I do not wish to take up too much space accumulating instances in our revolutionary history, but Franklin's conduct is perhaps worth considering. He was not what is called an enthusiast or fanatic. He was on the contrary one of the shrewd calculating kind. He had full knowledge of all the conditions. He resided in England as agent of Massachusetts and of the rebel cause in general from 1764 to 1775. It cannot be said that he did not know the power and merit of England. He admired the English political system. He was very fond of English life and preferred a residence among learned and cultivated people in England to one in America. Under these influences he at first believed that the colonists should submit after trying ordinary peaceful and so-called legal measures. In a word Franklin was at first of your opinion. But when he returned to America in 1775 and the spirit or influence of independence touched him he became the most unrelenting, obstinate and as you would say unreasoning, fanatical and blind stickler for absolute and unqualified independence at any price or at the price of extermination. The Continental Congress of which your ancestor was a member was, as late as the year 1780, so determined to keep up the struggle although in that year it was regarded as hopeless, that they arranged to have pictures prepared with short descriptions of what they considered British atrocities, but which were the milk of human kindness compared with Kitchener's Spanish concentration camps and other benevolences inflicted on the Boers. These pictures and descriptions were to be shown and taught to every American rebel child forever so as to burn into their minds eternal hatred and a struggle without end against the independence hating British brute. Just at the close of the revolution Franklin was preparing to have thirty-five of these pictures designed and engraved in France "in order," as he wrote to an Englishman, "to impress the minds of children and posterity with a deep sense of your bloody and insatiable malice and wickedness." If Franklin could apply such adjectives to England's comparatively mild attempts to suppress a rebellion, what would he say to-day of her worse than inhuman efforts to destroy two independent nations. Franklin believed that the success of our revolution had destroyed forever the inherent cruelty and despotic brutishness of the English tory. But the tory has gone on developing; and even the English liberal has less of the courage, intelligence and character which were such a brilliant and saving grace to him in the days of Burke, Chatham and Barre.