to show what he conceived to be the meaning of certain passages. He
altered the wording of the Book of Job so as to make it a satire on
English politics. He did it cleverly, and it was amusing; but it was a
very cheap sort of humor.
His most famous joke of this kind was his "Parable against Persecution."
He had learned it by heart, and when he was in England, and the
discussion turned on religious liberty, he would open the Bible and read
his parable as the last chapter in Genesis. The imitation of the
language of Scripture was perfect, and the parable itself was so
interesting and striking that every one was delighted with it. His
guests would wonder and say that they had never known there was such a
chapter in Genesis.
The parable was published and universally admired, but when it appeared
in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ some one very quickly discovered that it
had been taken from Jeremy Taylor's Polemical Discourses, and there was
a great discussion over it. Franklin afterwards said, in a letter to Mr.
Vaughan, that he had taken it from Taylor; and John Adams said that he
never pretended that it was original.[17] It is interesting to see how
cleverly he improved on Taylor's language:
TAYLOR.
"When Abraham sat at his tent door according to his custom,
waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old man stooping
and leaning on his staff; weary with age and travel, coming
towards him, who was an hundred years old. He received him
kindly, washed his feet, provided supper, and caused him to sit
down; but observing that the old man ate and prayed not, nor
begged for a blessing on his meat, he asked him why he did not
worship the God of heaven? The old man told him, that he
worshipped the fire only and acknowledged no other god. At which
answer Abraham grew so zealously angry, that he thrust the old
man out of his tent, and exposed him to all the evils of the
night and an unguarded condition. When the old man was gone, God
called to Abraham, and asked him where the stranger was? He
replied, I thrust him away, because he did not worship thee. God
answered him, I have suffered him these hundred years, although
he dishonoured me; and couldst not thou endure him one night,
and when he gave thee no trouble? Upon this, saith the story,
Abraham fetched him back again, and gave him hospitable
entertainment and wise instruction. Go thou and do likewise and
thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham."
FRANKLIN.
"¶ 1 And it came to pass after these things, that Abraham sat in
the door of his tent, about the going down of the sun. ¶ 2 And
behold a man, bent with age, coming from the way of the
wilderness leaning on his staff. ¶ 3 And Abraham rose and met
him, and said unto him: Turn in, I pray thee, and wash thy feet,
and tarry all night; and thou shalt arise early in the morning
and go on thy way. ¶ 4 But the man said, Nay, for I will abide
under this tree. ¶ 5 And Abraham pressed him greatly: so he
turned and they went into the tent, and Abraham baked unleavened
bread, and they did eat. ¶ 6 And when Abraham saw that the man
blessed not God he said unto him, wherefore dost thou not
worship the Most High God, Creator of heaven and earth? ¶ 7 And
the man answered, and said, I do not worship thy God, neither do
I call upon his name; for I have made to myself a god, which
abideth in my house and provideth me with all things. ¶ 8 And
Abraham's zeal was kindled against the man; and he arose and
fell upon him, and drove him forth with blows into the
wilderness. ¶ 9 And at midnight God called unto Abraham saying,
Abraham, where is the stranger? ¶ 10 And Abraham answered and
said, Lord, he would not worship thee, neither would he call
upon thy name; therefore have I driven him out from before my
face into the wilderness. ¶ 11 And God said, have I borne with
him these hundred and ninety and eight years, and nourished him,
and Cloathed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me; and
couldest not thou, who art thyself a sinner, bear with him one
night? ¶ 12 And Abraham said, Let not the anger of the Lord wax
hot against his servant; lo, I have sinned; forgive me I pray
thee. ¶ 13 And Abraham arose and went forth into the wilderness
and sought diligently for the man and found him, and returned
with him to the tent; and when he had entreated him kindly, he
sent him away on the morrow with gifts. ¶ 14 And God spake unto
Abraham, saying, For this thy sin shall thy seed be afflicted
four hundred years in a strange land. ¶ 15 But for thy
repentance will I deliver them; and they shall come forth with
power and gladness of heart, and with much substance."
The parable was, indeed, older than Taylor for Taylor said he had found
it in "The Jews' Book," and at length it was discovered in a Latin
dedication of a rabbinical work, called "The Rod of Judah," published at
Amsterdam in 1651, which ascribed the parable to the Persian poet Saadi.
None of them, however, had thought of introducing it into the Old
Testament, nor had they told it so well as Franklin, who gave it a new
currency, and it was reprinted as a half-penny tract and also in Lord
Kames's "Sketches of the History of Man."
While on this question of plagiarism it may be said that Franklin's
admirable style was in part modelled on that of the famous Massachusetts
divine, Cotton Mather, whom he had known and whose books he had read in
his boyhood. The similarity is, indeed, quite striking, and for vigorous
English he could hardly have had a better model. But he improved so much
on Mather that his style is entirely his own. It is the most effective
literary style ever used by an American. Nearly one hundred and fifty
years have passed since his Autobiography was written, yet it is still
read with delight by all classes of people, has been called for at some
public libraries four hundred times a year, and shows as much promise of
immortality as the poems of Longfellow or the romances of Hawthorne.
Besides his almanac and newspaper, Franklin extended his business by
publishing books, consisting mostly of religious tracts and
controversies. He also imported books from England, and sold them along
with the lamp-black, soap, and groceries contained in that strange
little store and printing-office on Market Street. He sent one of his
journeymen to Charleston to establish a branch printing-office, of which
Franklin was to pay one-third of the expense and receive one-third of
the profits. After continuing in this manner some five years, the
Legislature of the province in 1736 elected him clerk of that body,
which enabled him to retain the printing of the notes, laws, paper
money, and other public jobs, which he tells us were very profitable.
The next year Colonel Spotswood, Postmaster-General of the colonies,
made him deputy postmaster of Philadelphia. This appointment reinforced
his other occupations. He could collect news for his _Gazette_ more
easily, and also had greater facilities for distributing it to his
subscribers. In those days the postmaster of a town usually owned a
newspaper, because he could have the post-riders distribute copies of it
without cost, and he did not allow them to carry any newspaper but his
own. Franklin had been injured by the refusal of his predecessor to
distribute his _Gazette_; but when he became postmaster, finding his
subscriptions and advertisements much increased and his competitor's
newspaper declining, he magnanimously refused to retaliate, and allowed
his riders to carry the rival journal.
How much money Franklin actually made in his business is difficult to
determine, although many guesses have been made. He was, it would seem,
more largely and widely engaged than any other printer in the colonies,
for nearly all the important printing of the middle colonies and a
large part of that of the southern colonies came to his office. He made
enough to retire at forty-two years of age, having been working for
himself only twenty years.
On retiring he turned over his printing and publishing interest to his
foreman, David Hall, who was to carry on the business in his own way,
but under the firm name of Franklin & Hall, and to pay Franklin a
thousand pounds a year for eighteen years, at the end of which time Hall
was to become sole proprietor. This thousand pounds which Franklin was
to receive may be looked upon as an indication that before his
retirement the business was yielding him annually something more than
that sum, possibly almost two thousand pounds, as some have supposed.
He never again engaged actively in any gainful trade, and his retirement
seems to have been caused by the passion for scientific research which a
few years before had seized him, and by that trait of his character
which sometimes appears in the form of a sort of indolence and at other
times as a wilful determination to follow the bent of his inclinations
and pleasures. Although extremely economical and thrifty in practice as
well as in precept, he had very little love of money, and took no
pleasure in business for mere business' sake. The charges of sordidness
and mean penny-wisdom are not borne out by any of the real facts of his
life. It is not improbable that just before his retirement he had
advanced far enough in his scientific experiments to see dimly in the
future the chance of a great discovery and distinction. He certainly
went to work with a will as soon as he got rid of the cares of the
printing-office, and in a few years was rewarded.
He had invested some of his savings in houses and land in Philadelphia,
and the thousand pounds (five thousand dollars) which he was to receive
for eighteen years was a very good income in those times, and more than
equivalent to ten thousand dollars at the present day. He moved from the
bustle of Market Street and his home in the old printing, stationery,
and grocery house, and is supposed to have taken a house at the
southeast corner of Second and Race Streets. This was at the northern
edge of the town, close to the river, where in the summer evenings he
renewed his youthful fondness for swimming.
It must be confessed that very few self-made men, conducting a
profitable business with the prospect of steady accumulation of money,
have willingly resigned it in the prime of life, under the influence of
such sentiments as appear to have moved him. But that intense and
absolute devotion to business which is the prevailing mood of our times
had not then begun in America, and it was rather the fashion to retire.
The years which followed his retirement, and before he became absorbed
in political affairs, seem to have had for him a great deal of ideal
happiness. He lived like a man of taste and a scholar accustomed to
cultured surroundings more than like a self-made man who had battled for
forty years with the material world. In writing to his mother, he
said,--
"I read a great deal, ride a little, do a little business for
myself, now and then for others, retire when I can, and go into
company when I please; so the years roll round, and the last
will come, when I would rather have it said, He lived usefully
than He died rich."
After his withdrawal from business he remained postmaster of
Philadelphia, and in 1753, after he had held that office for sixteen
years, he was appointed Postmaster-General of all the colonies, with
William Hunter, of Virginia, as his colleague, and he retained this
position until dismissed from it by the British government in 1774, on
the eve of the Revolution. There was some salary attached to these
offices, that of Postmaster-General yielding three hundred pounds. The
postmastership of Philadelphia entailed no difficult duties at that
time, and his wife assisted him; but when he was made Postmaster-General
he more than earned his salary during the first few years by making
extensive journeys through the colonies to reform the system. The salary
attached to the office was not to be allowed unless the office produced
it; and during the first four years the unpaid salary of Franklin and
his colleague amounted to nine hundred and fifty pounds. He procured
faster post-riders, increased the number of mails between important
places, made a charge for carrying newspapers, had all newspapers
carried by the riders, and reduced some of the rates of postage.
But he was not the founder of the modern post-office system, nor was he
the first Postmaster-General of America, as some of his biographers
insist. He merely improved the system which he found and increased its
revenues as others have done before and since.
The leisure he sought by retirement was enjoyed but a few years. He
became more and more involved in public affairs, and soon spent most of
his time in England as agent of Pennsylvania or other colonies, and
during the Revolution he was in France. There was a salary attached to
these offices. As agent of Pennsylvania he received five hundred pounds
a year, and when he represented other colonies he received from
Massachusetts four hundred, from Georgia two hundred, and from New
Jersey one hundred. These sums, together with the thousand pounds a year
from Hall, would seem to be enough for a man of his habits; but
apparently he used it all, and was often slow in paying his debts.
In a letter written to Mrs. Stevenson in London, while he was envoy to
France, he expresses surprise that some of the London tradespeople still
considered him their debtor for things obtained from them during his
residence there some years before, and he asks Mrs. Stevenson, with whom
he had lodged, how his account stands with her. The thousand pounds from
Hall ceased in 1766, and after that his income must have been seriously
diminished, for the return from his invested savings is supposed to have
been only about seven hundred pounds. He appears to have overdrawn his
account with Hall, for there is a manuscript letter in the possession of
Mr. Howard Edwards, of Philadelphia, written by Hall March 1, 1770,
urging Franklin to pay nine hundred and ninety-three pounds which had
been due for three years.
He procured for his natural son, William, the royal governorship of New
Jersey, and he was diligent all his life in getting government places
for relatives. This practice does not appear to have been much
disapproved of in his time; he was not subjected to abuse on account of
it; and, indeed, nepotism is far preferable to some of the more modern
methods.
When Governor of Pennsylvania, after the Revolution, he declined, we are
told, to receive any salary for his three years' service, accepting only
his expenses for postage, which was high in those times, and amounted in
this case to seventy-seven pounds for the three years. This is one of
the innumerable statements about him in which the truth is distorted for
the sake of eulogy. He did not decline to receive his salary, but he
spent it in charity, and we find bequests of it in his will.
As minister to France he had at first five hundred pounds a year and his
expenses, and this was paid. He was also promised a secretary at a
salary of one thousand pounds a year; but, as the secretary was never
sent, he did the work himself with the assistance of his grandson,
William Temple Franklin, who was allowed only three hundred pounds a
year.
He considered himself very much underpaid for his services in resisting
the Stamp Act, for his mission to Canada in 1776 at the risk of his
life, and for the long and laborious years which he spent in France.
Certainly five hundred pounds a year and expenses was very small pay
for his diplomatic work in Paris, but during the last six years of his
mission there he received two thousand five hundred pounds a year, which
would seem to be sufficient compensation for acting as ambassador, as
well as merchant to buy and ship supplies to the United States, and as
financial agent to examine and accept innumerable bills of exchange
drawn by the Continental Congress (Bigelow's Works of Franklin, vol. ix.
p. 127). In 1788, two years before his death, he made a statement of
these claims for extra service and sent it to Congress, accompanied by a
letter to his friend, Charles Thomson, the secretary.
He thought that Congress should recognize these services by a grant of
land, an office, or in some other way, as was the custom in Europe when
an ambassador returned from a long foreign service; and he reminded
Thomson that both Arthur Lee and John Jay had been rewarded handsomely
for similar services. But the old Congress under the Articles of
Confederation was then just expiring, and took no notice of his
petition; and when the new Congress came in under the Constitution, it
does not appear that his claims were presented. It is a mistake to say,
however, as some have done, that the United States never paid him for
his services and still owes him money. These claims were for extra
services which the government had never obligated itself to pay.
He died quite well off for those times, leaving an estate worth, it is
supposed, considerably over one hundred thousand dollars. The rapid rise
in the value of houses and land in Philadelphia after the Revolution
accounts for a part of this sum. He owned five or six large houses in
Philadelphia, the printing-house which he built for his grandson, and
several small houses. He had also a number of vacant lots in the town, a
house and lot in Boston, a tract of land in Nova Scotia, another large
tract in Georgia, and still another in Ohio. His personal property,
consisting mostly of bonds and money, was worth from sixty to seventy
thousand dollars.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Pp. 209-217.
[16] Bigelow's Franklin from His Own Writings, vol. ii. p. 511.
[17] Bigelow's Works of Franklin, vol. v. p. 376; also vol. x. p. 78;
Adams's Works, vol. i. p. 659.
V
SCIENCE
The exact period at which Franklin began to turn his attention to
original researches in science is difficult to determine. There are no
traces of such efforts when he was a youth in Boston. He was not then
interested in science, even in a boyish way. His instincts at that time
led him almost exclusively in the direction of general reading and the
training of himself in the literary art by verse-writing and by
analyzing the essays of the _Spectator_.
The atmosphere of Boston was completely theological. There was no room,
no opportunity, for science, and no inducement or even suggestion that
would lead to it, still less to original research in it. We find
Franklin in a state of rebellion against the prevailing tone of thought,
writing against it in his brother's newspaper at the risk of
imprisonment, and in a manner more bitter and violent than anything he
afterwards composed. If he had remained in Boston it is not likely that
he would ever have taken seriously to science, for all his energies
would have been absorbed in fighting those intolerant conditions which
smothered all scientific inquiries.
In Pennsylvania he found the conditions reversed. The Quakers and the
German sects which made up the majority of the people of that province
in colonial times had more advanced ideas of liberty and free thought
than any of the other religious bodies in America, and in consequence
science flourished in Pennsylvania long before it gained entrance into
the other colonies. The first American medical college, the first
hospital, and the first separate dispensary were established there.
Several citizens of Philadelphia who were contemporaries of Franklin
achieved sufficient reputation in science to make their names well known
in Europe.
David Rittenhouse invented the metallic thermometer, developed the
construction of the compensation pendulum, and made valuable experiments
on the compressibility of water. He became a famous astronomer,
constructed an orrery to show the movements of the stars which was an
improvement on all its predecessors, and conducted the observations of
the transit of Venus in 1769. Pennsylvania was the only one of the
colonies that took these observations, which in that year were taken by
all the European governments in various parts of the world. The
Legislature and public institutions, together with a large number of
individuals, assisted in the undertaking, showing what very favorable
conditions for science prevailed in the province.[18]
These were the conditions which seem to have aroused Franklin. Without
them his mind tended more naturally to literature, politics, and schemes
of philanthropy and reform; but when his strong intellect was once
directed towards science, he easily excelled in it. Some of the early
questions discussed by the Junto, such as "Is sound an entity or body?"
and "How may the phenomena of vapors be explained?" show an inclination
towards scientific research; and it is very likely that he studied such
subjects more or less during the ten years which followed his beginning
business for himself.
In his _Gazette_ for December 15, 1737, there is an essay on the causes
of earthquakes, summarizing the various explanations which had been
given by learned men, and this essay is supposed to have been written by
him. Six years afterwards he made what has been usually considered his
first discovery,--namely, that the northeast storms of the Atlantic
coast move against the wind; or, in other words, that instead of these
storms coming from the northeast, whence the wind blows, they come from
the southwest. He was led to this discovery by attempting to observe an
eclipse of the moon which occurred on the evening of October 21, 1743;
but he was prevented by a heavy northeaster which did great damage on
the coast. He was surprised to find that it had not prevented the people
of Boston from seeing the eclipse. The storm, though coming from the
northeast, swept over Philadelphia before it reached Boston. For several
years he carefully collected information about these storms, and found
in every instance that they began to leeward and were often more violent
there than farther to windward.
He seems to have been the first person to observe these facts, but he
took no pains to make his observations public, except in conversation or
in letters to prominent men like Jared Eliot, of Connecticut, and these
letters were not published until long afterwards. This was his method in
all his investigations. He never wrote a book on science; he merely
reported his investigations and experiments by letter, usually to
learned people in England or France. There were no scientific
periodicals in those days. The men who were interested in such things
kept in touch with one another by means of correspondence and an
occasional pamphlet or book.
During the same period in which he was making observations on northeast
storms he invented the "Pennsylvania Fireplace," as he called it, a new
sort of stove which was a great improvement over the old methods of
heating rooms. He published a complete description of this stove in
1745, and it is one of the most interesting essays he ever wrote. It is
astonishing with what pleasure one can still read the first half of this
essay written one hundred and fifty years ago on the driest of dry
subjects. The language is so clear and beautiful, and the homely
personality of the writer so manifest, that one is inclined to lay down
the principle that the test of literary genius is the ability to be
fascinating about stoves.
He explained the laws of hot air and its movements; the Holland stove,
which afforded but little ventilation; the German stove, which was
simply an iron box fed from outside, with no ventilating properties; and
the great open fireplace fed with huge logs, which required such a
draft to prevent the smoke from coming back into the room that the outer
door had to be left open,--and if the door was shut the draft would draw
the outer air whistling and howling through the crevices of the windows.
His "Pennsylvania Fireplace" was what we would now call an
open-fireplace stove. It was intended to be less wasteful of fuel than
the ordinary fireplace and to give ventilation, while combining the
heating power of the German and Holland stoves. It continued in common
use for nearly a century, and modified forms of it are still called the
Franklin stoves.