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Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright and pleasant, and very mighty and strong.

Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringest forth divers fruits, and flowers of many colors, and grass.

Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for love's sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who peacefully shall endure, for thou, O Most High, wilt give them a crown.

Praised be my Lord for our sister the death of the body, from which no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin. Blessed are those who die in thy most holy will, for the second death shall have no power to do them harm. Praise ye and bless the Lord, and give thanks to him and serve him with great humility.

[The last stanza, in praise of death, was added to the poem on the day St. Francis left the world, October 4th, 1225.]

Translation of Maurice Francis Egan.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

(1706-1790)

BY JOHN BIGELOW

Dur

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. ing 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.

Franklin's Almanack, his crowning work in the sphere of journalism, published under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders,- better known since as Poor Richard,- is still one of the marvels of modern literature. Under one or another of many titles the contents of this publication, exclusive of its calendars, have been translated into every tongue having any pretensions to a literature; and have had more readers, probably, than any other publication in the English or indeed in any other language, with the single exception of the Bible. It was the first issue from an American press that found a popular welcome in foreign lands, and it still enjoys the special distinction of being the only almanac ever published that owed its extraordinary popularity entirely to its literary merit.

What adds to the surprise with which we contemplate the fame and fortunes of this unpretentious publication, is the fact that its reputation was established by its first number, and when its author was only twenty-six years of age. For a period of twenty-six years, and until Franklin ceased to edit it, this annual was looked forward to by a larger portion of the colonial population and with more impatience than now awaits a President's annual message to Congress.

Franklin graduated from journalism into diplomacy as naturally as winter glides into spring. This was simply because he was by common acclaim the fittest man for any kind of public service the colony possessed, and especially for any duty requiring talents for persuasion, in which he proved himself to be unquestionably past master among the diplomatists of his time.

The question of taxing the Penn proprietary estates in Pennsylvania, for the defense of the province from the French and Indians, had assumed such an acute stage in 1757 that the Assembly decided to petition the King upon the subject; and selected Franklin, then in the forty-first year of his age, to visit London and present their petition. The next forty-one years of his life were practically all spent in the diplomatic service. He was five years absent on this his first mission. Every interest in London was against him. He finally surmounted all obstacles by a compromise, which pledged the Assembly to pass an act exempting from taxation the unsurveyed lands of the Penn estate, the surveyed waste lands, however, to be assessed at the usual rate. For his success the Penns and their partisans never forgave him, and his fellow colonists never forgot him.

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, but not to remain. The question of taxing the colonies without representation was soon thrust upon them in the shape of a stamp duty, and Franklin was sent out again to urge its repeal. He reached London in November 1764, where he remained the next eleven years and until it became apparent that the surrender of the right to arbitrarily tax the

colonies would never be made by England during the life of the reigning sovereign, George III. Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, he sailed for Philadelphia on the 21st of March, 1775; and on the morning of his arrival was elected by the Assembly of Pennsylvania a delegate to the Continental Congress which consolidated the armies of the colonies, placed General George Washington in command of them, issued the first Continental currency, and assumed the responsibility of resisting the imperial government; his last hope of maintaining the integrity of the empire having been dissipated by recent collisions between the people and the royalist troops at Concord and Lexington. Franklin served on ten committees in this Congress. He was one of the five who drew up the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, and in September following was chosen unanimously as one of the three commissioners to be sent out to solicit for the infant republic the aid of France and the sympathies of continental Europe. In this mission, the importance of which to his country can hardly be exaggerated, he was greatly favored by the reputation which had preceded him as a man of science. While yet a journalist he had made some experiments in electricity, which established its identity with lightning. The publication by an English correspondent of the letters in which he gave an account of these experiments, secured his election as an honorary member of the Royal Society of London and undisputed rank among the most eminent natural philosophers of his time. When he arrived in Paris, therefore, he was already a member of every important learned society in Europe, one of the managers of the Royal Society of London, and one of the eight foreign members of the Royal Academy in Paris, where three editions of his scientific writings had already been printed. To these advantages must be added another of even greater weight: his errand there was to assist in dismembering the British Empire, than which nothing of a political nature was at this time much nearer every Frenchman's heart.

The history of this mission, and how Franklin succeeded in procuring from the French King financial aid to the amount of twenty-six millions of francs, at times when the very existence of the republic depended upon them, and finally a treaty of peace more favorable to his country than either England or France wished to concede, has been often told; and there is no chapter in the chronicles of this republic with which the world is more familiar.

Franklin's reputation grew with his success. "It was," wrote his colleague John Adams, "more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick the Great or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than all of them. If a collection could be made of all the gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the

eighteenth century, a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon le grand Franklin would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived."

A few weeks after signing the definitive treaty of peace in 1783, Franklin renewed an application which he had previously made just after signing the preliminary treaty, to be relieved of his mission; but it was not until the 7th of March, 1785, that Congress adopted a resolution permitting "the Honorable Benjamin Franklin to return to America as soon as convenient." Three days later, Thomas Jefferson was appointed to succeed him.

On the 13th of September, 1785, and after a sojourn of nearly nine years in the French capital, first in the capacity of commissioner and subsequently of minister plenipotentiary, Franklin once more landed in Philadelphia, on the same wharf on which, sixty-two years before, he had stepped, a friendless and practically penniless runaway apprentice of seventeen.

Though now in his seventy-ninth year, and a prey to infirmities not the necessary incidents of old age, he had scarcely unpacked his trunks after his return when he was chosen a member of the municipal council of Philadelphia, and its chairman. Shortly after, he was elected president of Pennsylvania, his own vote only lacking to make the vote unanimous. "I have not firmness," he wrote to a friend, "to resist the unanimous desire of my countryfolks; and I find myself harnessed again into their service another year. They engrossed the prime of my life; they have eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to pick my bones."

He was unanimously re-elected to this dignity for the two succeeding years, and while holding that office was chosen a member of the convention which met in May 1787 to frame the Constitution under which the people of the United States are still living.

With the adoption of that instrument, to which he probably contributed as much as any other individual, he retired from official life; though not from the service of the public, to which for the remaining years of his stay on earth his genius and his talents were faithfully consecrated.

Among the fruits of that unfamiliar leisure, always to be remembered among the noblest achievements of his illustrious career, was the part he had in organizing the first anti-slavery society in the world; and as its president, writing and signing the first remonstrance against slavery ever addressed to the Congress of the United States.

In surveying the life of Dr. Franklin as a whole, the thing that most impresses one is his constant study and singleness of purpose to promote the welfare of human society. It was his daily theme as a journalist, and his yearly theme as an almanac-maker. It is that