of scathing execration upon the heads of the malefactors which showed as nothing else in all his life ever showed how deep were the fountains that fed the calm flow of his ordinary benevolence.

O, ye unhappy Perpetrators of this horrid Wickedness! [he exclaimed, rising with a natural crescendo of exalted feeling even into the sublimated province of the apostrophe] reflect a Moment on the Mischief ye have done, the Disgrace ye have brought on your Country, on your Religion, and your Bible, on your Families and Children! Think on the Destruction of your captivated Country-folks (now among the wild Indians) which probably may follow, in Resentment of your Barbarity! Think on the Wrath of the United Five Nations, hitherto our Friends, but now provoked by your murdering one of their Tribes, in Danger of becoming our bitter Enemies. Think of the mild and good Government you have so audaciously insulted; the Laws of your King, your Country, and your God, that you have broken; the infamous Death that hangs over your Heads; for Justice, though slow, will come at last. All good People everywhere detest your Actions. You have imbrued your Hands in innocent Blood; how will you make them clean? The dying Shrieks and Groans of the Murdered, will often sound in your Ears. Their Spectres will sometimes attend you, and affright even your innocent Children! Fly where you will, your Consciences will go with you. Talking in your Sleep shall betray you, in the Delirium of a Fever you yourselves shall make your own Wickedness known.

These were honest, fearless words, but, so far as we know, the Erynnes did not plant any stings of conscience in the breasts of the men from Paxton District whom Franklin elsewhere in this Narrative described as the Christian white savages of Paxton and Donegal. On the contrary, several hundred men from the same region, armed with rifles and hatchets, and clad in hunting shirts, marched towards Philadelphia with the avowed purpose of

killing the Moravian Indians who had found refuge in its vicinity. The city was reduced to a state of terror, and Governor Penn, like his predecessors, could think of nothing more expedient to do than to invoke the advice and assistance of Franklin. He accordingly made Franklin's house his headquarters, and freely consulted with him touching every defensive measure required by the crisis. Again Franklin formed an association for the protection of Philadelphia; and, under his auspices, the citizens of Philadelphia were enrolled into nine companies, six of infantry, two of horse, and one of artillery. "Governor Penn," he afterwards declared in a letter to Lord Kames, "made my house for some time his head-quarters, and did everything by my advice; so that, for about fortyeight hours, I was a very great man; as I had been once some years before, in a time of public danger." On came the insurgents until they reached Germantown, seven miles from the city. Here they were met by four citizens, of whom Franklin was one, who had been requested by the Governor and his Council to confer with them. While the conference was pending, Franklin's regiment, supported by a detachment of King's troops, remained in the city under arms, and even young Quakers labored incessantly to complete the intrenchments around the barracks, in which the menaced Indians with their Moravian shepherd had been placed. Indeed, now that the waves of the Presbyterian invasion were lapping his own doorsill, the Quaker of every age in Philadelphia appears to have entirely lost sight of the duty of non-resistance. The conference satisfied the insurgents that graver work was ahead of them than that of slaying and scalping old men, women and children, and they retraced their steps. "The fighting face we put on," said Franklin, in his letter to Lord Kames, "and the reasonings we used with the insurgents, .. having turned them back and restored quiet to the city, I became a less man than ever; for I had,

by these transactions, made myself many enemies among the populace." He had, indeed, but not one whose enmity was not more honorable to him than the friendship of even all his host of friends.

Nor did the eagerness of Franklin to bring the Paxton assassins to justice cease with the conference at Germantown. Though pamphlets were sold in the streets of Philadelphia lauding their acts, and inveighing against all who had assisted in protecting the Moravian Indians, though the Governor himself was weak or wicked enough to curry political favor with the party which approved the recent outrages, Franklin still inflexibly maintained that the law should be vindicated by the condign punishment of the Paxton ringleaders. In another place we shall see what his resolute stand cost him politically.

WH

CHAPTER IV

FRANKLIN'S FAMILY RELATIONS

HEN we turn from Franklin's philanthropic zeal and public spirit to his more intimate personal and social traits, we find much that is admirable, not a little that is lovable, and some things with quite a different aspect. His vow of self-correction, when he had sowed his wild oats and reaped the usual harvest of smut and tares, was, as we have intimated, retrospective as well as prospective. He violated his obligations, as his brother James' apprentice, by absconding from Boston before his time was up, and added aggravation to his original offence by returning to Boston, and exhibiting his genteel new suit, watch and silver money to his brother's journeymen, while he descanted to them upon the land of milk and honey from which he had brought back these indicia of prosperity; his brother all the time standing by grum and sullen, and struggling with the emotions which afterwards caused him to say to his stepmother, when she expressed her wish that the brothers might become reconciled, that Benjamin had insulted him in such a manner before his people that he could never forget or forgive it. In this, however, he was mistaken, as Franklin tersely observes in the Autobiography. Some ten years subsequently, on his return from one of his decennial visits to Boston, Franklin stopped over at Newport, to see this brother, who had

removed thither, and he found him in a state of rapid physical decline. The former differences were forgotten, the meeting was very cordial and affectionate, and, in compliance with a request, then made of him by James, Franklin took James' son, a boy of ten, as an apprentice, into his own printing house at Philadelphia. Indeed, he did more than he was asked to do; for he sent the boy for some years to school before putting him to work. Afterwards, when the nephew became old enough to launch out into business on his own account, Franklin helped him to establish himself as a printer in New England with gifts of printing materials and a loan of more than two hundred pounds. Thus was the first deleatur of pricking conscience duly heeded by Franklin, the Printer; the first erratum revised. And it is but just to him to say that the erratum, if the whole truth were told, was probably more venial than his forgiving spirit allowed him to fully disclose. Under the indentures of apprenticeship, it was as incumbent upon the older brother to abstain from excessive punishment as it was upon the younger not to abscond. Franklin, in the Autobiography, while stating that James was passionate and often beat him, also states that James was otherwise not an ill-natured man, and finds extenuation for his brother's violence in the fear of the latter that the success of the Silence Dogood letters might make the young apprentice vain, and in the fact that the young apprentice himself was perhaps too saucy and provoking. Franklin almost always had a word of generous palliation for anyone who had wronged him. The chances, we think, distinctly are that the real nature of the relations between James and Benjamin are to be found not in the text of the Autobiography but in the note to it in which its author declares that the harsh and tyrannical treatment of his brother might have been a means of impressing him with that aversion to arbitrary power which had stuck to him through his whole life.