thrown away; your apology avails nothing. If your situation in
life is a sedentary one, your amusements, your recreations, at
least, should be active. You ought to walk or ride; or, if the
weather prevents that, play at billiards. But let us examine
your course of life. While the mornings are long, and you have
leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an
appetite for breakfast, by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself
with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not
worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four
dishes of tea, with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with
slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most
easily digested. Immediately afterward you sit down to write at
your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on
business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of
bodily exercise. But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you
say, to your sedentary condition. But what is your practice
after dinner? Walking in the beautiful garden of those friends,
with whom you have dined, would be the choice of men of sense;
yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged
for two or three hours!... Wrapt in the speculations of this
wretched game, you destroy your constitution. What can be
expected from such a course of living, but a body replete with
stagnant humors, ready to fall a prey to all kinds of dangerous
maladies, if I, the Gout, did not occasionally bring you relief
by agitating those humors, and so purifying or dissipating
them?... But amidst my instructions, I had almost forgot to
administer my wholesome corrections; so take that twinge,--and
that...."
He tried to give himself exercise by walking up and down his room. In
that humorous essay, "The Craven Street Gazette," in which he describes
the doings of Mrs. Stevenson's household, where he lived in London,
there is a passage evidently referring to himself: "Dr. Fatsides made
four hundred and sixty turns in his dining-room as the exact distance of
a visit to the lovely Lady Barwell, whom he did not find at home; so
there was no struggle for and against a kiss, and he sat down to dream
in the easy-chair that he had it without any trouble."
Some years afterwards, when he was in Paris, John Adams upbraided him
for not taking more exercise; but he replied, "Yes, I walk a league
every day in my chamber. I walk quick, and for an hour, so that I go a
league; I make a point of religion of it." This was not a very good
substitute for out-of-door exertion. In fact, Franklin's opinions on the
subject of exercise were not wise. The test of exercise was, he thought,
the amount of warmth it added to the body, and he inferred, therefore,
that walking must be better than riding on horseback, and he even
recommended walking up and down stairs. Walking, being monotonous and
having very little effect on the trunk and upper portions of the body,
is generally admitted to be insufficient for those who require much
exercise; while running up and down stairs would now be considered
positively injurious. But it is, perhaps, hardly in order to criticise
the methods of a man who succeeded in living to be eighty-four and who
served the public until the last year of his life.
Even when he was at his worst in Paris and unable to walk, his mind was
as vigorous as ever, and he looked well. Adams, who was determined to
comment on his neglect of exercise, says of him when in his crippled
condition, in 1785, "but he is strong and eats freely, so that he will
soon have other complaints besides the stone if he continues to live as
entirely without exercise as he does at present." Adams also said that
his only chance for life was a sea-voyage.
Soon afterwards Franklin was carried in a litter by easy journeys from
Paris to the sea-coast, and crossed to Southampton, England, to wait for
the vessel that was to take him to Philadelphia. While at Southampton he
says,--
"I went at noon to bathe in the Martin salt water hot bath, and
floating on my back, fell asleep, and slept near an hour by my
watch without sinking or turning! a thing I never did before and
should hardly have thought possible. Water is the easiest bed
that can be."
It was certainly odd that in his seventy-ninth year and enfeebled by
disease he should renew his youthful skill as a swimmer and justify to
himself his favorite theory that nakedness and water are not the causes
of colds.
His opinion that occasional journeys were essential to his health and
Adams's opinion of the necessity of a sea-voyage were both justified;
for when he reached Philadelphia, September 14, 1785, he could walk the
streets and bear the motion of an easy carriage. He was almost
immediately elected Governor of Pennsylvania, and held the office by
successive annual elections for three years. The public, he said, have
"engrossed the prime of my life. They have eaten my flesh, and seem
resolved now to pick my bones." During the summer of 1787 he served as a
member of the convention which framed the national Constitution,
although unable to stand up long enough to make a speech, all his
speeches being read by his colleague, James Wilson; and yet it was in
that convention, as we shall see, that he performed the most important
act of his political career.
In December, 1787, he had a fall down the stone steps of his garden,
spraining his right wrist and bringing on another attack of the stone.
But he recovered in the spring; and at this period, and indeed to the
end of his life, his wonderful vitality bore up so well against severe
disease that his mental faculties were unimpaired, his spirits buoyant,
and his face fresh and serene.
But towards the end he had to take to his bed, and the last two or three
years of his life were passed in terrible pain, with occasional respites
of a few weeks, during which he would return to some of his old
avocations, writing letters or essays of extraordinary brightness and
gayety. He wrote a long letter on his religious belief to President
Stiles about five weeks before his death, his humorous protest against
slavery two weeks later, and an important letter to Thomas Jefferson on
the Northeast Boundary question nine days before his death.
His grandchildren played around his bedside; friends and distinguished
men called to see him, and went away to write notes of what they
recollected of his remarkable conversation and cheerfulness. One of his
grandchildren, afterwards Mrs. William J. Duane, was eight years old
during the last year of his life, and she has related that every evening
after tea he insisted that she should bring her Webster's spelling-book
and say her lesson to him.
"A few days before he died, he rose from his bed and begged that
it might be made up for him so that he might die in a decent
manner. His daughter told him that she hoped he would recover
and live many years longer. He calmly replied, 'I hope not.'
Upon being advised to change his position in bed, that he might
breathe easy, he said, 'A dying man can do nothing easy.'"
(Bigelow's Franklin from his own Writings, vol. iii. p. 464.)
His physician, Dr. Jones, has described his last illness,--
"About sixteen days before his death he was seized with a
feverish indisposition, without any particular symptoms
attending it, till the third or fourth day, when he complained
of a pain in the left breast, which increased till it became
extremely acute, attended with a cough and laborious breathing.
During this state when the severity of his pains drew forth a
groan of complaint, he would observe--that he was afraid he did
not bear them as he ought--acknowledged his grateful sense of
the many blessings he had received from that Supreme Being, who
had raised him from small and low beginnings to such high rank
and consideration among men--and made no doubt but his present
afflictions were kindly intended to wean him from a world, in
which he was no longer fit to act the part assigned him. In this
frame of body and mind he continued till five days before his
death, when his pain and difficulty of breathing entirely left
him, and his family were flattering themselves with the hopes of
his recovery, when an imposthumation, [abscess] which had formed
itself in his lungs suddenly burst, and discharged a great
quantity of matter, which he continued to throw up while he had
sufficient strength to do it; but, as that failed, the organs of
respiration became gradually oppressed--a calm lethargic state
succeeded--and, on the 17th of April, 1790, about eleven o'clock
at night, he quietly expired, closing a long and useful life of
eighty-four years and three months."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vol. iv. p. 271.
II
EDUCATION
Self-made men of eminence have been quite numerous in America for a
hundred years. Franklin was our first hero of this kind, and I am
inclined to think our greatest. The others have achieved wealth or
political importance; sometimes both. But Franklin achieved not only
wealth and the reputation of a diplomatist and a statesman, but made
himself a most accomplished scholar, a man of letters of world-wide
fame, a philosopher of no small importance, and as an investigator and
discoverer in science he certainly enlarged the domain of human
knowledge.
His father, Josiah Franklin, an industrious candle-maker in Boston,
intended that his youngest son, Benjamin, should enter the ministry of
the Puritan Church. With this end in view he sent him, when eight years
old, to the Boston Grammar-School; but before a year had expired he
found that the cost of even this slight schooling was too much for the
slender means with which he had to provide for a large family of
children. So Franklin went to another school, kept by one George
Brownell, where he stayed for about a year, and then his school-days
were ended forever. He entered his father's shop to cut wicks and melt
tallow. During his two years of schooling he had learned to read and
write, but was not very good at arithmetic.
His associations were all humble, but they cannot be said to have been
those of either extreme poverty or ignorance. At Ecton,
Northamptonshire, England, whence his father came, the family had lived
for at least three hundred years, and how much longer is not known.
Several of those in the lineal line of Benjamin had been blacksmiths.
They were plain people who, having been always respectable and lived
long in one neighborhood, could trace their ancestry back for several
centuries.
They were unambitious, contented with their condition, and none of them
except Benjamin ever rose much above it, or even seriously tried to
rise. This may not have been from any lack of mental ability. Franklin's
father was a strong, active man, as was to be expected of the descendant
of a line of blacksmiths. He was intelligent and inquiring, conversed
well on general subjects, could draw well, played the violin and sang in
his home when the day's work was done, and was respected by his
neighbors as a prudent, sensible citizen whose advice was worth
obtaining. It does not appear that he was studious. But his brother
Benjamin, after whom our Franklin was named, was interested in politics,
collected pamphlets, made short-hand notes of the sermons he heard, and
was continually writing verses.
This Uncle Benjamin, while in England, took a great interest in the
nephew in America who was named after him, and he sent verses to him on
all sorts of subjects. He was unsuccessful in business, lost his wife
and all his children, save one, and finally came out to America to join
the family at Boston.
[Illustration: HOUSE IN WHICH FRANKLIN WAS BORN]
Franklin's mother was Abiah Folger, the second wife of his father. She
was the daughter of Peter Folger, of Nantucket, a surveyor, who is
described by Cotton Mather as a somewhat learned man. He made himself
familiar with some of the Indian languages, and taught the Indians to
read and write. He wrote verses of about the same quality as those of
Uncle Benjamin. One of these, called "A Looking Glass for the Times,"
while it is mere doggerel, shows that its author was interested in
literature. He was a man of liberal views and opposed to the persecution
of the Quakers and Baptists in Massachusetts.
From this grandfather on his mother's side Franklin no doubt inherited
his fondness for books, a fondness that was reinforced by a similar
tendency which, though not very strong in his father, evidently existed
in his father's family, as Uncle Benjamin's verses show. These verses
sent to the boy Franklin and his efforts at times to answer them were an
encouragement towards reading and knowledge. Franklin's extremely
liberal views may possibly have had their origin in his maternal
grandfather, Peter Folger.
But independently of these suppositions as regards heredity, we find
Franklin at twelve years of age reading everything he could lay his
hands on. His first book was Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which would
not interest boys nowadays, and scarcely interests mature people any
more; but there were no novels then and no story-books for boys.
"Pilgrim's Progress" is a prose story with dialogues between the
characters, the first instance of this sort of writing in English, and
sufficient to fascinate a boy when there was nothing better in the
world.
He liked it so well that he bought the rest of Bunyan's works, but soon
sold them to procure Burton's Historical Collections, which were forty
small chapmen's books, full of travels, adventures, history, and
descriptions of animals, well calculated to stimulate the interest of a
bright lad. Among his father's theological books was Plutarch's "Lives,"
which young Franklin read eagerly, also De Foe's "Essay upon Projects,"
and Cotton Mather's "Essays to do Good," which he said had an important
influence on his character.
He so hated cutting wicks and melting tallow that, like many other boys
of his time, he wanted to run away to sea; and his father, to check this
inclination and settle him, compelled him to sign articles of
apprenticeship with his brother James, who was a printer. The child's
taste for books, the father thought, fitted him to be a printer, which
would be a more profitable occupation than the ministry, for which he
was at first intended.
So Franklin was bound by law to serve his brother until he was
twenty-one. He learned the business quickly, stealing time to read
books, which he sometimes persuaded booksellers' apprentices to take
from their masters' shops in the evening. He would sit up nearly all
night to read them, so that they might be returned early in the morning
before they were missed.
[Illustration: PRINTING-PRESS AT WHICH FRANKLIN WORKED WHEN A BOY IN
BOSTON]
He wrote ballads, like his uncle Benjamin and his grandfather Peter
Folger, on popular events,--the drowning of a Captain Worthilake, and
the pirate Blackbeard,--and, after his brother had printed them, sold
them in the streets. His biographer, Weems, quotes one of these verses,
which he declares he had seen and remembered, and I give it with the
qualification that it comes from Weems:
"Come all you jolly sailors,
You all, so stout and brave;
Come hearken and I'll tell you
What happened on the wave.
"Oh! 'tis of that bloody Blackbeard
I'm going now for to tell;
And as how by gallant Maynard
He soon was sent to hell--
With a down, down, down, derry down."
His father ridiculed these verses, in spite of their successful sale,
and dissuaded him from any more attempts; but Franklin remained more or
less of a verse-writer to the end of his life. Verse-writing trained him
to write good prose, and this accomplishment contributed, he thought,
more than anything else to his advancement.
He had an intimate friend, John Collins, likewise inclined to books, and
the two argued and disputed with each other. Franklin was fond of wordy
contention at that time, and it was possibly a good mental training for
him. He had caught it, he says, from reading his father's books of
religious controversy. But in after-years he became convinced that this
disputatious turn was a very bad habit, which made one extremely
disagreeable and alienated friends; he therefore adopted during most of
his life a method of cautious modesty.
He once disputed with Collins on the propriety of educating women and on
their ability for study. He took the side of the women, and, feeling
himself worsted by Collins, who had a more fluent tongue, he reduced his
arguments to writing and sent them to him. A correspondence followed,
and Franklin's father, happening to find the papers, pointed out to his
son the great advantage Collins had in clearness and elegance of
expression. A hint is all that genius requires, and Franklin went
resolutely to work to improve himself.
"About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It
was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it,
read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought
the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it.
With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short
hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few
days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat
the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length,
and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable
words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator
with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected
them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in
recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have
acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since
the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of
different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for
the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of
searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety
in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of
the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I
had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I
also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion,
and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best
order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat
the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of
thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I
discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the
pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small
import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the
language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in
time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was
extremely ambitious."
In some respects this is the most interesting passage in all of
Franklin's writings. It was this severe training of himself which gave
him that wonderful facility in the use of English that made him a great
man. Without it he would have been second-rate or ordinary. His method
of improving his style served also as a discipline in thought and logic
such as is seldom, if ever, given nowadays in any school or college.
Many of those who have reflected deeply on the subject of college
education have declared that its ultimate object should be to give in
the highest degree the power of expression. Some have said that a sense
of honor and the power of expression should be its objects. But there
are few who will dispute the proposition that a collegian who receives
his diploma without receiving with it more of the art of expression than
most men possess has spent his time and his money in vain.
During the last thirty years we have been trying every conceivable
experiment in college education, many of them mere imitations from
abroad and many of them mere suggestions, suppositions, or Utopian
theories. When we began these experiments it was taken for granted that
the old methods, which had produced in this country such scholars,
writers, and thinkers as Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Hawthorne,
Webster, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Everett, Phillips, Channing,
Parker, and Parkman, and in England a host too numerous to name, must
necessarily be wrong. We began to imitate Germany. It was assumed that
if we transplanted the German system we should begin to grind out
Mommsens and Bunsens by the yard, like a cotton-mill; and that if we
added to the German system every plausible suggestion of our own for
making things easy, the result would be a stupendous success.
But how many men have we produced who can be compared with the men of
the old system? Not one. The experiment, except so far as it has given a
large number of people a great deal of pretty information about history
and the fine arts, is a vast failure. After thirty years of effort we
have just discovered that the boys whose nerves and eyesight are being
worn out under our wonderful system cannot write a decent letter in the
English language; and a committee of Harvard University have spent
months of labor and issued a voluminous report of hundreds of pages on
this mortifying discovery, leaving it as perplexing and humiliating as
they found it.
Remedies are proposed. We have made a mistake, say some, and they
suggest that for a change we adopt the English University system. After
partially abolishing Latin and Greek we were to have in place of them a
great deal of history and mathematics, which were more practical, it was
said; but now we are informed that this also was a mistake, and a
movement is on foot to abolish history and algebra. Others suggest the
French system, and one individual writes a long article for the
newspapers proving beyond the possibility of a doubt that French
education is just the thing we need. Always imitating something; always
trying to bring in the foreign and distant. And until we stop this
vulgar provincial snobbery and believe in ourselves and learn to do our
own work with our own people in our own way, we shall continue to
flounder and fail.
Let us distinguish clearly between information and education. If it is
necessary, especially in these times, to give people information on
various subjects,--on science, history, art, bric-a-brac, or mud
pies,--very good; let it be done by all means, for it seems to have a
refining influence on the masses. But do not call it education.
Education is teaching a person to do something with his mind or his
muscles or with both. It involves training, discipline, drill; things
which, as a rule, are very unpleasant to young people, and which, unless
they are geniuses, like Franklin, they will not take up of their own
accord.
You can never teach a boy to write good English by having him read
elegant extracts from distinguished authors, or by making him wade
through endless text-books of anatomy, physics, botany, history, and
philosophy, or by giving him a glib knowledge of French or German, or by
perfunctory translations of Latin and Greek prepared in the
new-fashioned, easy way, without a grammar.
The old English method, by which boys were compelled to write Latin
verses, was simply another form of Franklin's method, but rather more
severe in some respects, because the boy was compelled to discipline
his versifying power and hunt for and use words in two languages at
once. The result was some of the greatest masters of language that the
world has ever known, and the ordinary boy, though perhaps not a wonder
in all the sciences, did not have a learned committee of a university
investigating his disgraceful failure to use his native tongue. His
mind, moreover, had been so disciplined by the severe training in the
use of language--which is only another name for thought--that he was
capable of taking up and mastering with ease any subject in science or
philosophy, and could make as good mud pies and judge as well of
bric-a-brac as those who had never done anything else.
In this country people object to compelling boys to write verse,
because, as they say, it is an endeavor to force them to become poets
whether they have talent for it or not. Any one who reflects, however,
knows that there is no question of poetry in the matter. It is merely a
question of technical versifying and use of language. Franklin never
wrote a line of poetry in his life, but he wrote hundreds of lines of
verse, to the great improvement of the faculty which made him the man he
was.
When he voluntarily subjected himself to a mental discipline which
modern parents would consider cruel he was only fifteen years old;
certainly a rather unusual precocity, from which some people would
prophesy a dwarfed career or an early death. But he did some of his best
work after he was eighty, and died at the age of eighty-four.