I

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

At the beginning of the last century a hardy man, Josiah Franklin by name, born in England, the son of a blacksmith, himself a tallow-chandler, was living in a small house, in an obscure way, in Boston, then a colonial town of eight or ten thousand inhabitants, in the colony of Massachusetts Bay.

On the 17th of January, at the Blue Ball, in Hanover street, 1706,1 his tenth son was born into this world, and, it being Sunday, he was taken to the meeting-house and publicly baptized the same day, according to the common custom of those times; for then it was taught by the ministers that the devil watched about every cradle, ready to seize the souls of all babies dying before they got ecclesiastically sprinkled with water, and that the ceremony of baptism would save them from his clutches until they could discern good from evil. The minister had a wig on his head, and Geneva bands about his neck. There was no Bible upon the desk of the pulpit, and he thought it a sin to repeat the Lord's Prayer. When he said, “This child's name is Benjamin," how all those grim puritanic Bostonians looked on the tenth boy, the fifteenth child of the tallow-chandler! And prudent aunts doubtless wondered what he would do with such a family in those hard times. That little baby, humbly cradled, has turned out to be the greatest man that America ever bore in her bosom or set eyes upon. Beyond all question, as I think, Benjamin Franklin had

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the largest mind that has shone this side of the sea,— widest in its comprehension, most deep-looking, thoughtful, far-seeing, of course the most original ard creative child of the New World.

For the last four generations no man has shed such copious good influence on America; none added so much new truth to the popular knowledge; none has so skilfully organized its ideas into institutions; none has so powerfully and wisely directed the nation's conduct, and advanced its welfare in so many respects. No man

now has so strong a hold on the habits and manners of the people. Franklin comes home to the individual business of practical men in their daily life. His homely sayings are the proverbs of the people now. Much of our social machinery, academic, literary, philosophic, is of his device.

Let us now look this extraordinary Benjamin Franklin in the face, and see what he was.2

He was born in Boston, on the 17th of January, 1706. Thence he ran away in the autumn of 1723, and in October found himself a new home in Philadelphia, where he made his first meal in the street one Sunday morning from a draught of Delaware river water and a pennyworth of bread, giving twopence worth to a poor woman.3 Such was his first breakfast and his earliest charity in his adopted state. Here he worked as a journeyman printer. Deceived by Sir William Keith, the Governor of Pennsylvania, he went to England, landing there the 24th of December, 1724. He followed his trade in London for about two years. He returned to Philadelphia on the 11th of October, 1726, and resumed his business as printer, entering also into politics; or, rather, I should say, he became

a statesman, for he was never a politician, but a statesman from the beginning, who never solicited an office, nor used any indirection to retain one when it was in his possession. As agent for Pennsylvania, he again went to England in October, 1757, and returned to Philadelphia in November, 1762. But he went back to England in December, 1764, as agent for several colonies, and returned thence, 5th of May, 1775. He was sent as minister to France by the revolted colonies in 1776, whence, on September 14, 1785, he returned to Philadelphia, which he never left again. He was President, or what we should now call Governor, of Pennsylvania, from October, 1785, to October, 1788, and was also a member of the Federal Convention, which made the Constitution of the United States. He died on the 17th April, 1790, aged eighty-four years and three months, and his body lies buried at Philadelphia, in the corner of the churchyard, close to the Quaker meeting-house.

Franklin spent a little more than twenty-six years in Europe, more than twenty-three of them in various diplomatic services. He lived in Boston nearly eighteen years, was a citizen of Philadelphia more than sixty-six years, held his first public office in 1736, and left office altogether in 1788, serving his state and nation in many public trusts something about fifty-two years. He was married in 1730, at the age of twentyfour. His wife died in 1774. He was forty-four years a husband, though for twenty-three years he was in Europe for the most part, while she remained wholly in Pennsylvania. He left two children,— an illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, who afterwards became governor of the colony of New Jersey, and was a Tory, and a legitimate daughter, Sarah.1