Franklin spoke indeed for the new age and the New World. He was the first American: the very personification of that native sense of destiny and high mission in the world, and of that good-natured tolerance for the half-spent peoples of Europe, which is the American spirit; a living and vocal product, as it were, of all the material and spiritual forces that were transforming the people of the British plantations into a new nation. All racial and religious antagonisms, all sectional and intercolonial jealousies, all class prejudice, were in some manner comprehended and reconciled in Franklin. He was as old as the century and touched it at every point. What an inclusive experience was that of this self-made provincial who as a printer's boy heard Increase Mather preach in Boston and in his old age stood with Voltaire in Paris to be proclaimed the incomparable benefactor of mankind! Provincial! But was this man provincial? Or was that, indeed, a province which produced such men? Was that country rightly dependent and inferior where law and custom were most in accord with the philosopher's ideal society? In that transvaluation of old values effected by the intellectual revolution of the century, it was the fortune of America to emerge as a kind of concrete example of the imagined State of Nature. In contrast with Europe, so "artificial," so oppressed with defenseless tyrannies and useless inequalities, so encumbered with decayed superstitions and the debris of worn-out institutions, how superior was this new land of promise where the citizen was a free man, where the necessities of life were the sure reward of industry, where manners were simple, where vice was less prevalent than virtue and native incapacity the only effective barrier to ambition! In those years when British statesmen were endeavoring to reduce the "plantations" to a stricter obedience, some quickening influence from this ideal of Old World philosophers came to reinforce the determination of Americans to be masters of their own destiny. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE