conceived it would be good policy, and attended with advantage to the king's cause, to set Governor Franklin forward in contrast to his father's conduct," and this, thought the astute governor, "would have its weight in Europe." It had its weight with Lord George Germain; for Governor Franklin, when his cause was lost, went to England with the other tories, and the Government gave him eighteen hundred pounds in partial compensation for his losses, and settled upon him for life a pension of eight hundred pounds a year.*

How keenly Dr. Franklin felt this defection of his son, we could⚫ infer, if he had not recorded it. At this time, he was occasionally styled the Father of his Country, and few would have been then inclined to dispute his right to the title. Even Arthur Lee spoke of him as "our Pater Patriæ," in a letter to Lord Shelburne, written in 1776. That he should not have been able to bring his only son over to the side of his country, could not but have been deeply mortifying to his pride. Nine years after, he wrote, that "nothing had ever affected him with such keen sensations as to find himself deserted in his old age by his only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against him in a cause wherein his good fame, fortune, and life were all at stake." "You conceived, you say," continued Franklin, "that your duty to your king and regard for your country required this. I ought not to blame you for dif fering in sentiment with me in public affairs. We are men, all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power; they are formed and governed much by circumstances, that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situation was such that few would have censured your remaining neuter, though there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them."

The truth of this last observation is self-evident, but it may well be doubted whether it was applicable to the case in question. Governor Franklin was forty-five years of age, and had a clear right to decide upon his own course.

In 1776, Henry Laurens, of South Carolina, not certain whether his son, John, was prepared to accept the extreme measure of declaring independence, wrote to him these words:

• Whitehead's History of East Jersey, pp. 185 to 207.

"Remember you are of full age, entitled to judge for yourself; pin not your faith upon my sleeve, but act the part which an honest heart after mature deliberation shall dictate, and your services on the side which you may take, because you think it the right side, will be the more valuable. I cannot rejoice in the downfall of an old friend, of a parent from whose nurturing breasts I have drawn my support and strength; every evil which befalls old England grieves me. Would to God she had listened in time to the cries of her children, and had checked the insidious slanders of those who call themselves the king's servants and the king's friends, especially such of them as had been transported to America in the character of civil officers. If my own interests, if my own rights alone had been concerned, I would most freely have given the whole to the demands and disposal of her ministers in preference to a separation; but the rights of posterity were involved in the question. I happened to stand as one of their representatives, and dared not betray my trust."*

It was easy for Mr. Laurens to write this passage, because he had no serious apprehension that his son would forsake the side of his country, and because his own heart had not been weaned from England, as Franklin's had, by personal observation of the arrogance and ignorance of her ruling class. James Otis, on the other hand, could not, to his dying hour, forgive one of his daughters for marrying a British officer, and marked his resentment in his will by leaving her five shillings. It is idle to demand of human nature that which it is not capable of yielding. When men have staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors upon an issue; the risk being real, not a flight of Fourth-of-July rhetoric; when, in the event of defeat, they will, in very truth, lose their lives, their fortunes, and their good name; they cannot regard with philosophic toleration one of their own blood who throws the weight of his influence and his talents upon the adverse side; least of all, when that adverse side is supposed to be infinitely the stronger, and his own motives do not appear to be disinterested.

The son of William Franklin adhered to his grandfather, and saw his father no more until the great controversy had been decided by arms. Thus was the strange coincidence made complete;

"Materials for History," part i., p. 83.

Dr. Franklin lost his son; that son lost his; both sons were born just before their fathers' marriage; both were reared and educated in disregard of that circumstance; both abandoned their fathers at the same time and for the same cause. We shall see, also, that both were reconciled to their fathers at about the same time, and in about the same imperfect degree.

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to scourge us.”

CHAPTER III.

IN CONGRESS AGAIN.

DR. FRANKLIN returned from Perth Amboy to Philadelphia, and resumed his duties in Congress, a quorum of which assembled on the thirteenth of September. The city was all astir with warlike preparations. Twice a day the most zealous of the military companies drilled in the square. The saltpeter works were beginning to produce a little of that anxiously-sought commodity. Of six powder mills designed, two were nearly ready to go into operation; which, in the following spring, delivered twenty-five hundred pounds of powder a week. A manufactory of muskets was about to open, and turn out twenty-five muskets a day, with all the appendages complete. The fortifications upon the Delaware were advancing toward completion. Congress, the Committee of Safety, and numerous subordinate bodies, were in session every day. Arrests of suspected persons were frequent, and Sub-Committees of Safety boarded arriving vessels, to pick out treason from the letter-bags. Occasionally, there was tarring and feathering of tories; but oftener, the obnoxious person chose the alternative of mounting a cart, "publicly acknowledging his errors, and asking pardon of the crowd." The ladies, of course, were scraping lint and preparing bandages, in compliance with the published request of the Committee of Safety: Mrs. Bache among the busiest. Exciting news from Boston every week: the enemy re-enforced; General Washington strangely inactive; New England still unanimous for resistanco.

Again Dr. Franklin was chosen to serve on most of the working committees of Congress. He was a member who wrote little, spoke less, and worked always. We find him very busy this autumn at such employments as arranging a system of posts and expresses for the swift conveyance of dispatches; forming a line of packet vessels to sail between Europe and America; promoting the circulation of the Continental money, and drafting instructions for the generals in the field. He was still an active member of the Committee of Safety; and, as if these duties were not enough for an old man, he was elected in October a member of the Assembly of Pennsylvania. He was then a member of three bodies, each of which was in session daily, and upon each devolved duties which were novel, difficult, and absorbing.

Ill news from General Washington reached Congress a few days after the session opened. His extemporized army was falling to pieces; terms of enlistment were expiring, and most of the men were mad to get home; winter approaching, and no proper shelter for the troops; no winter clothing, no fuel, no money, small supply of provisions, scarcely any gunpowder; no adequate system of discipline, no provision made for raising new regiments, no well-defined limits to the authority of the governors of colonies; the entire system in need of revision and exact regulation. Glad, indeed, would the timid Dickinsonians have been to make no further hostile movement until news arrived of the effect upon a gracious king of that second petition which Richard Penn had carried to England. But General Washington's dispatch, written from the midst of an agonizing chaos, could not be disregarded. On the last day of September Congress elected a committee of three: Benjamin Franklin, of Pennsylvania, Thomas Lynch, of South Carolina, and Benjamin Harrison, of Virginia, to go to Cambridge, and there confer with General Washington, and with delegates from the New England colonies, and arrange a plan for raising, supplying, and governing the Continental Army.

Before setting out upon this important mission Dr. Franklin resigned his seat in the Assembly, and asked to be excused from further attendance upon the Committee of Safety. "It would be a happiness to me," he wrote, "if I could serve the public duly in all those stations; but, aged as I now am, I feel myself unequal to so much business, and on that account think it my duty to decline a

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part of it." The day before his departure for the camp he wrote to Dr. Priestley that humorous summing up of the grand result of the first campaign, the substance of which was a standing paragraph in the liberal newspapers during the early years of the war: Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head; and at Bunker's Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America. From these data Dr. Price's mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory."

The commissioners left Philadelphia on the fourth of October, and reached Cambridge after a ride of thirteen days. Franklin trod once more his native soil, and saw, but only saw, the city in which he was born. Joyful, indeed, was the meeting with his sister, his nephews, nieces and old friends: of whom there were many near Cambridge. The army and its chiefs, the people and their leaders, welcomed, with peculiar respect, their venerable and illustrious countryman. A single sentence from a letter of General Greene flashes light upon an evening scene at head-quarters. Greene, too, had the blood of blacksmiths in his veins. He had been one of those book-devouring boys of New England, who eat their dinner in ten minutes in order to get the other fifty for reading; who secrete candle-ends for a midnight debauch upon Euclid; who hoard their pence to buy an old Latin dictionary, and their minutes, to study it; who play deep tricks to balk the paternal dunce who does not mean to be put out of countenance by a son knowing more than himself; who work their way to education against every conceivable adverse influence; and astonish their relations, who foretold ruin from such wasting of time, by becoming the great men of their families before they are thirty-five. General Greene had now the felicity of seeing the founder of that noble New England Order--the first and greatest of the candle-end stealers and furtive book-absorbents. The young enthusiast gazed with rapture upon his aged chief. "During the whole evening," he wrote, "I viewed that very great man with silent admiration."

Bancroft's "History of the United States," viii., 112.