Yet this matter of income was important to him, and it was at no slight personal sacrifice that he was now serving his country. He had a moderate competence, but his expenses were almost doubled by living thus apart from his family, while his affairs suffered by reason of his absence. For a while he was left unmolested in the post-mastership, and in view of all the circumstances it must be confessed that the ministry behaved very well to him in this particular. Rumors which occasionally reached his ears made him uncomfortably aware how precarious his tenure of this position really was. His prolonged absence certainly gave an abundantly fair pretext for his removal; still advantage was not taken of it. Some of his enemies, as he wrote in December, 1770, by plentiful abuse endeavored to provoke him to resign; but they found him sadly "deficient in that Christian virtue of resignation." It was not until 1774, after the episode of the Hutchinson letters and the famous hearing before the privy council, that he was actually displaced. If this forbearance of the ministry was attributable to magnanimity, it stands out in prominent inconsistence with the general course of official life in England at that time. Probably no great injustice would be done in suggesting a baser motive. The ministry doubtless aimed at one or both of two things: to keep a certain personal hold upon him, which might, insensibly to himself, mollify his actions; and to discredit him among his countrymen by precisely such fleers as had been cast against him in the Massachusetts Assembly. More than once they sought to seduce him by offers of office; it was said that he could have been an under-secretary of state, had he been willing to qualify himself for the position by modifying his views on colonial questions. More than once, too, gossip circulated in America that some such bargain had been struck, a slander which was cruel and ignoble indeed, when the opportunity and temptation may be said to have been present any and every day during many years without ever receiving even a moment of doubtful consideration. Yet for this the English ministry are believed not to have been wholly responsible, since some of these tales are supposed to have been the unworthy work of Arthur Lee of Virginia. This young man, a student at one of the Inns of Court in London, was appointed by the Massachusetts Assembly as a successor to fill Franklin's place whenever the latter should return to Pennsylvania. For at the time it was anticipated that this return would soon occur; but circumstances interfered and prolonged Franklin's usefulness abroad during several years more. The heir apparent, who was ambitious, could not brook the disappointment of this delay; and though kindly treated and highly praised by the unsuspicious Franklin, he gave nothing but malice in return. It is perhaps not fully proved, yet it is certainly well suspected by historians, that his