It may perhaps be mentioned, as a defect in the character of Franklin, that when in France he could see nothing but the beautiful. His eye was turned from every revolting spectacle. In the society of elegantly dressed, highly educated, refined French ladies,--at dinner parties, glittering with gold and silver plate,--in social intercourse with men whose philosophical attainments were of the highest order, and whose politeness of speech and bearing rendered them delightful companions, Franklin found his time and thoughts engrossed. In all his voluminous writings we find no allusion to those tremendous wrongs, which Louis XIV. and Louis XV. had entailed upon the people,--wrongs which soon convulsed society with the volcanic throes of the French revolution. Jefferson, who succeeded Franklin, was cast in a different mould. He saw and fully comprehended the misery under which the millions of the French peasantry were groaning. And this led him to the conviction, that no people could be safe, unless the government were placed in their own hands. Still Franklin, like his brother deists, Hume and Voltaire, seeing how impotent were all the motives they could urge to make man virtuous, became thoroughly disgusted with human nature. He even went beyond Paul in his description of the hopeless depravity of man. The idea of reclaiming him by his philosophy was abandoned entirely. And yet he was not prepared to embrace that gospel, which the experience of ages has proved to be the "wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation." "He enlarges," writes Mr. Parton, "upon this theme, in his most delightful manner, in another letter to Dr. Priestley." In this letter he says in his usual jocular strain, that the more he studies the moral part of nature the more he is disgusted; that he finds men very badly constructed; that they are more prone to do evil than to do good; that they take great pleasure in killing one another, and that he doubts whether the species is worth preserving. He intimates that every attempt to save their souls is "an idle amusement." "As you grow older," he writes, "you may perhaps repent of having murdered, in mephitic air, so many honest, harmless mice, and wish that, to prevent mischief, you had used boys and girls instead of them." In this singular letter he represents a young angel having been sent to this world, under the guidance of an old courier spirit. They arrive over the seas of Martinico, in the midst of the horrible fight between the fleets of Rodney and De Grasse. "When," he writes, "through the clouds of smoke, he (the young angel) saw the fire of the guns, the decks covered with mangled limbs and bodies, dead or dying; the ships sinking, burning, or blown into the air; and the quantity of pain, misery and destruction the crews, yet alive, were with so much eagerness dealing round to one another, he turned angrily to his guide and said,