Franklin had originality. His many devices are evidence. But careful study of that which brought him much public attention--bagatelles by which he attached himself to popular affection--show all-round appropriation. He loved to stand in public light--to hear applause of himself. He loved to quiz his listeners, to bamboozle his readers. If his buying and applauding public believed Poor Richard’s proverbs sprang from his active mind instead of having been industriously gathered from old English and other folk proverbs and dyed with his practical humor--“the wisdom of many ages and nations,” as Franklin afterwards put it--that was their blunder by which he would gain gold as well as glory. Even “Richard Saunders” was not original with Franklin. It was the pen-name of a compiler of English almanacs. The young printer busily working his press doubtless chuckled at his deceptions--in spite of his filched maxim about honesty being the best policy. And it went with him all through life. His love of public applause, his desire to accumulate and his gleaming, quizzical humor led him on. His wonderful ease at adopting others’ products and making them his own one may admire if he turn his eyes from the moral significance, the downright turpitude of not acknowledging the source. Franklin’s practice would certainly not stand the test of universal application which his great contemporary, Kant, demanded of all acts. There has been of late endeavor to rehabilitate Franklin’s industrious common sense and praise its circumstance. So late as last year our American ambassador to St. James addressed students of the Workingmen’s College in London upon the energy, self-help, and sense of reality of this early American, and found the leading features of his character to be honesty (!) and respect for facts. It is, after all, a certain grace inherent in Franklin, a human feeling, a genial simplicity and candor, a directness of utterance and natural unfolding of his matter which are his perennial value in a literary way, and which warrant the estimate of an English critic who calls him the most readable writer yet known on the western side of the Atlantic. THE END FOOTNOTES: [1] I include “women” because Lucy Stone once told me she draughted some of the Kansas laws for married women while sitting in the nursery with her baby on her knee. Other women worked with her, she said. Their labor was in the fifties of the nineteenth century--at the height of the movement to ameliorate the legal condition of married women.