BENJAMIN FRANKLIN:

HIS

AUTOBIOGRAPHY;

WITH A NARRATIVE OF

HIS PUBLIC LIFE AND SERVICES.

BY REV. H. HASTINGS WELD.

WITH NUMEROUS DESIGNS BY J. G. CHAPMAN.

NEW YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,

82 CLIFF STREET.

453-17

A

Bedr

1:

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight, by

HARPER & BROTHERS,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

PREFACE.

BRILLIANT military deeds write their own history. Their sound strikes upon the ear, and challenges the attention of mankind. The sympathy of men with what is daring in courage and glorious in arms, makes all a soldier's countrymen his eulogists; and the hero usually receives more, rather than less, than his meed of praise. He has comrades, too, bound to him by a community in his sufferings and a partnership in his victories. Upon the follower the glory of the leader is reflected; and each follower, watchful of the fame of his leader, is ever ready to celebrate far and wide the glory of the achieve

ments

"All which he saw, and part of which he was."

Every soldier in an army, every man who has borne arms during a war, has his private family of admirers, and by these are the reputation of the officers-the representatives of the soldiers-extended, until the widening circle of praise embraces a nation. The successful soldier's apotheosis anticipates his death. The next generation endorses his deification, and in process of timevery short process too, as our national history may witness-oral tradition places the soldier on an elevation to which the biographer finds it very hard work to write up.

But statesmen and ambassadors, particularly those who move in such spheres as Franklin, owe small thanks to their cotemporaries. By their very position they are unable to vindicate themselves without injury to the public service; and although to them may be honestly due the praise of the Wise Man-" He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city"-they must look to posterity for justice. And posterity has not, as in the case of the warrior, the echo of cotemporary praise to bias its judgment in their favor. A nation hears of the advance of an enemy, and looks with gratitude to the opposing soldier from the moment that he buckles on his armor. Whatever be the result, joy in a victory, satisfaction in a repulse of the invader, or sorrow in defeat, the people can appreciate the valor, successful or unsuccessful, which opposed the foe. But the diplomatist, from the necessity of the case, works in the dark. His acts must be judged without the apparent cause and full justification of the open counter-movements of adversaries; for, as he strives against covert machinations, so must the motives of his operations be hidden. Even success in such a contest is without eclat. Defeat brings unqualified condemnation. When the point aimed at is gained, the successful statesman is not unfrequently the subject of detraction. Where the soldier finds applause in the verdict of his companion in arms, the statesman receives faint praise from his colleagues, if, indeed, he be not compelled to defend his course and motives before the public against associates who honestly differed from him. He, then, who writes the life of a statesman, has

not, as in the life of the warrior, merely to prepare an endorsement of public opinion. He has to wind a difficult path amid political prejudices, or to be content with only a portion of his countrymen for readers.

From these causes the political character of Franklin has suffered; not, indeed, by any charges affecting the integrity of the man; for, if there were such, they were disproved in his lifetime, and set aside as the merest ebullitions of personal enmity or party spleen. To the latest hour his countrymen strove with each other in doing him honor, and his last years were passed in the harvesting of his laurels. But his fame as a politician has lost in this wise: that writers, finding in the public mind a general admiration of the man, when they came to justify it by particulars, found themselves in a dilemma. It was not that there are not particulars enough, for there is a superfluity-capital sufficient for a dozen great reputations-but because these particulars are not all available with all men. There are no battle-fields in his story; and in the days when those who acted with him were alive, to have celebrated his acts of diplomacy would have been to wake up counter-memorials to the public. Therefore, because the history of cabinets offers less popular reading than the history of battle-fields, and because Franklin could not be elevated as a great politician for all to admire, his biographers celebrated his electrical discoveries. All acknowledged him great; but because all readers would not say ay to his statesmanship, he was cried up exceedingly as an economist. As a natural philosopher and as a fireside sage, the digester