looking at their general fellowship in the light of its natural prejudices, prepossessions, and embarrassments. It is to be considered also that the best of the class were a sort of warrant for the worst. Those who are tolerably well read in the biographies and histories of our Revolutionary period are aware that Dr. Franklin, who, about most exciting and passion-stirring subjects, was a man of remarkably moderate and tolerant spirit, was eminently a hater of the Tories, unrelenting in his animosity towards them, and sternly set against all the measures proposed at the Peace for their relief, either by the British Government to enforce our remuneration of their losses, or by our own General or State Governments to soften the penalties visited upon them. The origin and the explanation of this intense feeling of animosity toward the Loyalists in the breast of that philosopher of moderation are easily traced to one of the most interesting incidents in his residence near the British Court as agent for Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The incident is connected with the still unexplained mystery of his getting possession of the famous letters of Hutchinson, Oliver, etc. Franklin was living and directing all his practical efforts for enlightening and influencing those whom he supposed to be simply the ignorant plotters of mischief against the Colonists, under the full and most confident belief that those plotters were merely the stupid and conceited members of the British Cabinet. He never had dreamed that he was to look either above them to the King, or behind them to any unknown instigators of their mischief. With perfect good faith on his own part, he gave them the benefit of their own supposed ignorance, wrong-headedness, wilfulness, and ingenuity, such as it was, in inventing irritating and oppressive measures which, he warned them, would inevitably alienate the hearts and the allegiance of the Colonists. He records, that, while he had never had a thought but such as this imagined state of the facts had favored, a Liberal member of Parliament, an intimate friend of his, coming to him for a private interview, had told him that the Ministry were not the prime movers in this mischief, but were instigated to it by parties whom Franklin little suspected of such an agency. When the Doctor expressed his incredulity, the friend promised to give him decisive evidence of the full truth of his assertion. It came to Franklin in a form which astounded him, while it opened his eyes and fixed his indignation upon a class of men who from that moment onward were to him the exponents of all malignity and baseness. The evidence came in the shape of the originals, the autographs, of the above-named letters, written by natives of the American soil, office-holders under the Crown, who, while pampered and trusted by their constituents on this side of the water, were actually dictating, advising, and inspiriting the measures of the