with which General Schuyler had provided the party, took about thirty-six hours to traverse the thirty-six miles between the southern extremity of the lake and its northern. Then came the portage over the neck of land between Lake George and Lake Champlain, and the re-embarkation, after a delay of five days, on the waters of the latter lake. The portage was effected by placing the batteau on wheels and yoking it up to a string of oxen. Three days and a half more brought the party to St. John's, near the head of Lake Champlain, after a strenuous struggle with baffling ice and head winds. Another day's journey in _caleches_ brought them to Montreal where they were received by Arnold and a concourse of officers and citizens, and saluted with military honors.

It is enough to say that the Commissioners found American credit in Canada sunk to the lowest point. Even the express, sent by them from St. John's to tell Arnold of their arrival at that point, was held at a ferry for the ferriage charge until a friend, who was passing, changed an American paper dollar for him into silver; nor would the _caleches_ have come for the Commissioners if this friend had not engaged to pay the hire. Military defeat, violated contracts, discredited paper money and the anticipated coming of a British force overhung like a bank of nimbus cloud the entire horizon of American hopes in Canada. The Commissioners could not borrow money either upon the public or upon their own private credit. In a letter to Congress after they had been in Canada a week, they declared that, if money could not be had to support the American army in Canada with honor, so as to be respected instead of being hated by the people, it was their firm and unanimous opinion that it would be better to immediately withdraw it. With his usual public spirit, Franklin advanced on the credit of Congress to Arnold and other servants of Congress three hundred and fifty-three pounds in gold out of his own pocket--a loan which proved of great service in procuring provisions for the American army at a time of dire necessity. Two days after the letter of the Commissioners to Congress was written, news came to Montreal that a British fleet, full of troops, had reached Quebec, and landed a force, which had routed the small American army there. The decision was at once reached that there was nothing for the American forces to do but to retire to St. John's, and to prepare to resist at that point the advance of the British. This decision was acted upon at once, and the next morning Franklin, attended by John Carroll, set out on his return to Philadelphia; leaving his fellow-commissioners to oversee the retreat to St. John's and the establishment of defensive works at that point. With the assistance of General Schuyler, he and his companion passed safely down the lakes to Albany, and from Albany, after they had again enjoyed the General's hospitality, they were conveyed by his chariot to New York. Here Franklin wrote to his fellow-commissioners that he grew daily more feeble, and thought that he could hardly have got along so far but for Mr. Carroll's friendly assistance and tender care of him. Some symptoms of the gout, he further said, had appeared, which made him believe that his indisposition had been a smothered fit of that disorder, which his constitution wanted strength to form completely. But, with the reappearance of his old malady, came back the wit which, indeed, seems to have languished but little at any time under the rigors of his arduous mission. After congratulating Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll upon the recent capture of a British prize, loaded with seventy-five tons of gunpowder and a thousand carbines with bayonets, he further wrote: "The German Auxiliaries are certainly coming. It is our Business to prevent their Returning."

In the early part of June, Franklin was again in Philadelphia after an absence of about ten weeks. A little later the Declaration of Independence was reported to Congress by the committee, consisting of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Robert R. Livingston, Roger Sherman and himself, which had been elected by Congress to draft it, and after a debate, during which John Adams won only less reputation in defending, than Jefferson in writing, it, was adopted and given to the world, whose political opinions it was to influence so profoundly. Owing to a serious attack of the gout, Franklin had no hand in its preparation beyond suggesting a few verbal alterations. His part, however, in the adoption of the Articles of Confederation was more active. To the plan of allowing the thirteen States to vote on all questions by States, and of giving to each State, without reference to population or wealth, a single vote, he was strongly opposed; so much so that he even thought at one time of counselling Pennsylvania not to enter into the union if the plan was adopted. He hotly declared that a confederation upon such iniquitous terms would not last long. But we know from what Jefferson tells us that he also had his humorous fling at it. "At the time of the union of England and Scotland," he said, "the Duke of Argyle was most violently opposed to that measure, and among other things predicted that, as the whale had swallowed Jonah, so Scotland would be swallowed by England." "However," added Franklin, "when Lord Bute came into the government, he soon brought into its administration so many of his countrymen that it was found, in event, that Jonah had swallowed the whale."

About the same time, Franklin, Jefferson and John Adams were appointed a committee by Congress to hit upon a device for the seal of the Confederacy. No more congenial task could possibly have been set for Franklin, whose ingenuity always revelled in conceits of this kind. A device, based upon the drowning of Pharaoh, and accompanied by the motto, "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God," was suggested by him, and was made by the Committee, together with the Eye of Providence in a radiant triangle, the motto, _E Pluribus Unum_, and other elaborate features a part of its recommendation. As soon as Franklin was safely out of the country in France, Congress, perhaps not forgetting his story of John Thompson, the hatter, rejected as too redundant the entire complicated design except the _E Pluribus Unum_ and the Eye of Providence.

In the summer of 1776, Franklin also endeavored to carry out in another form his idea of preventing the Hessians from returning to their own country by assisting in distributing among them tobacco wrapped in copies of an address offering in the name of Congress a tract of land to every soldier who should desert the British service. Congress could not see why, if these hirelings were to be sold, they should not do the selling themselves instead of their Princes.

It was in the summer of 1776, too, that Franklin, John Adams and Edward Rutledge, of South Carolina, were elected a committee by Congress to call upon Lord Howe at Staten Island for the purpose of ascertaining whether he had any authority to negotiate a treaty of peace, and, if so, of learning what that authority was, and of receiving such propositions as he should think fit to make. Lord Howe was at the time the Admiral of the King's naval forces in America and joint commissioner with his brother General William Howe to grant pardons to such of the American rebels as should be ready to renew their allegiance to the King. On his arrival in July, 1776, at Sandy Hook, he had taken steps to distribute throughout the Colonies a declaration explaining the nature of the commission committed to his brother and himself. At the same time, he had written a letter to Franklin indicating his earnest desire to be instrumental in restoring peace between England and America. The same carrier delivered a copy of the declaration to Congress and the letter to Franklin. Both the declaration and the letter were given rude rebuffs. Congress ordered the declaration to be inserted in the newspapers so that, as it said, the few, who still remained suspended by a hope, founded either in the justice or moderation of their late King, might now at length be convinced that the valor alone of their country was to save its liberties. Franklin, after obtaining the permission of Congress, sent a reply to Lord Howe's letter by the hand of Colonel Palfrey of the American army. It is one of the best letters that he ever wrote, and told Lord Howe such blunt truths, and gave him such candid advice that, after reading it with surprise repeatedly flitting over his face, Lord Howe remarked to Colonel Palfrey with a gentleness as honorable to his amiable character as to that of Franklin that his old friend had expressed himself very warmly. Then subsequently had followed the disaster on Long Island, and the arrival of General Sullivan on parole at Philadelphia with a verbal message from Lord Howe to Congress, stating that he would like to confer with some of its members as private individuals though he could not yet treat with Congress itself. The result was the appointment of the committee to call upon him at Staten Island. The conference between the committee and Lord Howe took place at a house on that island and came to nothing. The committee had no authority to do anything except to receive proposals from Lord Howe, who really had no seasonable proposition to make, and Lord Howe had no authority to do anything except to grant pardons to persons who were not conscious of having committed any offence. When he stated in polite terms that he could not confer with the members of the committee as a committee of Congress but only as gentlemen of great ability and influence in the colonies, Adams declared in his emphatic way that he was willing to consider himself for a few moments in any character which would be agreeable to his Lordship except that of a British subject. "Mr. Adams," gravely observed Lord Howe, "is a decided character." All three of the Commissioners one by one made it clear to Lord Howe that the colonies were irrevocably committed to Independence. There was, therefore, nothing for him to do except to say in the end, "I am sorry, gentlemen, that you have had the trouble of coming so far to so little purpose." Minutes of this interesting conference were jotted down by Henry Strachey, Lord Howe's Secretary, and he has recorded two highly characteristic utterances of Franklin on the occasion. Such, Lord Howe declared, were his feelings towards America, on account of the honor conferred upon his family, by its recognition of the services rendered to it by his eldest brother (Viscount Howe), that, if America should fall, he would feel and lament it like the loss of a brother. Franklin's answer to this generous outburst is thus recorded by Strachey. "Dr. Franklin (with an easy air, a collected countenance, a bow, a smile, and all that _naivete_ which sometimes appeared in his conversation and often in his writings), My Lord, we will use our utmost endeavors to save your Lordship that mortification." Later, when Lord Howe assured Franklin that it was the commerce, the strength, the men of America rather than her money that Great Britain wanted, Franklin, ever alive to the military advantage possessed by the Colonies in the amazing capacity for reproduction of their people, replied, "Ay, My Lord, we have in America a pretty considerable manufactory of men." Strachey supposed that he meant to convey by this remark the impression that the American army was a large one, but Lord Howe knew Franklin's turn of mind better, and penciled on the margin of Strachey's manuscript, "No; their increasing population."

Lord Howe seems to have borne himself on this occasion in every respect like a gallant gentleman. When the three members of Congress reached the shore opposite to Staten Island, after the journey from Philadelphia, which Adams had made on horseback, and Franklin and Rutledge in chairs, they found a barge from him awaiting them with an officer in it as a hostage for their safe return from the island. Adams suggested that the hostage should be dispensed with, and his colleagues, he tells us in his grandiose way, "exulted in the proposition and agreed to it instantly." The fact was communicated to the officer, who bowed his assent, and re-embarked with the Americans. When Lord Howe saw the barge approaching the beach of the island, he walked down to meet it, and the Hessian regiment, which attended him, was drawn up in two lines facing each other. Upon seeing that the officer, whom he had sent over to the Jersey shore, had returned, Lord Howe exclaimed, "Gentlemen, you make me a very high compliment, and you may depend upon it I will consider it as the most sacred of things." When the party landed, he shook hands very cordially with Franklin, and, after being introduced to Adams and Rutledge, conducted the three between the two files of Hessians to the house where the conference was to take place; all four chatting pleasantly together as they walked along. Adams, who was far too intense an American not to hate savagely a Hessian, fresh from the cattle-pen of his Prince, described these soldiers as "looking fierce as ten Furies, and making all the grimaces, and gestures, and motions of their muskets with bayonets fixed, which, I suppose, military etiquette requires, but which we neither understood nor regarded." The house, which was to be the scene of the conference, was dilapidated and dirty from military use, but the apartment, into which the Americans were ushered, had been hung with moss and branches by Lord Howe with such refinement of taste that Adams subsequently pronounced it "not only wholesome, but romantically elegant." After reaching it, the whole party, including the colonel of the Hessian regiment, sat down to a collation "of good claret, good bread, cold ham, tongues, and mutton." When the repast was over, the colonel withdrew, the table was cleared and the fruitless conference began.

Nor was the activity of Franklin after his return from England limited to his duties as a member of Congress. If he fell asleep at times, when questions were under discussion by that body, it might well have been because he had no other time to sleep. Shortly after his return, he was elected Chairman of the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety, which was charged with the duty of arming and defending the Province, and of issuing bills of credit to defray the expense. In this office, he proved quite as fertile in expedients as he had done at the time of the Association years before. In the course of a year, the Delaware was effectively protected by forts and batteries and by a marine _chevaux-de-frise_, planned by Franklin himself; so much so that, when a British fleet attempted several years later to ascend the river, its progress was blocked for two months. Other features of the defensive plans adopted by the committee were row-galleys, fully armed and manned, of which Josiah Quincy spoke in a letter to Washington as "Dr. Franklin's row-galleys."

In the morning at six [Franklin wrote to Priestley], I am at the Committee of Safety, appointed by the Assembly to put the Province in a state of defence; which committee holds till near nine, when I am at the Congress, and that sits till after four in the afternoon. Both these bodies proceed with the greatest unanimity, and their meetings are well attended. It will scarce be credited in Britain, that men can be as diligent with us from zeal for the public good, as with you for thousands per annum. Such is the difference between uncorrupted new states, and corrupted old ones.

To the period when the Committee of Safety was holding its sessions belongs a story which William Temple Franklin tells us of his grandfather. Some of the more intolerant Pennsylvanians asked the Committee to call upon the Episcopal clergy to refrain from prayers for the King.

The measure [said Franklin, who always preserved his sense of proportion] is quite unnecessary; for the Episcopal clergy, to my certain knowledge, have been constantly praying, these twenty years, that "_God would give to the king and his council wisdom_"; and we all know that not the least notice has ever been taken of that prayer.

While a member of Congress and the Committee of Safety, Franklin was also elected a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, but, as the members of that body were still required before taking their seats to pledge their allegiance to the King, he was unwilling to actually take his seat. The Assembly was under the dominion of John Dickinson, the leader of the Proprietary Party, and was very reluctant to break finally with the Crown. Nevertheless, it re-elected Franklin to Congress, though he alone of the nine delegates, elected from Pennsylvania to that body, was unhesitatingly in favor of independence. This position of isolation he was not condemned to occupy long. At a subsequent election, the party in Pennsylvania, which shared Franklin's views, obtained the upper hand, followed the lead of Congress in repudiating all authority derived from the King and declared the Proprietary Government dissolved. For a time, there was no government of any kind in Pennsylvania for even the most elementary needs of society. The result, however, was an impressive illustration of the fact that all government is by no means on paper, for, at a later period of his life, Franklin told Sir Samuel Romilly that, while this anarchical condition lasted, order was perfectly preserved in every part of Pennsylvania, and that no man, who should have attempted to take advantage of the situation, for the purpose of evading the payment of a debt, could have endured the contempt with which he would have been visited.

The first step towards the restoration of civil government was taken by the Committee of Safety. It advised the people of Pennsylvania to elect delegates to a conference; they responded by doing so, and the delegates met at Philadelphia, sat five days, renounced allegiance to the King, took an oath of obedience to Congress and issued a call to the people to elect delegates to meet in convention and to form a constitution. At the election, which ensued, Franklin was one of the eight delegates elected from Philadelphia, and, when the convention met, he was unanimously chosen its President. On account of his duties as a member of Congress, his attendance upon the sessions of the convention was irregular, but it was regular enough to exert a marked influence over the proceedings of the body. In one respect, that is in the adoption of a single legislative chamber, the constitution framed by the convention bore the unmistakable impress of his peculiar political ideas.[28]

A few weeks after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, Franklin received a long letter from Dubourg addressed to "My Dear Master," which justified at least the inference that Vergennes leaned towards the cause of the Colonies. Encouraged by this letter, Congress elected three envoys to represent America in France: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Silas Deane. Deane was already in France. Jefferson was compelled by the ill health of his wife to decline, and Arthur Lee, then in London, was elected in his stead.

After a voyage of thirty days in the _Reprisal_, commanded by Captain Wickes, a small war-vessel in the service of Congress, Franklin reached Quiberon Bay. Thence he proceeded by land to Nantes and from Nantes to Paris. After his arrival at Paris, he lodged at the Hotel d'Hambourg, in the Rue de l'Universite, until he found a home in the house at Passy placed at his disposal by M. Donatien LeRay de Chaumont. For a time, he courted retirement, but, as France was drawn more and more closely into concert with the American rebels, his activity became more and more open, until the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga induced that country to abandon the policy of connivance and secret assistance, which it had pursued behind the screen, supplied by the commercial adventures of Caron de Beaumarchais, even before Franklin landed in Europe, and to enter into the treaty of alliance with the United States which made Adams, Lee and himself our fully acknowledged representatives at the French Court. The circumstances, under which the news of Burgoyne's capitulation was communicated to Franklin and his colleagues, constitute one of the most thrilling moments in history. The messenger, who conveyed it, was Jonathan Loring Austin, a young New Englander, and the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of War; and he was sent in a swift vessel for the very purpose by the State of Massachusetts. "Whatever in thy wise providence thou seest best to do with the young man, we beseech thee most fervently, at all events, to preserve the packet," is the tactless petition that Dr. Cooper is said to have addressed to Heaven on the Sunday before Austin sailed. The rumor of his coming preceded his arrival at Passy, and, when his chaise was heard in the court of the Hotel de Chaumont, Deane, Arthur and William Lee, Ralph Izard, Dr. Bancroft, Beaumarchais and Franklin went out to meet him. "Sir," said Franklin, "_is_ Philadelphia taken?" "Yes, sir," replied Austin. At this Franklin clasped his hands and turned as if to go back into the house. "But, sir," said Austin, "I have greater news than that. General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war!" The night of American adversity was now for the first time lit up by a real augury of dawn, and the treaties of amity and commerce and alliance between France and the United States, in the existing state of French feeling, followed almost as a matter of course.

When, weak from his long voyage, Franklin started out on the journey from the seashore to Paris, which led him at one point through the forest haunts of a bloodthirsty gang of robbers, he was seventy years of age. "Yet," he could truly declare some ten years later to George Whatley, "had I gone at seventy, it would have cut off twelve of the most active years of my life, employed too in matters of the greatest importance." These were indeed years of precious service to his country and of a fame for himself as resplendent as any in modern history which lacks the lustre of military glory. What Washington was to America in the field, Franklin was to her in the foreign relations upon which it may well be doubted whether the success of her arms did not at times depend. To obtain material aid in the form of money and munitions of war, soldiers and fleets from the one powerful country in Europe, which manifested a disposition to side actively with America, was the cardinal object of American policy after the outbreak of the Revolution, and rarely has any man ever been more richly qualified for the accomplishment of any object than was Franklin for the accomplishment of this. In the first place, his liberal and sympathetic nature, with its unrivalled capacity for assimilating foreign usages and habits of thought and feeling, slid without the slightest friction into every recess of its French environment. This was a fact of supreme importance in the case of a people so distinctive in point of race and temperament, and so irredeemably wedded to their own national prepossessions and prejudices as the French. Doubtless, Franklin was too wise a man not to have courted French favor, in a social sense, to some extent as a matter of political policy. Then, too, there is every reason to know that he was sincerely grateful to France for the benefits which she showered upon his country and himself. But it was mainly the spell of La Belle France herself, with her cordial appeal to his delight in existence, which finally produced the state of mutual affection that enabled him to say with truth that he loved the French and that they loved him. What this meant to our cause we can easily divine when we remember how wholly some of the colleagues of Franklin failed to recommend themselves to the good will of the people, whose good will it was of the utmost concern to America that they should conciliate, or to abstain from untimely dissensions. The exact reverse of what Franklin said of himself might be said of them. They disliked the French People, and the French People disliked them.[29] More than once it required all the management of Franklin to placate feelings that they had aroused in Vergennes, the French Minister, by lack of tact or good judgment. On one occasion, after being lectured by Adams, on the subject of the American paper money, held by citizens of France, Vergennes wrote to Franklin that nothing could be less analogous than the language of Adams to the alliance subsisting between his Majesty and the United States. In the same letter, he asked Franklin to lay the whole correspondence between Adams and himself before Congress, adding that his Majesty flattered himself that that Assembly, inspired with principles different from those which Mr. Adams had discovered, would convince his Majesty that they knew how to prize those marks of favor which the King had constantly shown to the United States. No choice was left to Franklin except to comply with the request and to do what he could to satisfy Vergennes that the sentiments of Congress and of Americans generally were very different from those of Adams. But unfortunately, before the correspondence between Adams and Vergennes could reach Congress, Adams had again, by his officious conduct in another particular, elicited a sharp rebuke from Vergennes. This correspondence, too, Vergennes requested Franklin to lay before Congress, which Franklin did with comments not more severe than the occasion called for, but which the pride of Adams, already deeply infected with the jealousy of Franklin, which he shared with Arthur Lee, so far as his manlier and wholesomer nature allowed, never fully forgave. "He," Vergennes said of Adams, in a letter to La Luzerne, "possesses a rigidity, a pedantry, an arrogance and a vanity which render him unfit to treat political questions."

After peace was restored between Great Britain and the United States, the strictures of Adams upon Vergennes and France became so imprudent and outspoken that Franklin wrote to Robert Morris:

I hope the ravings of a certain mischievous madman here against France and its ministers, which I hear of every day, will not be regarded in America, so as to diminish in the least the happy union that has hitherto subsisted between the two nations, and which is indeed the solid foundation of our present importance in Europe.

Four months later, Franklin, to use his own words, hazarded a mortal enmity by making this communication to Robert R. Livingston:

I ought not, however, to conceal from you, that one of my Colleagues is of a very different Opinion from me in these Matters. He thinks the French Minister one of the greatest Enemies of our Country, that he would have straitned our Boundaries, to prevent the Growth of our People; contracted our Fishery, to obstruct the Increase of our Seamen; and retained the Royalists among us, to keep us divided; that he privately opposes all our Negociations with foreign Courts, and afforded us, during the War, the Assistance we receiv'd, only to keep it alive, that we might be so much the more weaken'd by it; that to think of Gratitude to France is the greatest of Follies, and that to be influenc'd by it would ruin us. He makes no Secret of his having these Opinions, expresses them publicly, sometimes in presence of English Ministers, and speaks of hundreds of Instances which he could produce in Proof of them.

All this Franklin believed to be

as imaginary as I know his Fancies to be, that Count de V. and myself are continually plotting against him, and employing the News-Writers of Europe to depreciate his Character, &c. But as Shakespear says, "Trifles light as Air, &c." I am persuaded, however, that he means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.

A clever and just flash of characterization but for the usual inability of Franklin to refer abnormal conduct to anything short of dementia.[30] In the latter part of the same year, Franklin again had occasion to write to Robert Morris,

My Apprehension that the Union between France and our States might be diminished by Accounts from hence, was occasioned by the extravagant and violent Language held here by a Public Person, in public Company, which had that Tendency; and it was natural for me to think his Letters might hold the same Language, in which I was right; for I have since had Letters from Boston informing me of it. Luckily here, and I hope there, it is imputed to the true Cause, a Disorder in the Brain, which, tho' not constant, has its Fits too frequent.

Apart from more general considerations, as Franklin was, at the very time that Adams was holding this kind of discourse, soliciting more money from Vergennes for the United States, it was natural enough that he should fear the tendency of such ungrateful and provoking language to chill the liberality of the French Minister. It is agreeable, however, to recollect that in the succeeding year the able, upright and patriotic statesman, who had to such a conspicuous degree the defects of his virtues, was so far restored to reason, that Franklin could write to William Temple Franklin that he had walked to Auteuil on Saturday to dine with Mr. A. &c., with whom he went on comfortably.

As to how far Arthur Lee succeeded in ingratiating himself with Vergennes, the correspondence of that Minister with the French Minister in America enables us to judge without difficulty. In one letter, he wrote that he had too good an opinion of the intelligence and wisdom of the members of Congress and of all true patriots to suppose that they would allow themselves to be led astray by the representations of a man (Lee) whose character they ought to know.

As to Dr. Franklin [he continued], his conduct leaves nothing for Congress to desire. It is as zealous and patriotic, as it is wise and circumspect; and you may affirm with assurance, on all occasions where you think proper, that the method he pursues is much more efficacious than it would be if he were to assume a tone of importunity in multiplying his demands, and above all in supporting them by menaces, to which we should neither give credence nor value, and which would only tend to render him personally disagreeable.

The writer might as well have added "as is Arthur Lee." In another letter, Vergennes stated that the four millions more that France had decided to grant Dr. Franklin would convince Congress that they had "no occasion to employ the false policy of Mr. Izard and Mr. Lee to procure succors."[31]

For very different reasons, even Jay, with his admirable character, did not achieve any success in dealing with the French people beyond the kind of success which the French themselves damn with the phrase _succes d'estime_. The complaint that M. Grand made of him, when he was in Spain, "that he always appeared very much buttoned up," was hardly less applicable to him when he was transferred to Paris as one of our Peace Commissioners. "Mr. Jay," diarizes Adams, "likes Frenchmen as little as Mr. Lee and Mr. Izard