tility with England, and secured the acknowledgment of our independence. The war of eight sad years (1775-1783) was now over. They had been to him years of intense activity at the court of France, where he was not only American Minister, but Judge in Admiralty and Consul-General, charged with many and very discordant duties. Seventy-seven years old, he now sets the seal of triumph on the act of the American people. What was only a Declaration in 1776, is now a fact fixed in the history of mankind. Washington was the Franklin of camps, but Franklin was the Washington of courts; and the masterly skill of the great diplomatist, the patience which might tire but which never gave out; the extraordinary shrewdness, dexterity, patience, moderation, and silence with which he conducted the most difficult of negotiations, are not less admirable than the coolness, intrepidity, and caution of the great general in his most disastrous campaign. Now these troubles are all over. America is free, Britain is pacific, and Franklin congratulates his friends. "There never was a good war or a bad peace; " and yet he, the brave, wise man that he was, sought to make the treaty better, endeavoring to persuade England to agree that there should be no more temptation to privateering, and that all private property on sea and land should be perfectly safe from the ravages of war. Franklin wished to do in 1783 what the wisest negotiators tried to accomplish in April, 1856, in the treaty of Paris.

VI. Franklin, an old man of eighty-four, is making ready to die. The great philosopher, the great statesman, he has done with philosophy and state-craft, not yet ended his philanthropy. He is satisfied with hav

ing taken the thunderbolt from the sky, bringing it noiseless and harmless to the ground; he has not yet done with taking the scepter from tyrants. True, he has, by the foundation of the American state on the natural and inalienable rights of all, helped to set America free from the despotism of the British king and Parliament. None has done more for that. He has made the treaty with Prussia, which forbids privateering and the warlike plunder of individual property on land or sea. But now he remembers that there are some six hundred thousand African slaves in America, whose bodies are taken from their control, even in time of peace peace to other men, to them a period of perpetual war. So, in 1787, he founds a society for the abolition of slavery. He is its first president, and in that capacity signed a petition to Congress, asking "the restitution of liberty to those unhappy men, who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage; " asks Congress" that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men." This petition was the last public act of Franklin, the last public document he ever signed. He had put his hand to the Declaration of Independence; to the treaties of alliance with France and Prussia; to the treaty of peace with Great Britain; now he signs the first petition for the abolition of slavery.

Between 1783 and 1790 what important events had taken place! For three years he had been President of Pennsylvania, unanimously elected by the Assembly every time save the first, when one vote out of seventyseven was cast against him. He had been a member of the Federal Convention, which made the Constitu

tion, and, spite of what he considered to be its errors, put his name to it. Neither he, nor Washington, nor indeed any of the great men who helped to make that instrument, thought it perfect, or worshipped it as an idol.

In the Constitutional Convention Franklin consented to the continuance of slavery in the Union. I do not find that he publicly opposed the African slave-trade. At that time he was the greatest man on the Continent of America, possessing and enjoying great respect, great popularity and influence throughout the country. Had he said, "There must be no slavery in the United States. It is unprofitable; it conflicts with our interests, social, educational, commercial, moral. It is unphilosophical, at variance with the very objects of the Constitution, and incompatible with the political existence of a republic. Moreover, it is wicked, utterly

at war with the eternal law which God has written in the constitution of man and of matter. It must, by all means, be put down: "- had he said these things, what would have happened? Washington would have been at his side, and Madison and Sherman, with the States of New England and New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. On the other hand, Virginia and North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, might have gone and been annexed to England or Spain. But, instead of four millions of negro slaves, and instead of slave ships fitting out in New York and Baltimore, and the Federal Government at Boston playing genteel comedy at the slave-trader's trial, what a spectacle of domestic government should we have had! What national prosperity! But Franklin spoke no such word. Did he not think? Did he fear? Judge ye who can. To me, his silence there is the great fault of his life.

But now, as his last act, he seeks to correct the great fault and blot and vice of the American government the only one which has given us much trouble. The petition was presented on the 12th of February, 1790. It asked for the abolition of the slave trade, and for the emancipation of slaves. A storm followed; the South was in a rage, which lasted till near the end of March. Mr. Jackson, of Georgia, defended the "peculiar institution." The ancient republics had slaves; the whole current of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, proved that religion was not hostile to slavery. On the 23rd of March, 1790, Franklin wrote for the "National Gazette " the speech in favor of the enslavement of Christians. He put it into the mouth of a member of the Divan of Algiers. It was a parody of the actual words of Mr. Jackson, of Georgia, as delivered in Congress a few days before; the text, however, being taken out of the Koran. It was one of the most witty, brilliant, and ingenious things that came from his mind.

This was the last public writing of Dr. Franklin; and, with the exception of a letter to his sister and one to Mr. Jefferson, it was the last line which ran out from his fertile pen,― written only twenty-four days before his death. What a farewell it was! This old man, "the most rational, perhaps, of all philosophers," the most famous man in America, now in private life, waiting for the last angel to unbind his spirit and set him free from a perishing body, makes his last appearance before the American people as president of an abolition society, protesting against American slavery in the last public line he writes! One of his wittiest and most ingenious works is a plea for the bondman, adroit, masterly, short, and not to be answered. It was fit to be

the last scene of such a life. Drop down the curtain before the sick old man, and let his healthy soul ascend unseen and growing.

All

Look, now, at the character of Dr. Franklin. the materials for judging him are not yet before the public, for historians and biographers, like other attorneys, sometimes withhold the evidence, and keep important facts out of sight, so as to secure a verdict which does not cover the whole case. There are writings of Franklin which neither the public nor myself have ever seen. Enough, however, is known of this great man to enable us to form a just opinion. Additional things would alter the quantity, not the kind. The human faculties, not pertaining to the body, may be divided into these four: the intellectual, the moral, the affectional, and the religious. Look at Franklin in respect to each of the four.

I. He had an intellect of a very high order,- inventive, capacious, many-sided, retentive. His life covers nearly the whole of the eighteenth century. Ten years he was the contemporary of Leibnitz, twenty-one of Sir Isaac Newton. He was sixty-three years old when Alexander Humboldt and Cuvier were born. He embraced Voltaire. His orbit was intersected by that of Berkeley, Montesquieu, Hume, Kant, Priestley, Adam Smith. But in the eighty-four years to which his life extended, I find no mind, which, on the whole, seems so great. I mean so generally able, various, original, and strong. Others were quite superior to him in specialties of intellect,- metaphysical, mathematical, and poetical. Many surpassed him in wide learning, of literature, or science, and in careful and exact culture; but none equaled him in general large