Note 155 — PAPERS ON AMERICAN SUBJECTS, DURING THE REVOLUTIONARY TROUBLES. (continued 3)

It occurs to me to mention that Dr. Franklin was supposed to have been the inventor of a little emblematical design at the commencement of our disputes, representing the state of Great Britain and her colonies, should the former persist in restraining the latter's trade, destroying their currency, and taxing their people by laws made by a legislature in which they were not represented.—Great Britain was supposed to have been placed upon the globe: but the colonies, her limbs, being severed from her, she was seen lifting her eyes and mangled stumps to heaven; her shield, which she was unable to wield, lay useless by her side; her lance had pierced New England; the laurel branch was fallen from the hand of Pensylvania; the English oak had lost its head, and stood a bare trunk with a few withered branches; briars and thorns were on the ground beneath it; our ships had brooms at their topmast heads, denoting their being upon sale; and Britannia herself was seen sliding off the world, no longer able to hold its balance; her fragments overspread with the label date obolum Belisario.—This in short, was the fable of the belly and the members reversed. But I tell the story chiefly for the sake of the moral, which has the air of having been suggested by Dr. Franklin[156]; and is as follows.—"The political moral of this picture is now easily discovered. History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of its people. The ordaining of laws in favour of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is intitled to, and ought to enjoy; it being a matter of no moment to the state, whether a subject grows rich and flourishing on the Thames or the Ohio, in Edinburgh or Dublin. These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favoured and the people oppressed: from whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manners of connections, necessarily ensues; by which the whole state is weakened and perhaps ruined for ever."

This language is part of the same system with the following fragment of a sentence, which Dr. Franklin inserted in a political publication of one of his friends. "The attempts to establish arbitrary power over so great a part of the British empire, [are] to the imminent hazard of our most valuable commerce, and of that national strength, security, and felicity, which depend on union and liberty;"—The preservation of which, I am told, he used to say, had been the great object and labour of his life; the whole being such a thing as the world before never saw. B. V.