On the very day after his return, when he had scarce caught the breath of land, he was unanimously elected by the Assembly a delegate to the Provincial Congress. It was an emergency when the utmost must be made of time, brains, and men. By subsequent reelections he continued to sit in that body until his departure for France. There was business enough before it: the organization of a government, of the army, of the finances; most difficult of all, the arrangement of a national policy, and the harmonizing of conflicting opinions among men of influence at home. In all that came before the Congress Franklin was obliged to take his full share. He seems to have been upon all the busy and important committees. There were more ardent spirits, greater propelling forces, than he was; but his wisdom was transcendent. Dickinson and his followers were bent upon sending one more petition to the king, a scheme which was ridiculed almost with anger by the more advanced and resolute party. But Franklin's counsel was to give way to their wishes, as being the best policy for bringing them later into full accord with the party which was for war. He had no hopes of any other good result from the proceeding; but it also chimed with his desire to put the English as much as possible in the wrong. In the like direction was a clause in his draft of a declaration, intended to be issued by Washington in the summer of 1775. To counteract the charge that the colonies refused to contribute to the cost of their own protection, he proposed that, if Great Britain would abolish her monopoly of the colonial trade, allowing free commerce between the colonies and all the rest of the world, they would pay into the English sinking fund L100,000 annually for one hundred years; which would be more than sufficient, if "faithfully and inviolably applied for that purpose, ... to extinguish all her present national debt."