Volume 1 — CHAPTER VI (continued 2)

The King's changing his pointed conductors for blunt ones is, therefore, a matter of small importance to me. If I had a wish about it, it would be that he had rejected them altogether as ineffectual. For it is only since he thought himself and family safe from the thunder of Heaven, that he dared to use his own thunder in destroying his innocent subjects.

Dr. Ingenhousz, however, was not so self-contained, and made such an angry attack on Wilson that Franklin, who invariably relied in such cases upon silence and the principle that Truth is a cat with nine lives to defend him, laughingly remarked, "He seems as much heated about this one point, as the Jansenists and Molinists were about the five." As for King George, he had at least the satisfaction of realizing that his people still had a ready fund of wit for timely use. One homely couplet of the period, referring to Franklin's famous kite, ran in this way:

Another more polished poet penned these neat lines:

If we may believe Franklin, Sir John held the efficacy of the healing art in very moderate esteem. The reader has already been told of the humorous manner in which he let it be known that, in his opinion, of the two classes of practitioners, old women and regular physicians, the former had done the most to save the honor of the profession. Franklin also informed Dr. Rush that Sir John "once told him 92 fevers out of 100 cured themselves, 4 were cured by Art, and 4 proved fatal." But many people must have had a more favorable opinion of the professional value of Sir John than Sir John himself had, for his "Conversations" were in high repute. On this point, there is some evidence in a letter from Franklin to Dr. Thomas Bond, who was desirous of giving his son Richard the benefit of a foreign medical education. Referring to Sir John, Franklin wrote:

Every Wednesday Evening he admits young Physicians and Surgeons to a Conversation at his House, which is thought very improving to them. I will endeavour to introduce your Son there when he comes to London. And to tell you frankly my Opinion, I suspect there is more valuable knowledge in Physic to be learnt from the honest candid Observations of an old Practitioner, who is past all desire of more Business, having made his Fortune, who has none of the Professional Interest in keeping up a Parade of Science to draw Pupils, and who by Experience has discovered the Inefficacy of most Remedies and Modes of Practice, than from all the formal Lectures of all the Universities upon Earth.

That Dr. John cured at least one patient, we are told by Dr. Rush on the authority of Franklin, but it was Only himself of a tremor, and that by simply ceasing to take snuff. Dr. Pringle and himself, Franklin told Dr. Rush, observed that tremors of the hands were more frequent in France than elsewhere, and probably from the excessive use of snuff. "He concluded," says Dr. Rush, "that there was no great advantage in using tobacco in any way, for that he had kept company with persons who used it all his life, and no one had ever advised him to use it. The Doctor in the 81st year of his age declared he had never snuffed, chewed, or smoked."

Among the persons who sought Sir John's professional advice was Franklin himself. It was in relation to a cutaneous trouble which vexed him for some fourteen years, and broke out afresh when he was in his eighty-third year. But the best medicine that Franklin ever obtained from Sir John was his companionship upon two continental tours, one of which was inspired by the latter's desire to drink the waters at Pyrmont, and the other by the attractions of the French capital. When the news of Sir John's death reached Franklin at Passy he paid the usual heartfelt tribute. "We have lost our common Friend," he wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, "the excellent Pringle. How many pleasing hours you and I have pass'd together in his Company!"

Another English physician, for whom Franklin entertained a feeling of deep affection, was the Quaker Dr. John Fothergill. After the death of this friend, in a letter to Dr. John Coakley Lettsom, still another friend of his, and one of the famous English physicians of the eighteenth century, he expressed this extraordinary opinion of Dr. Fothergill's worth: "If we may estimate the goodness of a man by his disposition to do good, and his constant endeavours and success in doing it, I can hardly conceive that a better man has ever existed." No faint praise to be uttered by the founder of the Junto and one who valued above all things the character of a doer of good! Like Sir John Pringle, Dr. Fothergill belonged to the class of physicians who pursued medicine, as if it were a mistress not to be wooed except with the favor of the other members of the scientific sisterhood. He was an ardent botanist, and his collection of botanical specimens and paintings on vellum of rare plants was among the remarkable collections of his age. Two of his correspondents were the Pennsylvania botanists, John Bartram and Humphrey Marshall, who brought to his knowledge a flora in many shining instances unknown to the woods and fields of the Old World. His medical writings were held in high esteem, and were published after his death under the editorial supervision of Dr. Lettsom.

As a practitioner, he was eminently successful, and numbered among his patients many representatives of the most powerful and exclusive circles in London. What the extent of his practice was we can infer from a question put to him by Franklin in 1764.

By the way [he asked], when do you intend to live?—i. e., to enjoy life. When will you retire to your villa, give yourself repose, delight in viewing the operations of nature in the vegetable creation, assist her in her works, get your ingenious friends at times about you, make them happy with your conversation, and enjoy theirs: or, if alone, amuse yourself with your books and elegant collections?

To be hurried about perpetually from one sick chamber to another is not living. Do you please yourself with the fancy that you are doing good? You are mistaken. Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless, and almost all the other half ought not to be saved, as being mischievous. Does your conscience never hint to you the impiety of being in constant warfare against the plans of Providence? Disease was intended as the punishment of intemperance, sloth, and other vices, and the example of that punishment was intended to promote and strengthen the opposite virtues.

All of which, of course, except the suggestion about retirement, which was quite in keeping with Franklin's conception of a rational life, was nothing more than humorous paradox on the part of a man who loved all his fellow-creatures too much to despair of any of them.

When Franklin himself was seized with a grave attack of illness shortly after his arrival in England on his first mission, Doctor Fothergill was his physician, and seems to have cupped and physicked him with drastic assiduity. The patient was not a very docile one, for he wrote to Deborah that, too soon thinking himself well, he ventured out twice, and both times got fresh cold, and fell down again; and that his "good doctor" grew very angry with him for acting contrary to his cautions and directions, and obliged him to promise more observance for the future. Always to Franklin the Doctor remained the "good Doctor Fothergill." Even in a codicil to his will, in bequeathing to one of his friends the silver cream pot given to him by the doctor, with the motto "Keep bright the chain," he refers to him by that designation.

Nor were his obligations as a patient the only obligations that Franklin owed to this friend. When his early letters on electricity were sent over to England, only to be laughed at in the first instance, they happened to pass under the eye of the Doctor. He saw their merit, advised their publication, and wrote the preface to the pamphlet in which they were published by Cave. But the things for which Franklin valued the Doctor most were his public spirit and philanthropy. He was well known in Philadelphia, and, when Franklin arrived in London in 1757, he was actively assisted by the Doctor in his effort to secure a settlement of the dispute over taxation between the Pennsylvania Assembly and the Proprietaries. Afterwards, when Franklin's second mission to England was coming to an end, the Doctor was drawn deeply into a vain attempt made by Lord Howe and his sister and David Barclay, another Quaker friend of Franklin, to compose the American controversy by an agreement with Franklin. For this business, among other reasons, because of "his daily Visits among the Great, in the Practice of his Profession," of which Franklin speaks in his history of these negotiations, he would have been a most helpful ally; if the quarrel had not become so embittered. But, as it was, the knot, which the negotiators were striving to disentangle, was too intricate for anything but the edge of the sword. When the negotiations came to nothing, the good Doctor, who knew the sentiments of "the Great" in London at that time, if any private person did, had no advice to give to Franklin except, when he returned to America, to get certain of the Doctor's friends in Philadelphia, and two or three other persons together, and to inform them that, whatever specious pretences were offered by the English ministry, they were all hollow, and that to obtain a larger field, on which to fatten a herd of worthless parasites, was all that was regarded. It was a bad day, indeed, for England when one of the best men in the land could hold such language.

The silk experiment in Pennsylvania furnished still another congenial field for the co-operation of Franklin and Doctor Fothergill; and, in a letter to Franklin, the latter also declared in startlingly modern terms that, in the warmth of his affection for mankind, he could wish to see "the institution of a College of Justice, where the claims of sovereigns should be weighed, an award given, and war only made on him who refused submission."

"Dr. Fothergill, who was among the best men I have known, and a great promoter of useful projects," is the way in which Franklin alludes to the Doctor in the Autobiography. He then states in the same connection the plan that he submitted to the Doctor for "the more effectual cleaning and keeping clean the streets of London and Westminster"; but this plan, though not unworthy of the public zeal and ingenuity of its author, is too embryonic, when contrasted with modern municipal methods, and too tamely suggestive of the broom and dust-pan of ordinary domestic housekeeping, to deserve detailed attention.

Franklin was eminently what Dr. Johnson called a "clubable" man. When in England, he often dined at the London Coffee House in Ludgate Hill with the group of scientific men and liberal clergymen, who frequented the place, and of whom he spoke on one occasion as "that excellent Collection of good Men, the Club at the London." He also sometimes dined at St. Paul's Coffee House and the Dog Tavern on Garlick Hill, and with the Society of Friends to the Cause of Liberty at Paul's Head Tavern, Cateaton Street, where, upon every 4th day of November, the landing of King William and the Glorious Revolution were enthusiastically toasted. When he ate or drank at a club, he liked to do so in an atmosphere of free thought and free speech. Religion, spiced with heresy, and Politics flavored with liberalism, were the kinds of religion and politics that best suited his predilections. It was at St. Paul's Coffee House that he became acquainted with Dr. Richard Price, the celebrated clergyman and economist, who was then preaching every Sunday afternoon at Newington Green, where Franklin advised Sir John Pringle to go to hear in the Doctor a preacher of rational Christianity. It is probable that Sir John, in inquiring of Franklin where he could go to hear such a preacher, was moved rather by curiosity than piety; for Franklin wrote to Dr. Price: "At present I believe he has no view of attending constantly anywhere, but now and then only as it may suit his convenience."

The acquaintance between Franklin and Doctor Price, once formed, became a deeply-rooted friendship, and on Franklin's part it was accompanied by a degree of admiration for the Doctor's abilities which hurried him on one occasion into language that had little in common with the sober language in which his judgments were usually pronounced. Of Doctor Price's Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt, he wrote to the author in the most enthusiastic terms, "it being in my Opinion," he said, "consider^g the profound Study, & steady Application of Mind that the Work required, & the sound Judgment with which it is executed, and its great and important Utility to the Nation, the foremost Production of human Understanding, that this Century has afforded us." And to Franklin on one occasion this friend wrote that he considered his friendship one of the honors and blessings of his life.

When the American controversy arose, Dr. Price zealously espoused the cause of the Colonies, and this still further strengthened the friendship between the two. For his Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, the City of London presented him with the freedom of the city in a gold box of fifty pounds value; and so outspoken was he in the expression of his political convictions that Franklin wrote to John Winthrop in 1777 that "his Friends, on his Acc^t, were under some Apprehensions from the Violence of Government, in consequence of his late excellent Publications in favour of Liberty." Indeed, so near was he to making the American cause absolutely his own that Congress, while the American War was still raging, even invited him to become an American citizen and to assist in regulating the American finances, but that was one step further than he was willing to go. In a letter to Joseph Priestley, shortly after the Battle of Bunker's Hill, Franklin makes an amusing allusion to the mathematical genius of Dr. Price which was equal to the abstrusest problems involved in the calculation of annuities.

Britain [he said], at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head; and at Bunker's Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America. From these data his (Dr. Price's) mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.

Always in the American controversy, Franklin relied upon the loins as well as the hands of the Colonists for the final victory.

While mentioning Priestley, we might recall the compliment in a letter from Franklin to Dr. Price, in which the former brought the names of Priestley and Price into a highly honorable conjunction. Speaking of dissensions in the Royal Society, he said, "Disputes even on small Matters often produce Quarrels for want of knowing how to differ decently; an Art which it is said scarce anybody possesses but yourself and Dr. Priestley." Dr. Price was one of the habitués of the London Coffee House, and, in Franklin's letters to him from Passy, there are repeated references to the happy hours that the writer had spent there. "I never think of the Hours I so happily spent in that Company," he said in one letter, "without regretting that they are never to be repeated: For I see no Prospect of an End to the unhappy War in my Time." In another letter, he concluded with a heartfelt wish that he might embrace Dr. Price once more, and enjoy his sweet society in peace among his honest, worthy, ingenious friends at the London. In another letter, after peace was assured, he said that he longed to see and be merry with the Club, and, in a still later letter, he told Dr. Price that he might "pop" in some Thursday evening when they least expected him. In enclosing, on one occasion, to Dr. Price a copy of his Rabelaisian jeu d'esprit on "Perfumes," which was intended also for the eye of Priestley, Franklin cracks an obscene joke at the expense of Priestley's famous researches with regard to gases, but, when Dr. Price states in his reply, "We have been entertained with the pleasantry of it, and the ridicule it contains," we are again reminded that the eighteenth century was not the twentieth.

Dr. Price was one of the correspondents to whom Franklin expounded his theory that England's only chance for self-reformation was to render all places unprofitable and the King too poor to give bribes and pensions.

Till this is done [he said], which can only be by a Revolution (and I think you have not Virtue enough left to procure one), your Nation will always be plundered, and obliged to pay by Taxes the Plunderers for Plundering and Ruining. Liberty and Virtue therefore join in the call, COME OUT OF HER, MY PEOPLE!

In a later letter, he returns to the same subject in these words so pregnant with meaning for a student of the political conditions which palsied the influence of Chatham and Burke in their effort to avert the American War:

As it seems to be a settled Point at present, that the Minister must govern the Parliament, who are to do everything he would have done; and he is to bribe them to do this, and the People are to furnish the Money to pay these Bribes; the Parliament appears to me a very expensive Machine for Government, and I apprehend the People will find out in time, that they may as well be governed, and that it will be much cheaper to be governed, by the Minister alone; no Parliament being preferable to the present.

There are also some thoughtful observations in one of Franklin's letters to Dr. Price on the limited influence of Roman and Grecian oratory, as compared with the influence of the modern newspaper. "We now find," he observed, "that it is not only right to strike while the iron is hot, but that it may be very practicable to heat it by continually striking."

His last letter to Dr. Price was written less than a year before his own death. It refers to the death of the Bishop of St. Asaph's, and once more there is a mournful sigh from the Tree of Existence.

My Friends drop off one after another, when my Age and Infirmities prevent my making new Ones [he groaned], & if I still retained the necessary Activity and Ability, I hardly see among the existing Generation where I could make them of equal Goodness: So that the longer I live I must expect to be very wretched. As we draw nearer the Conclusion of Life, Nature furnishes with more Helps to wean us from it, among which one of the most powerful is the Loss of such dear Friends.

With Dr. Joseph Priestley, the famous clergyman and natural philosopher, Franklin was very intimate. The discoveries of Priestley, especially his discovery that carbonic acid gas is imbibed by vegetation, awakened Franklin's keenest interest, and, some years before Priestley actually received a medal from the Royal Society for his scientific achievements, Franklin earnestly, though vainly, endeavored to obtain one for him. "I find that you have set all the Philosophers of Europe at Work upon Fix'd Air," he said in one of his letters to Priestley, "and it is with great Pleasure I observe how high you stand in their Opinion; for I enjoy my Friend's fame as my own." And no one who knows his freedom from all petty, carking feelings of every sort, such as envy and jealousy, can doubt for a moment that he did. For a time, fixed air aroused so much speculation that it was thought that it might even be a remedy for putrid fevers and cancers. The absorption of carbonic acid gas by vegetation is all simple enough now, but it was not so simple when Priestley wrote to Franklin that he had discovered that even aquatic plants imbibe pure air, and emit it as excrementitious to them, in a dephlogisticated state. On one occasion, Franklin paid his fellow-philosopher the compliment of saying that he knew of no philosopher who started so much good game for the hunters after knowledge as he did.

For a time Priestley enjoyed the patronage of Lord Shelburne, who, desirous of having the company of a man of general learning to read with him, and superintend the education of his children, took Priestley from his congregation at Leeds, settled three hundred pounds a year upon him for ten years, and two hundred pounds for life, with a house to live in near his country seat. So Franklin stated in a letter to John Winthrop, when Priestley was engaged in the task of putting Lord Shelburne's great library into order. Subsequently patron and client separated amicably, but, before they did, Priestley consulted Franklin as to whether he should go on with the arrangement. The latter in a few judicious sentences counselled him to do so until the end of the term of ten years, and, by way of illustrating the frequent and troublesome changes, that human beings make without amendment, and often for the worse, told this story of his youth:

In my Youth, I was a Passenger in a little Sloop, descending the River Delaware. There being no Wind, we were obliged, when the Ebb was spent, to cast anchor, and wait for the next. The Heat of the Sun on the Vessel was excessive, the Company Strangers to me, and not very agreeable. Near the river Side I saw what I took to be a pleasant green Meadow, in the middle of which was a large shady Tree, where it struck my Fancy I could sit and read, (having a Book in my Pocket,) and pass the time agreeably till the tide turned. I therefore prevail'd with the Captain to put me ashore. Being landed, I found the greatest part of my Meadow was really a Marsh, in crossing which, to come at my Tree, I was up to my knees in Mire; and I had not placed myself under its Shade five Minutes, before the Muskitoes in Swarms found me out, attack'd my Legs, Hands, and Face, and made my Reading and my Rest impossible; so that I return'd to the Beach, and call'd for the Boat to come and take me aboard again, where I was oblig'd to bear the Heat I had strove to quit, and also the Laugh of the Company. Similar Cases in the Affairs of Life have since frequently fallen under my Observation.

Deterrent as was the advice, pointed by such a graphic story, Priestley did not take it, and, fortunately for him, the pleasant green meadow and large shady tree to which he retired did not prove such a deceptive mirage. After the separation, Lord Shelburne endeavored to induce him to renew their former relation, but he declined.

Priestley was one of the witnesses of the baiting, to which Franklin was subjected at the Cockpit, on account of the Hutchinson letters, on the famous occasion, of which it could be well said by every thoughtful Englishman a little later in the words of the ballad of Chevy-Chase,

Or "the speaking" of that day, as Lord Campbell has parodied the lines.

Priestley was also among those eye-witnesses of the scene, who testified to the absolutely impassive countenance with which Franklin bore the ordeal. As he left the room, however, he pressed Priestley's hand in a way that indicated much feeling. The next day, they breakfasted together, and Franklin told Priestley "that, if he had not considered the thing for which he had been so much insulted, as one of the best actions of his life, and what he should certainly do again in the same circumstances, he could not have supported it."

To Priestley also the world was first indebted for knowledge of the fact that, when Franklin afterwards came to sign in France the Treaty of Alliance between that country and the United States, he took pains to wear the same suit of spotted Manchester velvet that he wore when he was treated with such indecency at the Cockpit.

From France Franklin wrote to Priestley a letter expressing the horror—for no other term is strong enough to describe the sentiment—in which he held the unnatural war between Great Britain and her revolted Colonies.

The Hint you gave me jocularly [he said], that you did not quite despair of the Philosopher's Stone, draws from me a Request, that, when you have found it, you will take care to lose it again; for I believe in my conscience, that Mankind are wicked enough to continue slaughtering one another as long as they can find Money to pay the Butchers. But, of all the Wars in my time, this on the part of England appears to me the wickedest; having no Cause but Malice against Liberty, and the Jealousy of Commerce. And I think the Crime seems likely to meet with its proper Punishment; a total loss of her own Liberty, and the Destruction of her own Commerce.

But Franklin was not too incensed to have his joke in this same letter over even such a grim subject for merriment as powder. "When I was at the camp before Boston," he declared, "the Army had not 5 Rounds of Powder a Man. This was kept a Secret even from our People. The World wonder'd that we so seldom fir'd a Cannon; we could not afford it."

Another English friend of Franklin was Benjamin Vaughan, the son of a West Indian planter, and at one time the private secretary of Lord Shelburne. His family was connected with the House of Bedford, and his wife, Sarah Manning, was an aunt of the late Cardinal Manning. To Vaughan the reputation of Franklin is doubly indebted. In 1779, he brought out a new edition of Franklin's writings, and it was partly the entreaties of Abel James and himself which induced Franklin to continue the Autobiography, after work on it had been long suspended by its author because of the demands of the Revolution on his time. The spirit, in which the edition of Franklin's writings was prepared, found expression in the preface. "Can Englishmen," Vaughan asked, "read these things and not sigh at reflecting that the country which could produce their author, was once without controversy their own!"

Before Franklin left France he longed to pay another visit to England, and this matter is touched upon in a letter to Vaughan which sheds a sidelight upon the intimacy which existed between the two men.

By my doubts of the propriety of my going soon to London, [he said], I meant no reflection on my friends or yours. If I had any call there besides the pleasure of seeing those whom I love, I should have no doubts. If I live to arrive there, I shall certainly embrace your kind invitation, and take up my abode with you.

Some of the sagest observations ever made by Franklin are found in his letters to Vaughan, and several of his happy stories. The following reflections, prompted by English restraints upon commerce, were not intended to be taken literally, but they contain profound insight enough to merit transcription.

It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of this world are managed. Naturally one would imagine, that the interest of a few individuals should give way to general interest; but individuals manage their affairs with so much more application, industry, and address, than the public do theirs, that general interest most commonly gives way to particular. We assemble parliaments and councils, to have the benefit of their collected wisdom, but we necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices, and private interests. By the help of these, artful men overpower their wisdom, and dupe its possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, arrêts, and edicts, all the world over, for regulating commerce, an assembly of great men is the greatest fool upon earth.

When Franklin sat down to write this letter, Vaughan had asked him what remedy he had for the growing luxury of his country which gave so much offence to all English travellers without exception. In replying to this rather tactless question, Franklin's pen ran on until he had completed not so much a letter as an economic essay.

Our People [he begins] are hospitable, and have indeed too much Pride in displaying upon their Tables before Strangers the Plenty and Variety that our Country affords. They have the Vanity, too, of sometimes borrowing one another's Plate to entertain more splendidly. Strangers being invited from House to House, and meeting every Day with a Feast, imagine what they see is the ordinary Way of living of all the Families where they dine; when perhaps each Family lives a Week after upon the Remains of the Dinner given. It is, I own, a Folly in our People to give such Offence to English Travellers. The first part of the Proverb is thereby verified, that Fools make Feasts. I wish in this Case the other were as true, and Wise Men eat them. These Travellers might, one would think, find some Fault they could more decently reproach us with, than that of our excessive Civility to them as Strangers.

With this introduction, he proceeds to say a good word for luxury. "Is not the Hope of one day being able to purchase and enjoy Luxuries a great Spur to Labour and Industry?" he asked. And this question brought up one of the inevitable stories.

The Skipper of a Shallop, employed between Cape May and Philadelphia, had done us some small Service, for which he refused Pay. My Wife, understanding that he had a Daughter sent her as a Present a new-fashioned Cap. Three Years After, this Skipper being at my House with an old Farmer of Cape May, his Passenger, he mentioned the Cap, and how much his Daughter had been pleased with it. "But," says he, "it proved a dear Cap to our Congregation." "How so?" "When my Daughter appeared in it at Meeting, it was so much admired, that all the Girls resolved to get such Caps from Philadelphia, and my Wife and I computed, that the whole could not have cost less than a hundred Pound." "True," says the Farmer, "but you do not tell all the Story. I think the Cap was nevertheless an Advantage to us, for it was the first thing that put our Girls upon Knitting worsted Mittens for Sale at Philadelphia, that they might have wherewithal to buy Caps and Ribbands there, and you know that that Industry has continued, and is likely to continue and increase to a much greater Value, and answer better Purposes." Upon the whole, I was more reconciled to this little Piece of Luxury, since not only the Girls were made happier by having fine Caps, but the Philadelphians by the Supply of warm Mittens.

Then he argues still further as follows that luxury may not always be such an evil as it seems:

A Shilling spent idly by a Fool, may be picked up by a Wiser Person, who knows better what to do with it. It is therefore not lost. A vain, silly Fellow builds a fine House, furnishes it richly, lives in it expensively, and in few years ruins himself; but the Masons, Carpenters, Smiths, and other honest Tradesmen have been by his Employ assisted in maintaining and raising their Families; the Farmer has been paid for his labour, and encouraged, and the Estate is now in better Hands.

There were exceptional cases, of course. "If there be a Nation, for Instance, that exports its Beef and Linnen, to pay for its Importation of Claret and Porter, while a great Part of its People live upon Potatoes, and wear no Shirts, wherein does it differ from the Sot, who lets his Family starve, and sells his Clothes to buy Drink." He meant Ireland, it is needless to add. A little in this way, he confessed, was the exchange of American victuals for West Indian rum and sugar.

The existence of so much want and misery in the world, he thought, was due to the employment of men and women in works that produce neither the necessaries nor the conveniences of life. Such people, aided by those who do nothing, consume the necessaries raised by the laborious. This idea, he developed with his inborn lucidity, ending, however, of course, with the reflection that we should naturally expect from a man, who was so thoroughly in touch with his kind, that, upon the whole, the quantity of industry and prudence among mankind exceeded the quantity of idleness and folly.

This "long, rambling Letter" he called it—this "brief, pointed and masterly letter," we term it—concludes quite in the style of one of Poor Richard's dissertations:

Almost all the Parts of our Bodies require some Expence. The Feet demand Shoes; the Legs, Stockings; the rest of the Body, Clothing; and the Belly, a good deal of Victuals. Our Eyes, tho' exceedingly useful, ask, when reasonable, only the cheap Assistance of Spectacles, which could not much impair our Finances. But the Eyes of other People are the Eyes that ruin us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine Clothes, fine Houses, nor fine Furniture.

Another letter to Vaughan is really an essay on the Criminal Laws and the practice of privateering. And a wise, humane and sprightly essay it is, fully worthy of a man, who was entirely too far in advance of his age to approve the savage English laws, which hanged a thief for stealing a horse, and had no better answer to make to the culprit, when he pleaded that it was hard to hang a man for only stealing a horse, than the reply of Judge Burnet: "Man, thou art not to be hanged only for stealing, but that horses may not be stolen." Not unworthy either was this essay of a man whose benevolence was too clear-sighted and generous to be cheated by the pretence that the practice of privateering has its root in anything better than the rapacity of the highwayman. A highwayman, he said, was as much a robber, when he plundered in a gang, as when single; and a nation, that made an unjust war, was only a great gang. How could England, which had commissioned no less than seven hundred gangs of privateering robbers, he asked, have the face to condemn the crime of robbery in individuals, and hang up twenty criminals in a morning. It naturally put one in mind of a Newgate anecdote. "One of the Prisoners complain'd, that in the Night somebody had taken his Buckles out of his Shoes; 'What, the Devil!' says another, 'have we then Thieves among us? It must not be suffered, let us search out the Rogue, and pump him to death."

Vaughan was a prolix correspondent, and in reading his letters we cannot but be reminded at times of the question put to him by Franklin, when inveighing against the artifices adopted by booksellers for the purpose of padding books. After remarking that they were puffed up to such an extent that the selling of paper seemed the object, and printing on it, only the pretence, he said, "You have a law, I think, against butchers blowing of veal to make it look fatter; why not one against booksellers' blowing of books to make them look bigger."

Vaughan was among the friends who did not fail to hasten to Southampton when Franklin touched there on his return from France to America.

In what affectionate esteem Franklin held his two English friends, Dr. John Hawkesworth, the author and writer of oratorios, and John Stanley, the blind musician and organist of the Society of the Inner Temple, we have already seen. Stanley composed the music for Dr. Hawkesworth's oratorios Zimri and The Fall of Egypt, and like music and words the two friends themselves were blended in the mind of Franklin. Writing in the latter years of his life to another English friend of his, Thomas Jordan, the brewer, who had recently sent him a cask of porter, he had this to say about them, in connection with the two satellites of Georgium Sidus, which Herschel had just discovered.

Let us hope, my friend, that, when free from these bodily embarrassments, we may roam together through some of the systems he has explored, conducted by some of our old companions already acquainted with them. Hawkesworth will enliven our progress with his cheerful, sensible converse, and Stanley accompany the music of the spheres.

Several times, in his letter, Franklin refers to Hawkesworth as the "good Doctor Hawkesworth," and it was from him that he learned to call Strahan "Straney."

Another English friend of Franklin was John Sargent, a London merchant, a director of the Bank of England, and a member of Parliament. The friendship was shared by Mrs. Sargent, "whom I love very much," Franklin said in one of his letters to her husband. After his return from his second mission to England, he wrote to Sargent, asking him to receive the balance due him by Messrs. Browns and Collinson, and keep it for him or his children. "It may possibly," he declared, "soon be all I shall have left: as my American Property consists chiefly of Houses in our Seaport Towns, which your Ministry have begun to burn, and I suppose are wicked enough to burn them all." In connection with Sargent, it may also be mentioned that he was one of the applicants with Franklin for the Ohio grant, and that it was at his country seat at Halstead, in Kent, that Lord Stanhope called for the purpose of taking Franklin to Hayes, the country seat of Chatham, where Chatham and Franklin met for the first time.

Another English friend of Franklin was John Canton, who was, however, rather a scientific than a social comrade, though a fellow-tourist of his on one of his summer excursions; and still another was Dr. Alexander Small, for whom he cherished a feeling of real personal affection. In one letter to Small, he tells him that he had found relief from the gout by exposing his naked foot, when he was in bed, and thereby promoting the process of transpiration. He gave the fact, he said, to Small, in exchange for his receipt for tartar emetic, because the commerce of philosophy as well as other commerce was best promoted by taking care to make returns. In another letter to Small, there is a growl for the American Loyalists.

As to the Refugees [he observed], whom you think we were so impolitic in rejecting, I do not find that they are miss'd here, or that anybody regrets their Absence. And certainly they must be happier where they are, under the Government they admire; and be better receiv'd among a People, whose Cause they espous'd and fought for, than among those who cannot so soon have forgotten the Destruction of their Habitations, and the spilt Blood of their dearest Friends and near Relations.

Then there is a reference in this letter to the learned and ingenious friends, who had left Dr. Small and himself to join the majority in the world of spirits.

Every one of them [he said] now knows more than all of us they have left behind. It is to me a comfortable Reflection, that, since we must live forever in a future State, there is a sufficient Stock of Amusement in reserve for us, to be found in constantly learning something new to Eternity, the present Quantity of human Ignorance infinitely exceeding that of human Knowledge. Adieu, my dear Friend, and believe me, in whatever World, yours most affectionately.

In a subsequent letter, there is a softer word for the Loyalists. He believed, he said, that fear and error rather than malice occasioned their desertion of their country's cause and the adoption of the King's. The public resentment against them was then so far abated that none, who asked leave to return, were refused, and many of them then lived in America much at their ease. But he thought that the politicians, who were a sort of people that loved to fortify themselves in their projects by precedent, were perhaps waiting, before they ventured to propose the restoration of the confiscated estates of the Loyalists, to see whether the English Government would restore the forfeited estates in Scotland to the Scotch, those in Ireland to the Irish and those in England to the Welsh! He was glad that the Loyalists, who had not returned to America, had received, or were likely to receive, some compensation for their losses from England, but it did not seem so clearly consistent with the wisdom of Parliament for it to provide such compensation on behalf of the King, who had seduced these Loyalists by his proclamations. Some mad King, in the future, might set up such action on the part of Parliament as a precedent, as was realized by the Council of Brutes in the old fable, a copy of which he enclosed. The fable, of course, was not an old fable at all, but one of his own productions, in which the horse with the "boldness and freedom that became the nobleness of his nature," succeeded in convincing the council of the beasts, against the views of the wolves and foxes, that the lion should bestow no reward upon the mongrels, who, sprung in part from wolves and foxes, and corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, had deserted the honest dogs, when the lion, notwithstanding the attachment of these dogs to him, had, under the influence of evil counsellors, contracted an aversion to them, condemned them unheard and ordered his tigers, leopards and panthers to attack and destroy them. In this letter, there is another reference to the reformed prayer-book which Dr. Small and good Mrs. Baldwin had done him the honor, as we have seen, to approve. The things of this world, he said, took up too much of the little time left to him for him to undertake anything like a reformation in matters of religion. When we can sow good seed, we should, however, do it, and await with patience, when we can do no better, Nature's time for their sprouting.

A later letter assured Dr. Small that Franklin still loved England, and wished it prosperity, but it had only another growl for the Loyalists. Someone had said, he declared, that we are commanded to forgive our enemies, but that we are nowhere commanded to forgive our friends. The Loyalists, after uniting with the savages for the purpose of burning the houses of the American Whigs, and murdering and scalping their wives and children, had left them for the Government of their King in England and Nova Scotia. "We do not miss them," he said, "nor wish their return; nor do we envy them their present happiness."[36]

This letter also mildly deprecates the honor that Small did him in naming him with Timoleon. "I am like him only in retiring from my public labours," he declared, "which indeed my stone, and other infirmities of age, have made indispensably necessary."

The enthusiasm of the French people had drawn so freely upon the heroes of antiquity for a parallel to him that Dr. Small, perhaps, had to put up with Timoleon in default of a better classical congener.

Other English friends of Franklin were John Alleyne, Edward Bridgen, Edmund Burke, Mrs. Thompson, John Whitehurst, Anthony Tissington, Thomas Viny and Caleb Whitefoord. Our attention has already been called to his pithy reflections on early marriages in one of his letters to John Alleyne.

Treat your Wife [he said, in the concluding sentences of this admirable letter] always with Respect; it will procure Respect to you, not from her only but from all that observe it. Never use a slighting Expression to her, even in jest, for Slights in Jest, after frequent bandyings, are apt to end in angry earnest. Be studious in your Profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least, you will, by such Conduct, stand the best Chance for such Consequences.

In another letter to Alleyne, with his unerring good sense, he makes short work of the perverse prejudice against intermarriage with a deceased wife's sister which was destined to die so hard in the English mind.

To Edward Bridgen, a merchant of London, Franklin referred in a letter to Governor Alexander Martin of North Carolina as "a particular Friend of mine and a zealous one of the American Cause." The object of the letter was to reclaim from confiscation property in that state belonging to Bridgen. And it was to Bridgen that Franklin made the suggestion that, instead of repeating continually upon every half penny the dull story that everybody knew (and that it would have been no loss to mankind if nobody had ever known) that George III. was King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, etc., etc., there should be inscribed on the coin some important proverb of Solomon, some pious moral, prudential or economical precept, calculated to leave an impression upon the mind, especially of young persons, such as on some, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom"; on others, "Honesty is the best Policy"; on others, "He that by the plow would thrive, himself must either hold or drive"; on others, "Keep thy Shop, and thy Shop will keep thee"; on others, "A penny saved is a penny got"; on others, "He that buys what he has no need of, will soon be forced to sell his necessaries"; and on others, "Early to bed and early to rise, will make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

With Edmund Burke Franklin does not appear to have been intimate, but they knew each other well enough for the former in a letter to the latter to term the friendship between them an "old friendship." It was Burke who remarked, when Franklin was examined before the House of Commons on American affairs, that it was as if a school-master was being catechized by his pupils. For every reason, the judgment of so great a man about such an incident has its value, but among other reasons because Burke was accounted one of the best-informed men in England in relation to American affairs.

The only glimpse we obtain of Mrs. Thompson is in a letter written to her by Franklin from Paris, shortly after his arrival in France in 1776, but the raillery of this letter is too familiar in tone to have marked the course of anything but real intimacy.

You are too early, Hussy [he wrote], (as well as too saucy,) in calling me Rebel; you should wait for the Event, which will determine whether it is a Rebellion or only a Revolution. Here the Ladies are more civil; they call us les Insurgens, a Character that usually pleases them: And methinks all other Women who smart, or have smarted, under the Tyranny of a bad Husband, ought to be fixed in Revolution Principles, and act accordingly.

Then Mrs. Thompson is told some gossipy details about a common friend whom Franklin had seen during the preceding spring at New York, and these are succeeded by some gay sallies with regard to Mrs. Thompson's restlessness.

Pray learn [he said], if you have not already learnt, like me, to be pleased with other People's Pleasures, and happy with their Happiness, when none occur of your own; and then perhaps you will not so soon be weary of the Place you chance to be in, and so fond of Rambling to get rid of your Ennui. I fancy you have hit upon the right Reason of your being Weary of St. Omer's, viz. that you are out of Temper, which is the effect of full Living and Idleness. A Month in Bridewell, beating Hemp, upon Bread and Water, would give you Health and Spirits, and subsequent Cheerfulness and Contentment with every other Situation. I prescribe that Regimen for you, my dear, in pure good will, without a Fee. And let me tell you, if you do not get into Temper, neither Brussels nor Lisle will suit you. I know nothing of the Price of Living in either of those Places; but I am sure a single Woman, as you are, might with Economy upon two hundred Pounds a year maintain herself comfortably anywhere, and me into the Bargain. Do not invite me in earnest, however, to come and live with you; for, being posted here, I ought not to comply, and I am not sure I should be able to refuse.

This letter was written shortly after Franklin's arrival in France, but he had already caught the infection of French gallantry. It closes with a lifelike portrait of himself.

I know you wish you could see me [he said], but, as you can't, I will describe myself to you. Figure me in your mind as jolly as formerly, and as strong and hearty, only a few years older; very plainly dress'd, wearing my thin gray strait hair, that peeps out under my only Coiffure, a fine Fur Cap, which comes down my Forehead almost to my Spectacles. Think how this must appear among the Powder'd Heads of Paris! I wish every gentleman and Lady in France would only be so obliging as to follow my Fashion, comb their own Heads as I do mine, dismiss their Friseurs, and pay me half the Money they paid to them. You see, the gentry might well afford this, and I could then enlist those Friseurs, who are at least 100,000, and with the Money I would maintain them, make a Visit with them to England, and dress the Heads of your Ministers and Privy Counsellors; which I conceive to be at present un peu dérangées. Adieu, Madcap; and believe me ever, your affectionate Friend and humble Servant.

John Whitehurst, who was a maker of watches and philosophical instruments, and the author of an Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth, and his friend, Anthony Tissington, were residents of Derbyshire. Some of Whitehurst's letters to Franklin are still in existence, but none from Franklin to Whitehurst are. A letter from Franklin to Tissington has preserved one of the writer's characteristic stories. After speaking of the rheumatic pains, to which Mrs. Tissington was subject, he said:

'Tis a most wicked Distemper, & often puts me in mind of the Saying of a Scotch Divine to some of his Brethren who were complaining that their Flocks had of late been infected with Arianism and Socinianism. Mine, says he, is infected with a worse ism than either of those.—Pray, Brother, what can that be?—It is, the Rheumatism.

Thomas Viny was a wheel manufacturer of Tenterden, Kent. In a letter to him, Franklin tells him that he cannot without extreme reluctance think of using any arguments to persuade him to remove to America, because of the pain that the removal would occasion to Viny's brother. Possibly, however, he added, Viny might afterwards judge it not amiss, when the many children that he was likely to have, were grown up, to plant one of them in America, where he might prepare an asylum for the rest should any great calamity, which might God avert, befall England. A man he knew, who had a number of sons, used to say that he chose to settle them at some distance from each other, for he thought they throve better, as he remarked that cabbages, growing too near together, were not so likely to come to a head.

I shall be asleep before that time [Franklin continued], otherwise he might expect and command my best Advice and Assistance. But as the Ancients who knew not how to write had a Method of transmitting Friendships to Posterity; the Guest who had been hospitably entertain'd in a strange Country breaking a Stick with every one who did him a kindness; and the Producing such a Tally at any Time afterwards, by a Descendant of the Host, to a Son or Grandson of the Guest, was understood as a good Claim to special Regard besides the Common Rights of Hospitality: So if this Letter should happen to be preserv'd, your Son may produce it to mine as an Evidence of the Good will that once subsisted between their Fathers, as an Acknowledgment of the Obligations you laid me under by your many Civilities when I was in your Country and a Claim to all the Returns due from me if I had been living.

Another letter from Franklin to Viny was written at Passy. He joined most heartily he said with Viny in his prayers that the Almighty, who had favored the just cause, would perfect his work, and establish freedom in the New World as an asylum for those of the Old who deserved it. He thought the war a detestable one, and grieved much at the mischief and misery it was occasioning to many; his only consolation being that he did all in his power to prevent it. What a pleasure it would be to him on his return to America to see his old friend and his children settled there! "I hope," Franklin concluded, "he will find Vines and Fig-trees there for all of them, under which we may sit and converse, enjoying Peace and Plenty, a good Government, good Laws, and Liberty, without which Men lose half their Value."

Caleb Whitefoord resided at No. 8 Craven Street, London, or next door to Mrs. Stevenson's, where Franklin resided during his two missions to England, and the friendship between Franklin and himself, though very cordial on Whitefoord's part, would seem to have been on Franklin's part, though cordial, the friendship mainly of mere propinquity.[37]

Far more significant were the ties which bound Franklin to such English friends as Peter Collinson, the Rev. George Whitefield, Lord Le Despencer, James Hutton, David Hartley and George Whatley.

Peter Collinson was a London mercer who had a considerable correspondence with America. He not only enjoyed an acquaintance with men of prominence and influence in the Colonies, but he earnestly interested himself in promoting the production of American flax, hemp, silk and wine. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, besides being one of the founders of the Society of Antiquaries, and it was directly due to the electric tube sent over by him to the Library Company of Philadelphia that Franklin entered upon those experiments in electricity which he communicated to Collinson in a series of memorable letters, that brought lasting renown to their author when given to the world by Collinson. In a letter to Michael Collinson, Franklin speaks of Peter Collinson as our "dear departed Friend," and pays a feeling tribute to his unselfish patronage of the Library at Philadelphia. He alludes to the valuable presents made to the Library by Collinson and others, whose generosity had been kindled by Collinson's zeal, and he states the remarkable fact that for more than thirty years successively Collinson had participated in the annual selection of books for the Library, and had shouldered the whole burden of buying them in London, and shipping them to Philadelphia without ever charging or even accepting any consideration for his trouble. Nay more, during the same time, he had transmitted to the directors of the Library Company the earliest account of every new European improvement in Agriculture and the Arts, or discovery in Philosophy. Curious in botany as Collinson may have been, it is not hazardous to say that he never gathered or sowed any seed more fruitful than these benefactions, and we can readily understand how deeply his friendship must have been cherished by a spirit so congenial with his as that of Franklin. They were friends before they ever met, but it was not until Franklin arrived in London on his first mission to England that they greeted each other face to face. Franklin's first letter to America, written the day after he reached London, was hastily penned at Collinson's house, and, the next day, John Hanbury, the great Virginia merchant, by an arrangement with Collinson, called for Franklin in his carriage, and conveyed him to the house of Lord Granville for an interview with that nobleman. The letters from Franklin to Collinson on the subject of electricity are, we hardly need say, the most important of the former's letters to him, but very valuable, too, are some of his observations in other letters to his correspondent on political conditions in Pennsylvania and the relations between the Colonies and the mother country. To the scientific letters and to these observations we shall have occasion to revert further on. Beyond a reference to some black silk, sent by Collinson to Deborah, with a generous disregard of the fact that the fowl meadow grass seed that Franklin had sent to him from America never came up, the correspondence between Collinson and Franklin is marked by few intimate features. It was, however, on the back of a letter from Franklin to Collinson, in which the former condoled with the latter on the loss of his wife, that this good man, for such we must believe Collinson to have been, indorsed these singular comments, the offspring probably of purely morbid self-reproach:

There was no occasion of any Phylosophy on this ever to be lamented occasion. Peter Collinson had few feelings but for Himself. The same Principle that led him to deprive his son of his Birthright when that son lay in the Agonies of Death and knew not what he put his hand to, supported Peter Collinson in the loss of the best of Women in a manner that did no Honour to his Feelings, his Gratitude or his Humanity.

The eye of the reader has already been drawn to the Rev. George Whitefield, whose eloquence, we are told by Franklin in the Autobiography, "had a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers." After the death of Whitefield, Franklin paid this handsome tribute to him in a letter to Robert Morris and Thomas Leach. "I knew him intimately upwards of thirty years. His Integrity, Disinterestedness, and indefatigable Zeal in prosecuting every good Work, I have never seen equalled, I shall never see exceeded." To Franklin, too, we are indebted for a striking description of his characteristics as an orator, when he came over to Philadelphia from Ireland, and, after being at first permitted to preach in some churches, was later compelled to preach in the fields, because the clergy took a dislike to him, and refused him their pulpits.

He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however numerous, observ'd the most exact silence. He preach'd one evening from the top of the Court-house steps, which are in the middle of Market-Street, and on the west side of Second-Street, which crosses it at right angles. Both streets were fill'd with his hearers to a considerable distance. Being among the hindmost in Market-Street, I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards down the street towards the river; and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front-Street, when some noise in the street obscur'd it. Imagining then a semi-circle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were fill'd with auditors, to each of whom I allow'd two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand. This reconcil'd me to the newspaper accounts of his having preach'd to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, and to the antient histories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted.

By experience, Franklin came to distinguish easily between Whitefield's newly composed sermons and those which he had often preached in the course of his travels.

His delivery of the latter was so improv'd by frequent repetitions that every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turn'd and well plac'd, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleas'd with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that receiv'd from an excellent piece of musick.

Notwithstanding the extraordinary influence of Whitefield's oratory over his auditors, to which Franklin testifies so unqualifiedly, it is obvious enough, as we have seen, that a nature so little given to extreme forms of enthusiasm as that of Franklin could not but regard the hysteria produced by it with some degree of contemptuous amusement.

Who [he asked in his Essay on "Shavers and Trimmers," in the Pennsylvania Gazette], has been more notorious for shaving and fleecing, than that Apostle of Apostles, that Preacher of Preachers, the Rev. Mr. G. W.? But I forbear making farther mention of this spiritual Shaver and Trimmer, lest I should affect the Minds of my Readers as deeply as his Preaching has affected their Pockets.

This was mere jesting on the part of a man to whom everything had its humorous as well as its serious side. Very different in spirit are some of the passages in Franklin's letters to Whitefield.

I am glad to hear [he wrote on one occasion] that you have frequent opportunities of preaching among the great. If you can gain them to a good and exemplary life, wonderful changes will follow in the manners of the lower ranks; for ad exemplum regis, etc. On this principle, Confucius, the famous Eastern reformer, proceeded. When he saw his country sunk in vice, and wickedness of all kinds triumphant, he applied himself first to the grandees; and having, by his doctrine, won them to the cause of virtue, the commons followed in multitudes. The mode has a wonderful influence on mankind; and there are numbers who, perhaps, fear less the being in hell, than out of the fashion. Our most western reformations began with the ignorant mob; and when numbers of them were gained, interest and party views drew in the wise and great. Where both methods can be used, reformations are likely to be more speedy. O that some method could be found to make them lasting! He who discovers that will, in my opinion, deserve more, ten thousand times, than the inventor of the longitude.

Another letter from Franklin to Whitefield is not only distinguished by the same missionary accent but also by the deep-seated loyalty to the English Crown which was so slow in yielding first to disillusionment and then to detestation. Alluding to Whitefield's desire to be the chaplain of an American army, he said that he wished that they could be jointly employed by the Crown to settle a colony on the Ohio.

What a glorious Thing [he exclaimed] it would be, to settle in that fine Country a large strong Body of Religious and Industrious People! What a Security to the other Colonies; and Advantage to Britain, by Increasing her People, Territory, Strength and Commerce! Might it not greatly facilitate the Introduction of pure Religion among the Heathen, if we could, by such a Colony, show them a better Sample of Christians than they commonly see in our Indian Traders, the most vicious and abandoned Wretches of our Nation?... Life, like a dramatic Piece, should not only be conducted with Regularity, but methinks it should finish handsomely. Being now in the last Act, I begin to cast about for something fit to end with. Or if mine be more properly compar'd to an Epigram, as some of its few Lines are but barely tolerable, I am very desirous of concluding with a bright Point. In such an Enterprise I could spend the Remainder of Life with Pleasure; and I firmly believe God would bless us with Success, if we undertook it with a sincere Regard to his Honour, the Service of our gracious King, and (which is the same thing) the Publick Good.

From the joint enterprise of settling a colony on the Ohio with Whitefield to the joint enterprise of abridging the Book of English Prayer with Lord Le Despencer was a far cry, but not too far for Franklin, as we have seen.

Lord Le Despencer, or Sir Francis Dashwood, as he was known, when he was one of the jolly monks of Medmenham Abbey, was numbered by Franklin among his best friends, and at West Wycombe, the country seat of this nobleman, Franklin spent many happy hours. On one occasion, he writes to his son that he has passed sixteen days there most agreeably. On another occasion, he tells him that he has just come to West Wycombe to spend a few days and breathe a little fresh air. "I am in this House," he said, "as much at my Ease as if it was my own; and the Gardens are a Paradise." After a journey to Oxford, with Lord Le Despencer, he informed the same correspondent that the former was very good to him on all occasions and seemed of late very desirous of his company. Whatever else the owner of West Wycombe may have been, Franklin's letters leave us no room to doubt that he was a capital host.

To a very different type of character in every respect belonged James Hutton, another dear friend of Franklin. He was a bookseller at the sign of the Bible and Sun, west of Temple Bar, and for fifty-five years a zealous member of the Moravian Church. His interest in the missionary labors of that Church, his benevolence, which knew no sectarian limitations, his sense and simplicity of manners won for him an honorable standing even in Court Circles. We are told by William Temple Franklin that he was highly esteemed by George III. and his consort, and was well known to many of the English nobility and men of letters; not being refused admittance to the highest ranks even at Buckingham House, though his ardent benevolence inclined him greatly to neglect his own dress that he might better feed the hungry and cover the naked. A man of that kind always had easy access to the heart of Franklin, open though its hospitable portals were to other friends of a very different description. In a letter to David Hartley from Passy, Franklin speaks of Hutton in these terms: "An old Friend of mine, Mr. Hutton, a Chief of the Moravians, who is often at the Queen's Palace, and is sometimes spoken to by the King, was over here lately." In a letter to Hutton himself from Passy, Franklin applies to him the term, "My dear old friend," which with its different variations meant with him the high-water mark of intimacy. Hutton is also brought to our sight, though in a droll way, in the Craven Street Gazette, the mock Chronicle, in which Franklin, with a delicacy and richness of humor all his own, pictures No. 7 Craven Street as a Court, Mrs. Stevenson as a Queen, with lords and ladies in her train, and Hutton and himself as rivals for the good graces of Dolly Blount, Polly's friend.

This Morning [the Gazette notes, under date of Tuesday, Sept. 25], my good Lord Hutton call'd at Craven-Street House and enquir'd very respectfully & affectionately concerning the Welfare of the Queen. He then imparted to the big Man (Franklin himself) a Piece of Intelligence important to them both, and but just communicated by Lady Hawkesworth, viz. that the amiable and delectable Companion, Miss D (orothea) B (lount), had made a Vow to marry absolutely him of the two whose Wife should first depart this Life. It is impossible to express the various Agitations of Mind appearing in both their Faces on this Occasion. Vanity at the Preference given them over the rest of Mankind; Affection to their present Wives, Fear of losing them, Hope, if they must lose them, to obtain the proposed Comfort; Jealousy of each other in case both Wives should die together, &c. &c. &c.,—all working at the same time jumbled their Features into inexplicable Confusion. They parted at length with Professions & outward Appearances indeed of ever-enduring Friendship, but it was shrewdly suspected that each of them sincerely wished Health & long Life to the other's Wife; & that however long either of these Friends might like to live himself, the other would be very well pleas'd to survive him.

Hutton was one of the simple and warm-hearted friends of Franklin who endeavored by their individual exertions to accelerate the restoration of peace between Great Britain and America, and, like all of Franklin's English friends, who kept up a correspondence with him, while the war was going on, he had to read some scathing fulminations against England.

You have lost by this mad War [Franklin said in one letter to Hutton], and the Barbarity with which it has been carried on, not only the Government and Commerce of America, and the public Revenues and private Wealth arising from that Commerce, but what is more, you have lost the Esteem, Respect, Friendship, and Affection of all that great and growing People, who consider you at present, and whose Posterity will consider you, as the worst and wickedest Nation upon Earth.

Twelve days later, Franklin annexed a postscript to this letter which must have been an even severer trial to Hutton's equanimity than the letter itself.

I abominate with you [he said], all Murder, and I may add, that the Slaughter of Men in an unjust Cause is nothing less than Murder; I therefore never think of your present Ministers and their Abettors, but with the Image strongly painted in my View, of their Hands, red, wet, and dropping with the Blood of my Countrymen, Friends, and Relations.

Franklin's opinion of the King was imparted to Hutton in terms fully as indignant. The letter, in which this was done, was prompted by a letter from Hutton to a third person giving an account of some abominable murders inflicted by American frontiersmen upon the poor Moravian Indians. This time it was not English, but American hands that were red with blood, but Franklin was resourceful enough all the same to fix the responsibility for the murders by a train of indirect reasoning on the King. Why, he asked, had a single man in England, who happened to love blood and to hate Americans, been permitted to gratify that bad temper by hiring German murderers, and joining them with his own to destroy, in a continued course of bloody years, near 100,000 human creatures, many of them possessed of useful talents, virtues and abilities to which he had no pretension! It was he who had furnished the savages with hatchets and scalping knives, and engaged them to fall upon defenceless American farmers, and murder them with their wives and children, paying for their scalps, of which the account kept in America already amounted, he had heard, to near two thousand. Perhaps, the people of the frontiers, he declared, exasperated by the cruelties of the Indians, had been induced to kill all Indians that fell into their hands without distinction; so that even these horrid murders of the poor Moravians might be laid to the King's charge.

And yet [said Franklin] this Man lives, enjoys all the good Things this World can afford, and is surrounded by Flatterers, who keep even his Conscience quiet by telling him he is the best of Princes! I wonder at this, but I can not therefore part with the comfortable Belief of a Divine Providence; and the more I see the Impossibility, from the number & extent of his Crimes, of giving equivalent Punishment to a wicked Man in this Life, the more I am convinc'd of a future State, in which all that here appears to be wrong shall be set right, all that is crooked made straight. In this Faith let you & I, my dear Friend, comfort ourselves; it is the only Comfort, in the present dark Scene of Things, that is allowed us.

The friendship between Franklin and David Hartley had to endure the concussion of some knocks even harder than these. Hartley was the son of David Hartley, the philosopher, from whom Hartley Coleridge, the poet, derived his name. He was a B. A. of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and a fellow of Merton College, and represented Hull in Parliament from 1774 to 1780 and from 1782 to 1784. An adherent of Lord Rockingham, and a warm friend of Franklin, he was naturally enough selected as the British plenipotentiary to assist in drawing up the treaty of peace between Great Britain and America. Before this time, however, he had been engaged in a protracted correspondence with Franklin, marked by a degree of liberality and humane feeling on his part which did him great honor. To alleviate the condition of American prisoners in England, to promote the exchange of these prisoners and British prisoners in America, to bring about a reunion between Great Britain and her colonies, and, that failing, a separation attended by as little mutual animosity as possible, were the generous objects to which his efforts were addressed. In pursuing these objects, he must have found it difficult at times to submit meekly to some of the ireful invective against his King, Parliament and People, which punctuates Franklin's solicitation of his mediatory offices, in behalf of American prisoners, and pleas for a peace between Great Britain and America, attended by really generous concessions upon the part of Great Britain. The year after his arrival in France as our minister, Franklin wrote to Hartley:

As to our submitting to the government of Great Britain, it is vain to think of it. She has given us, by her numberless barbarities in the prosecution of the war, and in the treatment of prisoners, by her malice in bribing slaves to murder their masters, and savages to massacre the families of farmers, with her baseness in rewarding the unfaithfulness of servants, and debauching the virtue of honest seamen, intrusted with our property, so deep an impression of her depravity, that we never again can trust her in the management of our affairs and interests.

As the war went on, leaving its trail of blood and increasing hatred behind it, his language at times becomes even more intense. About a year and a half later, he wrote to Hartley, "We know that your King hates Whigs and Presbyterians; that he thirsts for our Blood, of which he has already drunk large Draughts; that his servile unprincipled Ministers are ready to execute the Wickedest of his Orders, and his venal Parliament equally ready to vote them just." This outburst was evoked by what he conceived to be a cunning effort of the English Ministry to divide America and her French ally. The next outburst was provoked by the same cause. "The Truth is," he said, "we have no kind of Faith in your Government, which appears to us as insidious and deceitful as it is unjust and cruel; its Character is that of the Spider in Thomson,

Finally, all the hurrying feelings aroused in him at times by what he called "bloody and insatiable Malice and Wickedness" became condensed in an abstract term so full of passion as "devilism." Franklin was not the man to take hold of the handles of a plough and then turn back. In his correspondence with Hartley, as with his other English friends, after he entered upon his mission to France, is the clearest recognition of the fact, to use his own robust figure of speech, that England had lost limbs which would never grow again, and his unwavering resolution to give his assent to nothing less than the complete independence of the Colonies. For him, for his country, there were never more to be any connecting links between Great Britain and America except those of mere international good will and commercial comity. Upon propositions of every sort, looking to a reconciliation between the two lands, he lingered solely for the purpose of obtaining for America, when peace finally came, as large a measure of territorial aggrandizement as he could possibly secure. Of a conciliatory bill, of which Hartley sent him a copy, he said, "It might have erected a Wall of Brass round England, if such a Measure had been adopted, when Fryar Bacon's brazen Head cried out, TIME IS! But the wisdom of it was not seen, till after the fatal Cry of time's past!"

It was the almost pathetic desire of such correspondents of Franklin as Hartley to save some sort of organic tie between the two countries from the wreckage wrought by the fatal policy of the British Ministry, which makes it difficult for us to read Franklin's French letters to men like Hutton and Hartley without feeling that the harsh terms, which he often employed in these letters about the English King, Parliament and People, were hardly fair to that courageous and high-minded band of English patriots, who made the American cause almost as much theirs as his own, and stopped only short of treason in the assertion of their belief that the immemorial liberties of England as well as the liberties of America were staked upon the issue of the American contest. It was the extreme outspoken dissatisfaction, with which English Whigs regarded the effort of the British Ministry to force its own violent and technical views of colonial policy upon America, that made it possible for Franklin to write to Englishmen as he did about their government without exciting either frank or sullen resentment. But there was undoubtedly still another reason with which politics had nothing to do. These Whigs not only respected the manly candor, with which Franklin expressed convictions that they knew had been formed by a singularly enlightened, generous and sober mind, once devotedly attached by the strongest ties of tradition and affection to the colonial connection between Great Britain and America, but they had been too intimate with him personally not to be aware that it was not in his nature to harbor any real or lasting malignity of feeling towards anyone. And that this view of his character was correct is shown by more than one feature of his correspondence with Hartley. In a letter to Hartley, he said that, when Hartley's nation was hiring all the cutthroats it could collect of all countries and colors to destroy the Americans, it was hard to persuade the Americans not to ask, or accept of, aid from any country that might be prevailed with to grant it, and this from the hope that, though the British then thirsted for their blood, and pursued them with fire and sword, they might in some future time treat them kindly. But the outbreak does not seem so fierce when he goes on to say, "America has been forc'd and driven into the Arms of France. She was a dutiful and virtuous Daughter. A cruel Mother-in-law turn'd her out of Doors, defam'd her, and sought her Life. All the World knows her Innocence, and takes her part; and her Friends hope soon to see her honorably married." One of the peculiarities of that kindly and facetious nature was that its sense of humor would at times work its way even between the lines of formal state papers; to say nothing of letters to a familiar friend on the conduct of an enemy. Nor could Hartley doubt that the old well-springs of mirth and loving kindness were as full as ever to overflowing, when, in response to a letter from him to Franklin, containing the Scotch ballad, Auld Robin Gray, he received this lively application of the ballad to existing conditions:

I cannot make an entire application of it to present Circumstances; but, taking it in Parts, and changing Persons, some of it is extremely apropos. First Jenie may be supposed Old England, and Jamie, America. Jenie laments the loss of Jamie, and recollects with Pain his Love for her, his Industry in Business to promote her Wealth and Welfare, and her own Ingratitude.

Her grief for this Separation is expressed very pathetically.

There is no Doubt but that honest Jamie had still so much Love for her as to Pity her in his Heart, tho' he might, at the same time, be not a little angry with her.

Towards the Conclusion, we must change the Persons, and let Jamie be old England, Jennie, America, and old Robin Gray, the Kingdom of France. Then honest Jenie, having made a Treaty of Marriage with Gray, expresses her firm Resolution of Fidelity, in a manner that does Honour to her good Sense, and her Virtue.

How was it possible for Hartley to remain angry with a man like this, even if he was told by him in another letter that, though there could be but few things, in which he would venture to disobey the orders of Congress, he would, nevertheless, instantly renounce the commission that he held from it, and banish himself forever from so infamous a country as America, if Congress were to instruct him to seek a truce of ten years with Great Britain, with the stipulation that America was not to assist France during that time, if the war between Great Britain and France continued? This was trying, though not so trying perhaps as his statement in still another letter to Hartley that he thought of his reasonings to show that, if France should require of America something unreasonable, America would not be obliged by the treaty between them to continue the war as her ally, what he supposed an honest woman would think, if a gallant should entertain her with suppositions of cases in which infidelity to her husband would be justifiable. Nor was the merry adaptation of the ballad of Auld Robin Gray the only thing of the kind that tended to relieve the tension of the reproaches heaped by Franklin upon Great Britain in his letters to Hartley. In the same letter, in which he depicts the King as thirsty for still further draughts of American blood, and repels with apparently hot wrath the suggestion of Hartley that the alliance between France and America was the greatest stumbling-block in the way of peace between Great Britain and France, he tells Hartley that the proposition to separate France and America puts him in mind of the comic farce entitled God-send, or The Wreckers. It was not hard, of course, for him to be put in mind of something conceived by his own mind. The farce opens with this stage introduction: (A Ship riding at anchor in a great Storm. A Lee Shore full of Rocks, and lin'd with people, furnish'd with Axes & Carriages to cut up Wrecks, knock the Sailors on the Head, and carry off the Plunder; according to Custom.) Then, after a lively dialogue between the wreckers, who have grown impatient with the staunch way in which the ship is riding out the storm, they put off in a boat in the hope of luring her to the shore, and come under her stern, and try to persuade her captain, in the course of another lively dialogue, that his cable is a damned rotten French cable, and will part of itself in half an hour; only to be told by the captain that they are rogues, and offer nothing but treachery and mischief, and that his cable is good and strong, and would hold long enough to balk their projects. The dialogue ends with the exclamation by the spokesman of the wreckers, "Come, my Lads, let's be gone. This Fellow is not so great a Fool as we took him to be."

Familiar affection glistens in every line of the letters from Franklin to George Whatley, and one of them is suffused with the genial warmth of his best social hours. After some strictures on an epitaph by Pope, he said in this letter:

I like better the concluding Sentiment in the old Song, call'd The Old Man's Wish, wherein, after wishing for a warm house in a country Town, an easy Horse, some good old authors, ingenious and cheerful Companions, a Pudding on Sundays, with stout Ale, and a bottle of Burgundy, &c., &c., in separate Stanzas, each ending with this burthen,

he adds,

But what signifies our Wishing? Things happen, after all, as they will happen. I have sung that wishing Song a thousand times, when I was young, and now find, at Four-score, that the three Contraries have befallen me, being subject to the Gout and the Stone, and not being yet Master of all my Passions. Like the proud Girl in my Country, who wished and resolv'd not to marry a Parson, nor a Presbyterian, nor an Irishman; and at length found herself married to an Irish Presbyterian Parson.

In the course of one of the summer rambles, which he took every year for twenty years, for health and recreation, Franklin twice visited Scotland, once in 1759, and once in 1771. As the result of civilities received by him in that country at the hands of Sir Alexander Dick, the President of the College of Physicians at Edinburgh, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, a Judge of the Court of Session, and author of The Elements of Criticism and The Sketches of the History of Man, he became a fast friend of these two eminent men. After completing with his son a tour of nearly 1500 miles in 1759, he wrote to Sir Alexander Dick, whose guests they had been for a time, that the many civilities, favors and kindnesses heaped upon them, while they were in Scotland, had made the most lasting impression upon their minds, and endeared that country to them beyond expression. In the same letter, he asked Sir Alexander to assure Lady Dick that he had great faith in her parting prayers that the purse she honored him with would never be quite empty. His letters to Lord Kames testified in even stronger terms to the happy hours that he had spent in Scotland on this visit.

How unfortunate I was [he wrote to him] that I did not press you and Lady Kames more strongly to favor us with your company farther. How much more agreeable would our journey have been, if we could have enjoyed you as far as York. We could have beguiled the way, by discoursing of a thousand things, that now we may never have an opportunity of considering together; for conversation warms the mind, enlivens the imagination, and is continually starting fresh game, that is immediately pursued and taken, and which would never have occurred in the duller intercourse of epistolary correspondence. So that whenever I reflect on the great pleasure and advantage I received from the free communication of sentiment, in the conversations we had at Kames, and in the agreeable little rides to the Tweed side, I shall forever regret our premature parting.

Even more fervid was the conclusion of this letter:

Our conversation till we came to York, was chiefly a recollection of what we had seen and heard, the pleasure we had enjoyed, and the kindness we had received in Scotland, and how far that country had exceeded our expectations. On the whole, I must say, I think the time we spent there, was six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life: and the agreeable and instructive society we found there in such plenty, has left so pleasing an impression on my memory, that did not strong connexions draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of my days in.

In a later letter to Lord Kames, he returns to the same pleasing field of association.

Your invitation to make another jaunt to Scotland, and offer to meet us half way en famille, was extremely obliging. Certainly I never spent my time anywhere more agreeably, nor have I been in any place, where the inhabitants and their conversation left such lastingly pleasing impressions on my mind, accompanied with the strongest inclination once more to visit that hospitable, friendly, and sensible people.

When we recall Franklin's distaste for theology and metaphysics, the humor that ever lurked about his lips, and Sydney Smith's famous observation that it requires a surgical operation to get a joke into a Scotchman's head, we may well experience a sensation of momentary surprise when we read these earnest tributes to the charm of Scotch social conditions in 1759—a sense of surprise increased by the fact that, in the Autobiography, Franklin ends a little dissertation on the odious nature of disputation with these words: "Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinborough." But all such sensations of surprise pass away when we remember that manly simplicity, practical sagacity, a spirit of enterprise and a love of learning, which no discouragements can chill, were also Scotch characteristics that Franklin shared with Scotchmen.

When Franklin returned in 1771 to the "odious-smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts and most enlightened understandings," amid which Sydney Smith, with his exaggerated humor, afterwards pictured himself as dwelling when he was a resident of Edinburgh, William Franklin did not accompany him.

In Scotland [Franklin wrote to his son after this second visit] I spent 5 Days with Lord Kaims at his Seat, Blair Drummond near Stirling, two or three Days at Glasgow, two Days at Carron Iron Works, and the rest of the Month in and about Edinburgh, lodging at David Hume's, who entertain'd me with the greatest Kindness and Hospitality, as did Lord Kaims & his Lady. All our old Acquaintance there, Sir Alex^r Dick and Lady, Mr. M^cGowan, Drs. Robertson, Cullen, Black, Ferguson, Russel, and others, enquired affectionately of your Welfare. I was out three Months, and the Journey was evidently of great service to my Health.

The letters from Franklin to Lord Kames cover a great variety of topics; and to his observations on some of these topics, which were of a political or scientific nature, we shall return in other connections. One letter was written, when Franklin was on the eve of sailing from Portsmouth to America in 1762, and that the moment of embarkation upon the perilous seas of that time was a solemn one is manifest enough in its opening statements:

My dear Lord,

I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to America, but cannot leave this happy island and my friends in it, without extreme regret, though I am going to a country and a people that I love. I am going from the old world to the new; and I fancy I feel like those, who are leaving this world for the next: grief at the parting; fear of the passage; hope of the future.

But never were votive chaplets woven and gratefully suspended by a voyager after a more prosperous passage than this. Franklin left England in company with ten sail of merchant ships, under the convoy of a man-of-war, touched at the heavenly Madeira Islands, and was then caught up in the benign trade winds, and borne safely to the American coast.

The weather was so favourable [he stated in another letter to Lord Kames] that there were few days in which we could not visit from ship to ship, dining with each other, and on board of the man-of-war; which made the time pass agreeably, much more so than when one goes in a single ship; for this was like travelling in a moving village, with all one's neighbours about one.

Among the things upon which Franklin prided himself was the fact that he shaved himself, and in one of his letters to Lord Kames this trivial circumstance is brought to our notice in these wise words:

I have long been of an opinion similar to that you express, and think happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life. Thus I reckon it among my felicities, that I can set my own razor, and shave myself perfectly well; in which I have a daily pleasure, and avoid the uneasiness one is sometimes obliged to suffer from the dirty fingers or bad breath of a slovenly barber.

There was also a link of friendship between Franklin and David Hume. In a letter to Strahan, Franklin, when on his visit to Scotland in 1771, writes to him that Hume, agreeably to the precepts of the Gospel, had received the stranger, and that he was then living with him at his house in the New Town at Edinburgh most happily. In another letter, a week or so later, he informed Strahan, after a short excursion from Edinburgh, that he was well and again under the hospitable roof of the good Samaritan. Hume was too much of a bigoted Tory not to snarl a little at Franklin's "factious" spirit, when the Revolution was coming on, but, when Franklin was leaving England in 1762, he paid him this handsome compliment: