'like one of the Furies with nothing but Whips and Snakes about 'her. And so, they Worship God just as the Indians do the Devil, 'not as they love him, but because they are afraid of him.'' Thus our merry youth and his jovial friends strive to amuse and startle the Boston of 1723. He spoke the truth, but not all the truth. The brethren at whom he aimed his ridicule were seriously striving, with the best light they had, to become good and better men. To that end, they were making weekly and daily efforts. For that purpose, they went to church on Sundays, and, on week days went apart from the converse of men, to meditate on their ways and on their duty. They were on the watch against rising passions and turbulent desires; they were warring with the world, the flesh, and the devil. This was the advantage they had over their witty adversaries; and this was the reason why they at length prevailed. The brethren may have been going toward Jerusalem in a painful, roundabout, and irrational manner, but they were going. The young Couranters had not made up their minds whether or not there was a Jerusalem. To use Franklin's own simile, they were knocking out the bung of the beer-barrel, before providing the cask of wine. This was the course pursued by all the wits of that scoffing century, from Voltaire, downward; and that was the reason why, with all their genius and knowledge, they produced a merely transitory effect. The poor peasants who went to mass in Voltaire's village were doing their best to be good men. Voltaire was chiefly striving to show Europe what a witty man Voltaire was; and hence, the poor peasants were wiser in their generation than the children of light. As a set-off to the heresies of the Courant, it should be mentioned that it was through that journal that the colonists first became acquainted with the sacred poems of Dr. Isaac Watts, who was then a poor and unknown English curate, with an income of a hundred pounds a year, of which he gave away one-third. The Courant published his psalms and hymns, from time to time, with warm commendation. To a generation accustomed to sing the doggerel of Sternhold and Hopkins, they must have seemed sublime indeed. Watts was always a favorite with Franklin, who, on his death-bed, heard him read with pleasure and emotion. The Courant appears to have prospered under its young publisher. A month after James Franklin fell under the ban of the council, we read in the Courant: "This Paper having met with so general an Acceptance in Town and Country, as to require a far greater number of them to be printed, than there is of the other publick Papers; and it being besides more generally read by a Vast Number of Borrowers, who do not take it in, the Publisher thinks proper to give this publick Notice for the Incouragement of those who would have Advertisements inserted in the publick Prints, which they may have printed in this Paper at a moderate price." Three months later, the price of the paper was raised from three pence to four pence, and from ten shillings a year to twelve shillings. CHAPTER VIII. A RUNAWAY APPRENTICE. As the gay Couranters commented so freely upon the ways of the brethren, their own conduct ought to have been most exemplary. It was not. Cotton Mather, who had all the stock classical allusions at his tongue's end, might have turned upon the conductors of the Courant, if he had had access to its sanctum, and said, "Young physicians, heal yourselves." James and Benjamin, brothers though they were, had not virtue enough between them to live together in tolerable peace. The elder was jealous of the younger's reputation. He was harsh and unjust to him; and Benjamin owns, in his autobiography, that "perhaps, he was too saucy and provoking." James did not know that he had the most valuable apprentice in the world, and the apprentice knew it too well. Benjamin, however, had thrown himself most heartily into his brother's contest with the Council, had defended him ably in the Courant, and exerted all his talents in covering the persecutors with ridicule. Benjamin, I think, had a hand in getting up that article of six columns in the Courant of May 8, 1723, in which the illegality and unconstitutionality of the prosecution were demonstrated. We have a right to conclude, for many reasons, that the elder brother was the one most in fault. The canceling of his indentures had set the apprentice free; since his brother would not dare to appeal to the secret document which still bound him. But, neither this circumstance, nor the lad's increased age and usefulness, had the effect of rendering his brother less exacting or better tempered. A quarrel, more violent than any previous one, occurred between the brothers, a few months after the second attempt to silence the Courant. From words James Franklin proceeded to blows, though his brother was then seventeen years of age. The youth, burning with indignation, asserted his right to be free, and declared his intention to leave his brother's service. It is an evidence how changed our feelings have become with regard to the sanctity of engagements, that this resolve of the apprentice to leave his brother, which few persons of the present day would be inclined to censure, Franklin regarded as "one of the first errata" of his life. His father, also, urged him to remain and fulfill his contract with his brother. Benjamin adhered to his resolve. His brother went round to all the printers in Boston, giving them his own version of the difference between himself and his apprentice. When Benjamin applied to them for employment, they all made common cause with his master, and refused him. The youth would not yield. His fancy wandered to other scenes. Boston was not all the world. Besides, he already shared the odium of the Courant, and his Socratic disputations upon religion had rendered him, in the eyes of many worthy people, an object of horror. He was pointed at as an infidel and an atheist. From what he had seen of the treatment of his brother, he inferred that he should be in great danger of getting into scrapes himself, if he established himself in Boston as a printer. Revolving such thoughts in his anxious mind, he was soon prepared for that bold step, through which Boston lost a troublesome printer, and the world gained a Benjamin Franklin. Running away must have been a familiar idea to this angry and resolute youth, since he had a hundred times read in the News Letter, and very often set in type in the Courant, advertisements offering four pounds reward for catching runaway apprentices. The extraordinary number of such advertisements in the colonial newspapers, is some confirmation of Adam Smith's argument against binding boys for a term of years to learn a trade. Runaway negroes and runaway apprentices made the staple of advertising in the colonies for many years. Benjamin had resolved to run away. There were then but three towns in the colonies which could boast a printing office: Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. To New York, only because it was nearer than Philadelphia, he determined to go. His old friend, John Collins, with whom he had discussed the education of women, and whom he had converted to deism, undertook to manage his flight, and engaged a passage for him in a New York sloop. To account for his coming on board secretly and keeping himself concealed, Collins told the Captain, that his friend had had an intrigue with a girl of bad character, whose parents were determined to make him marry her. To raise the passage money the runaway was obliged to sell some of his precious books. Franklin has not given us the date of his departure; but I notice a little advertisement in the New England Courant for September 30, 1723, which enables us to infer about what time the event occurred: "James Franklin, printer in Queens Street, wants a likely lad for an apprentice." Even the voyage from Boston to New York was not safe at that time from the highwaymen of the sea. July 19, 1723, twenty-six pirates were hanged at Newport, Rhode Island. It was in 1723, that two pirate vessels came in near Sandy Hook, and engaged the British man-of-war, Greyhound. After a hard fight, the Greyhound managed to capture one of the pirate vessels, with her crew of forty-two men, all of whom were executed, soon after, on Long Island. Benjamin Franklin may have seen their bodies hanging in chains as the sloop glided past. The piratical craft that escaped sailed away northward and made twenty French prizes, and was the terror of the sea until 1725, when the government was aroused at length, and nearly suppressed piracy on the American coast.* Our young friend, however, had a safe, swift, and pleasant passage, of which one incident only is known to us. When the sloop was becalmed one day off Block Island, the sailors amused themselves by fishing for cod, as becalmed sailors and yachtmen do to this day off that coast. Benjamin, who still adhered to his vegetarian theory, regarded the taking of life for the sake of procuring food as murder. Fishing, in particular, was murder unprovoked; for no one could contend that these cod, which the sailors kept hauling up * Watson's "Annals of Philadelphia," il, 226. over the sloop's bulwarks and slapping down upon the deck, had wrought any harm to their captors. This argument, so long as the mere catching continued, seemed unanswerable; but when, by and by, the cod began to send forth a most alluring odor from the frying-pan, the tempted vegetarian, who had formerly been extremely fond of fish, found it necessary to go over his reasoning again, to see if there was not a flaw in it. He was so unhappy as not to be able to find one, and for some minutes there was a struggle between principle and inclination. It occurred to him, at length, that when the fish were opened he had seen smaller fish in their stomachs. "If you eat one another," said he to himself, "I don't see why we may not eat you." So he dined upon cod very heartily, and continued afterwards to eat what other people ate. After telling this story he makes an observation which is often attributed to Talleyrand and others, but which was a familiar joke with Franklin when Talleyrand was a boy. "So convenient a thing it is," says Franklin, "to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do." In the beautiful month of October, 1723, after a passage of three days from Boston, Benjamin Franklin, then nearly eighteen years old, stood in the streets of New York. He had not an acquaintance in the town; he had no letter of recommendation; he had very little money. New York was then a town of seven or eight thousand inhabitants, where most objects that met the eye and most sounds that caught the ear were Dutch. The houses had their gable-ends toward the street; the sidewalks were cobble-stoned; the streets were those narrow, crooked lanes which we still find at the extremity of Down-Town. It was a clean, compact, tidy, country place. A Philadelphian wrote, some years after: "the rough stones which formed the pavement of New York were so thoroughly swept that the stones stand up sharp and prominent, to the great inconvenience of those who are not accustomed to so rough a path. But habit reconciles every thing. It is diverting enough to see a Philadelphian at New York; he walks the streets with as much painful caution as if his toes were covered with corns, or his feet lamed with the gout: while a New Yorker, as little approving the plain masonry of Philadelphia, shuffles along the pavement like a parrot on a mahogany table." |