Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the colonies, being in the country when I received this petition, I transmitted it to his lordship, enclosed in a letter, of which the following is a copy; as also of his answer.1

No one who knows Lord Dartmouth, can doubt the sincerity of the good wishes expressed in his letter to me; and if his majesty's other servants had fortunately been possessed of the same benevolent dispositions, with as much of that attention to the public interest, and dexterity in managing it, as statesmen of this country generally show in obtaining and securing their places, here was a fine opportunity put into their hands of "re-establishing the union and harmony that formerly subsisted between Great Britain and her colonies," so necessary to the welfare of both, and upon the easy condition of only "restoring things to the state they were in at the conclusion of the late war." This was a solemn declaration sent over from the province most aggrieved, in which they acquitted Britain of their grievances, and charged them all upon a few individuals of their own country. Upon the heads of these very mischievous men they deprecated no vengeance, though that of the whole nation was justly merited; they considered it as a hard thing for an administration to punish a governor who had acted from orders, though the orders had been procured by his misrepresentations and calumnies; they therefore only petitioned, "that his majesty would be pleased to remove T. Hutchinson, esq. and A. Oliver, esq. from their posts in that government, and place good and faithful men in their stead." These men might have been placed or pensioned elsewhere, as others have been; or like the scape-goats of old, they might have carried away into the wilderness all the offences which had arisen between the two countries, with the burthen of which, they, having been the authors of these mischiefs, were most justly chargeable.

But this opportunity ministers had not the wisdom to embrace; they chose rather to reject it, and to abuse and punish me for giving it. A court clamour was raised against me as an incendiary; and the very action upon which I valued myself, as it appeared to me a means of lessening our differences, I was unlucky enough to find charged upon me, as a wicked attempt to increase them. Strange perversion! 2

See Appendix, No. 7.

"We must not, in the course of public life, expect immediate approbation, and immediate grateful acknowledgement of our services. But let us persevere through abuse, and even injury. The internal satisfaction of a good conscience is always present, and time will do us justice in the minds of the people, even those at present the most prejudiced against us."-FRANKLIN'S PRIVAte Correspondence.

I was it seems equally unlucky in another action, which I also intended for a good one, and which brought on the above-mentioned clamour. The news being arrived here of the publication of those letters in America, great enquiry was made who had transmitted them. Mr. Temple, a gentleman of the customs, was accused of it in the papers. He vindicated himself. A public altercation ensued upon it, between him and a Mr. Whately, brother and executor to the person to whom it was supposed the letters had been originally written, and who was suspected by some of communicating them; on the supposition, that by his brother's death they might have fallen into his hands. As the gentleman to whom I sent them, had, in his letter to me above recited, given an important reason for his desiring it should be concealed, that he was the person who received them, and had for the same reason chosen not to let it be known I sent them, I suffered that altercation to go on without interfering, supposing it would end, as other newspaper controversies usually do, when the parties and the public should be tired of them. But this dispute unexpectedly and suddenly produced a duel. The gentlemen were parted; Mr. Whately was wounded, but not dangerously. This, however, alarmed me, and made me wish I had prevented it; but imagining all now over between them, I still kept silence, till I heard that the duel was understood to be unfinished, (as having been interrupted by persons accidentally near), and that it would probably be repeated as soon as Mr. Whately, who was mending daily, had recovered his strength. I then thought it high time to interpose; and as the quarrel was for the public opinion, I took what I thought the shortest way to settle that opinion, with regard to the parties, by publishing what follows.1

This declaration of mine was at first generally approved, except that some blamed me for not having made it sooner, so as to prevent the duel; but I had not the gift of prophecy I could not foresee that the gentlemen would fight; I did not even foresee that either of them could possibly take it ill of me. I imagined I was doing them a good office, in clearing both of them from suspicion, and removing the cause of their difference. I should have thought it natural for them both to have thanked me, but I was mistaken as to one of them; his wound perhaps at first prevented him, and afterwards he was tutored probably to another kind of behaviour by his court connections. My only acquaintance with this gentleman, Mr. William Whately, was from an application he made to me to do him the favour of enquiring

* Sec Appendix, No. 7.

after some land in Pennsylvania, supposed to have been purchased anciently from the first proprietor, by a Major Thomson his grandfather, of which they had some imperfect memorandums in the family, but knew not whether it might not have been sold or conveyed away by him in his life-time, as there was no mention of it in his will. I took the trouble of writing accordingly, to a friend of mine, an eminent lawyer there, well acquainted with such business, desiring him to make the enquiry. He took some pains in it at my request, and succeeded; and in a letter informed me, that he had found the land; that the proprietary claimed it, but he thought the title was clear to the heir of Thomson; that he could easily recover it for him, and would undertake it if Mr. Whately should think fit to employ him; or if he should rather chuse to sell it, my friend empowered me to make him an offer of 5,000l. sterling for it. With this letter I waited upon him about a inonth before the duel, at his house in Lombard Street, the first time I had ever been in it. He was pleased with the intelligence, and called upon me once or twice afterwards to concert the means of making out his title. I mention some of these circumstances to show, that it was not through any previous acquaintance with him that I came to the knowledge of the famous letters; for they had been in America near a year before I so much as knew where he lived :—and the others I mention to show his gratitude. I could have excused his not thanking me for sparing him a second hazard of his life; for though he might feel himself served, he might also apprehend that to seem pleased would look as if he was afraid of fighting again; or perhaps he did not value his life at any thing; but the addition to his fortune one would think of some value to a banker; and yet the return this worthy gentleman made me for both favours, was without the smallest previous notice, warning, complaint, or request to me, directly or indirectly, to clap upon my back a Chancery suit. His bill set forth, "That he was administrator of the goods and chattels of his late brother Thomas Whately; that some letters had been written to his said brother by the governors Hutchinson and Oliver; that those letters had been in the custody of his said brother at the time of his death, or had been by him delivered to some other person for perusal, and to be by such person safely kept and returned to said Thomas Whately; that the same had by some means come into my hands; that to prevent a discovery, I, or some person by my order, had erased the address of the letters to the said Thomas Whately; that, carrying on the trade of a printer, I had by my agents or confederates, printed and published the same letters in America, and disposed of great numbers; that I threatened to print and sell the same in England; and that he had applied to me to deliver up to him the said

letters, and all copies thereof, and desist from printing and publishing the same, and account with him for the profits thereof; and he was in hopes I would have complied with such request, but so it was that I had refused, &c. contrary to equity and good conscience, and to the manifest injury and oppression of him the complainant; and praying my lord chancellor that I might be obliged to discover how I came by the letters, what number of copies I had printed and sold, and to account with him for the profits, &c. &c." The gentleman himself must have known, that every circumstance of this was totally false; that of his brother's having delivered the letters to some other person for perusal, excepted. Those as little acquainted with law as I was, (who indeed never before had a law-suit of any kind) may wonder at this as much as I did; but I have now learnt that in Chancery, though the defendant must swear to the truth of every point in his answer, the plaintiff is not put to his oath, or obliged to have the least regard to truth in his bill, but is allowed to lie as much as he pleases. I do not understand this, unless it be for the encouragement of

business.

My answer upon oath was, "That the letters in question were given to me, and came into my hands, as agent for the house of representatives of the province of Massachusetts Bay; that when given to me, I did not know to whom they had been addressed, no address appearing upon them; nor did I know before, that any such letters existed; that I had not been for many years concerned in printing; that I did not cause the letters to be printed, nor direct the doing it; that I did not erase any address that might have been on the letters, nor did I know that any other person had made such erasure; that I did, as agent to the province, transmit (as I apprehended it my duty to do) the said letters to one of the committee, with whom I had been directed to correspond, inasmuch as in my judgment they related to matters of great public importance to that province, and were put into my hands for that purpose; that I had never been applied to by the complainant, as asserted in his bill, and had made no profits of the letters, nor intended to make any, &c."

It was about this time become evident, that all thoughts of reconciliation with the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, by attention to their petitions and a redress of their grievances, was laid aside; that severity was resolved; and that the decrying and vilifying the people of that country, and me their agent among the rest, was quite a court measure. It was the ton with all the ministerial folks to abuse them and me, in every company, and in every newspaper; and it was intimated to me as a thing settled, long before it happened, that the petition for removal of the

governors was to be rejected, the assembly censured, and myself who had presented it, was to be punished by the loss of my place in the Post-Office. For all this I was therefore prepared; but the attack from Mr. Whately was, I own, a surprise to me; under the above-mentioned circumstances of obligation, and without the slightest provocation, I could not have imagined any man base enough to commence, of his own motion, such a vexatious suit against me. But a little accidental information served to throw some light upon the business: an acquaintance calling on me, after having just been at the Treasury, showed me what he styled a pretty thing, for a friend of his; it was an order for 150l. payable to Dr. Samuel Johnson, said to be one half of his yearly pension, and drawn by the secretary of the Treasury on this same Mr. Whately. I then considered him as a banker to the Treasury for the pension-money, and thence as having an interested connection with administration, that might induce him to act by direction of others in harassing me with this suit; which gave me if possible a still meaner opinion of him, than if he had done it of his own accord.

What further steps he or his confederates, the ministers, will take in this cause, I know not: I do not indeed believe the banker himself, finding there are no profits to be shared, would willingly lay out a sixpence more upon the suit; but then my finances are not sufficient to cope at law with the Treasury here; especially when administration has taken care to prevent my constituents of New England from paying me any salary, or reimbursing me any expences, by a special instruction to the governor, not to sign any warrant for that purpose on the Treasury there.

The injustice of thus depriving the people there of the use of their own money, to pay an agent acting in their defence, while the governor, with a large salary out of the money extorted from them by act of parliament, was enabled to pay plentifully Mauduit and Wedderburn to abuse and defame them and their agent, is so evident as to need no comment.—But this they call government!!

Here closes the tract, as written by Dr. Franklin.

It plainly appears by the foregoing lucid statement, and the faithful account of the unwarrantable proceedings before the lords of the privy council, (Appendix

This was the late William Strahan, esq. M. P. and king's printer:-father to the present member of parliament for Aldborough.