BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

(1706-1790)

BY JOHN BIGELOW

HE youngest of the four children of a Boston tallow-chandler named Franklin was born a subject of Queen Anne of England, on the 6th of January, 1706; and on the same day received the baptismal name of Benjamin at the Old South Church in that city. He continued for more than seventy of the eighty-four years of his life a subject of four successive British monarchs. During that period, neither Anne nor either of the three Georges who succeeded her had a subject of whom they had more reason to be proud, nor one whom at his death their people generally supposed they had more reason to detest. No Englishman of his generation can now be said to have established a more enduring fame, in any way, than Franklin established in many ways. As a printer, as a journalist, as a diplomatist, as a statesman, as a philosopher, he was easily first among his peers.

On the other hand, it is no disparagement of the services of any of his contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic, to say that no one of his generation contributed more effectually to the dissolution of the bonds which united the principal British-American colonies to the mother country, and towards conferring upon them independence and a popular government.

As a practical printer Franklin was reported to have had no superiors; as a journalist he exerted an influence not only unrivaled in his day, but more potent, on this continent at least, than either of his sovereigns or their Parliaments. The organization of a police, and later of the militia, for Philadelphia; of companies for extinguishing fires; making the sweeping and paving of the streets a municipal function; the formation of the first public library for Philadelphia, and the establishment of an academy which has matured into the now famous University of Pennsylvania, were among the conspicuous reforms which he planted and watered in the columns of the Philadelphia Gazette. This journal he founded; upon the earnings of it he mainly subsisted during a long life, and any sheet of it to-day would bring a larger price in the open market probably than a single sheet of any other periodical ever published.