Produced by David Edwards, Josephine Paolucc and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) BENJAMIN FRANKLIN SELF-REVEALED A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY BASED MAINLY ON HIS OWN WRITINGS BY WILLIAM CABELL BRUCE IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME II G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON _The Knickerbocker Press_ 1917 COPYRIGHT, 1917 BY W. CABELL BRUCE _The Knickerbocker Press, New York_ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I.--FRANKLIN'S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 1 II.--FRANKLIN AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 26 III.--FRANKLIN AS A STATESMAN 95 IV.--FRANKLIN AS A MAN OF SCIENCE 350 V.--FRANKLIN AS A WRITER 423 INDEX 531 Benjamin Franklin Self-Revealed CHAPTER I Franklin's Personal Characteristics The precise explanation of the great concourse of friends that Franklin drew about him, at the different stages of his long journey through the world, is to be found partly in his robust, honorable character and mental gifts. The sterner virtues, which are necessarily the foundations of such esteem as he enjoyed, he possessed in an eminent degree. An uncommonly virile and resolute spirit animated the body, which was equal in youth to the task of swimming partly on and partly under water from near Chelsea to Blackfriars, and of exhibiting on the way all of Thevenot's motions and positions as well as some of its own, and which shortly afterwards even sported about the becalmed Berkshire in the Atlantic almost with the strength and ease of one of the numerous dolphins mentioned by Franklin in his Journal of his voyage on that ship from England to America. He hated cruelty, injustice, rapacity and arbitrary conduct. It was no idle or insincere compliment that Burke paid him when he spoke of his "liberal and manly way of thinking." How stoutly his spirit met its responsibilities in Pennsylvania, prior to the Declaration of Independence, we have seen. The risks incident to the adoption of that declaration it incurred with the same fearless courage. Of all the men who united in its adoption, he, perhaps, was in the best position to know, because of his long residence in England, and familiarity with the temper of the English monarch and his ministry, what the personal consequences to the signers were likely to be, if the American cause should prove unsuccessful. He had a head to lose even harder to replace than that of his friend Lavoisier, he had a fortune to be involved in flame or confiscation, the joy of living meant to him what it has meant to few men, and more than one statement in his writings affords us convincing proof that, quite apart from the collective act of all the signers in pledging their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to the "glorious