Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume 2 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own WritingsBruce, Wiliam Cabell
History
Benjamin Franklin; Self-Revealed, Volume 2 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings
Bruce, Wiliam Cabell
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
The next bearer of the olive branch, who came over to Paris, came under
very different auspices. This was William Jones, afterwards Sir William
Jones, who was at the time affianced to Anna Maria Shipley. He did not come
as the representative of the King or his Ministers, but as the
representative of the generous and patriotic Englishmen, who had cherished
the same dream of world-wide British unity as Franklin himself, and whose
sacrifices in behalf of their fellow-Englishmen in America should be
almost as gratefully remembered by us as the Continental soldiers who
perished at Monmouth or Camden. Draping his thoughts with academic terms,
he submitted a paper to Dr. Franklin entitled _A Fragment from Polybius_ in
which England, France, the United States and Franklin are given names
borrowed from antiquity, and various suggestions are made for the
settlement of the existing controversy between Great Britain and America.
England becomes Athens, France, Caria, America, the Islands, and Franklin,
Eleutherion; and Jones himself is masked as an Athenian lawyer.
This I _know_ [observes the latter-day Athenian] and
positively pronounce, that, while Athens is Athens, her
proud but brave citizens will never _expressly_
recognize the independence of the Islands; their
resources are, no doubt, exhaustible, but will not be
exhausted in the lives of us and of our children. In
this resolution all parties agree.
There should be, the writer suggested, "a perfect coordination between
Athens and the Thirteen United Islands, they considering her not as a
parent, whom they must obey, but as an elder sister, whom they can not help
loving, and to whom they shall give pre-eminence of honor and co-equality
of power." Other suggestions were that the new constitutions of the Islands
should remain intact, but that, on every occasion, requiring acts for the
general good, there should be an assembly of deputies from the Senate of
Athens, and the Congress of the Islands, who should fairly adjust the whole
business, and settle the ratio of the contributions on both sides; that
this committee should consist of fifty Islanders and fifty Athenians, or of
a smaller number chosen by them, and that, if it was thought necessary, and
found convenient, a proportionate number of Athenian citizens should have
seats, and the power of debating and voting on questions of common concern
in the great assembly of the Islands, and a proportionable number of
Islanders should sit with the like power in the Assembly at Athens. The
whole reminds the reader of the classical fictions to which the first
Parliamentary reporters were driven by press censorship. The paper, drafted
by Jones, was little more than a mere literary exercise, prompted by
ingenuous enthusiasm, but we may be sure that it kindled in Franklin very
different feelings from those aroused in him by the insidious appeal of
Charles de Weissenstein.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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