But he remained an active man during his whole life. He felt an interest in every kind of improvement, and to many he extended a fostering care. As early as 1785, he aided in establishing the Philadelphia Agricultural Society, and when the Academy of Fine Arts was founded in that city he was one of its liberal patrons. He aided also in establishing the Philadelphia Bank. Of the former, he was vice president, and of the two latter, president when he died. He was a friend to all the labouring classes, and made himself acquainted with the principles of farming and the mechanic trades. His private papers exhibit a great variety of draughts and plans of bridges, canals, water-works, machinery and implements of husbandry, and numerous recipes relative to the arts. Like the philosophic Franklin, he extended his researches to almost every subject within the grasp of man, and treasured in his mind the essential oil of each. He always sought for solid substance that could be applied to substantial use. His mind and his manners were opposed to pedantry and pomp. He was what, in common parlance, would now be called a plain, old fashioned, blunt man. His bluntness was not of an offensive kind; it consisted in laconic truth, dressed in republican simplicity, a garb that was much admired during the times of pure unsophisticated patriotism. Although he originated many important measures in the national and state legislature, he seldom spoke in the forum, and was often unknown to the public as such, when the author of the most salutary propositions. He was ambitious only to do good, and was not anxious that his name should be wafted on the breeze of popular applause or be emblazoned in the high places of the earth. To know that he had been instrumental in benefitting the human family was the ultimatum of his soul. When the importance of a subject induced him to rise in debate he was listened to with profound attention, and was an example worthy of imitation. Without any pretensions to refined elocution, he expressed in strong language the sentiments he strongly felt. He came directly to the point, adhered closely to it in a strain of keen, cutting, pithy and laconic reasoning; was always brief, often casting into the shade, by his remarks of a few moments, the laboured and gaudy speeches of his opponents that had cost them weeks to prepare and hours to deliver. He effected this, not by personal recrimination or irony, but by aiming his blows at the strong points, the syllabus of their superstructure, which he often demolished at one bold stroke with the damask blade of sound logic, drawn from the scabbard of plain common sense, and wielded by the vigorous arm of lucid reason. He was opposed to every shade of aristocracy and every thing anti-republican, both in theory and practice. His views were broad and liberal, his purposes were honest and patriotic. He was an attentive reader, and wrote numerous essays, which are forcible, logical, and extremely sarcastic.