Benjamin Franklin

When the report of Franklin's death reached Paris, he received, among other marks of respect, this significant honor by one of the revolutionary clubs: in the café where the members met, his bust was crowned with oak-leaves, and on the pedestal below was engraved the single word VIR. This simple encomium, calling to mind Napoleon's This is a man after meeting Goethe, sums up better than a volume of eulogy what Franklin was in his own day and what his life may still signify to us. He acted at one time as a commander of troops, yet cannot be called a soldier; he was a great statesman, yet not among the greatest; he made famous discoveries in science, yet was scarcely a professional scientist; he was lauded as a philosopher, yet barely outstepped the region of common sense; he wrote ever as a moralist, yet in some respects lived a free life; he is one of the few great American authors, yet never published a book; he was a shrewd economist, yet left at his death only a moderate fortune; he accomplished much as a philanthropist, yet never sacrificed his own weal. Above all and in all things he was a man, able to cope with every chance of life and wring profit out of it; he had perhaps the alertest mind of any man of that alert century. In his shrewdness, versatility, self-reliance, wit, as also in his lack of the deeper reverence and imagination, he, I think, more than any other man who has yet lived, represents the full American character. And so in studying his life, though at times we may wish that to his practical intelligence were added the fervid insight of Jonathan Edwards, who was his only intellectual equal in the colonies, or the serene faith of an Emerson, who was born "within a kite string's distance" of his birthplace in Boston, yet in the end we are borne away by the wonderful openness and rectitude of his mind, and are willing to grant him his high representative position.

Franklin's ancestors were of the sturdy sort that have made the strength of the Anglo-Saxon race. For three hundred years at least his family had lived on a freehold of thirty acres in the village of Ecton, Northamptonshire; and for many generations father and son had been smiths. Parton, in his capital Life of Franklin, has observed that Washington's ancestors lived in the same county, although much higher in the social scale; and it may well have been that more than one of Franklin's ancestors "tightened a rivet in the armor or replaced a shoe upon the horse of a Washington, or doffed his cap to a Washington riding past the ancestral forge." During these long years the family seems to have gathered strength from the soil, as families are wont to do. Seeing how the Franklins, when the fit of emigrating seized upon them, blossomed out momentarily, and then dwindled away, we are reminded of Poor Richard's wise observation,--

"I never saw an oft-removëd tree Nor yet an oft-removëd family That throve so well as those that settled be."

About the year 1685, Josiah Franklin, the youngest of four sons, came with his wife and three children to Boston. He had been a dyer in the old home, but now in New England, finding little to be done in this line, he set up as a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler, and prospered in a small way. By his first wife he had four more children, and then by a second wife ten others,--a goodly sheaf of seventeen, among whom Benjamin, the destined philosopher, was the fifteenth.

The second wife, Benjamin's mother, was the daughter of Peter Folger, one of the settlers of Nantucket,--"a godly and learned Englishman," who, like many of the pious New England folk, used to relieve his heart in doggerel rhymes. In his "Looking-Glass for the Times" he appeals boldly for liberty of conscience in behalf of the persecuted Anabaptists and Quakers, and we are not surprised that Franklin should have commended the manly freedom of these crude verses. Young Benjamin was open to every influence about him, and something of the large and immovable tolerance of his nature may have been caught from old Peter Folger, his grandfather. We can imagine with what relish that sturdy Protestant, if he had lived so long, would have received Benjamin's famous "Parable against Persecution," which the author used to pretend to read as the last chapter of Genesis, to the great mystification of his audience,--"And it came to pass after these things that Abraham sat in the door of his tent," etc. Try the trick to-day, and you will find most of your hearers equally mystified, so perfectly has Franklin imitated the tone of Old Testament language.