did. He says they are not a moral people; they know not what it is; he

don't like any Frenchman; the Marquis de Lafayette is clever, but he is a Frenchman."

John Laurens, too, when he came over to Paris to solicit money for the American army, _beau sabreur_ as he was, handled the French as awkwardly as the rest. "He was indefatigable, while he staid," Franklin wrote to William Carmichael, "and took true Pains, but he _brusqu'd_ the Ministers too much, and I found after he was gone that he had thereby given more Offence than I could have imagin'd." The truth is that, until the watchful detachment of Adams and Jay from their foreign environment became of some service to the United States in helping to assure to them the full fruits of their victory in the final shuffle of diplomacy over the Treaty of Peace, Franklin after the return of Silas Deane to America was the only one of our diplomatic representatives who can be said to have earned his salt in France.[32] The rest, so far from promoting the objects of the French mission, did much to jeopard its success. The United States could well have afforded to keep them all at home and to pay them double the amount of the salaries which were wasted upon them abroad. They either could not rise above the limitations and prejudices of foreigners in dealing with a people peculiarly tenacious of their own national views and characteristics, or were too lacking in diplomatic instinct and _savoir faire_ to hold their own grating idiosyncracies of temper and disposition in check, when it was of the highest importance to their country that they should do so; or they were so restive under the pre-eminence of Franklin as to be unable to control the envy and ill-feeling, which harassed his peace, and tended to discredit the cause, in which they were engaged. Congress did not do many wise things in regard to our interests in France during the Revolution, but undoubtedly it did one, when it finally brought the discord of its envoys in that country to an end by declining to accept the resignation of Franklin and appointing him the sole Ambassador of the United States at Paris.[33] Under no circumstances, does his success in obtaining succor for America from France stand out so clearly as when contrasted with the futile missions of Arthur Lee, William Lee, Ralph Izard, Francis Dana and John Jay to other courts than that of France. So far from obtaining any material aid for the United States from the countries, to which they were accredited, and should never have been sent,[34] they had to fall back upon Franklin himself for their own subsistence; though it is only fair to them to say that some of them were allowed by these countries too little freedom of approach to make an impression of any kind upon them, good or otherwise. For the bad feeling entertained by Adams, Lee and Izard towards Franklin there is no valid reason for holding Franklin responsible. It is plain that he did not lack the inclination to be on friendly terms with Adams; and there is no evidence that he in any way provoked the malice which he suffered at the hands of Arthur Lee, or the passionate animosity which he excited in Ralph Izard. As late as 1780, after the return of Adams to Europe as a peace commissioner, Franklin wrote to William Carmichael that Adams and himself lived on good terms with each other, though the former, he added, had never communicated anything of his business to him, and he had made no inquiries of him. If Franklin did not live on good terms with Arthur Lee, it was because no one, unless it were Adams, or Ralph Izard, when drawn to Lee by common jealousy of Franklin, could live on good terms with a man whose character was so hopelessly soured and perverted by suspicion and spleen. It was doubtless with entire truth that Franklin in a letter to William Carmichael, in which he termed Lee the most malicious enemy that he ever had, declared that there was not the smallest cause for his enmity. It had been inspired in England, as it had been revived in France, simply by the brooding desire of Lee to displace Franklin. In 1771, he made it plain in a letter from England to Samuel Adams that Franklin, in his opinion, was not too good to be the instrument of Lord Hillsborough's treachery in pretending that all designs against the charter of Massachusetts had been laid aside.

The possession of a profitable office at will, the having a son in a high post at pleasure, the grand purpose of his residence here being to effect a change in the government of Pennsylvania, for which administration must be cultivated and courted [Lee wrote], are circumstances which, joined with the temporizing conduct he has always held in American affairs, preclude every rational hope that, in an open contest between an oppressive administration and a free people, Dr. Franklin can be a faithful advocate for the latter.

In another letter he intimated a suspicion that Dr. Franklin had been "bribed to betray his trust." The motive for such communications is made clear enough by still another letter that he sent over to Boston stating that, while Dr. Franklin frequently assured him that he would sail for Philadelphia in a few weeks, he believed he would not quit them till he was gathered to his fathers.[35] The insidious calumnies that Lee sowed in Massachusetts, when he was coveting Franklin's agency for that colony, were only too effective for a time in creating even in the minds of such men as Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Josiah Quincy an impression unfavorable to Franklin's fidelity to the American cause. How little based on any real misgivings as to the character of the man, whose place he craved, were the innuendoes and accusations of Lee, may be inferred from his statement at the time of the Privy Council outrage that Franklin bore the assaults of Wedderburn "with a firmness and equanimity which conscious integrity can inspire." In a letter to Lord Shelburne in 1776, he even spoke of Franklin as "our _Pater Patriae_."

In France, the same sense of having a young man's revenue withered out by tedious expectation led to similar misrepresentations and intrigue. This time, the object was to bring about the transfer of Franklin from France, where the jealousy of Lee was incessantly inflamed by his great reputation and influence, to some other post, and the appointment of Lee himself as his successor. If the change had not been such as to foreshadow utter ruin to American interests in France, the letters that Arthur Lee wrote to his brother Richard Henry Lee in the prosecution of these aims would be little less than ludicrous. "My idea of adapting characters and places is this," he said in one letter, "Dr. F. to Vienna, as the first, most respectable, and quiet; Mr. Deane to Holland.... France remains the centre of political activity, and here, therefore, I should choose to be employed." There was but one way, he said in another letter to his brother, of bringing to an end the neglect, dissipation, and private schemes, which he saw in every department of the American Mission at Paris, and that was the plan he had before suggested of appointing the Dr. _honoris causa_ to Vienna, Mr. Deane to Holland, and Mr. Jennings to Madrid, and of leaving him (Lee) at Paris. To Samuel Adams he wrote that he had been at the several courts of Spain, Vienna and Berlin, and found that of France to be the great wheel that moved them all. He would, therefore, be much obliged to Adams for remembering that he should prefer being at the court of France.

Lee was a man of considerable ability, though his incurable defects of disposition and temper almost wholly deprived him of the profitable use of it, and he was from first to last, when in Europe, loyal to the American cause. But, if there ever was a person born under the malignant sign, Scorpio, it was he. He was

"More peevish, cross and splenetic Than dog distract or monkey sick."

In the course of his suspicious, jealous and quarrelsome life he appears to have inflicted a venomous sting upon almost every human being that ever crossed the path of his inordinate and intriguing ambition. In the monopoly of intelligence and public virtue that he arrogated to himself he was not unlike the French woman who was credited by Franklin with the assertion that she met with nobody but herself that was always in the right. With a few exceptions, no prominent American in France, when he was in that country, escaped his insidious defamation. Silas Deane was the accomplice of Beaumarchais in his effort to make the United States pay for free gifts of the French King. Franklin was a cunning rogue ever on the watch to line the pockets of his grandnephew, Jonathan Williams; indeed Lee did not scruple to term him "the father of corruption"; every day gave him fresh reasons for suspecting William Carmichael; John Paul Jones was merely the captain of "a cruising job of Chaumont and Dr. Franklin." And so on with the other contemporaries, whose character he did his best to tarnish with the breath of calumny, ever actuated as he was by the sinister, backward-spelling disposition which

"Never gives to truth and virtue that Which simpleness and merit purchaseth."

What both Lee and Adams could not forgive in Franklin was the fact that, though there were three American envoys at Paris, the French Ministry and People would have it that there was only one, "_le digne Franklin_,"[36] "_le plus grand philosophe du siecle_," "_l'honneur de l'Amerique, et de l'humanite_." The wounded sense of self-importance, awakened by this fact, assumed in Adams, except in his more extravagant moments, no worse form than that of quickened self-assertion, or the charge that Franklin was grown too inert, from years and physical infirmities, to conduct the routine business of the mission with the proper degree of order and system, or was too susceptible to social and academic flattery to keep a vigilant eye upon the more selfish side of French policy. But in the case of Lee, lacerated vanity not only led him along finally to the conclusion that Deane and Franklin were both rascals, but early convinced him that all their transactions, even the simplest, where he was concerned, were shaped by a desire to slight or affront him, or to deprive him of his just privileges and standing as one of the Commissioners. He had hardly been in France a year before his perverse pen was lecturing and scolding Franklin as if he were one of the most arbitrary and inconsiderate of men instead of one of the most reasonable and considerate. At first, Franklin did not reply to such letters, but his failure to reply simply supplied Lee with another excuse for scolding. At last, Lee, after taxing him with tardiness in settling the accounts of the Commissioners, and with keeping him in the dark about the mission on which M. Gerard had been sent to America, expressed the hope that he would not treat this letter from him as he had many others with the indignity of not answering it.

It is true [said Franklin], that I have omitted answering some of your Letters, particularly your angry ones, in which you, with very magisterial Airs, school'd and documented me, as if I had been one of your Domestics. I saw in the strongest Light the Importance of our living in decent Civility towards each other, while our great Affairs were depending here. I saw your jealous, suspicious, malignant and quarrelsome Temper, which was daily manifesting itself against Mr. Deane, and almost every other Person you had any Concern with: I therefore pass'd your Affronts in Silence; did not answer but burnt your angry Letters, and received you when I next saw you with the same Civility as if you had never wrote them.

These words are taken from a letter in which Franklin replied in detail to all the grievances vented in Lee's letter. On the day before, he had written a curter reply which gives us a good idea of what his anger was at flood-tide.

It is true [this reply began], I have omitted answering some of your Letters. I do not like to answer angry Letters. I hate Disputes. I am old, can not have long to live, have much to do and no time for Altercation. If I have often receiv'd and borne your Magisterial Snubbings and Rebukes without Reply, ascribe it to the right Causes, my Concern for the Honour & Success of our Mission, which would be hurt by our Quarrelling, my Love of Peace, my Respect for your good Qualities, and my Pity of your Sick Mind, which is forever tormenting itself, with its Jealousies, Suspicions & Fancies that others mean you ill, wrong you, or fail in Respect for you. If you do not cure yourself of this Temper it will end in Insanity, of which it is the Symptomatick Forerunner, as I have seen in several Instances. God preserve you from so terrible an Evil: and for his sake pray suffer me to live in quiet.

The petition was not heeded. Cut off by his impracticable temper and the dis-esteem of the French Ministry from any participation in the more important transactions of the Mission, the industrious malice of Lee found employment in accusations of peculation against the other agents of the United States in France and in petty refinements over the proper methods of keeping the accounts and papers of the Commissioners. Everything that he touched threw out thorns and exuded acrid juices. Franklin might well have said of him what he said of his brother, William Lee, that he was not only a disputatious but a very artful man. He pursued Deane with such plausible misrepresentations, when the latter sought justice at the hands of Congress, that the unhappy man was finally hurried, to use Franklin's phrase, into joining his friend, Arnold. How he harried Jonathan Williams, we have already seen. So well understood was his litigious, malevolent temper that, when the State of Virginia desired to purchase arms and military stores in France, several merchants refused to have any dealings with him, and one firm dealt with him only to be involved in the usual web of fine-spun suspicion and controversy.

I hope, however [wrote Franklin to Patrick Henry, at the time Governor of Virginia, who had solicited Franklin's assistance in the matter], that you will at length be provided with what you want, which I think you might have been long since, if the Affair had not been in Hands, which Men of Honour and Candour here are generally averse to dealing with, as not caring to hazard Quarrels and Abuses in the settlement of their Accounts.

He dared not meddle, he said, with the dispute in which Lee was engaged, "being charg'd by the Congress to endeavour at maintaining a good Understanding with their other Servants," which was, "indeed, a hard task with some of them," he declared.

As his acquaintance with Lee and his brother, William Lee, extended, Franklin became more and more wary in dealing with them. This was illustrated in his attitude towards the papers of Thomas Morris, the brother of Robert Morris, and the Commercial Agent of the United States at Nantes. When this gentleman, who, according to one of his contemporaries, "turned out the greatest drunkard the world ever produced," had duly paid the forfeit of his bibulous life, William Lee, with the aid of an order from the French Ministry, secured possession of all his papers, public and private, and, when on the eve of setting out for Germany, placed the trunk containing them sealed in the custody of Franklin. The key, Franklin told him, he would rather have in the keeping of Arthur Lee. A correspondence followed between Franklin and John Ross, who had obtained an order from Congress for the delivery of the trunk to him. If it had been Pandora's box, Franklin could not have undertaken the delivery of the papers in a more gingerly manner.

I am glad [he wrote to Ross], an Order is come for delivering them to you. But as the Dispute about them may hereafter be continued, and Papers suspected to be embezzled by somebody; and as I have sign'd a terrible long Receipt for the Trunk, of which I have no copy, and only remember that it appear'd to be constructed with all the Circumspection of the Writers Motto, _Non incautus futuri_ and that it fill'd a Half Sheet so full there was scarce Room for the Names of the four Evidences he requir'd to witness it; I beg you will not expect me to send it to you at Nantes but appoint who you please to receive it for you here. For I think I must deliver it before Witnesses, who may certify the State of the Seals; nothing being more likely than that Seals on a Trunk may rub off in the Carriage on so long a Journey; and then I should be expos'd to the Artful Suggestions of some who do not love me, & whom I conceive to be of very malignant Dispositions.

Afterwards, when Arthur Lee informed Franklin that, unless he was furnished with money by him, he would have to give up the thought of proceeding to Spain, Franklin replied dryly: "As I can not furnish the Expence, and there is not, in my Opinion, any Likelihood at Present of your being received at that Court, I think your Resolution of returning forthwith to America is both wise and honest." And, even when he supposed that he was finally rid of the gad-fly, which had annoyed him so long, and that Lee was off for America, with his poisoned ink-well and busy pen, Franklin took pains that he should not have everything his own way, though a thousand leagues distant. "There are some Americans returning hence," he wrote to Samuel Cooper, "with whom our people should be upon their guard, as carrying with them a spirit of enmity to this country. Not being liked here themselves, they dislike the people; for the same reason, indeed, they ought to dislike all that know them."

Three days later, he wrote to Joseph Reed, of Pennsylvania, a letter in which, after denying a false statement made about the writer by Lee, he said, "He proposes, I understand, to settle in your Government. I caution you to beware of him; for, in sowing Suspicions and Jealousies, in creating Misunderstandings and Quarrels among friends, in Malice, Subtilty, and indefatigable industry, he has I think no equal." A few days later, he wrote to William Carmichael, "Messrs. Lee and Izard are gone to L'Orient, in order to embark in the _Alliance_ together, but they did not travel together from hence. No soul regrets their departure. They separately came to take leave of me, very respectfully offering their services to carry any dispatches, etc."

But gone the gad-fly was not yet. After Lee reached L'Orient, the officers and men of the _Alliance_ refused to weigh anchor until certain claims of theirs to wages and prize money were complied with, and, while John Paul Jones, their captain, was away at Paris, engaged in an effort to hasten the payment of the prize-money, Captain Peter Landais, acting under the advice of Arthur Lee and Commodore Gillon, took possession of the ship and sailed off for America. As soon as the news of the mutiny came to Franklin, he suspected that Arthur Lee was at the bottom of it.

I have no doubt [he wrote to Samuel Wharton, in regard to Landais] that your suspicion of his Adviser is well founded. That Genius must either find or make a Quarrel wherever he is. The only excuse for him that his Conduct will admit of, is his being at times out of his Senses. This I always allow, and am persuaded that if some of the many Enemies he provokes do not kill him sooner he will die in a madhouse.

The sequel of this high-handed proceeding afforded Franklin another opportunity to question Lee's mental soundness. The _Alliance_ was not long out before Landais exhibited such flightiness that its passengers deposed him, and placed the ship in command of its first lieutenant. Commenting on the incident, Franklin wrote to Samuel Cooper:

Dr. Lee's accusation of Capt. Landais for Insanity was probably well founded; as in my Opinion would have been the same Accusation, if it had been brought by Landais against Lee; For tho' neither of them are permanently mad, they are both so at times; and the Insanity of the Latter is the most Mischievous.

How truly high-handed the rape of the _Alliance_ was, will be realized, when the reader is told that at the time Landais had been deprived of the captaincy of the _Alliance_, upon the charge of gross misconduct in the glorious engagement between the _Serapis_ and the _Bon Homme Richard_, and was looking forward to a court-martial in America upon specifications involving a capital offence; that he had abandoned the ship, and that Jones, who had won imperishable honor and renown in the conflict between the _Serapis_ and the _Bon Homme Richard_, had been placed in command of her by Franklin, and had been in command of her for eight months; and that Franklin had in a letter to Landais sternly refused to restore her to him.

Of William Lee, Franklin had, as we have just seen, very much the same opinion that he had of Arthur Lee. When he talked to Franklin of nominating Jonathan Williams, his grandnephew, and Mr. Lloyd in the place of Thomas Morris and himself as the Commercial Agents of the United States at Nantes, Franklin wrote to Williams: "I question whether there be Flesh enough upon the Bone for two to pick. I doubt its being worth your while to accept of it. I did not thank him for mentioning you because I do not wish to be much oblig'd to him and less to be a little oblig'd."

Not long after this, Franklin had less cause to think well of William Lee than ever. Upon representations being made by Ralph Izard and him to the three Commissioners, Arthur Lee, Deane and Franklin, that, though they had been appointed Ministers to the courts of Berlin, Vienna and Florence by Congress, no provision for their expenses had reached them, the three Commissioners asked what sums they would require. William Lee replied that he could not exactly compute in advance what he would need, but that, if he was empowered to draw upon the banker of the Commissioners, he would certainly only draw from time to time for such sums as were absolutely necessary; and that it was therefore a matter of little importance at what amount the credit was fixed. "It would however look handsome & confidential," he said, "if the sum were two Thousand Louis." Thereupon, Franklin tells us, the Commissioners "did frankly but unwarily give the Orders." Soon afterwards, Deane and Franklin were informed that William Lee and Izard had gone directly to the banker of the Commissioners, and drawn out the whole amount of the credit, and had deposited it to their own account exclusively. After that, even an order from Congress, empowering William Lee and Izard to draw upon the Commissioners for their expenses at foreign courts, was unavailing to open Franklin's purse strings. Doubtless, he wrote with calm irony to the Committee on Foreign Affairs at home, Congress, when it passed its resolution, intended to supply the Commissioners with funds for meeting the drafts of William Lee and Izard. And, to make things still worse for the disappointed beneficiaries of the resolution, he further said: "I could have no intention to distress them, because I must know it is out of my Power, as their private Fortunes and Credit will enable them at all times to pay their own Expences."

Arthur Lee had taken good care to protect himself against any such afterclaps. In a formal letter to him, refusing to accede to his suggestion that no orders should be drawn upon the banker of the Commissioners, unless signed by all three of the Commissioners, Franklin told him flatly that he did not choose to be obliged to ask Mr. Lee's consent, whenever he might have occasion to draw for his subsistence, as that assent could not be expected from any necessity of a reciprocal compliance on Mr. Franklin's part, Mr. Lee having secured his subsistence by taking into his own disposition 185,000 livres, and his brother, by a deception on the Commissioners, 48,000.

Ralph Izard, of South Carolina, was very closely linked with Arthur Lee in Franklin's mind. Though appointed by Congress Commissioner to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany at Florence, this court refused to receive him for fear of offending England, and he remained in Paris during the entire period of his appointment. In a letter to James Lovell, Franklin stated that he had made it a constant rule to answer no angry, affronting or abusive letters, of which he had received many, and long ones, from Mr. Lee and Mr. Izard. The hostility of Izard to Franklin, due in the main to the same causes as Arthur Lee's, was whetted partly by the fact that he was not consulted, when the treaty of alliance was entered into between the American Commissioners and France, and partly by the fact that Franklin refused to honor some of his pecuniary applications. In a letter from Passy to Francis Hopkinson, Franklin, as we have seen, said that he deserved Izard's enmity because he might have avoided it by paying him a compliment which he neglected, but elsewhere in his correspondence he rests this enmity upon substantially the same grounds as that of Arthur Lee. When Izard assailed him, because he had not conferred with him in relation to the treaty of alliance, Franklin replied that he would give his letter a full answer when he had the honor of seeing him. "But," he said, "I must submit to remain some days under the Opinion you appear to have form'd not only of my poor Understanding in the general Interests of America, but of my Defects in Sincerity, Politeness & Attention to your Instructions."

It is doubtful whether a letter in which, in reply to an application for money, he reminded Izard of the latter's own pecuniary independence, was ever sent; but part of it is too pointed not to bear quotation. After dwelling upon the many calls upon the funds in the hands of the Commissioners, it goes on in these words:

In this Situation of our Affairs, we hope you will not insist on our giving you a farther Credit with our Banker, with whom we are daily in danger of having no farther Credit ourselves. It is not a Year since you received from us the sum of Two Thousand Guineas, which you thought necessary on Acct of your being to set out immediately for Florence. You have not incurr'd the Expence of that Journey. You are a Gentleman of Fortune. You did not come to France with any Dependence on being maintained here with your Family at the Expence of the United States, in the Time of their Distress, and without rendering them the equivalent Service they expected.

Izard seems to have had the kind of temper that heats as readily as iron but cools off as slowly as a footbrick, wrapped up in flannels.[37] Speaking of the indignity, to which Franklin had been subjected in his sight before the Privy Council, he said: "When Dr. Franklin was so unmercifully bespattered by Wedderburn, I sat upon thorns; and had it been me that was so grossly insulted, I should instantly have repelled the attack, in defiance of every consequence." It is not unlikely that he would have been as good as his word, so prompt was the second, who had borne the challenge from Temple to Whately, to give free play to his irascible and imperious nature. But Graydon is our authority for the statement, too, that as long as four years after Izard had returned in the _Alliance_ from France to the United States, the name of Franklin could not be mentioned in his presence without hurrying him into a state of excitement.

Altogether, our readers will agree with us, we are sure, in thinking that few things in our national history are calculated to leave a more painful impression upon the mind than the conduct of some of the men, who were supposed to represent the United States abroad, while Franklin, in spite of the jarring discords, of which he was the innocent author, was manfully struggling with the responsibilities which belonged in part to others, but never really rested upon any but his own old shoulders (as he termed them). By character and temperament, in some instances, they were conspicuously unfitted for the delicate tasks of diplomacy, and were too raw and rigidly set in their personal and national prejudices besides ever to succeed in repressing their dislike for the French. There can be no doubt, Jay aside, that they would have quarrelled with each other as rancorously as they did with Franklin but for the cohesion created by their common jealousy of him. How indefensible their attitude towards him was becomes all the more apparent when we recollect that rarely has any man ever been endowed with a mind or nature better fitted to disarm malice than those of Franklin. It is a hard judgment, not to be formed without due allowance for the extent to which the testimony of history is always suborned by the glamour of a great reputation, but it is nevertheless, we believe, only a just judgment, to declare that Franklin spoke the simple truth when he wrote to William Carmichael, "Lee and Izard are open, and, so far, honourable Enemies; the Adams, if Enemies, are more covered. I never did any of them the least Injury, and can conceive no other Source of their Malice but Envy." The excessive respect, shown him in France by all ranks of people, he said in the same letter, and the little notice taken of them, was a mortifying circumstance, but it was what he could neither prevent nor remedy.

This "excessive respect," or justly deserved fame, as the biographer of Franklin might call it, was another thing which contributed to Franklin's brilliant success at the Court of France. When he arrived in that country, he was no stranger there. His two previous visits to it had made him well acquainted with Turgot, Quesnay, Dupont de Nemours, the elder Mirabeau, Dubourg and Morellet and the other members of the group, known as the Physiocrats, whose speculative passion for Agriculture was one of the active intellectual forces of the time. His literary and scientific attainments had likewise won him the favor of other famous Frenchmen. These are facts of no slight importance, when we recall the extent to which the currents of French thought, on the eve of the French Revolution, were fed and directed by men of letters and philosophers. When Franklin found himself in France, for the third time, he was a member of the Royal Society at London and the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, and had been honored with academic degrees not only by Yale, Harvard and William and Mary in his own country, but by Oxford in England and St. Andrews in Scotland.[38] An edition of his scientific works had been translated into French by his friend Dubourg, and his _Way to Wealth_ had been translated into the same language, and distributed broadcast by bishops and cures among the members of their flocks as incentives to industry and frugality. It was in France, too, that D'Alibard had verified the sublime hypothesis of Franklin by drawing down the lightning from the clouds. Moreover, before he left England at the end of his second mission to that country, his activity and prominence in resisting the arbitrary measures of the British Ministry had made his political influence and standing thoroughly familiar to the French Cabinet, which had for many years kept a close watch upon every movement or event that portended a revolt of the American Colonies. Along with these solid claims to the attention and respect of the French people were certain other circumstances that strongly tended to heighten the fame of Franklin. It was the era when the modern Press was beginning to assert its new-born power, and the fur cap, one of the badges of the mediaeval printer, that he wore, was hardly necessary to remind the newspapers of that day, with all their facilities for rouging public reputation by artful and persistent publicity, that Franklin was first of all a printer. It was also the era when the idea of the universal brotherhood of men of all classes and races made an uncommonly strong appeal to democratic and humanitarian impulses. Such an age could readily enough regard a man like Franklin as a true citizen of the world, a veritable friend of man and a torch-bearer of the new social and political freedom. It was also the era when it was the mode to indulge dreams of primitive beatitude and idyllic simplicity, and around no figure could such dreams more naturally gather than that of the venerable and celebrated man, whose thin white hair, worn straight without wig or powder, plain dress and frank, direct speech seemed to make him the ideal exemplar of a state of society devoid of monarch, aristocrat or hierarch.[39]

That Franklin, when he came to Paris, as the representative of a country, which was not only at war with the hereditary enemy of France, but had fearlessly avowed general political sentiments, that France herself was eager to avow, should, with his fame, simple manners and social charm, have excited for a time the surpassing enthusiasm which he did is not surprising; for what the French ardently admire they usually festoon with fireworks and crown with flowers; but that this enthusiasm should have continued, so far as we can see, wholly unabated for nine years, is a surprising thing, indeed, when we recollect how inclined the fickle populace of every country is to beat in its hour of inevitable reaction the idol before which it has prostrated itself in its hour of infatuation. While in France, Franklin was not simply the mode, he was the rage. Learned men from every part of Europe thought a visit to Paris quite incomplete, if it did not include a call upon him. Even the Emperor Joseph, "a King by trade," as he once termed himself, intrigued to meet him _incognito_. Among the many letters that he received from individuals, distinguished or obscure, who sought to flatter him or to draw upon his wisdom or treasured knowledge, was Robespierre--then a young advocate at Arras--who sent him a copy of his argument in defence of the lightning rod before the Council of Artois, and Marat who, true enough to his future, was investigating the physical laws of heat and flame. In the letter to Franklin, by which the copy of his argument was accompanied, Robespierre spoke of Franklin as "a man whose least merit is to be the most illustrious _savant_ of the world." To have a Franklin stove in its fireplace, with a portrait of Franklin on the wall above it, grew to be a common feature of the home of the wealthier householder in Paris. His spectacles, his marten fur cap, his brown coat, his bamboo cane became objects of general imitation. Canes and snuff-boxes were carried _a la Franklin_. Portraits, busts and medallions of him were multiplied without stint. Among the busts were some in Sevres china, set in blue stones with gold borders, and among the medallions were innumerable ones made of clay dug at Passy.

The clay medallion of me [Franklin wrote to Sarah Bache] you say you gave to Mr. Hopkinson was the first of the kind made in France. A variety of others have been made since of different sizes; some to be set in the lids of snuff-boxes, and some so small as to be worn in rings; and the numbers sold are incredible. These, with the pictures, busts, and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere) have made your father's face as well known as that of the moon, so that he durst not do anything that would oblige him to run away, as his phiz would discover him wherever he should venture to show it.

It was computed that some two hundred different kinds of representations of his face were turned out to be set in rings, watches, snuff-boxes, bracelets, looking-glasses and other chattels. One print of him is said to have made the fortune of the engraver. Particularly striking is the testimony of John Adams to the fame of Franklin when in France, which is part of the remarkable letter published by him in the _Boston Patriot_ on May 11, 1811, in answer to Franklin's strictures on his conduct in France:

His reputation was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire; and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them.... His name was familiar to government and people, to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a _valet de chambre_, coachman or footman, a lady's chambermaid, or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind. When they spoke of him, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.

To the pen of Adams we are also indebted for an account of the first public meeting between Voltaire and Franklin, which also testified with such dramatic _eclat_ to the place occupied by Franklin in the hearts of the French people. This was at the hall of the Academy of Science in Paris.

Voltaire and Franklin were both present, and there presently arose a general cry that M. Voltaire and M. Franklin should be introduced to each other. This was done, and they bowed and spoke to each other. This was no satisfaction; there must be something more. Neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected; they, however, took each other by the hand. But this was not enough; the clamor continued, until the explanation came out. "_Il faut s'embrasser, a la Francaise._" The two aged actors upon this great theatre of philosophy and frivolity then embraced each other, by hugging one another in their arms, and kissing each other's cheeks, and then the tumult subsided. And the cry immediately spread through the whole kingdom, and, I suppose, over all Europe, _"Qu'il etait charmant de voir embrasser Solon et Sophocle!"_

A few weeks later Voltaire was dead, and, in the fall of the same year, his Apotheosis was celebrated by the Lodge of Nine Sisters--a Freemason's Lodge in Paris. An account of this memorable occasion was subsequently published by the officers of the Lodge. Madame Denis, the niece of Voltaire, and the Marchioness of Villette, whom he called his _Belle et Bonne_, and under whose roof he died, were present. After various addresses and strains of orchestral music, a clap of thunder was heard. Then

the sepulchral pyramid disappeared, great light succeeded the gloom which had prevailed till now, an agreeable symphony sounded in the place of the mournful music, and an immense picture of the apotheosis of Voltaire was disclosed. The picture represented Corneille, Racine and Moliere above Voltaire as he leaves his tomb. Truth and Beneficence present him to them. Envy pulls at his shroud, in the wish to hold him back, but is driven away by Minerva. Higher up may be seen Fame, publishing the triumph of Voltaire.

Crowns were then laid upon the heads of La Dixmerie, the orator, Gauget, the painter, and Franklin, who lifted them from their heads and laid them at the feet of Voltaire's image.

Madame Campan in her _Memoirs_ mentions another occasion on which the most beautiful of three hundred women was designated to place a crown of laurel on Franklin's head, and to kiss him on each cheek.

Add to all these evidences of popular admiration and affection the intimate footing maintained by Franklin in so many French homes, and we begin to understand how powerfully his public and social standing helped to swell the resistless tide of sympathy and enthusiasm which bore down all opposition to the French alliance.

But far more than to his mere congeniality with the social spirit of the French People, or to his literary and scientific fame, or to his kinship with all the liberal tendencies of the eighteenth century in America and Europe, was the success of Franklin at the French court due to those general attributes of mind and character which he brought to every exigency of his private or public life: his good sense, his good feeling, his perfect equipoise, his tact, his reasonableness, his kindly humor. It was these things which, above everything else, enabled him to surmount all the trying difficulties of his situation, and to give to the world the most imposing example of fruitful pecuniary solicitation that it has ever known. The firm hold that he obtained upon the esteem and good will of Vergennes, "that just and good man" he terms him in one of his letters, was but the merited reward of personal qualities which invite, secure and retain esteem and good will under all human conditions. Vergennes, who held the keys of the French money-chest, and directed the policies of France, respected, trusted and liked Franklin, because Franklin, at any rate, duly recognized and acknowledged the generous motives which had, in part, inspired French intervention in the American contest, because he exhibited a considerate appreciation of the sacrifices which it cost France, still bleeding from her last struggle with Great Britain, to make such large and repeated loans to the United States, and because his tactful and discreet applications for pecuniary assistance for his country were never marked by disgusting importunity or thinly veiled menaces. How true this is we have already seen; and its truth is still further confirmed by the testimony of Franklin's successor, Jefferson, who, when asked in Paris, whether he replaced Franklin, was in the habit of replying, "No one can replace him, sir; I am only his successor." After stating the circumstances, including his own association with Franklin at Paris, which had convinced him that the charge of subservience to France, made against Franklin, had not a shadow of foundation, Jefferson pays this impressive tribute to him:

He possessed the confidence of that Government in the highest degree, insomuch, that it may truly be said, that they were more under his influence than he under theirs. The fact is, that his temper was so amiable and conciliatory, his conduct so rational, never urging impossibilities, or even things unreasonably inconvenient to them, in short, so moderate and attentive to _their_ difficulties as well as our own, that what his enemies called subserviency, I saw was only that reasonable disposition, which, sensible that advantages are not all to be on one side, yielding what is just and liberal, is the more certain of obtaining liberality and justice. Mutual confidence produces, of course, mutual influence, and this was all which subsisted between Dr. Franklin and the government of France.

To Jefferson we are also indebted for the statement that, when he was in France, there appeared to him more respect and veneration attached to the character of Franklin than to that of any other person in the same country, foreign or native.

The volume of multifarious tasks performed by Franklin in France was immense. The most valuable service rendered by him to the United States was in obtaining from the French King the pecuniary aids which helped Congress to defray the expenses of the Revolutionary War. It has been truly said that he, and not Robert Morris, was the real financier of the Revolution. Until the triumph of the patriot cause was assured, he was the only one of the American envoys in Europe whose pecuniary solicitations met with any material success. Sometimes even such sums as were obtained by others outside of France were more attributable to his indirect influence than to their own direct efforts. No matter upon whom Congress might recklessly draw drafts, they were certain to come around to the aged negotiator, who appeared to be able to secure money from France even when France had no money for herself. He might be told that a loan which he had just procured from Vergennes was positively the last that France could make, and, yet, when he was compelled by desperation at home to give another reluctant rub to his magic lamp, there always stood the French servitor with his chest of gold. The aggregate amount of the loans and gifts made by France to the United States was on February 21, 1783, little short of forty-three millions of francs. It was these loans and gifts, transformed into munitions of war and military supplies, which again and again infused reviving life into the fainting bosom of his country, and enabled her soldiers to turn an undaunted face to her foes. How a man of Franklin's years could have borne up under such frightful anxieties as those imposed upon him by the pecuniary demands of Congress and her other foreign envoys, to say nothing of additional burdens, it is difficult to understand. In the second year after his arrival in France, when drafts began to pour in on him from Congress, he reminded it that the envoys had not undertaken to do more than to honor its bills for interest on certain specified sums; and this reminder was frequently repeated. It might as well have been syllabled to the winds. Though most of the limited cargoes of tobacco and other products remitted by Congress as a basis of credit fell into the hands of the ever-watchful British cruisers, almost every ship brought over bills upon the envoys or large orders for clothing, arms and ammunition. At one time, they had notice that bills for interest had been drawn on them to the amount of two million and a half, when they did not have a fifth of that sum on deposit with their banker. In a letter to the Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1779, Franklin, who was really our sole envoy for the purpose of paying such bills, enumerates the great quantities of clothing, arms, ammunition and naval stores, which the envoys had sent over to America, the heavy drafts paid by them that Congress had drawn in favor of officers returning to France, or of other persons, the outlays of the envoys for the benefit of American prisoners, the amounts advanced by them to other agents of the United States, the freight charges paid by them and the sums expended by them in fitting out Captain Conygham and the _Raleigh_, _Alfred_, _Boston_, _Providence_, _Alliance_, _Ranger_ and other frigates. "And now," he concluded, "the Drafts of the Treasurer of the Loans coming very fast upon me, the Anxiety I have suffered, and the Distress of Mind lest I should not be able to pay them, has for a long time been very great indeed." This was but one of the earlier crises in the financial experience which led Franklin to say that his seemed to be the Gibeonite task of drawing water for all the congregation of Israel. The point of the observation becomes still more manifest when the reader is told that drafts were also frequently drawn on Franklin by the European agents of the Committee of Commerce of Congress, and that even the foreign agents of individual States of the Union, finding that no American abroad but he seemed to have any credit, applied to him for assistance in effecting loans for their principals. Indeed, one agent of the United States, a Mr. Bingham, did not scruple, without authority from Congress, or any other source, to notify Franklin that the _Deane_ and the _General Gates_ had just arrived at Martinique and were in need of overhauling and provisions, and that he would have to draw upon him for the expense. This was too much even for Franklin's patience, and, when Mr. Bingham's bills were returned protested, that gentleman loudly complained that his credit had been effectually ruined. And, as the necessities of Congress became greater and greater, it almost wholly ceased to recognize that there were any limitations upon its right to draw upon Franklin, or that there was even any reason why it should notify him that such drafts were drawn. It simply drew, hit or miss. For pursuing this course in regard to him, there was at least the excuse that, no matter how freely it drew upon him, he somehow contrived to preserve the credit of Congress unstained. But Congress had no such excuse for drawing bills in this reckless manner, as it did too often, upon John Jay, Henry Laurens or John Adams. It is a laughable fact that, when some of its bills drawn upon Henry Laurens reached Europe, the drawee, who had never arrived in Holland, the country to which he was accredited, at all, was a prisoner in the Tower. As none of the other envoys, upon whom Congress drew, had any resource but to beg Franklin to pay the drafts, these drafts might as well have been drawn upon him in the first instance. No wonder that, with this accumulation of responsibility upon his shoulders, Franklin should have written to John Jay in Spain in these terms:

But the little Success that has attended your late applications for money mortified me exceedingly; and the Storm of Bills, which I found coming upon us both has terrified and vexed me to such a Degree, that I have been deprived of Sleep, and so much indispos'd by continual anxiety, as to be render'd almost incapable of writing.

This very letter, however, bears witness to his remarkable aptitude for dunning without incurring its odious penalties. Overcoming his almost invincible reluctance, he said, he had made another application to the French Court for more money, and had been told to make himself easy as he would be assisted with what was necessary. Indeed, so generous was its conduct on this occasion that, when Franklin, in part payment for the loan, proposed that Congress should provision the French army in America with produce demanded from the States, his Majesty declined the proposal, saying that to furnish his army with such a large quantity of provisions as it needed might straiten Congress. "You will not wonder at my loving this good prince," Franklin concluded.

Amid all the cruel embarrassments of his situation, however, he never abated one jot of heart or hope, nor for one moment lost sight of the imperial future which he so clearly foresaw for the country that was adding sixty thousand children to her numbers annually. In this same letter, he let Jay know that in his opinion no amount of present distress should induce the United States to make the concessions to Spain that she was disposed to hold out as the price of her assistance. "Poor as we are," his indomitable spirit declared, "yet, as I know we shall be rich, I would rather agree with them to buy at a great Price the whole of their Right on the Mississippi, than sell a Drop of its waters. A Neighbour might as well ask me to sell my Street Door." Loyal, too, to Congress he remained from first to last. The worst that he was willing to say in a letter to Thomas Ruston of its rash conduct in flooding the world with bills that for all it knew might never be paid was a quiet, "That body Is, as you suppose, not well skill'd in Financing."

Less than two months after his letter to Jay, we find him again appealing to Vergennes for pecuniary aid with which to enable Congress to co-operate with the French forces in America, and, a few weeks later, when the vitality of the American cause was at its lowest point, he again takes up, on fresh calls from Congress, the same tedious refrain. The letter written by him to Vergennes on this occasion is one of his supplicatory masterpieces. He lays before the French Minister evidence that the spirit of the United States is unbroken, and that the recent success of the British in Carolina was chiefly due to the lack of the necessary means for "furnishing, marching, and paying the Expence of Troops sufficient to defend that Province." He tells him that Lafayette had written that it was impossible to conceive, without seeing it, the distress that the troops had suffered for want of clothing; and that Washington, too, had written to him that the situation of the United States made one of two things essential to them, a peace, or the most vigorous aid of their allies, particularly in the article of money. For the aid, so necessary in the present conjuncture, he said, they could rely on France alone, and the continuance of the King's goodness towards them. And then he concluded with these affecting but not altogether artless words:

I am grown old. I feel myself much enfeebled by my late long Illness, and it is probable I shall not long have any more Concern in these Affairs. I therefore take this Occasion to express my Opinion to your Excellency, that the present Conjuncture is critical; that there is some Danger lest the Congress should lose its Influence over the people, if it is found unable to procure the Aids that are wanted; and that the whole System of the New Governt in America may thereby be shaken; that, if the English are suffer'd once to recover that Country, such an Opportunity of effectual Separation as the present may not occur again in the Course of Ages; and that the Possession of those fertile and extensive Regions, and that vast Sea Coast, will afford them so Broad a Basis for future Greatness, by the rapid growth of their Commerce, and Breed of Seamen and Soldiers, as will enable them to become the _Terror of Europe_, and to exercise with impunity that Insolence, which is so natural to their Nation, and which will increase enormously with the Increase of their Power.

Hard upon the heels of this letter came a letter from John Adams, inquiring whether Franklin could furnish funds for paying bills to the amount of ten thousand pounds sterling which had been drawn by Congress on Adams. Franklin replied by saying that he had not yet received a positive answer to his last appeal for aid to the French King, but that he had, however, two of the Christian Graces, Faith and Hope, though his faith was only that of which the Apostle speaks--the evidence of things not seen. In truth, he declared, he did not see at that time how so many bills drawn at random on the Ministers of Congress in France, Spain and Holland were to be paid. But all bills drawn upon them by Congress should be accepted at any risk; and he would accordingly do his best, and, if those endeavors failed, he was ready to break, run away or go to prison with Adams, as it should please God. His endeavors were successful, so startlingly successful that Vergennes informed him that his Majesty, to give the States a signal proof of his friendship, had resolved to grant them the sum of six millions, not as a loan, but as a free gift. But the announcement was accompanied by the significant statement that, as the supplies previously purchased in France by the United States, were supposed to be of bad quality, the Ministers would themselves take care of the purchase, with part of the gift, of such articles as were urgently needed in America, and the balance, remaining after these purchases, was to be drawn for by General Washington upon M. d'Harvelay, Garde du Tresor Royal. "There was no room to dispute on this point," Franklin wrote to Samuel Huntington, "every donor having the right of qualifying his gifts with such terms as he thinks proper"; but the restrictions upon the gift would seem, after all, to have been waived. Shortly after the six millions was promised, Colonel Laurens, who was supposed by Washington to be peculiarly competent to state the needs of the American army, arrived in France, and to him Franklin delegated the task of making purchases for Congress with part of the sum. Franklin was already supporting Adams, Dana, Jay and Carmichael on the proceeds of his persuasive approaches to the French King, and, at best, the arrival of Laurens would have meant little except another ministerial mouth to feed. Unfortunately, however, it signified much more to Franklin's peace. Before returning to America, with two millions and a half of the six millions, Laurens made such free use of the remainder that Franklin, unable to meet bills, with which he was threatened, was compelled to write to Adams not to accept any more bills that were expected to be paid by him without notice to him, and to Jay that, if the bills drawn upon him some months before could not be paid by him, they would have to go to protest. "For," Franklin said, "it will not be in my Power to help you. And I see that nothing will cure the Congress of this Madness of Drawing upon the Pump at Aldgate, but such a Proof that its Well has a Bottom."

To make things worse, though Congress continued to draw bills upon Franklin after the gift of the six millions, it deprived him of the ability to use that fund by forbidding any portion of it to be used without its order. Franklin by prompt action did succeed in intercepting a part of the six millions, which Laurens had taken to Holland, and which was about to follow him to America. Speaking of this in a letter to William Jackson, who had come over with Laurens, and was very angry with Franklin for detaining the amount, Franklin wrote, "I see, that nobody cares how much I am distressed, provided they can carry their own Points. I must, therefore, take what care I can of mine, theirs and mine being equally intended for the Service of the Public." It would have been well for Jackson if he had let the matter rest there, but he did not, and had the temerity to write to Franklin a saucy letter to which he replied in these terms:

These Superior Airs you give yourself, young Gentleman, of Reproof to me, and Reminding me of my Duty do not become you, whose special Department and Employ in Public Affairs, of which you are so vain, is but of yesterday, and would never have existed but by my Concurrence, and would have ended in Disgrace if I had not supported your enormous Purchases by accepting your Drafts. The charging me with want of oeconomy is particularly improper in _you_, when the only Instance you know of it is my having indiscreetly comply'd with your Demand in advancing you 120 Louis for the Expence of your Journey to Paris and when the only Instance I know of your oeconomizing Money is your sending me three Expresses, one after another, on the same Day, all the way from Holland to Paris, each with a Letter saying the same thing to the same purpose.

One of the transactions, mentioned in this correspondence, is a good illustration of the pecuniary "afterclaps," to use Franklin's term, to which Franklin was frequently subjected. He had agreed to pay for goods for the United States to the amount of fifteen thousand pounds. Instead of the purchases amounting to fifteen thousand pounds, they amounted to fifty thousand, and he persistently refused to pay for them. Jackson then hurried express to him, urged that the goods were bought by order of Colonel Laurens, that they were on shipboard, and that, if Franklin did not pay for them, they would have to be relanded and returned, or sold; which would be a disgrace, he insisted, to the United States. In the end, Franklin accepted the bills for the whole amount, and applied to the French Ministry for the money with which to pay for them. The application was a particularly disagreeable one to him, not only because all the fiscal calculations of the French Government for the year had been completed, but because no part of the purchase price of the goods would be expended in France. At first, the grant was absolutely refused, but at length Franklin obtained it, and hoped that the difficulty was over. It was not. Afterwards, the officers of the ship decided that she was overloaded, and the goods were transferred to two other ships, whose owners required Franklin to either buy the ships, or to pay them a freight bill nearly equal to the value of the ships. This whole transaction was bad enough, but William Jackson at least had the grace to notify Franklin that the bills in this instance were about to descend upon him before their descent. This, we know from a mildly reproachful letter, written by Franklin to John Paul Jones, a Mr. Moylan was not kind enough to do when he drew upon Franklin for nearly one hundred thousand livres for supplies ordered by Jones for the _Ariel_.

These are but typical instances of the financial complications in which Franklin was involved from time to time while he was drawing water for all the congregation of Israel. Long after their date, bills were still making his life miserable.

This serves chiefly to acquaint you [he wrote on one occasion to John Adams] that I will endeavour to pay the Bills that have been presented to you drawn on Mr. Laurens. But you terrify me, by acquainting me that there are yet a great number behind. It is hard that I never had any information sent me of the Sums drawn, a Line of Order to pay, nor a Syllable of Approbation for having paid any of the Bills drawn on Mr. Laurens, Mr. Jay or yourself.

To John Jay about the same time he wrote, "The cursed Bills, as you justly term them, do us infinite Prejudice." In a letter to John Adams, he speaks of "the dreaded Drafts." At times it looked as if the stream of French bounty was at last exhausted. "With the million mentioned," he wrote to John Adams in substantially the same terms as he had written to Robert Morris two days before, "I can continue paying to the end of February, and then, if I get no more I must shut up shop." This was in January, 1782, when France, in addition to assisting the United States with a fleet and army, had advanced great additional sums to them since the beginning of the preceding year. At this time, for very shame Franklin could scarcely pluck up courage enough to make another pecuniary application to the French Ministry. In giving in a letter to John Jay his reasons for not holding out the hope of pecuniary relief to him, he said, "I had weary'd this friendly & generous Court with often repeated after-clap Demands, occasioned by these unadvised (as well as ill advis'd) & therefore unexpected Drafts, and was ashamed to show my Face to the Minister." In the same letter, Franklin also said: "We have been assisted with near 20 Millions since the Beginning of last Year, besides a Fleet and Army; and yet I am oblig'd to worry [them] with my Solicitations for more, which makes us appear insatiable."

But the most interesting passage in this letter is the following: "You mention my Proposing to repay the Sum you want in America. I had try'd that last year. I drew a Bill on Congress for a considerable Sum to be advanced me here, and paid in provisions for the French Troops. My Bill was not honoured!" Worst of all, when Bills from Congress still showered upon him, after its promise that no more bills would be drawn on him subsequent to a fixed date, he began to suspect that the drawing was still going on, and that the bills were antedated. To no American was the heedless reliance of Congress upon the generosity of France more mortifying than to him. He repeatedly suggested the obligation of his own country to look more to self-help and less to the aid of her friendly and generous ally, and, at times, in his characteristic way, he would demonstrate arithmetically how easy it would be for the United States to support the burden of the war themselves if they would only keep down the spirit of luxury and extravagance at home, and cease to buy so many foreign gewgaws and superfluities and so much tea. "In my opinion, the surest way to obtain liberal aid from others is vigorously to help ourselves," he wrote to Robert R. Livingston. "It is absurd," he said later in another letter to Robert Morris, "the pretending to be lovers of liberty while they (the American people) grudge paying for the defence of it." He was generously prompt always also to ascribe any temporary interruption to the flow of French subsidy to the pressing necessities of France herself. Full, too, always he was of simple-hearted gratitude to France for the princely help that she had given to the American cause. No one knew better than he that this help originated partly in selfish policy, and was continued partly because it had been extended too liberally already to be easily discontinued. "Those, who have begun to assist us," he shrewdly observed to Jay, when counselling him that every first favor obtained from Spain was _tant de gagne_, "are more likely to continue than to decline." Every appeal that he ever made in his life to liberality in any form took the bias of self-interest duly into account. But he was merely true to his settled principle that human character is an amalgam of both unselfish and selfish motives, when, realizing that the aid rendered by France to the United States originated partly in the glow of a generous enthusiasm for the cause of human liberty and fraternity, he wrote to Robert R. Livingston on August 12, 1782, a letter in which, after stating that the whole amount of the indebtedness, then due by the United States to France, amounted to eighteen million livres, exclusive of the Holland loan guaranteed by the King of France, he said:

In reading it [a statement of the account] you will discover several fresh marks of the King's goodness towards us, amounting to the value of near two millions. These, added to the free gifts before made to us at different times, form an object of at least twelve millions, for which no returns but that of gratitude and friendship are expected. These, I hope, may be everlasting.

In a subsequent letter to Vergennes, Franklin referred to the King as our "Friend and Father." But naturally enough deep-seated gratitude found its most impressive utterance when the long and bloody war was at an end, the independence of the United States fully established and Franklin ready, as he wrote to Robert R. Livingston, to say with old Simeon, "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."

May I beg the favour of you, Sir [he wrote to Vergennes, when he was soon to leave France forever], to express respectfully for me to his Majesty, the deep Sense I have of all the inestimable Benefits his Goodness has conferr'd on my Country; a Sentiment that it will be the Business of the little Remainder of Life now left me, to impress equally on the Minds of all my Countrymen. My sincere Prayers are, that God may shower down his Blessings on the King, the Queen, their children, and all the royal Family to the latest Generations!

It would be irksome to detail all the loans obtained by Franklin from the French King, and all the terrifying drafts drawn upon him. Profuse from first to last as were the bills, which he was called upon to pay, he appears to have met them all, with a few exceptions, whether drawn upon Adams, Jay, Laurens or himself. Nor, when an extortioner attempted to perpetrate an outrage upon the United States, did he fail to oppose him with a wit quite as keen as his and with a spirit far more resolute. Such a skinflint seems to have been De Neufville, of Amsterdam, who offered on one occasion to borrow money for the United States, provided that their representatives hypothecated to his firm, in the name of the whole Congress of the Thirteen United States, as security for the loan, all the lands, cities, territories and possessions of the said Thirteen States, present or prospective. After mercilessly analyzing in a letter to John Adams the unconscionable covenants by which this tremendous hypothecation was to be accompanied, Franklin ended with these observations:

By this time, I fancy, your Excellency is satisfy'd, that I was wrong in supposing J. de Neufville as much a Jew as any in Jerusalem (a reference to what he had said in a former letter) since Jacob was not content with any per cents, but took the whole of his Brother Esau's Birthright, & his Posterity did the same by the Cananites, & cut their Throats into the Bargain; which, in my Conscience, I do not think M. J. de Neufville has the least Inclination to do by us,--while he can get anything by our being alive.

The immediate occasion for this letter was the refusal of De Neufville to allow the goods which had bred trouble between Franklin and William Jackson to be delivered to the agents of the United States until a claim for damages that he had preferred against the United States was satisfied. "We have, you observe" Franklin had written in an earlier letter to John Adams, "our Hands in the Lyon's Mouth; but if Mr. N. is a Lyon, I am a Bear, and I think I can hug & gripe him till he lets go our Hands." And he was as good as his word, and let De Neufville know that, if he did not deliver the goods, the bills drawn by him on Franklin for the price, though accepted, would not be paid. A few days later, in another letter to Adams with respect to the same matter, Franklin said in regard to a proposal of settlement made by De Neufville, "I think that the less we have to do with that Shark the better; his jaws are too strong, his teeth too many and his appetite immensely voracious." Before the episode was ended, De Neufville was only too glad to dispatch his son to Paris to beseech the bear to relax his hug.

There was still another reason why the arrival of bills from America should be feared by Franklin. They were drawn in three sets each, and there was constant danger, as the sets came in at different times, of the same bill being paid more than once. In fact, repeated efforts were fraudulently made to palm off duplicates and triplicates as firsts upon Franklin. To shut off frauds, the minutest inspection of the bills, as they were presented for payment, was indispensable, and, for this task, Franklin, Congress having wholly ignored his request for a secretary, had no one to help him but Temple and the French clerk at fifty louis a year. The task was rendered especially laborious by the fact that a host of the bills was drawn by Congress in very small amounts for the payment of interest abroad.

Far less tedious, of course, but still burdensome enough, was the labor of copying the dispatches that left Franklin's hands. At one time, the Atlantic was so alive with British cruisers that a dispatch on its way to Congress from France had almost as little chance of escape as a jettisoned dog in a shark-infested sea.

Adams [stated one of the letters in 1777 of our envoys in France], by whom we wrote early this summer, was taken on this coast, having sunk his dispatches. We hear that Hammond shared the same fate on your coast. Johnson, by whom we wrote in September, was taken going out of the channel, and poor Captain Wickes (of the _Reprisal_) who sailed at the same time, and had duplicates, we just now hear foundered near Newfoundland, every man perishing but the cook.

It was a batch of papers tossed into the ocean, and snatched up by a nimble British sailor, before they sank, that first apprised the British Ministry of the treaty for an alliance hatching between Holland and the United States, and led Great Britain to declare war promptly against Holland. With such perilous conditions to face, Franklin's dispatches were sometimes copied as often as seven times. Besides the copy retained by him, and the copy sent to Congress, other copies were later sent to Congress by the next ships leaving France for the United States.

Another most onerous function imposed upon Franklin, until the appointment of Thomas Barclay, a merchant, as Consul-General to France, was that of purchasing supplies for Congress and fitting out ships. Special provision for this function should, of course, have been made by Congress, so as to leave him free to give his attention to what he termed his political duties, but it was not until after he had repeatedly begged Congress to relieve him from it that Congress first appointed for that purpose Colonel Palfrey, who was lost at sea, on his way over to France, and then Barclay. In the meantime, Franklin had suffered infinite annoyance in the performance of duties for which he had no time, and insisted that he had no knowledge or training. Writing to Jonathan Williams about the dispatch of certain goods to America, he said:

At this Distance from the Ports, and unacquainted as I am with such Affairs, I know not what to advise about getting either that Cloathing or the small Arms and Powder at L'Orient or the Cloth of Mr. Ross transported to America; and yet everybody writes to me for Orders, or Advice, or Opinion, or Approbation, which is like calling upon a blind Man to judge of Colours.

Writing later to Williams about the same matter, when it had assumed a still more vexatious aspect, he peremptorily turned down a project laid before him by Williams, saying with an ebullition of impatience quite unlike the ordinary tenor of his even temper, "I have been too long in hot Water, plagu'd almost to Death with the Passions, Vagaries, and ill Humours and Madnesses of other People. I must have a little Repose."

Another office performed by Franklin, though no special commission for the purpose was ever issued to him by Congress, was that of a Judge in Admiralty. A large quantity of blank commissions for privateers having been sent to him by Congress shortly after his arrival in France, he delivered them to cruisers, fitted out in the ports of France, and manned by smugglers, who knew every creek and cove on the English coast which they had so often visited by night as well, to use a simile employed by one of Franklin's correspondents, as they knew the corners of their beds. The alarm and loss created by these privateers was no mean offset to the destructive efficiency of the British cruisers. One privateer, the _Black Prince_, took in the course of three months more than thirty sail. Such was the apprehension excited by the depredations of American privateers that the seacoasts of England were kept in a constant state of panic, and the premium rate on marine insurance was largely enhanced. As prizes were brought into French harbors, the papers seized in them were examined by Franklin for the purpose of passing upon their legality and the liability of the prizes to sale. It was also under the patronage of Franklin and Deane that the _Reprisal_, the first American ship to fire a gun or capture a prize in European waters, the _Lexington_, a sloop-of-war, of fourteen guns, fitted out by Congress, and commanded by Captain Johnson, the _Dolphin_, a cutter of ten guns, purchased by our envoys from M. de Chaumont, and the _Surprise_, a cutter, commanded by the doughty Captain Gustavus Conyngham, inflicted such injury upon English commerce, including the capture of the Lisbon packet by Captain Wickes, that the French Ministry was compelled to heed the remonstrances of Lord Stormont, the English Minister, so far as to make a deceitful show, in one form or another, of vindicating the outraged neutrality of France. But, when the flimsiest ruses were allowed by the French Ministry to circumvent its interdiction of the abuse of its ports by American ships, with prizes in tow, and Captain Conyngham and his crew, after passing a few days in luxury in a French prison, found means in some unaccountable manner to escape, just as two English men-of-war were coming over to ask that they be delivered to them as pirates, there was little fear anywhere along the French coast, or in the breasts of our envoys, that any sternly vigorous embargo was likely to be laid upon the privateering activities of the United States by anything except the naval energy of England itself.

At this time, Franklin was eager to retaliate the destruction and suffering wantonly inflicted upon some of the defenceless seacoast towns of America by the British. He, therefore, advised Congress to put three frigates into the very best fighting trim, and to send them, loaded with tobacco, as if they were common merchantmen, to Nantes or Bordeaux, but with instructions, when they reached the one or the other port, to make off suddenly for some unsuspecting British port, pounce upon the vessels in its harbor, levy contributions, burn, plunder and get away before any harm could be done to them by a counterstroke.

The burning or plundering of Liverpool or Glasgow [he said] would do us more essential service than a million of treasure and much blood spent on the continent. It would raise our reputation to the highest pitch, and lessen in the same degree that of the enemy. We are confident it is practicable, and with very little danger.

In a letter to Lafayette, too, Franklin stated that the coasts of England and Scotland were extremely open and defenceless, and that there were many rich towns in those countries near the sea "which 4 or 5000 Men, landing unexpectedly, might easily surprize and destroy, or exact from them a heavy Contribution taking a part in ready Money and Hostages for the rest." He even calculated in livres the amounts that might be demanded of Bristol, Bath, Liverpool, Lancaster and other English towns.

But the most eventful thing that Franklin ever did in relation to American activity on the sea was to invite John Paul Jones to take command of a fine frigate that the envoys had ordered from Holland, but had been compelled by the vigilance of Great Britain to turn over to France, when but partially built. While at Brest, Jones received a confidential note from Franklin telling him that the King had asked the loan of him to the French navy for a while, and wished him to take command of the frigate. "She is at present," he said, "the property of the King; but, as there is no war yet declared, you will have the commission and flag of the United States, and act under their orders and laws." The frigate, however, was far from being completed, and the thought of a stranger being placed in command of her was highly irritating to French naval officers with a mind to promotion. Chafing under the delay and uncertainty, occasioned by these circumstances, Jones, whose remarkable literary facility, despite his lack of education, is at least one illustration of the truth of Dogberry's saying that reading and writing come by nature, wrote impatient appeals to the French Minister, Franklin, the members of the Royal Family and the King himself.

While in this humor, his eye happened to fall upon a maxim in one of Poor Richard's Almanacs, "If you would have your business done, go; if not, send." He heeded the suggestion, proceeded to Versailles and secured an order for the purchase of the forty-gun ship, which, in honor of his monitor, he called the _Bon Homme Richard_. What she did, old as she was, with her heroic commander, and her medley crew of Americans, Irish, English, Scotch, French, Portuguese, Maltese and Malay sailors, before she relaxed her dying clutch upon the _Serapis_, and sank, immortalized by a splendid victory, to the bottom of the ocean, there is no need for the biographer of Franklin to tell. It is enough to say that for Franklin Jones ever entertained a feeling little short of passionate reverence. "The letter which I had the honor to receive from your Excellency to-day ... would make a coward brave," was his reply to one of Franklin's wise and humane letters of instruction. This letter is evidence enough that Franklin was not so incensed by the ruthless conduct at times of the British in America as to be lost to the clemency of his own abstract views about the proper limits of warfare.

Altho' [he said] the English have wantonly burnt many defenceless Towns in America, you are not to follow this Example, unless where a Reasonable Ransom is refused; in which Case, your own generous feelings, as well as this Instruction, will induce you to give timely Notice of your Intention, that sick and ancient Persons, Women and Children, may be first removed.

The relief of American prisoners in England was another thing which continually taxed the attention of Franklin during the Revolutionary War. "I was sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not," was a reproach that no one of them could justly address to him. His nature was a truly compassionate one, and, in few respects, does it show to greater advantage than in his unceasing efforts to secure the exchange of his unhappy countrymen, confined at Portsmouth and Plymouth, or, that failing, to provide them with all the pecuniary succor in his power, in addition to that so generously extended to them by many kind hearts in England.[40] In his friend, David Hartley, a man, whose peaceful and humane instincts even the vilest passions of war could not efface, he had an agent in a position to reach the ear of the English Ministry for the purpose of promoting the exchange of prisoners. For different reasons, the task was a painfully slow one. In the beginning, all American prisoners were committed to prison upon the charge of high treason, a charge entirely inconsistent with the idea of exchange. Besides, England was reluctant to relinquish the advantage that she had, until the treaty of alliance between France and America was consummated, in the fact that American ships had nowhere to confine their prisoners except under their own hatches. They tried to meet this difficulty by releasing English prisoners on parole on their each promising that they would secure the release of an American prisoner, but the English Admiralty, after some hesitation, finally refused to surrender a single American prisoner in exchange for such paroled Englishmen. Commenting upon this fact, along with another incident, Franklin wrote to James Lovell, "There is no gaining anything upon these Barbarians by Advances of Civility or Humanity." At last, however, several cartels were agreed upon, and he enjoyed the great happiness of seeing some hundred or so American captives brought over to France and released. He was still, however, to incur a great disappointment when, owing to the fear on the part of Holland of provoking English resentment, the five hundred prisoners, transferred to Holland by John Paul Jones, after his engagement with the _Serapis_, had to be exchanged for French instead of American prisoners. The French Ministry promised to make this disappointment good by advancing to Franklin an equal number of English prisoners taken by French ships, but the English Ministry promptly met this promise by refusing to exchange American prisoners for any English prisoners except such as had been captured by American ships. It was also a great disappointment to Franklin that he could not induce the English Ministry to give its assent to a formal proposition from him that prisoners, taken by either country, should be immediately released upon the understanding that an equal number of prisoners held by the other should also be released. The high-minded conduct of Hartley, inspired in part by the hope that lenient treatment of American prisoners might help to re-unite the two countries, was all the more admirable, when contrasted with the harsh words, in which Franklin sometimes in his letters to him inveighed against the English King, Parliament and People. It is inconceivable that even Hartley would not have gradually wearied of well-doing, if his perfect knowledge of Franklin's benevolent nature had not taught him how to make liberal allowances for his friend's occasional gusts of indignation.

This indignation was usually visited upon the English King and Ministry, but upon one occasion it was visited upon the English people as well.

It is now impossible [he wrote to Hartley] to persuade our people, as I long endeavoured, that the war was merely ministerial, and that the nation bore still a good will to us. The infinite number of addresses printed in your gazettes, all approving this conduct of your government towards us, and encouraging our destruction by every possible means, the great majority in Parliament constantly manifesting the same sentiments, and the popular public rejoicings on occasion of any news of the slaughter of an innocent and virtuous people, fighting only in defence of their just rights; these, together with the recommendations of the same measures by even your celebrated moralists and divines, in their writings and sermons, that are cited approved and applauded in your great national assemblies; all join in convincing us, that you are no longer the magnanimous and enlightened nation, we once esteemed you, and that you are unfit and unworthy to govern us, as not being able to govern your own passions.

Indeed, in this letter Franklin even told Hartley that, if the resentment of the English people did not speedily fall on their ministry, the future inhabitants of America would detest the name of Englishman as much as the children in Holland did those of Alva and Spaniard. But, scold as he might England and her rulers, he deeply appreciated the magnanimity of the good man, who even took pains to see that sums placed in his hands by Franklin were duly applied to the relief of the prisoners for whose liberty he strove so disinterestedly. Referring in one of his letters to Hartley to two little bills of exchange that he had sent to him for this purpose, he said, "Permit me to repeat my thankful Acknowledgments for the very humane and kind part you have acted in this Affair. If I thought it necessary I would pray God to bless you for it. But I know he will do it without my Prayers."

Correspondingly stern was the rebuke of Franklin for the heartless knave, Thomas Digges, equal even to the theft of an obolus placed upon the closed eyelids of a dead man as the price of his ferriage across the Styx--who drew upon Franklin in midwinter for four hundred and ninety-five pounds sterling for the relief of the American prisoners, and converted all but about thirty pounds of the sum to his own personal use. "We have no Name in our Language," said Franklin in a letter to William Hodgson, "for such atrocious Wickedness. If such a Fellow is not damn'd, it is not worth while to keep a Devil."

Besides Hartley, to say nothing of this William Hodgson, a merchant, who performed offices for Franklin similar to those of Hartley, there was another Englishman whose humanity with regard to American prisoners elicited the grateful acknowledgments of Franklin. This was Thomas Wren, a Presbyterian minister at Portsmouth, who was untiring in soliciting contributions from his Christian brethren in England, and applying the sums thus obtained by him, as well as the weekly allowances sent to him by Franklin, to the wants of American prisoners in Forton Prison. "I think some public Notice," Franklin wrote to Robert R. Livingston, "should be taken of this good Man. I wish the Congress would enable me to make him a Present, and that some of our Universities would confer upon him the Degree of Doctor." The suggestion bore fruit, Congress sent Wren a vote of thanks, and the degree of Doctor in Divinity was conferred upon him by Princeton College. He, too, did not need the prayers of Franklin to receive the blessings reserved for the few rare spirits who can hear the voice of the God of Mercy even above the tumult of his battling children.

There were many other engrossing claims of a public or quasi-public nature upon Franklin's attention in France. In the earlier stages of the Revolutionary War, he was fairly besieged by foreign officers eager to share in its peril and glory. Several of those recommended by him to Congress--such as Steuben--gave a good account of themselves in America, but the number of those, who had no special title to his recommendation, was so great, that his ingenuity and sense of humor were severely strained to evade them or laugh them off.

You can have no Conception [he wrote to a friend] how I am harass'd. All my Friends are sought out and teiz'd to teize me. Great officers of all Ranks, in all Departments; Ladies, great and small, besides professed Sollicitors, worry me from Morning to Night. The Noise of every Coach now that enters my Court terrifies me. I am afraid to accept an Invitation to dine abroad, being almost sure of meeting with some Officer or Officer's Friend, who, as soon as I am put in a good Humour by a Glass or two of Champaign, begins his Attack upon me. Luckily I do not often in my sleep dream myself in these vexatious Situations, or I should be afraid of what are now my only Hours of Comfort. If, therefore, you have the least remaining Kindness for me, if you would not help to drive me out of France, for God's sake, my dear friend, let this your 23rd Application be your last.

The friend to whom this letter was written was a Frenchman, and the lecture that Franklin read to him in it on the easy-going habits of his countrymen in giving recommendations is also worthy of quotation:

Permit me to mention to you [he said] that, in my Opinion, the natural complaisance of this country often carries People too far in the Article of _Recommendations_. You give them with too much Facility to Persons of whose real Characters you know nothing, and sometimes at the request of others of whom you know as little. Frequently, if a man has no useful Talents, is good for nothing and burdensome to his Relations, or is indiscreet, Profligate, and extravagant, they are glad to get rid of him by sending him to the other end of the World; and for that purpose scruple not to recommend him to those that they wish should recommend him to others, as "_un bon sujet, plein de merite_," &c. &c. In consequence of my crediting such Recommendations, my own are out of Credit, and I can not advise anybody to have the least Dependence on them. If, after knowing this, you persist in desiring my Recommendation for this Person, who is known neither to _me_ nor to _you_, I will give it, tho', as I said before, I ought to refuse it.

The subject was one that repeatedly awakened his humorous instincts.

You can have no conception of the Arts and Interest made use of to recommend and engage us to recommend very indifferent persons [he wrote to James Lovell]. The importunity is boundless. The Numbers we refuse incredible: which if you knew you would applaud us for, and on that Account excuse the few we have been prevail'd on to introduce to you. But, as somebody says,

"Poets lose half the Praise they would have got, Were it but known what they discreetly blot."

The extent to which Silas Deane yielded to the solicitations of eager candidates abroad for military honor was one of the things that helped to destroy his standing with Congress. A second letter was written by Franklin to Lovell in which he had a word of extenuation for Deane's weakness in this respect.

I, who am upon the spot [he said] and know the infinite Difficulty of resisting the powerful Solicitations here of great Men, who if disoblig'd might have it in their Power to obstruct the Supplies he was then obtaining, do not wonder, that, being a Stranger to the People, and unacquainted with the Language, he was at first prevail'd on to make some such Agreements, when all were recommended, as they always are, as _officiers experimentes_, _braves comme leurs epees_, _pleins de Courage, de Talents, et de Zele pour notre Cause_, &c. &c. in short, mere Cesars, each of whom would have been an invaluable Acquisition to America.

Franklin even had the temerity to draft this _jeu d'esprit_ to suit the character of the more extreme class of applications made to him for military employment, and it was actually used at times according to William Temple Franklin.

The bearer of this, who is going to America, presses me to give him a Letter of Recommendation, tho' I know nothing of him, not even his Name. This may seem extraordinary, but I assure you it is not uncommon here. Sometimes, indeed one unknown Person brings another equally unknown, to recommend him; and sometimes they recommend one another! As to this Gentleman, I must refer you to himself for his Character and Merits, with which he is certainly better acquainted than I can possibly be. I recommend him however to those Civilities, which every Stranger, of whom one knows no Harm, has a Right to; and I request you will do him all the good Offices, and show him all the Favour that, on further Acquaintance, you shall find him to deserve.

An ill-balanced man might have fretted himself into an angry outbreak or a state of physical decline under the exasperation of such importunities, but none of the petty annoyances of Franklin's position were too rough to withstand the smoothing effect of his unctuous humor. It was like the oil that he was in the habit of carrying around with him in the hollow joint of a bamboo cane during the period of his life when he was testing the tranquillizing effect of oil upon ruffled water.

At times, however, the unreasonableness of some of the applicants was too much even for Rabelais in his easy chair.

First [he wrote to a M. Lith], you desired to have Means procur'd for you of taking a Voyage to America "_avec surete_"; which is not possible, as the Dangers of the Sea subsist always, and at present there is the additional Danger of being taken by the English. Then you desire that this may be _sans trop grandes Depenses_, which is not intelligible enough to be answer'd, because, not knowing your Ability of bearing expences, one can not judge what may be _trop grandes_. Lastly, you desire Letters of Address to the Congress and to General Washington; which it is not reasonable to ask of one who knows no more of you, than that your name is Lith, and that you live at Bayreuth.

Another applicant, who thirsted for military renown, was one, Louis Givanetti Pellion, "ci-devant Garde du Corps de S. M. le Roi de Sardaigne, aujourd'hui Controlleur de la Cour de S. Mo susdite." "I know how," this gentleman wrote, "to accommodate myself to all climates, manners, circumstances, and times. I am passionately fond of travel, I love to see the great world, its armies and navies. Neither cards, nor wine nor women have any influence over me; but a ship, an army, long voyages, all these are Paradise to me."

It was also Franklin's lot to receive many letters of inquiry about the New World from individuals in Europe, who were thinking of migrating to America for peaceable purposes. What of its climate, its trade, its people, its laws? These were some of the questions relating to the New Eldorado which these individuals wished answered. To all who questioned him about the opportunities held out by America, when he did not simply refer the questioners to Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer," his answers were substantially the same. The emigrants to America would find a good climate, good air, good soil, good government, good laws and liberty there, but no Lotus Land. One Reuben Harvey wrote to him from Cork that about one hundred poor Irish tradesmen and husbandmen desired to settle in America. Franklin replied sententiously, "They will go to a Country where People do not Export their Beef and Linnen to import Claret, while the Poor at home live on Potatoes and wear Rags. Indeed America has not Beef and Linnen sufficient for Exportation because every man there, even the poorest, eats Beef and wears a Shirt."

Numerous letters came to him from authors inviting his literary criticism, or asking him to accord to them the honor of permitting them to dedicate their works to him. Allamand, the Warden of the forests and waters of the Island of Corsica, wished to know from him what canals there were in America. None, he replied, unless a short water-way, cut, it was said, in a single night across a loop formed by a long bend in Duck Creek, in the State of Delaware, could be called such. Projectors of all kinds solicited his views about their several projects, sane or crack-brained. Sheer beggars, as we have already seen, were likewise among his correspondents. One, La Baronne de Randerath, tells him that she has been advised by the doctors to take her husband to Aix, and, as her justification for requesting a loan from Franklin for the purpose, she mentions that her husband and Franklin are both Masons, though members of different lodges. Another letter requests him to exercise his influence with the Minister of Marine in behalf of the writer, a sea captain, who wishes to be discharged from the King's service. Dartmouth College, Brown University, Princeton College and Dickinson College all appealed to him for his aid in their efforts to secure money or other gifts abroad. In a word, he was not only world-famous but paid fully all the minor as well as major penalties of world-fame.

How curdled by the animosities of the Revolutionary War was the milk of human kindness even in such an amiable breast as that of Franklin, we have already had reason enough to know. His nature yielded slowly to the intense feelings, aroused by the long conflict between Great Britain and her Colonies, but it was equally slow to part with them when once inflamed. The most notable thing about his attitude towards Great Britain, after the first effusion of American blood at Lexington, was the inexorable firmness with which he repelled all advances upon the part of England that fell short of the recognition of American Independence. When the English Ministry fully realized that Great Britain was not waging war against a few rebellious malcontents but against a whole people in arms, overture after overture was informally made to Franklin by one English emissary or another, in the effort to dissolve the alliance between France and the United States, and to restore, as far as possible, the old connection between Great Britain and America. Among the first of these emissaries was Franklin's good friend, James Hutton. Franklin received him with the most affectionate kindness, but a letter, which he wrote to Hutton, after Hutton had returned to England, showed how entirely fruitless the journey of the latter had been. A peace, Franklin said, England might undoubtedly obtain by dropping all her pretensions to govern America, but, if she did not, with the peace, recover the affections of the American people, it would be neither a lasting nor a profitable one. To recover the respect and affection of America, England must tread back the steps that she had taken and disgrace the American advisers and promoters of the war, with all those who had inflamed the nation against America by their malicious writings; and all the ministers and generals who had prosecuted the war with such inhumanity. A little generosity, in the way of territorial concessions added to the counsels of necessity, would have a happy effect. For instance, Franklin said, if England would have a real friendly as well as able ally in America, and avoid all occasions of future discord, which would otherwise be continually arising along its American frontiers, it might throw in Canada, Nova Scotia and the Floridas.

Hutton was succeeded by William Pulteney, a member of Parliament. All of his propositions were predicated upon the continued dependence of America. Every proposition, Franklin let him know, which implied the voluntary return of America to dependence on Great Britain was out of the question. The proper course for Great Britain, in his judgment, was to acknowledge the independence of the United States, and to enter into such a treaty of peace, friendship and commerce with them as France itself had formed. The concluding words of Franklin's letter were hardly necessary to convince Pulteney of the hopelessness of his task. "May God at last," they ran, "grant that Wisdom to your national Councils, which he seems long to have deny'd them, and which only sincere, just, and humane Intentions can merit or expect." Ten days before this letter was written, the American envoys had been presented to the French King. Then followed David Hartley and Mr. George Hammond, the father of the George Hammond, who, many years afterwards, became Minister Plenipotentiary from England to the United States. When they arrived at Paris, it was only to find that the treaty of alliance between France and the United States had already been signed, and to learn soon afterwards that one of its clauses obliged the United States to make common cause with France, in case England declared war against her. How authentic were the credentials of the next emissary it is impossible to say, but Franklin was entirely confident that he came over to France under the direct patronage of George III. The circumstances were these. One morning, a lengthy letter was thrown into a window of Franklin's residence at Passy, written in English, dated at Brussels, and signed Charles de Weissenstein. The letter conjured Franklin in the name of the Just and Omniscient God, before whom all must soon appear, and by his hopes of future fame, to consider if some expedient could not be devised for ending the desolation of America and preventing the war imminent in Europe. It then declared that France would certainly at last betray America, and suggested a plan for the union of England and America. Under the plan, among other things, judges of the American courts were to be named by the King, and to hold their offices for life, and were to bear titles either as peers of America, or otherwise, as should be decided by his Majesty; there were to be septennial sessions of Congress, or more frequent ones, if his Majesty should think fit to call Congress together oftener, but all its proceedings were to be transmitted to the British Parliament, without whose consent no money was ever to be granted by Congress, or any separate State of America to the Crown; the chief offices of the American civil list were to be named in the plan, and the compensation attached to them was to be paid by America; the naval and military forces of the Union were to be under the direction of his Majesty, but the British Parliament was to fix their extent, and vote the sums necessary for their maintenance. It was also proposed by the letter that, to protect Franklin, Washington, Adams, Hancock and other leaders of the American Revolution from the personal enmity in England, by which their talents might otherwise be kept down, they were to have offices or pensions for life at their option. The promise was also made that, in case his Majesty, or his successors, should ever create American peers, then those persons, or their descendants, were to be among the first peers created, if they desired. Moreover, _Mr._ Washington was to have immediately a brevet of lieutenant-general, and all the honors and precedence incident thereto, but was not to assume or bear any command without a special warrant, or letter of service for that purpose, from the King.

The writer further asked for a personal interview with Franklin for the purpose of discussing the details of the project, or, he stated, if that was not practicable, he would be in a certain part of the Cathedral of Notre Dame on a certain day at noon precisely, with a rose in his hat, to receive a written answer from Franklin which he would transmit directly to the King himself. Franklin laid the letter before his colleagues, and it was agreed that it should be answered by him, and that both it and the answer should be laid before Vergennes, and that the answer should be sent or kept back as Vergennes believed best. The French Minister decided that it had best not be sent. At the hour fixed for the interview, however, an agent of the French police was on hand, and he reported that a gentleman, whose name he afterwards ascertained to be an Irish one by tracking him to his hotel, did appear at the appointed time, and, finding no one to meet him, wandered about the Cathedral, looking at the altars and pictures, but never losing sight of the place suggested for the tryst, and often returning to it, and gazing anxiously about him as if he expected some one. The scornful tone of the letter, drafted by Franklin, which is not unlike one of the scolding speeches, with which the Homeric heroes expressed their opinions of each other, leaves little room for doubt that he truly believed himself to be assailing no less a person than the bigoted King himself. After some savage thrusts, which remind us of those aimed by Hamlet at Polonius behind the arras, he bursts out into these exclamatory words:

This proposition of delivering ourselves, bound and gagged, ready for hanging, without even a right to complain, and without a friend to be found afterwards among all mankind you would have us embrace upon the faith of an act of Parliament! Good God! An act of your Parliament! This demonstrates that you do not yet know us, and that you fancy we do not know you; but it is not merely this flimsy faith, that we are to act upon; you offer us _hope_, the hope of PLACES, PENSIONS, and PEERAGES. These, judging from yourselves, you think are motives irresistible. This offer to corrupt us, Sir, is with me your credential, and convinces me that you are not a private volunteer in your application. It bears the stamp of British court character. It is even the signature of your King.

The next bearer of the olive branch, who came over to Paris, came under very different auspices. This was William Jones, afterwards Sir William Jones, who was at the time affianced to Anna Maria Shipley. He did not come as the representative of the King or his Ministers, but as the representative of the generous and patriotic Englishmen, who had cherished the same dream of world-wide British unity as Franklin himself, and whose sacrifices in behalf of their fellow-Englishmen in America should be almost as gratefully remembered by us as the Continental soldiers who perished at Monmouth or Camden. Draping his thoughts with academic terms, he submitted a paper to Dr. Franklin entitled _A Fragment from Polybius_ in which England, France, the United States and Franklin are given names borrowed from antiquity, and various suggestions are made for the settlement of the existing controversy between Great Britain and America. England becomes Athens, France, Caria, America, the Islands, and Franklin, Eleutherion; and Jones himself is masked as an Athenian lawyer.

This I _know_ [observes the latter-day Athenian] and positively pronounce, that, while Athens is Athens, her proud but brave citizens will never _expressly_ recognize the independence of the Islands; their resources are, no doubt, exhaustible, but will not be exhausted in the lives of us and of our children. In this resolution all parties agree.

There should be, the writer suggested, "a perfect coordination between Athens and the Thirteen United Islands, they considering her not as a parent, whom they must obey, but as an elder sister, whom they can not help loving, and to whom they shall give pre-eminence of honor and co-equality of power." Other suggestions were that the new constitutions of the Islands should remain intact, but that, on every occasion, requiring acts for the general good, there should be an assembly of deputies from the Senate of Athens, and the Congress of the Islands, who should fairly adjust the whole business, and settle the ratio of the contributions on both sides; that this committee should consist of fifty Islanders and fifty Athenians, or of a smaller number chosen by them, and that, if it was thought necessary, and found convenient, a proportionate number of Athenian citizens should have seats, and the power of debating and voting on questions of common concern in the great assembly of the Islands, and a proportionable number of Islanders should sit with the like power in the Assembly at Athens. The whole reminds the reader of the classical fictions to which the first Parliamentary reporters were driven by press censorship. The paper, drafted by Jones, was little more than a mere literary exercise, prompted by ingenuous enthusiasm, but we may be sure that it kindled in Franklin very different feelings from those aroused in him by the insidious appeal of Charles de Weissenstein.

The shortcomings, which Franklin is supposed by his enemies to have exhibited in France with respect to the duties of his post, require but little attention. Apart from a lack of clerical neatness and system, such as might more justly be imputed as a serious reproach to a book-keeper or clerk, they rest upon evidence easily perverted by enmity or jealousy.[41] Adams had no little to say about Franklin's love of ease and tranquillity, the social and academic distractions, to which he was subject, and the extent to which his time was consumed by curious visitors. It is a sufficient answer to all such disparagement to declare that he successfully dispatched an enormous amount of public business with but very little aid, and unflinchingly bore a load of responsibility only less weighty than that of Washington; that no spy, such as obtained secret access to the papers of Silas Deane and Arthur Lee for the purposes of the British Government, ever abstracted any valuable information from his papers; and that his position in the polite and learned world, and the popular curiosity, excited by his fame, were among the things which tended most effectually to recommend him to the favor of the French People and Ministry. The effort was also made by John Adams to create the impression that Franklin was unduly subservient to the influence of France, and that, but for the superior firmness of John Jay and himself, the United States would not have concluded a peace with England on terms anything like so favorable as those actually obtained from her.

In what respects Franklin can be truly said to have been servile to French influence, it is impossible to see. If by this is meant that he did not share the prejudices of Adams and Jay against the French people, did not harbor their keen distrust of the motives of the French ministry and did not feel as free as they to ignore the proprieties, arising out of the profound obligations of America to France, the reflection is just enough. Neither Adams nor Jay ever succeeded in making himself sufficiently acceptable to the French people or ministry, or obtained sufficient benefits from them for his countrymen, to feel any sense of personal indebtedness to them, or to be inclined to show any unusual degree of consideration to them. This was true of Jay, if for no other reason, because his intercourse with them was but limited in point of time. Franklin, on the other hand, was the idol of the French people, and received from Vergennes as decisive proofs of confidence as one individual can confer upon another. No one could have been in a better position than he was to know that the French alliance was hardly more the fruit of selfish policy upon the part of the French ministry, or of a desire upon its part to avenge historic injuries, than of the generous sensibility of the French people to the liberal and democratic impulses, which were hurrying them on to the fiercest outbreak of uncalculating enthusiasm that the world has ever seen. He had never entered the cabinet of the French Minister to sue for pecuniary aid without coming away with a fresh cordial for the drooping energies of his people. That upright and able minister, he wrote to Samuel Huntington, on one occasion, had never promised him anything which he did not punctually perform.[42] No matter how dark were the thick clouds that enveloped the fate of his country, no matter how acute was the pecuniary distress of France herself, there was always another million at the bottom of the stocking of the French tax-payer for the land of freedom and opportunity. Franklin had even known what it was to beg for a loan from the French King and to receive it as a gracious gift. He would have been fashioned of ignoble materials, indeed, if he had been too quick, in seeking the selfish advantage of his country, to forget the extraordinary magnanimity of her ally, and to suspect a disposition upon her part to deprive the United States of the just rewards of the triumph, which they might never have achieved but for her. And he, at any rate, with his strong sense of justice, was not likely to commit himself with unhesitating alacrity to a coldblooded scramble for concessions from England to America which took no account of the fact that France not only had the interests of America, but also her own necessities to consult, and that it was as essential to her interests that America should not make peace with England before she did, as it was to the interests of America that France should not make peace with England before America did. In the Treaty of Alliance, France had assumed no obligation to the United States except that of continuing to wage war against England until their independence was acknowledged, and of not concluding any peace with England that did not include them. She had never bound herself to secure to America the right of fishery on the Newfoundland Banks, or to oppose every restriction upon the extension of her western boundaries. In the course of the war, there was a time when the situation of America was so desperate that Vergennes was, with perfect fidelity to the American cause, brought to the conclusion that the Thirteen States might well afford to surrender a part of their territory to England as the price of independence; and this was a conclusion to which any honest American mind might have been brought under the circumstances. And, even after this crisis had passed, and negotiations for peace were pending between Great Britain and the Allies, it is not surprising that he should not have foreseen that he would ever have occasion to say, as he did after England and America came to terms, that England had bought rather than made a peace, but should have thought that England might still hold out stubbornly enough to cause even America to feel that she could be reasonably expected by France to forego more than one minor expectation to make certain of her independence. There was also the fact, which could hardly escape the attention of a man so deferential to the authority of his principals as Franklin always was, that Congress had positively instructed its Commissioners to make the most candid and confidential communications upon all subjects to the minister of its generous ally, the King of France, to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or a truce without the knowledge and concurrence of the Minister and King, and ultimately to govern themselves by their advice and opinion.

And there was also the fact that Franklin had always had such marked success in influencing the conclusions of Vergennes, that he might well have confided in his ability to bring the French minister over to any reasonable views that he might form about the results that America had the right to expect from the Peace; particularly as Vergennes had long been possessed with a haunting fear that America might be detached from her alliance with France.

In the light of all these circumstances, it is not strange that Franklin should have been reluctant, in the first instance, to unite with Adams and Jay in signing the preliminary treaty of peace with England without previously consulting with Vergennes; for that is the only tangible foundation for the claim that he was too submissive to the selfish designs of France; and there is no substantial evidence that any real point was gained by America by the act, or that it awakened any feeling in Vergennes profounder than the passing disappointment, born of realized distrust and affronted pride, which led him to write to M. de la Luzerne, the French Minister to the United States, immediately after it as follows:

I think it proper that the most influential members of Congress should be informed of the very irregular conduct of their Commissioners in regard to us. You may speak of it not in the tone of complaint. I accuse no person; I blame no one, not even Dr. Franklin. He has yielded too easily to the bias of his colleagues, who do not pretend to recognize the rules of courtesy in regard to us. All their attentions have been taken up by the English whom they have met in Paris. If we may judge of the future from what has passed here under our eyes, we shall be but poorly paid for all that we have done for the United States, and for securing to them a national existence.

When we recollect how faithfully France had rejected every effort upon the part of England to treat for peace with her separately, and insisted that the treaty of peace between England and France, on the one hand, and the treaty of peace between England and the United States, on the other, should go hand in hand, how entirely Vergennes had refrained from inquiring into the course of the pending negotiations between England and our commissioners, which resulted in the signing of the preliminary treaty of peace between England and the United States; and how singularly limited was the measure of concession that France asked for herself from England, these words cannot be read by any true American without a highly painful impression.

When Franklin appealed, after the peace, to both Adams and Jay to deny the statement, current in America, that he had not stood up stoutly for American rights, when the peace was being concluded, Jay complied with unreserved emphasis, and Adams with a reluctant note which rendered his testimony but the stronger. The truth is that, if Franklin's conduct during the peace negotiations was not admirable in every respect, it was only because he found that he could not decline to unite with his colleagues in violating the instruction of Congress without breaking with them and hazarding discord that might be fatal to the interests of his country. He did not, of course, believe that France, after the enormous sacrifices that she had made for American independence, was engaged in a treacherous effort to shackle the growth of the United States. He could not readily have entertained such a totally ungrounded suspicion as that which led Jay, when he learnt that De Rayneval was going over to London to have an interview with Shelburne, to leap to the conclusion that it was for the purpose of confounding American aspirations, and to inform Shelburne that now was the time for England to outbid France for the favor of America by executing at once preliminary articles of peace, conceding to America the points about which she was most concerned. The overture was a bold one, but if it had not been accepted in the manner that it was, and had been communicated by Shelburne to Vergennes, it might have been attended by consequences inimical to the Alliance which even the personal influence of Franklin might not have been able to prevent. Franklin was too prudent to risk rashly the support of an ally, from which the United States still found it necessary to borrow money, even after their independence was acknowledged, and too grateful to risk lightly the friendship of an ally which had not only aided the United States with soldiers, ships and money to secure their independence, but had repeatedly declined to treat with England except on the basis of American independence. His inclination naturally and properly enough was to maintain with Vergennes until the last the frank and intimate relations that he had always maintained with him; to avoid everything that might have the least savor of faithlessness or sharp practice in the opinion of our ally, and to rely upon our growing importance and the ordinary appeals of argument and persuasion for a peace at once fair and just to both the United States and France. But never once from the time that he wrote to Lord Shelburne the brief letter, that initiated the negotiations for peace between England and the United States, until the day that he threw himself, after the consummation of peace, into the arms of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, saying, "My friend! Could I have hoped at my age to enjoy such a happiness," was he animated by any purpose except that of securing for his countrymen the most generous terms that he could. It is by no means improbable that, if he had been our sole negotiator, he would not only have obtained for us all that was secured by his Fellow-Commissioners and himself but Canada besides, and would, moreover, have saved the United States the reproach that justly attached to them because of the precipitate signature of the preliminary articles of peace. As we have already seen, the acquisition of Canada by the United States was something that he had definitely in mind even before the negotiations for peace began, and, when they did begin, this was one of the things that he specified in a memorandum that he gave to Oswald, the British envoy, as concessions that it was advisable for England to make, and we also know from the correspondence of Oswald that it was a topic to which his conversation frequently turned. With such address did he ply Oswald upon this point that the latter went so far as to say that it might be conceded. To compass it, he was even willing to agree that the Loyalists should be compensated by the United States for their losses; which was the point upon which the English Ministry was most earnestly bent, and the one which aroused in him feelings of the deepest antagonism. What a trifling recompense the compensation of the Loyalists would have been for such an addition to our national domain as Canada we hardly need say; nor need we dilate upon the far-sighted statesmanship which so surely foresaw what futurity held in store for a country which, as late as 1760, had been gravely proposed to be exchanged with France for the Island of Guadeloupe. It is to be regretted by the United States, if the present happy lot of Canada is to be the subject of regret at all, that the desire of Franklin to secure Canada for them was not more urgently seconded by Adams and Jay. The former was enthusiastically resolved, as was but proper, to secure for New England the right to fish on the Newfoundland Banks, and the latter was especially eager, as any statesman with the slightest glow of imagination might well have been, to remove every obstacle in our pathway westward. Neither appears to have been zealously alive to the considerations, which led Franklin to cast a covetous eye upon Canada, and to make it one of the primary objects of his efforts to promote the interests of America during the peace negotiations. On the other hand, Franklin was not less impressed than they were with the importance of our North Eastern Fisheries and our Western Destiny; and was quite as stiff as they in maintaining our rights with respect to them. Moreover, when the insistence of the English Ministry upon compensation for the Loyalists threatened to be the only rock, upon which the negotiations were likely to split, it was his suggestiveness which relieved the situation by proposing, as an offset to the losses of the Loyalists, the payment by England of the pecuniary losses wantonly inflicted by her upon the inhabitants of such towns as Fairfield and Norfolk on our Atlantic seaboard. After this timely counter-claim, a compromise was soon reached, under which it was agreed that the Loyalists should be referred to the justice of the individual States with a favorable recommendation from the Commissioners. This was but a diplomatic way of disposing of the proposition adversely without seeming to do so, for Shelburne as well as the American Commissioners must have realized that the recommendation was the only form of indemnity that the Loyalists were likely to obtain.

Friendly as Franklin was to the French Court, it was only where some treaty stipulation was involved, or some definite rule of courtesy was to be observed, that he recognized the right of France to influence the course of the negotiations between England and the American Commissioners. He knew as well as Adams and Jay that French policy, partly because of considerations, peculiar to France herself, and partly because of obligations, that France owed to Spain, differed in some very material respects from American policy. But he entertained the belief, and justly entertained the belief, that this was no reason why Vergennes should necessarily be moved by the settled, perfidious purpose of arresting an agreement between England and America until the negotiations between England and France and Spain had gone too far for the United States to be any longer in the position to insist effectively upon their fishery and boundary claims. The disposition of the French Minister to contemplate contingencies, in which concessions would have to be made by America, was in Franklin's judgment "due to the moderation of the minister and to his desire of removing every obstacle to speedy negotiations for peace"; and there is no real reason to believe that he was not right. It is quite true that Marbois, when he was the French Secretary of Legation in the United States, in his famous letter to Vergennes, which the English were at pains to bring to the notice of John Jay, suggested to Vergennes that he should let the Americans know that their pretensions to the Newfoundland fisheries were not well founded, and that the French King did not mean to support them; but, as Vergennes wrote to M. de la Luzerne, the successor of Gerard, the opinion of Marbois was not necessarily that of the King, and, moreover the views of his letter had not been followed. When Franklin made his suggestion to Oswald in respect to Canada, he did not bring it to the knowledge of Vergennes. In the very commencement of the negotiations between England and the United States, he let it be known to Grenville, the envoy of Charles James Fox, that, when Great Britain acknowledged the independence of America, the treaty, that America had made with France for gaining it, ended, and no conventional tie remained between America and France but that of the treaty of commerce which England, too, might establish between America and herself, if she pleased. Indeed, Vergennes himself clearly recognized the right of the American Commissioners to make the best terms that they could for themselves in the matter of the fisheries, the western boundaries or any other object of American policy.

We are [he wrote Luzerne on April 9, 1782], and shall always be, disposed to consent that the American plenipotentiaries in Europe should treat according to their instructions directly and without our intervention with those of the Court of London, while we on our side shall treat in the same way, provided that the two negotiations continue at the same rate, and that the two treaties shall be signed the same day, and shall not be good the one without the other.

The hesitation of Franklin about executing the preliminary articles of peace between England and the United States was not due to any doubt as to the technical right of the American Commissioners to sign it, aside from the instruction of Congress that they were not to take any important step without the advice of the French Ministry. He hesitated to sign it because he was subject to this instruction, and also because he felt that for the Commissioners to sign such a treaty, without taking Vergennes into their confidence, was hardly compatible with the scrupulous deference due to such a timely, generous and powerful ally as France had proved herself to be and might be again. His reason for disregarding the instruction of Congress, and uniting with his colleagues in signing the articles doubtless was that he deemed it unwise, in any view of the case, not to subordinate his own judgment, after full discussion, to that of the majority of the Commission in a case where, if the French Minister were acting in bad faith, it was but proper that his bad faith should be anticipated, and where, if he were acting in good faith, his resentment was not likely to be more serious than that which is usually visited upon a mere breach of diplomatic decorum. The execution of the articles was expressly made subject to the proviso that they were to have no force, if England did not reach an understanding with France also. Without such a proviso, the action of our Commissioners, of course, would have merited the contempt of the world. With it, Franklin was left free to say, disingenuously it must be confessed, to Vergennes that, in signing the articles, the Commissioners had at the most been guilty of neglecting a point of _bienseance_. No one knew better than he that no such soothing pretence could be set up by Adams and Jay, and that, even as respected himself, though the extent of his offence consisted, as Vergennes truly divined, in yielding to the bias of his colleagues, he had been drawn into a position in which it was impossible for him to separate himself wholly from either the motives or the moral responsibilities of his colleagues. In transmitting with them to Congress a copy of the articles, he united with them in this statement:

As we had reason to imagine that the Articles respecting the boundaries, the refugees and fisheries, did not correspond with the policy of this court, we did not communicate the preliminaries to the Minister until after they were signed, and not even then the separate Article. We hope that these considerations will excuse our having so far deviated from the spirit of our instructions. The Count de Vergennes, on perusing the Articles, appeared surprised, but not displeased, at their being so favorable to us.

The separate article was one fixing the northern boundary of West Florida, in case Great Britain, at the conclusion of the war, should recover, or be put in possession of, that Province. In reply to a letter from Robert R. Livingston, disapproving the manner, in which the articles had been signed, Franklin said that they had done what appeared to all of them best at the time, and, if they had done wrong, the Congress would do right, after hearing them, to censure them. The nomination by Congress of five persons to the service, he further said, seemed to mark that they had some dependence on their joint judgment, since one alone could have made a treaty by direction of the French Ministry, as well as twenty. But there can be no doubt that the individual views of Franklin about the aims of the French Court, in relation to the United States, are to be found not in the letter of the Commissioners to Congress, but in his own words in this same reply to Livingston:

I will only add [he said] that, with respect to myself, neither the Letter from M. de Marbois, handed us thro' the British Negociators (a suspicious Channel) nor the Conversations respecting the Fishery, the Boundaries, the Royalists, &c., recommending Moderation in our Demands, are of Weight sufficient in my Mind to fix an Opinion, that this Court wish'd to restrain us in obtaining any Degree of Advantage we could prevail on our Enemies to accord; since those Discourses are fairly resolvable, by supposing a very natural Apprehension, that we, relying too much on the Ability of France to continue the War in our favour, and supply us constantly with Money, might insist on more Advantages than the English would be willing to grant, and thereby lose the Opportunity of making Peace, so necessary to all our friends.

It is impossible, however, to believe that Franklin could have taken such a step except with grave misgivings as to its effect on the mind of Vergennes. This is shown by the reserve which he, as well as his fellow-commissioners, maintained towards Vergennes, while the preliminary articles were being matured.

According to the injunctions of Congress [Vergennes wrote to Luzerne], they should have done nothing without our participation. I have pointed out to you, Sir, that the King would not have sought to interest himself in the negotiations, save in so far as his offices might be necessary to his friends. The American Commissioners will not say that I have sought to intervene in their business, still less that I have wearied them by my curiosity. They have kept themselves carefully out of my way.

It must have taxed even the nice judgment of Franklin to calculate precisely the degree of resentment that the act of the Commissioners would excite. He took the precaution of sending a copy of the articles to Vergennes the day after they were signed. His receipt of them was followed by an ominous silence. Some days later, Franklin called upon Vergennes, and the latter took pains to let him perceive that the signing of the articles had little in it which could be agreeable to the King, and Franklin advanced such excuses for his colleagues and himself as the case permitted. According to Vergennes, the conversation was amicable, but for a time it did not efface the impression that his mind had received. A week or so later, when Franklin proposed to send the preliminary articles to America by a ship, for which an English passport had been provided, and was soliciting a loan of twenty millions of francs from France, Vergennes gave him a bad quarter of an hour.

I am at a loss sir [he said] to explain your conduct, and that of your colleagues on this occasion. You have concluded your preliminary articles without any communication between us, although the instructions from Congress prescribe that nothing shall be done without the participation of the King. You are about to hold out a certain hope of peace to America, without even informing yourself on the state of the negotiation on our part. You are wise and discreet, sir; you perfectly understand what is due to propriety; you have all your life performed your duties. I pray you to consider how you propose to fulfill those, which are due to the King! I am not desirous of enlarging these reflections; I commit them to your own integrity. When you shall be pleased to relieve my uncertainty, I will entreat the King to enable me to answer your demands.

The reply of Franklin was almost abject.

Nothing [he said] has been agreed in the preliminaries contrary to the interests of France; and no peace is to take place between us and England, till you have concluded yours. Your observation is, however, apparently just, that, in not consulting you before they were signed, we have been guilty of neglecting a point of _bienseance_. But, as this was not from want of respect for the King, whom we all love and honour, we hope it will be excused, and that the great work, which has hitherto been so happily conducted, is so nearly brought to perfection, and is so glorious to his reign, will not be ruined by a single indiscretion of ours. And certainly the whole edifice sinks to the ground immediately, if you refuse on that account to give us any further assistance.

Again, unpromising as the conditions were, there was no resisting the voice of the seductive mendicant. France did not lend the twenty millions of francs to the United States because she did not have that much to lend; but she did lend six. If any loss of dignity or self-respect was suffered on this occasion it was not by her.

The definitive treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States was signed at Paris on September 3, 1783, and was ratified a few months later by both the contracting powers. Several weeks after it was signed, Franklin again tendered his resignation to Congress, but it was not accepted until March 7, 1785. Three days later, Jefferson, who had been in France ever since August, 1784, for the purpose of co-operating with Franklin and Adams in the negotiation of commercial treaties with England and other European countries, was appointed the American plenipotentiary at the Court of Versailles in the place of Franklin.

Shortly after the return of Franklin to Philadelphia, he was elected President of the Executive Council of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and, in 1787, he was elected a member of the convention which adopted the Federal Constitution. There was only one man in the United States whose claims to the Presidency of the Convention could possibly be deemed paramount to his; and that was Washington. The nomination of Washington to the position was to have been made by him, but the weather on the day, fixed for it, was too bad to permit him at his advanced age, and in his infirm condition, to venture abroad. The honor of making the nomination, therefore, fell to Robert Morris, another member of the Pennsylvania delegation. It was thought becoming and graceful in Pennsylvania, Madison tells us, to pass by her own distinguished citizen as President, and to take the lead in giving that pre-eminence to the late Commander-in-Chief of the American Army, which the country felt to be his due.[43] At the next session of the Convention, Franklin was present, and thereafter he attended its sessions regularly for five hours each day for more than four months. His stone made it impossible for him to stand long upon his feet, and, when he participated on any important occasion in the discussions of the body, it was his habit to reduce his thoughts to writing, and to have them read to the body by one of his colleagues, usually James Wilson. Copies of these speeches were made by Madison from the original manuscripts for his reports of the debates of the Convention, and, unlike the speeches of the other leading members of the Assembly, the speeches of Franklin have consequently come down to us in their entirety. Of his general course in the Convention, it is enough to say that it was strongly marked by liberalism, faith in the popular intelligence and virtue, and the aversion to arbitrary power which was always such a prominent feature of his conduct in every relation. He had a quick eye to the abuses of authority, and it is probable that, if he had been a younger man, when the Convention met, and had lived until the clash between the Federalists and the Republicans arose, he would have been a Republican. Inane idealism, lack of energy and resolution did not belong to his character, but, to say nothing more, what he had seen of the workings of monarchical and aristocratic institutions, during the long dispute between England and her colonies, was not calculated to prejudice him in their favor.[44]

The compensation that should be paid to the Chief Magistrate of the Union was the first topic to which he formally addressed himself as a member of the Convention. In his opinion, no pecuniary compensation should be paid to him. The argument that he pursued in support of his proposition was one that he had often made with respect to the Government of Great Britain.

Sir [he said] there are two Passions which have a powerful Influence in the Affairs of Men. These are _Ambition and Avarice_; the Love of Power and the Love of Money. Separately, each of these has great Force in prompting Men to Action; but when united in View of the same Object, they have in many Minds the most violent Effects. Place before the Eyes of such Men a Post of _Honour_, that shall at the same time be a Place of _Profit_, and they will move Heaven and Earth to obtain it. The vast Number of such Places it is that renders the British Government so tempestuous. The Struggles for them are the true source of all those Factions which are perpetually dividing the Nation, distracting its Councils, hurrying it sometimes into fruitless and mischievous Wars, and often compelling a Submission to dishonorable Terms of Peace.

The argument, of course, fell upon deaf ears. It really presupposes a numerous class, at once sufficiently free from pecuniary anxieties to give its exclusive attention to public duties, and sufficiently qualified to discharge them with the requisite degree of success. Such a class was not to be found in America, at any rate, and, even if it was, it would have been invidious in the eyes of a democratic community to limit the enjoyment of public office to it. The subsequent history of the Republic showed that, in the beginning of our national existence, even moderate salaries did not suffice to keep some of the ablest men in the United States from declining or resigning federal office. The long journeys and the bad roads and taverns of that day were probably responsible for this state of things. In the first thirty years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution, no less than one hundred and ten seats in the United States Senate were resigned, and Washington experienced great difficulty in inducing lawyers to accept positions even on the Supreme Bench of the United States. It is a remarkable fact that, during the first thirty years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution, ten persons either declined to serve as associate justices of the Supreme Court, or resigned the office. It is a still more remarkable fact that both Jay and Ellsworth resigned as Chief Justice after brief terms of office. There was, however, undoubtedly an element of expediency in the views of Franklin, for it is no uncommon thing in the United States to see the supervisory functions of certain offices, connected with the educational or eleemosynary systems of the country, more efficiently and faithfully exercised, when exercised without pay by men, in whom public spirit or philanthropic zeal is highly developed, than they would be, if exercised by the very different kind of men who would be attracted to them, if salaried.

In connection with another question, the extent to which the superior wealth and population of the larger states were to be represented in Congress, it was the fortune of Franklin to exert a powerful and decisive influence. The debate over this question was so protracted and heated, the smaller States demanding equal representation with the larger in both Houses of Congress, and the larger repelling the claim as utterly unreasonable and unjust, that it looked, at one time, as if the Convention would break up like a ship lodged on a fatal rock. Then it was that Franklin found out to his surprise that his colleagues did not set the same value as himself upon the harmonizing influence of prayer. Not only was his suggestion that the proceedings of the Convention be opened each day with it rejected, but the controversy became more acrimonious than ever; John Dickinson, one of the members from Delaware, who always had a way of chafing in harness, even declaring that rather than be deprived of an equality of representation in the Legislature he would prefer to be a foreign subject. At this point, Franklin came forward with a proposition of compromise, accompanied by one of his happy illustrations.

The diversity of opinion [he said] turns on two points. If a proportional representation take place, the small States contend that their liberties will be in danger. If an equality of votes is to be put into its place, the larger States say their money will be in danger. When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of the planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint.

He then proposed that all the States should have an equal number of delegates in Congress, and that on all questions affecting the authority or sovereignty of a State, or, when appointments and confirmations were under consideration, every State should have an equal vote, but that on bills to raise or expend money every State should have a vote proportioned to its population. This compromise did not meet with the favor of the smaller States. Under the lead of Dickinson, they still contended for unvarying equality between them and the larger States. At length, a committee was appointed to consider the matter, and to report a compromise, and Franklin was one of its members. It came back with a plan, proposed by his constructive intellect, namely, that, in the Senate, every State should have equal representation, but that, in the other House, every State should have a representation proportioned to its population; and that bills to raise or expend money should originate in the other House. The report of the committee was adopted, and no device of the Constitution has, in practice, more strikingly vindicated the wisdom of the brain by which it was conceived than that hit upon by Franklin for disarming the jealousy and fears of the smaller States represented in the Convention.

He approved the proposed article making the presidential term of office seven years, and declaring its incumbent ineligible for a second term. The sagacity of this conclusion has been confirmed by experience. There was nothing degrading, Franklin thought, in the idea of the magistrate returning to the mass of the people; for in free governments rulers are the servants, and the people are their superiors and sovereigns. The same popular bias manifested itself when the proposition was made to limit the suffrage to freeholders. "It is of great consequence," he said, "that we should not depress the virtue and public spirit of our common people, of which they displayed a great deal during the war, and which contributed principally to the favorable issue of it." The British statute, setting forth the danger of tumultuous meetings, and, under that pretext, narrowing the right of suffrage to persons having freeholds of a certain value, was soon followed, he added, by another, subjecting the people, who had no votes, to peculiar labors and hardships. Some days later, Madison informs us, he expressed his dislike to everything that tended to debase the spirit of the common people. If honesty was often the companion of wealth, and, if poverty was exposed to peculiar temptations, it was not less true, he declared, that the possession of property increased the desire for more property. Some of the greatest rogues he was ever acquainted with were the richest rogues. They should remember the character which the Scriptures require in rulers, that they should be men hating covetousness. The Constitution would be much read and attended in Europe, and, if it should betray a great partiality to the rich, would not only cost them the esteem of the most liberal and enlightened men there, but discourage the common people from removing to America.

He strongly favored the clause giving Congress the power to impeach the President. When the head of the government cannot be lawfully called to account, the people have no recourse, he said, against oppression but revolution and assassination. These, it should be recollected, were the utterances of a man who was from age too near the end of political ambition to be possibly influenced by demagogic designs of any sort. Franklin also opposed the idea of conferring an absolute veto upon the President, and the requirement of fourteen years' residence as a condition of citizenship. Four years he believed to be enough. He approved the article making an overt act essential to the crime of treason, and exacting the evidence of two witnesses to establish the overt act.

He also forcibly expressed his views with regard to the respective powers with which the two Houses of Congress should be invested. When the Convention was drawing to a close, he urged its members in a tactful and persuasive speech to lay aside their individual disappointments, and to give their work to the world with the stamp of unanimity. As is well known, when the last members were signing, he looked towards the President's chair, at the back of which there was a representation of a rising sun, and, after observing to some of his associates near him that painters had found it difficult in their art to distinguish a rising from a setting sun, he concluded with this exultant peroration: "I have often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: but now, at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun." And a rising sun, indeed, it was, starting out upon its splendid circuit like the sun in the lines of Charles Lamb, "with all his fires and travelling glories round him."

The opinions of Franklin with regard to general political topics are always acute and interesting, and, unlike the opinions of most great men, even the greatest, are rarely, if ever, flecked by the errors of his time. In some quarters, there has been a disposition to reproach him with being an advocate of what since his day has come to be known in the United States as rag or fiat money. The reproach loses sight of the fact that the currency problems, with which he had to deal, did not turn upon the true respective functions of paper and real money, under conditions that permit their application to their several natural and proper uses. No such conditions existed in America during the colonial period or the Revolutionary War. There was no California, Alaska, Nevada, or Colorado then. "Gold and Silver," Franklin said in 1767, in his _Remarks and Facts Concerning American Paper Money_, "are not the Produce of _North-America_, which has no Mines."

Every civilized community, unless it is to be remanded to mere barter, must have some kind of convenient medium for the exchange of commodities and the payment of debts, even though it be no better than wampum or tobacco. Paper money, whether it bore interest or not, and whether it was a legal tender or not, was, unsupported by any real provision for its redemption, a dangerous currency for America, in her early history, as it is for any country, whatever its state of maturity; but she had no choice. It was either that or something not even as good on the whole for monetary purposes. Not only were there no gold or silver mines in North America, but the balance of trade between the Colonies and Great Britain was so greatly in favor of the latter country that even such gold and silver coin, as found its way to them, was at once drawn off to her.

However fit [bitterly declared Franklin in the pamphlet, to which we have just referred], a particular Thing may be for a particular Purpose, wherever that Thing is not to be had, or not to be had in sufficient Plenty, it becomes necessary to use something else, the fittest that can be got, in lieu of it.

In America, this undoubtedly was a paper currency, even though issued as real, and not representative, money. At times, in the history of the Colonies, it worked much pecuniary loss and debasement of morals, but, makeshift as it was, it was the best makeshift that the situation of the Colonies allowed; and, when New England petitioned for the Act of Parliament, depriving it of the legal-tender quality within her limits, it was only, Franklin contended, because the close intercourse between the four provinces, of which she was constituted, and the large supply of hard money, derived by her from her whale and cod fisheries, took the sting out of the act. But, when the act was afterwards extended to the other colonies, it became a real grievance, and, as such, was stated by Franklin, in his examination before the House of Commons, to be one of the causes, which had lessened the respect of the Colonies for Parliament. "It seems hard therefore," he said in the paper just mentioned, "to draw all their real Money from them, and then refuse them the poor Privilege of using Paper instead of it." In the same essay, the circumstances, in which the need for a paper currency in the Colonies originated, are stated in his perspicuous manner: "The Truth is, that the Balance of their Trade with Britain being generally against them, the Gold and Silver is drawn out to pay that Balance; and then the Necessity of some Medium of Trade has induced the making of Paper Money, which could not be carried away."

In his capacity as colonial agent, Franklin earnestly strove to secure the repeal of the British legislation, forbidding the use of paper money in the Colonies as a legal tender, and he even enlisted for this purpose the aid of a large body of London merchants, engaged in the American trade, but his efforts met with slight success. Some of the members of the Board of Trade, who had united in recommending the restraint upon colonial paper money, were, it was said, at the time in the state of mind of Soame Jenyns, who had laughingly declared, when he was asked as a member of the Board to concur in some measure, "I have no kind of objection to it, provided we have heretofore signed nothing to the contrary."[45] Worse still, Grenville threw out the chilling suggestion in the House of Commons that Great Britain should make the paper money for the Colonies, issue it upon loan there, take the interest and apply it as Parliament might think proper.[46] This suggestion, and the interest excited by it led to a letter from Franklin to Galloway in which he said that he was not for applying again very soon for a repeal of the restraining act. "I am afraid," he remarked, "an ill use will be made of it. The plan of our adversaries is to render Assemblies in America useless; and to have a revenue independent of their grants, for all the purposes of their defence, and supporting governments among them."

These comments were followed by the suggestion that the Pennsylvania Assembly might be petitioned by the more prominent citizens of Pennsylvania to authorize a moderate emission of paper money, though without the legal-tender feature; the petition to be accompanied by a mutual engagement upon the part of the petitioners to take the money in all business transactions at rates fixed by law. Or, perhaps, Franklin said, a bank might be established that would meet the currency needs of the community. In any event, should the scarcity of money continue, they would rely more upon their own industrial resources, to the detriment of the British merchant, and by keeping in Pennsylvania the real cash, that came into it, would, in time, have a quantity sufficient for all their occasions. The same thought, tinged with a trace of resentment, emerges in one of his letters to Lord Kames:

As I think a scarcity of money will work with our other present motives for lessening our fond extravagance in the use of the superfluous manufactures of this country, which unkindly grudges us the enjoyment of common rights, and will tend to lead us naturally into industry and frugality, I am grown more indifferent about the repeal of the act, and, if my countrymen will be advised by me, we shall never ask it again.[47]

The relations sustained by Franklin to the Continental paper currency we have already seen. There was an apparent element of inconsistency in his suggestion that it should bear interest; for interest-bearing bills, he had contended in his _Remarks and Facts Concerning American Paper Money_, were objectionable as currency, because it was tedious to calculate interest on one of them, as often as it changed hands, and also because a distinct advantage was to be gained by hoarding them.

The Continental bills depreciated so rapidly that in 1777 the price of a bushel of salt at Baltimore was nine pounds. Three years later, the price of a yard of cassimere in America was $300, and of a yard of jean and habit cloth $60. Inflated as the bills were, Franklin with his cheerful habit of mind was not at a loss to say a good word for them. There was some advantage to the general public, at any rate, he wrote to Stephen Sayre, in the facility with which taxes could be paid off with the depreciated paper. Congress, he wrote to Dr. Cooper, had blundered in not earlier adopting his suggestion that the interest on the bills should be paid in real money.

The _only Remedy_ now [he said] seems to be a Diminution of the Quantity by a vigourous Taxation, of great nominal Sums, which the People are more able to pay, in proportion to the Quantity and diminished Value; and the _only Consolation_ under the Evil is, that the Publick Debt is proportionably diminish'd with the Depreciation; and this by a kind of imperceptible Tax, everyone having paid a Part of it in the Fall of Value that took place between his receiving and Paying such Sums as pass'd thro' his hands.

In this same letter, Franklin declared that it was a mystery to foreign politicians how America had been able to continue a war for four years without money, and how it could pay with paper that had no previously fixed fund appropriated specifically to redeem it. "This Currency, as we manage it," he said, "is a wonderful Machine. It performs its Office when we issue it; it pays and clothes Troops, and provides Victuals and Ammunition; and when we are obliged to issue a Quantity excessive, it pays itself off by Depreciation." The paper he subsequently wrote to Thomas Ruston had really operated as a tax, and was perhaps the most equal of all taxes, since it depreciated in the hands of holders of money, and thereby taxed them in proportion to the sums they held and the time they held them, which generally was in proportion to men's wealth.

All this, of course, was but making the best of a _pis-aller_. Franklin in a sense held a brief for paper money all his life, because, during almost his whole life, his country had to put up with paper money, whether she wanted to do so or not. When the Revolutionary War was over, he could be less of an advocate, and more of a judge with respect to such money; and the change is neatly illustrated in the words that he wrote from Philadelphia to the Duc de la Rochefoucauld in 1787. "Paper money in moderate quantities has been found beneficial; when more than the occasions of commerce require, it depreciated and was mischievous; and the populace are apt to demand more than is necessary."

To see at once how quickly Franklin could evade the danger, lurking in the proposition, urged by John Adams upon Vergennes, that the subjects of King Louis were as fairly amenable to the will of Congress, in reducing the value of paper money in their hands to one part in forty, as the Americans themselves, and yet how perfectly Franklin understood the workings of a depreciated paper currency, we need but turn to a letter from him to M. Le Veillard dated Feb. 17, 1788.

Where there is a free government [he said in this letter] and the people make their own laws by their representatives, I see no injustice in their obliging one another to take their own paper money. It is no more so than compelling a man by law to take his own note. But it is unjust to pay strangers with such money against their will. The making of paper money with such a sanction is however a folly, since, although you may by law oblige a citizen to take it for his goods, you cannot fix his prices; and his liberty of rating them as he pleases, which is the same thing as setting what value he pleases on your money, defeats your sanction.

Franklin was a free-trader, but his opinions with regard to import duties are sometimes streaked with Protectionist reasoning. All the natural leanings of such a broad-minded man were, it almost goes without saying, in favor of unrestricted commerce. His general attitude towards commercial restrictions was emphatically expressed in one of his letters to Peter Collinson from which we have already quoted.

In time perhaps [he said] Mankind may be wise enough to let Trade take its own Course, find its own Channels, and regulate its own Proportions, etc. At present, most of the Edicts of Princes, Placaerts, Laws & Ordinances of Kingdoms & States for that purpose, prove political Blunders. The Advantages they produce not being _general_ for the Commonwealth; but _particular_, to private Persons or Bodies in the State who procur'd them, and _at the Expence of the rest of the People_.

Many years later, he wrote to Benjamin Vaughan, "The making England entirely a free port would have been the wisest step ever taken for its advantage." In recent years, his _Wail of a Protected Manufacturer_ has been reprinted and widely circulated in England by the opponents of the Fair Trade movement:

Suppose a country, X, which has three industries--cloth, silk, iron--and supplies three other countries--A, B, and C--therewith, wishes to increase the sale and raise the price of cloth in favour of its cloth-makers.

To that end X prohibits the importation of cloth from A.

In retaliation A prohibits silks coming from X.

The workers in silk complain of the decline in their trade.

To satisfy them X excludes silk from B.

B, to retaliate, shuts out iron and hardware against X.

Then the makers of iron and hardware cry out that their trades are being ruined.

So X closes its doors against iron and hardware from C.

In return C refuses to take cloth from X.

Who is the gainer by all these prohibitions?

Answer

All the four countries have diminished their common fund of the enjoyments and conveniences of life.

The open ports of the United States, after the conclusion of the American Revolution, were a source of keen gratification to Franklin. They had brought in, he thought, a vast plenty of foreign goods, and occasioned a demand for domestic produce; so that America enjoyed the double advantage of buying what they consumed cheap, and of selling what they could spare dear.

The following views in a letter from him to Jared Eliot, as far back as the year 1747, sound like a recent tariff reform speech in Congress:

First, I imagine that the Five Per Cent Duty on Goods imported from your Neighbouring Governments, tho' paid at first Hand by the Importer, will not upon the whole come out of his Pocket, but be paid in Fact by the Consumer; for the Importer will be sure to sell his Goods as much dearer as to reimburse himself; so that it is only another Mode of Taxing your own People tho' perhaps meant to raise Money on your Neighbours.

But then follows what a free trader, using Franklin's own coarse phrase, might call "spitting in the soup." "Yet, if you can make some of the Goods, heretofore imported, among yourselves, the advanc'd price of five per cent may encourage your own Manufacture, and in time make the Importation of such Articles unnecessary, which will be an Advantage."

In another place, he employed language in harmony with the importance that the Protectionist assigns to his favorite system as a means of building up local markets for the produce of the farmer.[48] It may be truly said, however, as has already been hinted, that Franklin was never more friendly to the principle of international free trade than in the latter years of his life. In his letter to Le Veillard of Feb. 17, 1788, he used language which demonstrates that he was still convinced that import duties are paid by the consumer, and in an earlier letter to Robert R. Livingston in 1783 he said that he felt inclined to believe that a State, which left all her ports open to all the world, upon equal terms, would, by that means, have foreign commodities cheaper, sell its own productions dearer and be on the whole the most prosperous.

For export duties, he had a fierce contempt. "To lay duties on a commodity exported, which our neighbours want," he wrote to James Lovell in 1778, "is a knavish attempt to get something for nothing. The statesman who first invented it had the genius of a pickpocket, and would have been a pickpocket if fortune had suitably placed him."

How thoroughly Franklin understood the principles, which regulate the ebb and flow of population, we have had occasion to note.

With equal intelligence, he laid bare the pauperizing effect of aid injudiciously extended to the poor in too generous a measure. Commenting in his essay on the Laboring Poor on the liberal provision, made for indigence in England, he said:

I fear the giving mankind a dependance on anything for support, in age or sickness, besides industry and frugality during youth and health, tends to flatter our natural indolence, to encourage idleness and prodigality, and thereby to promote and increase poverty, the very evil it was intended to cure; thus multiplying beggars instead of diminishing them.

In his essay, Franklin makes the interesting statement that the condition of the poor in England was by far the best in Europe; "for that," he adds, "except in England and her American colonies, there is not in any country of the known world, not even in Scotland or Ireland, a provision by law to enforce a support of the poor. Everywhere else necessity reduces to beggary." The whole essay is a highly ingenious argument to the effect that it is a misconception to think of a rich man as the sole possessor of his wealth, and that in one way or another the laboring poor have the usufruct of the entire clear income of all the property owners in the community. Nobody knew better than Poor Richard that no help is worth speaking of save that which promotes self-help.

The support of the poor [he wrote to Richard Jackson] should not be by maintaining them in idleness, but by employing them in some kind of labour suited to their abilities of body, as I am informed begins to be of late the practice in many parts of England, where workhouses are erected for that purpose. If these were general, I should think the poor would be more careful, and work voluntarily to lay up something for themselves against a rainy day, rather than run the risk of being obliged to work at the pleasure of others for a bare subsistence, and that too under confinement.

For Agriculture, Franklin always had an appreciative word. "Agriculture," he observed in a letter to Cadwallader Evans, "is truly _productive of new wealth_; manufacturers only change forms, and, whatever value they give to the materials they work upon, they in the meantime consume an equal value in provisions, &c."

His other observations on Agriculture are worthy of being read for the light that they cast on his own character, if for no other reason. It is, he declared, in a letter to Jonathan Shipley, "the most useful, the most independent, and therefore the noblest of Employments." Another remark of his in his _Positions to be Examined, Concerning National Wealth_ is that there seemed to him but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth:

The first is by _war_, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is _robbery_. The second by _commerce_, which is _generally_ cheating. The third by _agriculture_, the only _honest way_, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favour, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.

The same spirit gives life to the following observations too in his essay on "The Internal State of America": "The Agriculture and Fisheries of the United States are the great Sources of our Encreasing Wealth. He that puts a Seed into the Earth is recompens'd, perhaps, by receiving twenty out of it; and he who draws a Fish out of our Waters, draws up a Piece of Silver."

In Franklin's time as now there was a feeling that the farmer did not receive his full share of the blessings of organized society. In his _Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor_, he makes a farmer say, "I am one of that class of people, that feeds you all, and at present is abused by you all. In short I am a _farmer_."

Franklin's views about punishment were also conspicuously worthy of his kind heart and sound sense. His letter to Benjamin Vaughan on the Criminal Laws is one of his best essays, and merited the honor conferred on it by Samuel Romilly, when he added it in the form of an appendix to his own observations on _Dr. Madan's Thoughts on Executive Justice_. In the course of his feeling exposures of existing fallacies with respect to the philosophy of punishment, Franklin, who did not scruple to say that there would be less crime, if there were no criminal laws, asked these searching questions:

I see, in the last Newspaper from London, that a Woman is capitally convicted at the Old Bailey, for privately stealing out of a Shop some Gauze, value 14 Shillings and three pence; is there any Proportion between the Injury done by a Theft, value 14/3, and the Punishment of a human Creature, by Death, on a Gibbet? Might not that Woman, by her Labour, have made the Reparation ordain'd by God, in paying fourfold? Is not all Punishment inflicted beyond the Merit of the Offence, so much Punishment of Innocence? In this light, how vast is the annual Quantity of not only _injured_, but _suffering_ Innocence, in almost all the civilized States of Europe!

That Franklin was opposed to imprisonment for debt it is hardly necessary to say. His sense of humor, if nothing else, was sufficient to point out to him the absurdity of depriving a debtor of all means of earning money until he earned enough to satisfy his creditors. John Baynes, in his Journal, informs us that, in a conversation with him, Franklin expressed his disapprobation of "this usage" in very strong terms. He said he could not compare any sum of money with imprisonment--they were not commensurable quantities.

Both slavery and the slave trade were held by Franklin in just reprobation, but his views on these subjects, it must be confessed, would be weightier, if he had not trafficked at one time in slaves himself. As it is, he occupies somewhat the same equivocal position as that which inspired Thomas Moore to pen the blackguard lines in which he pictured the American slaveholding patriot as dreaming of Freedom in his bondmaid's arms.[49] The economic truth, however, of what he had to say about Slave Labor in his essay on "The Increase of Mankind" is undeniable.

Tis an ill-grounded Opinion [he declared] that by the Labour of slaves, _America_ may possibly vie in Cheapness of Manufactures with _Britain_. The Labour of Slaves here can never be so cheap here as the Labour of working Men is in _Britain_. Anyone may compute it. Interest of Money is in the Colonies from 6 to 10 per Cent. Slaves one with another cost 30L Sterling per Head. Reckon then the Interest of the first Purchase of a Slave, the Insurance or Risque on his Life, his Cloathing and Diet, Expences in his Sickness and Loss of Time, Loss by his Neglect of Business (Neglect is natural to the Man who is not to be benefited by his own Care or Diligence), Expence of a Driver to keep him at Work, and his Pilfering from Time to Time, almost every Slave being _by Nature_ a Thief, and compare the whole Amount with the Wages of a Manufacturer of Iron or Wool in _England_, you will see that Labour is much cheaper there than it ever can be by Negroes here.

In this essay, the introduction of slaves is enumerated as one of the causes that diminish the growth of white population.

The Negroes brought into the _English_ Sugar _Islands_ [he says] have greatly diminish'd the Whites there; the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habit of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain'd 100. The Whites who have Slaves, not labouring, are enfeebled, and therefore not so generally prolific; the Slaves being work'd too hard, and ill fed, their Constitutions are broken, and the Deaths among them are more than the Births; so that a continual Supply is needed from _Africa_. The Northern Colonies, having few Slaves, increase in Whites. Slaves also pejorate the Families that use them; the white Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.[50]

FOOTNOTES:

[10] There is no evidence that, while he was a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin ever had occasion, as every member of an American State legislature is likely to have, to deal with a bill for the extermination of hawks and owls; but a skeleton sketch by his hand of his services as an assemblyman shows that he shared the fate of the ordinary member of an American State legislature in having a bill relating to dogs referred to a Committee of which he was a member.

[11] Franklin, though in no sense a time server, rarely got out of touch with the majority simply because he always saw things as the best collective intelligence of the community is likely to see them--only a little sooner and more clearly. "Friend Joseph," one Quaker is said to have asked of an acquaintance, "didst thee ever know Dr. Franklin to be in a minority?"

[12] "I believe it will in time be clearly seen by all thinking People that the Government and Property of a Province should not be in the same family. Tis too much weight in one scale." Letter from Franklin to Israel Pemberton, Mar. 19, 1759.

[13] In 1768, the revenues of the Proprietaries from their Pennsylvania estates were estimated by Joseph Galloway to be not much short of one hundred thousand pounds.

[14] "The shocking news of the strange, unprecedented and ignominious defeat of General Braddock," William Franklin said, "had no more effect upon Governor Morris than the miracles of Moses had on the heart of Pharaoh."

[15] Franklin's first impressions of Lord Loudon were very different from his later ones. In a letter to Strahan from New York, dated July 27, 1756, he said: "I have had the honour of several conferences with him on our American affairs, and am extremely pleased with him. I think there can not be a fitter person for the service he is engaged in."

[16] In connection with this feature of the proposed Plan of Union, Franklin gives us some interesting facts in regard to the distances that could be made in a day's journey in America in 1754. Philadelphia, he said, was named as the place for the first meeting of the Grand Council because it was central, and accessible by high roads, which were for the most part so good that forty or fifty miles a day might very well be, and frequently were, travelled over them. It could also be reached under very favorable conditions by water. In summer the passage from Charleston to Philadelphia often did not consume more than a week. Two or three days were required for the passage from Rhode Island to New York, through the Sound, and the distance between New York and Philadelphia could be covered in two days by stage-boats and wheel-carriages that set out every other day. The transit from Charleston to Philadelphia could be facilitated by the use of the Chesapeake Bay. But, if all the members of the Grand Council were to set out for Philadelphia on horseback, the most distant ones, those from New Hampshire and South Carolina, could probably arrive at their destination in fifteen or twenty days.

[17] Another good Indian story is told by Franklin in his _Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America_: "A Swedish Minister, having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanah Indians, made a Sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical Facts on which our Religion is founded; such as the Fall of our First Parents by eating an Apple, the coming of Christ to repair the Mischief, his Miracles and Suffering, &c. When he had finished, an Indian Orator stood up to thank him. 'What you have told us,' says he, 'is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat Apples. It is better to make them all into Cyder. We are much oblig'd by your kindness in coming so far, to tell us these Things which you have heard from your Mothers. In return, I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours. In the Beginning, our Fathers had only the Flesh of Animals, to subsist on; and if their Hunting was unsuccessful, they were starving. Two of our young Hunters, having kill'd a Deer, made a Fire in the Woods to broil some Part of it. When they were about to satisfy their Hunger, they beheld a beautiful young Woman descend from the Clouds, and seat herself on that Hill, which you see yonder among the blue Mountains. They said to each other, it is a Spirit that has smelt our broiling Venison, and wishes to eat of it; let us offer some to her. They presented her with the Tongue; she was pleas'd with the Taste of it, and said, "Your kindness shall be rewarded; come to this Place after thirteen Moons, and you shall find something that will be of great Benefit in nourishing you and your children to the latest Generations." They did so, and, to their surprise, found Plants they had never seen before; but which, from that ancient time, have been constantly cultivated among us, to our great Advantage. Where her right Hand had touched the Ground, they found Maize; where her left hand had touch'd it, they found Kidney-Beans, and where her Back side had sat on it they found Tobacco.' The good Missionary, disgusted with this idle Tale, said: 'What I delivered to you were sacred Truths; but what you tell me is mere Fable, Fiction, and Falsehood.' The Indian, offended, reply'd, 'My brother, it seems your Friends have not done you Justice in your Education; they have not well instructed you in the Rules of common Civility. You saw that we, who understand and practise those Rules, believ'd all your stories; why do you refuse to believe ours?'"

[18] When asked in the course of his examination before the House of Commons what the temper of America towards Great Britain was before the year 1763, Franklin made this reply: "The best in the world. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in all their courts, obedience to acts of parliament. Numerous as the people are in the several provinces, they cost you nothing in forts, citadels, garrisons, or armies, to keep them in subjection. They were governed by this country at the expence only of a little pen, ink and paper. They were led by a thread. They had not only a respect, but an affection for Great-Britain; for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions, that greatly increased the commerce. Natives of Britain were always treated with particular regard; to be an Old England man was, of itself, a character of some respect, and gave a kind of rank among us."

How little colored by the exigencies of the moment these words were is made apparent in a letter from Franklin to Francis Maseres after the independence of the Colonies had been acknowledged by England. "The true _loyalists_ were the people of America, against whom they (the Tories) acted. No people were ever known more truly loyal, and universally so, to their sovereigns. The Protestant succession in the House of Hanover was their idol. Not a Jacobite was to be found from one end of the Colonies to the other. They were affectionate to the people of England, zealous and forward to assist in her wars, by voluntary contributions of men and money, even beyond their proportion. The King and Parliament had frequently acknowledged this by public messages, resolutions, and reimbursements. But they were equally fond of what they esteemed their rights; and, if they resisted when those were attacked, it was a resistance in favour of a British constitution, which every Englishman might share in enjoying, who should come to live among them; it was resisting arbitrary impositions, that were contrary to common right and to their fundamental constitutions, and to constant ancient usage. It was indeed a resistance in favour of the liberties of England, which might have been endangered by success in the attempt against ours; and therefore a great man in your Parliament did not scruple to declare, he _rejoiced that America had resisted_. I, for the same reason, may add this very resistance to the other instances of their loyalty."

[19] The view that Franklin took of the constitutional tie between Great Britain and America was expressed in many different forms. One of the concisest is to be found in a letter to his grandnephew Jonathan Williams, dated Feb. 12, 1786, and, therefore, written after the tie, whatever its exact nature was, had become a subject for the historian rather than the politician. Speaking of a controversy in which Williams had been involved, he says: "It seems to me that instead of discussing _When_ we ceas'd to be British Subjects you should have deny'd our _ever having been such_. We were Subjects to the King of G. Britain, as were also the Irish, the Jersey and Guernsey People and the Hanoverians, but we were American Subjects as they were Irish, Jersey and Hanoverian Subjects. None are British Subjects but those under the Parliament of Britain."

[20] "Your medallion is in good company; it is placed with those of Lord Chatham, Lord Camden, Marquis of Rockingham, Sir George Saville, and some others, who honoured me with a show of friendly regard, when in England."

(Letter from Franklin to Geo. Whatley, May 18, 1787.)

[21] This idea is advanced also in _The Mother Country_, _A Song_, which Jared Sparks thought was probably written by Franklin about the time of the Stamp Act or a little later:

"We have an old mother that peevish is grown; She snubs us like children that scarce walk alone; She forgets we're grown up and have sense of our own; Which nobody can deny, deny, Which nobody can deny.

If we don't obey orders, whatever the case, She frowns, and she chides and she loses all pati- Ence, and sometimes she hits us a slap in the face, Which nobody can deny, etc.

Her orders so odd are, we often suspect That age has impaired her sound intellect. But still an old mother should have due respect, Which nobody can deny, etc.

Let's bear with her humors as well as we can; But why should we bear the abuse of her man? When servants make mischief, they earn the rattan, Which nobody should deny, etc.

Know too, ye bad neighbours, who aim to divide The sons from the mother, that still she's our pride; And if ye attack her we're all of her side, Which nobody can deny, etc.

We'll join in her lawsuits, to baffle all those, Who, to get what she has, will be often her foes; For we know it must all be our own, when she goes, Which nobody can deny, deny, Which nobody can deny."

[22] "But there can hardly be a doubt, as between the America and the England of the future, that the daughter, at some no very distant time, will, whether fairer or less fair, be unquestionably yet stronger than the mother.

"'O matre forti filia fortior.'"

_Kin Beyond Sea_, by William E. Gladstone.

[23] Jared Sparks hardly overstates the case when he asserts that the policy and acts of Lord Hillsborough contributed more, perhaps, than those of any other man towards increasing the discontents which led to the separation of the Colonies from Great Britain.

[24] On Jan. 28, 1820, John Adams stated in a letter to Dr. Hosack, of New York, that Temple had told him in Holland that he had communicated the Hutchinson letters to Dr. Franklin, though "I swear to you," he said to Adams, "that I did not procure them in the manner represented."

[25] Worldly success has rarely been less effective in gilding an unworthy character than it was in the case of Wedderburn. American indignation over his tirade against Franklin, indecent as it was under the circumstances, would seem to be somewhat overdone, when we remember the professional license allowed from time immemorial to the pleas of lawyers. It is enough to say that we can safely leave his English contemporaries to take care of his forbidding reputation. The searing irons of two of the most ferocious satirists of literary history have left ineffaceable scars upon his forehead. In the _Rosciad_ Churchill lifted the veil from the future in these terms:

"To mischief train'd, e'en from his mother's womb, Grown old in fraud, tho. yet in manhood's bloom, Adopting arts, by which gay villains rise, And reach the heights, which honest men despise."

"In vain," Junius wrote to the Duke of Grafton, some ten years later, "would our gracious sovereign have looked round him for another character as consummate as yours. Lord Mansfield shrinks from his principles; Charles Fox is yet in blossom; and as for Mr. Wedderburn, there is something about him which even treachery can not trust." But the "gracious sovereign," to whom Wedderburn, afterwards Lord Rosslyn, sold his Whig principles, when they had reached just the right stage of merchantable maturity, was equally hard upon him. "When he died," Lord Brougham tells us, "after a few hours' illness, the intelligence was brought to the King, who, with a circumspection abundantly characteristic, asked the bearer of it if he was quite _sure_ of the fact, as Lord Rosslyn had not been ailing before; and, upon being assured that a sudden attack of gout in the stomach had really ended the days of his late servant and once assiduous courtier, his majesty was graciously pleased to exclaim: 'Then he has not left a worse man behind him.'"

[26] It is hard to think of a man, whose life was so essentially urban as that of Franklin, becoming a backwoodsman, but such he was ready to become, if necessary. In his _Hints for a Reply to the Protests of Certain Members of the House of Lords against the Repeal of the Stamp Act_, he uses this resolute language: "I can only Judge of others by myself. I have some little property in America. I will freely spend nineteen shillings in the pound to defend my right of giving or refusing the other shilling, and, after all, if I can not defend that right, I can retire cheerfully with my little family into the boundless woods of America, which are sure to afford freedom and subsistence to any man who can bait a hook or pull a trigger."

[27] In 1780, Franklin wrote from Passy to Georgiana Shipley: "I am unhappily an Enemy, yet I think there has been enough of Blood spilt, and I wish what is left in the Veins of that once lov'd People, may be spared by a Peace solid and everlasting."

[28] Franklin's three political hobbies were gratuitous public service, a plural executive and a single legislature. Through his influence, the second and third of these two ideas were engrafted upon the Revolutionary Constitution of the State of Pennsylvania, and were later ably defended by him, when assailed. The manner in which he illustrated his opposition to a bi-cameral legislature is well-known. "Has not," he said, "the famous political Fable of the Snake, with two Heads and one Body, some useful Instruction contained in it? She was going to a Brook to drink, and in her Way was to pass thro' a Hedge, a Twig of which opposed her direct course; one Head chose to go on the right side of the Twig, the other on the left; so that time was spent in the Contest, and, before the Decision was completed, the poor Snake died with thirst." As far as carrying the idea of gratuitous public service into execution was concerned, Franklin, of course, might as well have attempted to grow pineapples in the squares of Philadelphia.

[29] In his Diary John Adams states shortly after his arrival in France that it was said among other things that Arthur Lee had given offence by an unhappy disposition, and by indiscreet speeches before servants and others concerning the French nation and government--despising and cursing them.

[30] Deprived of its epigrammatic form, this estimate does not differ so very greatly from that of Jefferson a few years later: "He is vain, irritable and a bad calculator of the force and probable effects of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him. He is as disinterested as the being who made him; he is profound in his views and accurate in his judgment, except when a knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment. He is so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him. He would be, as he was, a great man in Congress."

[31] On Oct. 29, 1778, Vergennes finally wrote to Gerard, the French Minister at Philadelphia, that his fear of Lee and of _ses entours_ made the communication of state secrets to him impossible, and he instructed Gerard to inform Congress that Lee's conduct had "created the highest disgust" in the courts of France and Spain. It is doubtful whether any man of the same degree of parts, courage and patriotic constancy as Arthur Lee was ever more irredeemably condemned by the general verdict of his contemporaries or posterity. It would be a profitless task to bring together the most notable of these judgments. Jefferson summed up most of them in a few words: "Dr. Lee," he said, "was his (Franklin's) principal calumniator, a man of much malignity, who, besides enlisting his whole family in the same hostility, was enabled, as the agent of Massachusetts with the British Government, to infuse it into that State with considerable effect. Mr. Izard, the Doctor's enemy also, but from a pecuniary transaction, never countenanced these charges against him. Mr. Jay, Silas Deane, Mr. Laurens, his colleagues also, ever maintained towards him unlimited confidence and respect." Silas Deane, the most efficient envoy except Franklin sent abroad by Congress during the Revolution, derived a degree of unaffected pleasure from the respect felt for Franklin in France that contrasts most favorably with the base jealousy of Arthur Lee and the ignoble jealousy of John Adams. After telling how the French populace on a certain occasion showed Franklin a measure of deference seldom paid to their first princes of the blood, he says: "When he attended the operas and plays, similar honors were paid him, and I confess I felt a joy and pride which was pure and honest, though not disinterested, for I considered it an honor to be known to be an American and his acquaintance."

[32] John Adams admits in his Diary that Deane was "active, diligent, subtle and successful, having accomplished the great purpose of his mission to advantage." After the recall of Deane from France, Franklin wrote of him to Henry Laurens: "Having lived intimately with him now fifteen months, the greatest part of the time in the same House, and been a constant witness of his public Conduct, I can not omit giving this Testimony, tho. unasked, in his Behalf, that I esteem him a faithful, active, and able Minister, who, to my Knowledge, has done in various ways great and important Service to his Country, whose Interests I wish may always, by every one in her employ, be as much and as effectually promoted." On other occasions, Franklin spoke in equally laudatory terms of the abilities and services of Deane. But when Deane, soured by the persistent malevolence of Arthur Lee and the injustice of Congress, was weak enough to fall away from "the glorious cause," Franklin gave him up. "I see no place for him but England," he wrote to Robert Morris. "He continues, however, to sit croaking at Ghent chagrined, discontented, and dispirited." Franklin, however, was too nice a judge of conduct, and of the balanced considerations, which have to be taken into account in passing upon it, not to refer later to Deane as "poor, unhappy Deane,"--language such as he would have been the last man in the world to use with regard to a perfidious scoundrel like Benedict Arnold.

[33] The Diary of John Adams shows that shortly after he arrived in France Franklin took pains to lay before him the lamentable situation created by the impracticable tempers of the Lees and Izard. It would have been well for the reputation of Adams if this conversation had resulted in a thorough understanding between Franklin and himself, but the bias that he brought to France as a member of the Adams-Lee faction in Congress and the inability of his egotistical, jealous, suspicious and bustling, though honorable and fearless, nature, to reconcile itself to the overshadowing fame and influence of Franklin at the French Court drew him into working relations with Lee and Izard, which abundantly verified all that Franklin had said to him about them. "There are two men in the world," he declares in his Diary, "who are men of honor and integrity, I believe, but whose prejudices and violent tempers would raise quarrels in the Elysian fields, if not in Heaven." At times the vanity of Adams--easily mortified, easily elated as all vanity is--was humbled by some fresh proof of the dwarfing prominence of Franklin. "Neither Lee nor myself is looked upon of much consequence," he observes in his Diary. On another occasion, when Arthur Lee suggested that the papers of the mission should be kept in a room in his own house, Adams objected for the reason, among others, that nine tenths of the public letters would ever be carried where Dr. Franklin was. These were but temporary reactions. When down, the vanity of Adams was soon on its legs again. The reminder given by Vergennes to the officious, tactless reasonings and strictures, to which he was subjected by Adams, that Franklin was the sole American plenipotentiary in France, and the steps that the latter was compelled to take, both by the request of Vergennes and his own sense of the peril, that such injudicious conduct on the part of Adams signified to the American cause, to smooth over the rupture, sent Adams off to Holland in a resentful but subdued state of mind. But his success in negotiating a loan in Holland and the prospect of engaging in a matter of such supreme importance as the final negotiations for peace lifted him up to giddy heights of intoxicated self-importance again. Referring to the loan in his Diary, he says: "The compliment of _Monsieur_, _Vous etes le Washington de la negociation_ (Sir, you are the Washington of the negotiation) was repeated to me by more than one person.... A few of these compliments would kill Franklin if they should come to his ears." His observations in his Diary on Jay and Franklin, when he came over to France to participate with them in the final negotiations for peace, are equally characteristic. "Between two as subtle spirits as any in this world, the one malicious, the other, I think honest, I shall have a delicate, a nice, a critical part to act. Franklin's cunning will be to divide us; to this end he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will manoeuvre. My curiosity will at least be employed in observing his invention and his artifice."

[34] "I think," said Franklin in a letter to Charles W. F. Dumas, in 1778, "that a young State like a young Virgin, should modestly stay at home, & wait the Application of Suitors for an Alliance with her; and not run about offering her Amity to all the World; and hazarding their Refusal." "Our Virgin," he added a line or so later, "is a jolly one; and tho. at present not very rich, Will in time be a great Fortune."

[35] Franklin was entirely cognizant of the motive by which Lee was influenced. Referring in a letter to Thomas Cushing, dated July 7, 1773, to censure with which he had been visited for supposed neglect in not sending earlier intelligence to Massachusetts of certain English measures affecting her welfare, he said, "This Censure, tho. grievous, does not so much surprize me, as I apprehended from the Beginning, that between the Friends of an old Agent, my Predecessor, who thought himself hardly us'd in his Dismission, and those of a young one impatient for the Succession, my situation was not likely to be a very comfortable one, as my Faults could scarce pass unobserved."

[36] On one occasion this expression gave rise to an incident that is worth recalling. We tell it as it is told by Parton. A large cake was sent to the apartment in which the envoys were assembled, bearing this inscription: _Le digne Franklin_--the worthy Franklin. Upon reading the inscription, Mr. Deane said: "As usual, Doctor, we have to thank you for our accommodation, and to appropriate your present to our joint use." "Not at all," said Franklin, "this must be intended for all the Commissioners; only these French people can not write English. They mean no doubt, Lee, Deane, Franklin." "That might answer," remarked the magnanimous Lee, "but we know that whenever they remember us at all they always put you first."

[37] "It must," Adams says in his letter to the Boston _Patriot_ of Aug. 21, 1811, with the whiff of bombast that is wafted to us from so many of his vigorous and vivid utterances, "suffice to say that Mr. Izard, with a fund of honor, integrity, candor and benevolence in his character, which must render him eternally estimable in the sight of all moral and social beings, was, nevertheless, the most passionate, and in his passions the most violent and unbridled in his expressions, of any man I ever knew."

[38] In the latter part of his life, it must have severely taxed the memory of Franklin to recollect all the honors paid to him by educational institutions and learned societies of one kind or another. The honorary degree of Master of Arts was conferred on him in July, 1753, by Harvard College, and in September of the same year by Yale College. In April, 1756, the degree of Master of Arts was bestowed on him by William and Mary College. In 1759, he received the degree of Doctor in Laws from the University of St. Andrews, and in 1762, he was made a Doctor of Civil Laws by the University of Oxford. At various times in his life, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an Honorary Fellow of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, a member of the Royal Society of London, one of the eight foreign associates of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, an honorary member of the Medical Society of London, the first foreign associate of the Royal Society of Medicine at Paris, and a member of other learned societies or academies at Padua, Turin, Orleans, Madrid, Rotterdam, Goettingen and elsewhere.

[39] "It would be difficult," says Count Segur, "to describe the eagerness and delight with which the American envoys, the agents of a people in a state of insurrection against their monarch, were received in France, in the bosom of an ancient monarchy. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the luxury of our capital, the elegance of our fashions, the magnificence of Versailles, the still brilliant remains of the monarchical pride of Louis XIV., and the polished and superb dignity of our nobility on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the almost rustic apparel, the plain but firm demeanor, the free and direct language of the envoys, whose antique simplicity of dress and appearance seemed to have introduced within our walls, in the midst of the effeminate and servile refinement of the eighteenth century, some sages contemporary with Plato, or republicans of the age of Cato and of Fabius. This unexpected apparition produced upon us a greater effect in consequence of its novelty, and of its occurring precisely at the period when literature and philosophy had circulated amongst us an unusual desire for reforms, a disposition to encourage innovations, and the seeds of an ardent attachment to liberty."

[40] Compassion, it must be confessed, was not the only motive that made Franklin so eager to secure the freedom of his imprisoned countrymen. "If we once had our Prisoners from England," he wrote to M. de Sartine on Feb. 13, 1780, "several other privateers would immediately be manned with them."

[41] A Commissioner, Thomas Barclay, was appointed by Congress to audit the accounts of all the servants of the United States who had been entrusted with the expenditure of money in Europe during the Revolutionary War. "I rendered to him," said Franklin in a letter to Cyrus Griffin, the President of Congress, dated Nov. 29, 1788, "all my accounts, which he examined, and stated methodically. By this statement he found a balance due me on the 4th of May, 1785, of 7,533 livres, 19 sols, 3 den., which I accordingly received of the Congress banker; the difference between my statement and his being only seven sols, which by mistake I had overcharged;--about three pence half penny sterling."

[42] The dogged steadfastness with which Vergennes pursued his task of humbling the pride and power of England through her rebellious colonies was in keeping with the main point of what Choiseul had said about him as the French Ambassador at Constantinople: "The Count de Vergennes has something to say against whatever is proposed to him, but he never finds any difficulty in carrying out his instructions. Were we to order him to send us the Vizier's head, he would write that it was dangerous, but the head would come." The levity of Maurepas, as President of the Council of State, and the grave diligence of Vergennes, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, led D'Aranda to say of them, "I chat with M. de Maurepas, I negotiate with M. de Vergennes."

[43] In a letter to William Carmichael in 1788, after saying that he presumed that there would not be a vote against the election of Washington to the Presidency, Jefferson added: "It is more doubtful who will be Vice-President. The age of Dr. Franklin, and the doubt whether he would accept it, are the only circumstances that admit a question, but that he would be the man." Some twenty-two years afterwards, he wrote to Col. William Duane that he believed that a greater or better character than Franklin had rarely existed.

[44] Optimist and thorough-going democrat as Franklin was, Shays' Rebellion and the heated conflict of opposing principles, concomitant with the adoption of the Federal Constitution, set up a slight current of reaction in his sanguine nature. On May 25, 1789, he wrote to Charles Carroll of Carrollton: "We have been guarding against an evil that old States are most liable to, _excess of power_, in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be _defect of obedience_ in the subjects." Some six months later, in his _Queries and Remarks respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania_, he quoted the advice of the prophet, "Stand in the old ways, view the ancient Paths, consider them well, and be not among those that are given to Change." But in this instance Franklin was really invoking the spirit of conservatism in aid of liberalism; for the occasion for the Biblical reference was the suggestion that the Pennsylvania Assembly should no longer consist of a single chamber but of an Upper House based on property and a Lower House based on population.

[45] This remark brings up in a timely way another member of the Board of Trade, Lord Clare, whose habits were such as to aid us in understanding why the Board did not always retain a clear recollection of its past transactions. Speaking of an interview with him, Franklin wrote to his son: "He gave me a great deal of flummery; saying, that though at my Examination (before the House of Commons) I answered some of his questions a little pertly, yet he liked me, from that day, for the spirit I showed in defence of my country; and at parting, after we had drank a bottle and a half of claret each, he hugged and kissed me, protesting he never in his life met with a man he was so much in love with."

[46] The story told by Franklin of a running colloquy between George Grenville, who had on one occasion, as usual, been denouncing the Americans as rebels and Colonel Onslow, a warm friend of America, is good enough to be related. After recalling the Roman practice of sending a commission to a disaffected province for the purpose of investigating the causes of its discontent, Onslow declared his willingness, if the House of Commons should think fit to appoint them, to go over to America _with that honorable gentleman_. "Upon this there was a great laugh, which continued some time, and was rather increased by Mr. Grenville's asking, 'Will the gentleman engage, that I shall be safe there? Can I be assured that I shall be allowed to come back again to make the report?' As soon as the laugh was so far subsided, as that Mr. Onslow could be heard again, he added: 'I can not absolutely engage for the honorable gentleman's safe return, but if he goes thither upon this service, I am strongly of opinion the _event_ will contribute greatly to the future quiet of both countries.' On which the laugh was renewed and redoubled."

[47] The principal features of a plan for the issuance of a stable colonial currency proposed by Franklin and Governor Pownall to the British Ministry, in 1764, 1765 and 1766 were these: bills of credit to a certain amount were to be printed in England for the use of the Colonies; and a loan office was to be established in each colony, empowered to issue the bills, take security for their payment and receive payment of them. They were to be paid in full in ten years, and were to bear interest at the rate of five per centum per annum; and one tenth of the principal was to be paid each year with the proper proportion of interest. They were to be a legal tender.

[48] "Here in England," Franklin wrote to Humphrey Marshall on Apr. 22, 1771, "it is well known and understood, that whenever a Manufacture is established which employs a Number of Hands, it raises the Value of Lands in the neighbouring Country all around it; partly by the greater Demand near at hand for the produce of the Land; and partly from the Plenty of Money drawn by the Manufacturers to that part of the Country. It seems therefore the Interest of all our Farmers and Owners of Lands, to encourage our Young Manufactures in preference to foreign ones imported among us from distant Countries."

[49]

The patriot, fresh from Freedom's Councils come, Now pleas'd retires to lash his slaves at home; Or woo, perhaps, some black Aspasia's charms, And dream of freedom in his bondsmaid's arms.

To Thomas Hume, Esq., M.D. From the City of Washington.

[50] By his will Franklin released his son-in-law from the payment of a bond for L2172, 5s, with the request that he would immediately after the death of the testator set free "his negro man Bob."