•The co THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1921 All rights reserved 26-35 INTRODUCTION BENJAMIN FRANKLIN TEN years before the breaking out of the war of the Revolution, Hume called Franklin "the first philosopher and indeed the first great man of letters" in the new world; on the very eve of that struggle, Samuel Johnson, in his astonishing pamphlet Taxation no Tyranny, described him as "a master of mischief," who knew "how to put in motion the engine of political electricity"; and during the war, while Franklin was pressing the claims of the American patriots upon France, he was often represented in varicas attitudes as commanding and using the lightning as a servant of the cause of liberty. Turgot's famous line "Eripuit cœlo fulmen, septrumque tyrannis," happily expressed the two sides of Franklin's activity which made a deep impression on Europe: his fruitful passion for science, and his ardent advocacy of liberty. During the eventful years from 1765 to his death in 1790, Franklin was, from the European standpoint, distinctly the foremost man in America; and after the lapse of more than a century, probably no American save Lincoln is more widely known beyond the sea In this country other figures have to a certain extent withdrawn public attention from his extraordinary career and sensibly diminished his reputation; a process which has been aided by Franklin's lack of idealism in mind and character; but the estimate of Franklin by Europe has been more adequate than the judgment of his countrymen. The more closely his career is studied the more clear does it become that, with the exception of Lincoln, no man yet born on this continent has more strikingly expressed its feeling or illustrated the range of its opportunities. Like Lincoln, Franklin was of humble parentage. The representative, for many years in a spiritual as well as official sense, of the middle colonies, Franklin was born in Boston. It was in the year 1706, Queen Anne was served by a group of brilliant writers at home, and the colonies were fairly content in the new world. There were but ten of them and their combined population did not reach four hundred thousand; a thin skirmish line of civilization stretched over the breadth of an immense and hostile continent. The earliest of American journalists came at a time when there was but one newspaper in the colonies. His father, an English dissenter, had come to Boston in 1685 and became a tallow-chandler. The boy had various schooling, partly at home, partly at the Boston Latin School, and partly under a teacher of some local reputation; but his formal education was ended prematurely in his eleventh year. His parents talked of the church as a career; the boy talked of the sea: but for two years his work was in his father's shop, "cutting wick for the candles, filling the dipping mould and the mould for cast candles, attending the shop, going of errands." From early childhood he was fond of reading, and the little money that came his way went into books. The boy's first extensive purchase was John Bunyan's works in small volumes; a selection suggestive of literary taste if not of religious instinct. These volumes were sold later in order to secure Burton's Historical Collections. The library of the elder Franklin was small in bulk and made up chiefly of books of polemical theology; and probably there has never been a mind more indifferent to |