Sydney George Fisher

“ Like the rest of his party, he harbored the bitter thought that France intended to lord it over the United States, send a general over there who would control all the military operations, get all the glory, and give the French ever after a preponderating influence. He thought America had been too free in expressions of gratitude to France, that a little more stoutness, a greater air of independence and boldness in our demands, would procure sufficient assistance and at the same time save us from the calamity of passing into the hands of a tyrant who would be worse than Great Britain had been. ”

“ I shall now consider what you say about the action of General Lee and the leaders of the confederacy. You assume that they were struggling for independence; and that is most extraordinary. It is an insult, as it seems to me, to the intelligence of the whole American people. I never before heard our civil war described in that way. That Lee or the confederacy were struggling for independence in the sense in which the American colonists of 1776, or the Boers of to-day or the Swiss or the Irish struggled for that object I most positively deny. ”

“ He had admitted sending the letters to Massachusetts. But how had he obtained them? How did he get possession of the private letters of a deceased member of the government; letters, too, that every one had been warned not to allow to get into a colonial agent’s hands? If the distinguished man of science whose fascinating manner and conversation were the delight of London drawing-rooms and noblemen’s country-seats had stepped down from the heights of philosophy to do this sort of work, why, then, his great reputation and popularity need no longer be considered as protecting him. ”

“ The adventurousness of the plan was irresistible—a home for the new faith in the primeval forest, far from imprisonment, tithes, and persecution, and to be won by effort worthy of a man. It was, however, a dream destined not to be realized for many a long year. More was needed than the mere consent of the Indians. In the meantime, however, a temporary refuge for the sect was found in the province of West Jersey on the Delaware, which two Quakers had bought from Lord Berkeley for the comparatively small sum of 1000 pounds. ”

“ If it is necessary, especially in these times, to give people information on various subjects,—on science, history, art, bric-a-brac, or mud pies,—very good; let it be done by all means, for it seems to have a refining influence on the masses. But do not call it education. Education is teaching a person to do something with his mind or his muscles or with both. It involves training, discipline, drill; things which, as a rule, are very unpleasant to young people, and which, unless they are geniuses, like Franklin, they will not take up of their own accord. ”

“ Our revolution was an out and out rebellion against legitimate control because we wanted to govern ourselves; because we did not want to be governed by people who lived three thousand miles away in another and far separated country; because we did not want to be taxed by the outsider; because we did not want him to maintain an army amongst us to keep us in order, because we did not want him to regulate our commerce or our manufacturing industries ”

“ To run upon old houses among the Jersey pines still stored with Latin classics and old editions of Shakespeare, Addison, or Samuel Johnson, to come across an old mill with its machinery, cogwheels, flywheels, and all, made of wood, to find people who make their own oars, and the handles of their tools from the materials furnished by their own forest, is now unfortunately a refreshment of the spirit that is daily becoming rarer. ”

“ How did Washington settle it with Duché? The young clergyman made a powerful appeal to him. He said that the whole solution of the war rested with Washington alone. He alone could stop the fighting. He alone could persuade the other leaders in the name of God and humanity to give up a hopeless contest. This was somewhat of an exaggeration. The war was deeper than Washington just as the Boer war is deeper than Kruger. But never mind that. Duché's idea was that Washington should at the head of his army negotiate for some settlement short of independence. Independence, England would never grant. ”

“ Miss Read, despairing of Franklin’s return, had yielded to the persuasions of her family and married a potter named Rogers, and Keimer seemed to be prospering. But the young printer was in a business that he liked. He was devoted to Mr. Denham, with whom his prospects were excellent, and he thought himself settled at last. In a few months, however, both he and Mr. Denham were taken with the pleurisy. Mr. Denham died, and Franklin, fully expecting to die, made up his mind to it like a philosopher who believed that there was nothing beyond the grave. ”

“ In her time the ocean was free from enemy cruisers, and the trade of the colony grew so rapidly that the increasing sales of land and quitrents soon enabled her to pay off the mortgage on the province and all the rest of her husband's debts. It was sad that Penn did not live to see that day, which he had so hoped for in his last years, when, with ocean commerce free from depredations, the increasing money returns from his province would obviate all necessity of selling the government to the Crown.
With all debts paid and prosperity increasing, Penn's sons became very rich men. ”

“ The whig party in England was growing smaller. The whole English nation, "all orders and ranks of men are now unanimous and determined to risk their all on the contest."
"Under so many discouraging circumstances, can virtue, can honor, can the love of your country prompt you to persevere. Humanity itself (and sure I am humanity is no stranger to your breast) calls upon you to desist. Your army must perish for want of common necessaries, or thousands of innocent families must perish to support them. Wherever they encamp the country must be impoverished. ”

“ Self-made men of eminence have been quite numerous in America for a hundred years. Franklin was our first hero of this kind, and I am inclined to think our greatest. The others have achieved wealth or political importance; sometimes both. But Franklin achieved not only wealth and the reputation of a diplomatist and a statesman, but made himself a most accomplished scholar, a man of letters of world-wide fame, a philosopher of no small importance, and as an investigator and discoverer in science he certainly enlarged the domain of human knowledge. ”

“ But were the Quakers really narrow, or were they any more narrow than other rigorously self-disciplined people: Spartans, Puritans, soldiers whose discipline enables them to achieve great results? All discipline is in one sense narrow. Quaker quietude and retirement probably conserved mental energy instead of dissipating it. In an age of superstition and irrational religion, their minds were free and unhampered, and it was the dominant rational tone of their thought that enabled science to flourish in Pennsylvania. ”

“ The New England farmers for all the rest of the summer, autumn and following winter formed themselves into a most vulgar and absurd army and surrounded Boston, shutting in the British. The minds of those farmers were full almost to fanaticism of the principle of equality and the rights of man, "the levelling principles" as they were then called which now form the foundation of our American life. The officers among them were merely leaders and persuaders. ”

“ One, called “Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One,” was an [Pg 241] admirable satire on the conduct of the British government. A great empire is like a cake, most easily diminished at the edges. Take care that colonies never enjoy the same rights as the mother country. Forget all benefits conferred by colonies; treat them as if they were always inclined to revolt; send prodigals, broken gamesters, and stock-jobbers to rule over them; punish them for petitioning against injustice; despise their voluntary grants of money, and harass them with novel taxes ”

“ Immigrants and pioneers from all the New England and Middle States flocked out that way to the land of promise in wagons, or horseback, or trudging along on foot. Substantial taverns grew up along the route; and habitual freighters and stage drivers, proud of their fine teams of horses, grew into characters of the road. When the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, it followed the same line. In fact, most of the lines of railroad in the State follow Indian trails. The trails for trade and tribal intercourse led east and west. ”

“ I must confess I was astonished to read this long record of atrocious injustice, inhumanity, stupidity and cruelty which generation after generation has hammered the Boers into a separate people, given them a long list of martyrs and anniversaries of ferocity and built up in them a fell hatred of the English, which now astonishes men like yourself, who suppose this to be a mere sudden outbreak, and who have not the time, or will not take the trouble, to investigate the long chain of causes which led up to it. ”

“ He thinks the French minister one of the greatest enemies of our country, that he would have straitened our boundaries, to prevent the growth of our people; contracted our fishery, to obstruct the increase of our seamen; and retained the royalists among us, to keep us divided; that he privately opposes all our negotiations with foreign courts, and afforded us, during the war, the assistance we received, only to keep it alive, that we might be so much the more weakened by it; that to think of gratitude to France is the greatest of follies, and that to be influenced by it would ruin us. ”

“ Yet in one way the Brandywine Hills are closely connected with those sands, for from these very hills have been quarried the hard rocks for the great breakwater at the Cape, behind which the fleets of merchant vessels take refuge in storms.
The great sand dunes behind the lighthouse at the cape have their equal nowhere else on the coast. Blown by the ocean winds, the dunes work inland, overwhelming a pine forest to the tree tops and filling swamps in their course. The beach is strewn with every type of wreckage of man's vain attempts to conquer the sea. ”

“ The rising moral sentiment against slavery in the north, which seemed to them to threaten the abolition of slavery in the south by violence without regard to the Constitution and without compensation to owners drove them into war. Their confederacy which they formed was a mere make-shift to protect millions of dollars worth of slaves. There is no evidence of any passion for independence among them, such as has characterized the people already described, and as a matter of fact there was nothing in their unseparated situation that would cause that passion. ”

“ In the same way Temple Franklin made alterations in his grandfather’s writings, changing their vigorous Anglo-Saxon into stilted Latin phrases.
It is curious that American myth-making is so unlike the ancient myth-making which as time went on made its gods and goddesses more and more human with mortal loves and passions. Our process is just the reverse. Out of a man who actually lived among us and of whose life we have many truthful details we make an impossible abstraction of idealized virtues. ”

“ It is a curious commentary on the times and on human nature that these Quaker folk, treated as outcasts and enemies of good order and religion in England and gradually losing all their property in heavy fines and confiscations, should so suddenly in the wilderness prove the capacity of their "Holy Experiment" for achieving the best sort of good order and material success. They immediately built a most charming little town by the waterside, snug and pretty with its red brick houses in the best architectural style. ”

“ But when the attempt is made to render such an infamous doctrine respectable by affixing to it the honored name of Adams, a protest is in order from all those who are at all familiar with our own history.
I do not believe that our American people when their attention is really brought to the matter believe in any such doctrine. But their attention is not usually brought to it. We have been by our stupendous power far removed for a long time from the possibility of such a struggle. We are accustomed to the business method of settling serious disputes by yielding at once to overwhelming power ”

“ You can never teach a boy to write good English by having him read elegant extracts from distinguished authors, or by making him wade through endless text-books of anatomy, physics, botany, history, and philosophy, or by giving him a glib knowledge of French or German, or by perfunctory translations of Latin and Greek prepared in the new-fashioned, easy way, without a grammar. ”

“ When she deals with an independence-loving people she makes of them either an Ireland or a United States. And that is the question in South Africa. Shall there be an Ireland in South Africa or a United States of South Africa?
It is most dismal to read of Englishmen suggesting for the Boers the same old methods that were used in Ireland, "colonization," stamping out the native language, stamping out the love of independence, banishment, depriving of weapons, the greatest severity, no mercy. The Irish were deprived of their weapons, even of their shot guns. ”

“ Under such a change, while the Quakers might still have an influence in the Legislature, the Crown would probably give the executive offices to Churchmen. They therefore labored hard to discredit the Quakers. They kept harping on the absurdity of a set of fanatics attempting to govern a colony without a militia and without administering oaths of office or using oaths in judicial proceedings. How could any one's life be safe from foreign enemies without soldiers, and what safeguard was there for life, liberty, and property before judges, jurors, and witnesses, none of whom had been sworn? ”

“ When through the clouds of smoke he saw the fire of the guns, the decks covered with mangled limbs and bodies dead and dying, or blown into the air, and the quantity of pain, misery, and destruction the crews yet alive were thus with so much eagerness dealing round to one another, he turned angrily to his guide and said, ‘You blundering blockhead, you are ignorant of your business; you undertook to conduct me to the earth and you have brought me into hell!’ ‘No, sir,’ says the guide, ‘I have made no mistake; this is really the earth, and these are men. ”

“ After the English conquest on the Delaware, not a few of the Dutch migrated to Maryland, where their descendants, it is said, are still to be found. Some in later years returned to the Delaware, where on the whole, notwithstanding the early confiscations, English rule seemed to promise well. The very first documents, the terms of surrender both on the Delaware and on the Hudson, breathed an air of Anglo-Saxon freedom. Everybody was at liberty to come and go at will. Hollanders could migrate to the Delaware or to New York as much as before. ”

“ If the Boers are wrong in defending against England by guerilla methods an independence long since acknowledged, then we were ten thousand times wrong in supporting by the same methods a rebellion for independence against that same country which it is said can rule any people better than those people can rule themselves. ”

“ No American, and certainly no Englishman, has ever spoken so well of the French. He never could forget, he said, the nine years’ happiness that he had enjoyed there “in the sweet society of a people whose conversation is instructive, whose manners are highly pleasing, and who, above all the nations of the world, [Pg 347] have, in the greatest perfection, the art of making themselves beloved by strangers.” ”

“ I have made these lengthy statements and quotations for the sake of reminding you that the man who was responsible for your existence and also very largely for the existence of the revolution, faced with his eyes open the very state of affairs which you say should in conscience and good morals compel a man to surrender and give up. He faced a far worse state of affairs than the Boers face, and he had less excuse for his conduct. ”

“ We find Franklin in a state of rebellion against the prevailing tone of thought, writing against it in his brother’s newspaper at the risk of imprisonment, and in a manner more bitter and violent than anything he afterwards composed. If he had remained in Boston it is not likely that he would ever have taken seriously to science, for all his energies would have been absorbed in fighting those intolerant conditions which smothered all scientific inquiries. ”

“ He cared little or nothing for the confederacy. It was the invasion of Virginia against which he fought and he always commanded the army in Virginia. "Save in defence of my native state," he said, "I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword."
Such a man easily dropped the contest for the confederacy when the point of scientific defeat had been reached. He fought to acquit his own honor as a man fights a duel until blood is drawn, and that done he has no more incentive for fighting. ”

“ It interested them all the more that the man who represented all this for them, and whose name seemed to be really a French one, came from the horrible wilderness of America, the home of interminable dark forests, filled with savage beasts and still more savage men.
France at that time was the gay, pleasure- and sensation-loving France which had just been living under the reign of Louis XIV. Sated with luxury and magnificence, with much intelligence and culture even among the middle classes, there was no novelty that pleased Frenchmen more than something which seemed to be close to nature ”

“ Blood is thicker than water. But I doubt if any of them—Lowell, Motley, or even Holmes in his famous three months’ visit—had such a good time as Franklin.
He loved England and was no doubt delighted with the appointments that sent him there. If it is true, as his enemies have charged, that he schemed for public office, it is not surprising in view of the pleasure he derived from appointments such as these. Writing to Miss Stevenson on March 23, 1763, after he had returned to Pennsylvania from his first mission, he says,—
“Of all the enviable things England has, I envy it most its people. ”

“ Some years afterwards, when he was in Paris, John Adams upbraided him for not taking more exercise; but he replied, “Yes, I walk a league every day in my chamber. I walk quick, and for an hour, so that I go a league; I make a point of religion of it.” This was not a very good substitute for out-of-door exertion. In fact, Franklin’s opinions on the subject of exercise were not wise. The test of exercise was, he thought, the amount of warmth it added to the body, and he inferred, therefore, that walking must be better than riding on horseback, and he even recommended walking up and down stairs. ”

“ You try to imagine which one of his thousand clever strokes and sayings was passing through his mind that day; and the strong, intensely individualized figure, which resembles that of an old athlete, is wonderfully suggestive of life, experience, and contest.
But the Duplessis portrait, which was painted from life in Paris in 1778, when he was seventy-two, reveals more than any of them. The Sumner portrait is Franklin the youth; the Martin and the Grundmann portraits are Franklin the philosopher and statesman; the Duplessis portrait is Franklin the man. ”

“ In truth, Lee and Izard wrote so much and so violently that they dug the graves of their own reputations. It was Dr. Johnson who said that no man was ever written down except by himself, and Franklin once shrewdly remarked, “spots of dirt thrown upon my character I suffered while fresh to remain; I did not choose to spread by endeavoring to remove them, but relied on the vulgar adage that they would all rub off when they were dry.”
General public opinion was then and has remained in favor of Franklin, and the prominent men of France were, without exception, on his side. ”

“ His mind, moreover, had been so disciplined by the severe training in the use of language—which is only another name for thought—that he was capable of taking up and mastering with ease any subject in science or philosophy, and could make as good mud pies and judge as well of bric-a-brac as those who had never done anything else.
In this country people object to compelling boys to write verse, because, as they say, it is an endeavor to force them to become poets whether they have talent for it or not. Any one who reflects, however, knows that there is no question of poetry in the matter. ”

“ Franklin was, strange to say, always more [Pg 178] popular in France than in either America or England. In England his experiments in electricity were at first laughed at, and the Royal Society refused to publish his letters in their proceedings. But after Collinson had secured their publication in a pamphlet, they were translated into German, Italian, and Latin, as well as into French, and were greatly admired not only for the discoveries and knowledge they revealed, but for their fascinating style and noble candor tinged occasionally with the most telling and homely humor. ”

“ In nearly every one of them the whole attitude, the droop of the shoulders and arms, and the quietude of the face are reposeful.
He seems to have been totally without either irritability or excitability. In this he was the reverse of Washington, who was subject to violent outbursts of anger, could swear “like an angel of God,” as one of his officers said, and had a fiery temper to control. Perhaps Franklin’s strong sense of humor saved him from oaths; there are no swearing stories recorded of him; instead of them we have innumerable jokes and witticisms. ”

“ Every farm-house and hunter’s cabin had one hanging by the fireplace, and the rich were also eager to read afresh every year the weather forecasts, receipts, scraps of history, and advice mingled with jokes and verses.
Every printer issued an almanac as a matter of course, for it was the one publication which was sure to sell, and there was always more or less money to be made by it. While Franklin and Meredith were in business they published their almanac annually, and it was prepared by Thomas Godfrey, the mathematician, who with his wife lived in part of Franklin’s house. ”

“ At any moment they might hear that they had neither country nor flag, that the Revolution had collapsed, and that they must spend the rest of their lives in France as pensioners on the royal bounty, daring to go neither to America nor to England, where they would be hung as ringleaders of the rebels. ”

“ During the rest of his life his work in science was principally in the way of encouraging its study. He was always observing, collecting facts, and writing out his conclusions. The public business in which he was soon constantly employed, and the long years of his diplomatic service in England and France, were serious interruptions, and during the last part of his life it was not often that he could steal time for that loving investigation of nature which after his thirtieth year became the great passion of his life. ”

“ But in Massachusetts Samuel Adams was laboring night and day to force a breach. He had as much contempt as the Tories for Franklin’s peace and love policy, and thought it ridiculous that such a man should be the agent for Massachusetts. He was convinced that there never would be peace, that it was not desirable, and that the sooner there were war and independence the better.
The Tory government knew all this; it knew of the committees of correspondence that the Boston patriots were inaugurating to inflame the whole country ”