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BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

SELF-REVEALED

A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY BASED MAINLY ON HIS OWN WRITINGS

BY

WILLIAM CABELL BRUCE

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME II

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
_The Knickerbocker Press_
1917


COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY
W. CABELL BRUCE

_The Knickerbocker Press, New York_




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                      PAGE

I.--FRANKLIN'S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS         1

II.--FRANKLIN AS A MAN OF BUSINESS             26

III.--FRANKLIN AS A STATESMAN                  95

IV.--FRANKLIN AS A MAN OF SCIENCE             350

V.--FRANKLIN AS A WRITER                      423

INDEX                                         531




Benjamin Franklin

Self-Revealed




CHAPTER I

Franklin's Personal Characteristics


The precise explanation of the great concourse of friends that Franklin
drew about him, at the different stages of his long journey through the
world, is to be found partly in his robust, honorable character and mental
gifts. The sterner virtues, which are necessarily the foundations of such
esteem as he enjoyed, he possessed in an eminent degree. An uncommonly
virile and resolute spirit animated the body, which was equal in youth to
the task of swimming partly on and partly under water from near Chelsea to
Blackfriars, and of exhibiting on the way all of Thevenot's motions and
positions as well as some of its own, and which shortly afterwards even
sported about the becalmed Berkshire in the Atlantic almost with the
strength and ease of one of the numerous dolphins mentioned by Franklin in
his Journal of his voyage on that ship from England to America. He hated
cruelty, injustice, rapacity and arbitrary conduct. It was no idle or
insincere compliment that Burke paid him when he spoke of his "liberal and
manly way of thinking." How stoutly his spirit met its responsibilities in
Pennsylvania, prior to the Declaration of Independence, we have seen. The
risks incident to the adoption of that declaration it incurred with the
same fearless courage. Of all the men who united in its adoption, he,
perhaps, was in the best position to know, because of his long residence in
England, and familiarity with the temper of the English monarch and his
ministry, what the personal consequences to the signers were likely to be,
if the American cause should prove unsuccessful. He had a head to lose even
harder to replace than that of his friend Lavoisier, he had a fortune to be
involved in flame or confiscation, the joy of living meant to him what it
has meant to few men, and more than one statement in his writings affords
us convincing proof that, quite apart from the collective act of all the
signers in pledging their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to the "glorious
cause," he did not lose sight of the fact that the Gray Tower still stood
upon its ancient hill with its eye upon the Traitor's Gate, and its bosom
stored with instruments of savage vengeance. Indeed, it was the thought
that his son had been engaged against him in a game, in which not only his
fortune but his neck had been at stake, that made it so difficult for him,
forgiving as he was, to keep down the bile of violated nature. But, when
the time came for affixing his signature to the Declaration, he not only
did it with the equanimity of the rest, but, if tradition may be believed,
with a light-hearted intrepidity like that of Sir Walter Raleigh jesting on
the scaffold with the edge of the axe. "We must all hang together,"
declared John Hancock, when pleading for unanimity. "Yes," Franklin is said
to have replied, "we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we
shall all hang separately."

The inability of old age, partly from sheer loss of animal vigor, and
partly from the desire for peace, produced by the general decline in
vividness of everything in a world, that it is about to quit, to assert
itself with the force of will and temper, that belongs to us in our prime,
is one of the most noticeable phenomena of the later stages of human
existence. But John Adams to the contrary, the evidence all tends to show
that the resolution of character exhibited by Franklin in the heyday of his
physical strength he exhibited to the last. He was always slow to anger.
Independent of the remarkable self-control, which enabled him to preserve a
countenance, while Wedderburn was traducing him, as fixed as if it had been
car