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.

He

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. 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

ness of power, and great variety and strength of mind. In an age of encyclopedias, his was the most encyclopedic head in all Christendom. In the century of revolution, his was the most revolutionary and constructive intellect.10

Franklin had a great understanding, a moderate imagination, and a great reason. He could never have become an eminent poet or orator. With such, the means is half the end. He does not seem to have attended to any of the fine arts, with the single exception of music. He was not fond of works of imagination, and in his boyhood he sold Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to buy Burton's Historical Collections. Perhaps he underrated the beautiful and the sublime. I do not remember, in the ten volumes of his writings, a line containing a single reference to either. This defect in his mental structure continually appears in his works and in his life. Hence, there is a certain homeliness and lack of elegance in his writings, and sometimes a little coarseness and rudeness. Hence, also, comes the popular judgment that he was not a high-minded man. Kant, Kepler, Descartes, Leibnitz, Schelling, were men of great imagination, which gives a particular poetic charm to their works that you do not find in the Saxon philosophers. Bacon, Locke, Newton, Adam Smith, were men of vast ability, but not imaginative or poetic. Franklin thinks, investigates, theorizes, invents, but never does he dream. No haze hangs on the sharp outline of his exact idea to lend it an added charm.

Besides this immense understanding, Franklin had an immense reason, which gave him great insight and power in all practical, philosophic, and speculative matters. He was a man of the most uncommon common sense. He saw clearly into the remote causes of

things, and had great power of generalization to discuss the universal laws, the one eternal principle, or the manifold and floating facts. He did not come to his philosophic conclusions and discoveries by that poetic imagination which creates hypothesis after hypothesis, until some one fits the case; nor did he seem to reach them by that logical process which is called induction. But he rather perfected his wonderful inventions by his own simple greatness of understanding and of reason, a spontaneous instinct of causality, which led him to the point at once. He announced his discoveries with no parade. He does the thing, and says nothing about it, as if it were the commonest thing in the world.

His simplicity appears not only in his manners and in his life, but also in his intellectual method. Accordingly, he was a great inventor of new ideas in science, the philosophy of matter, and in politics, the philosophy of states; in both running before the experience of the world. If only his philosophic writings had come down to us, we should say, "Here was a mind of the first order, a brother of Leibnitz, Newton, Cuvier, Humboldt." If nought but his political writings were preserved, his thoughts on agriculture, manufactures, commerce, finance, the condition and prospect of the colonies, the effect of certain taxes on them, the historical development of America and her ultimate relation to England, then we should say, "Here was one of the greatest political thinkers of the age or of the world." For while he anticipated the scientific discoveries of future philosophers, he does the same in the departments of the politician and the statesman. He understood easily the complicated affairs of a nation, and saw clearly the great general laws which

determine the welfare of the individual or of the state. Yet he made occasional mistakes; for the swift forethought of genius, on the whole, is not so wise as the slow experience of the human race. Nobody is as great as everybody.

Constructive as well as inventive, Franklin was a great organizer. He knew how to make his thought a thing, to put his scientific idea into matter— making a machine, his social idea into men creating an institution. He could produce the maximum of result with the minimum outlay of means. His contrivances, mechanical and social, are many and surprising. He improved the printing press, invented stereotyping, and manifold letter-writers. He cured smoky chimneys of their bad habits. He amended the shape and the rig of ships. He showed the sailors how they might take advantage of the Gulf-stream to shorten their eastward transit of the Atlantic, and how to steer so as to avoid it on the westward passage. He told them how a few men might haul a heavy boat, and how they might keep fresh provisions at sea. He suggested improvements in the soup-dishes of sailors, and in the watertroughs of horses. He introduced new kinds of seeds, grass, turnips, broom-corn, curious beans from England, vines from France, and many other vegetables and plants. He drained lands skilfully, and gathered great crops from them. He reformed fireplaces, and invented the Franklin stove. First of all men he warmed public buildings. He had a fan on his chair, moved by a treadle, so as to drive away the flies. He made him spectacles, with two sets of glasses, for far and near sight. He invented a musical instrument, and improved the electrical machine. He discovered that lightning and electricity are the same, proving it