To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances, and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto too much neglected fellow-creatures. A plan so extensive cannot be carried into execution without considerable pecuniary resources, beyond the present ordinary funds of the Society. We hope much from the generosity of enlightened and benevolent freemen, and will gratefully receive any donations or subscriptions for this purpose, which may be made to our treasurer, James Starr, or to James Pemberton, chairman of our committee of correspondence. Signed, by order of the Society, B. FRANKLIN, _President_. Philadelphia, 9th of November, 1789. Writing to John Wright in London in 1789, Franklin showed that he never neglected the movement to abolish the slave trade: PHILADELPHIA, 4 November, 1789. I wish success to your endeavours for obtaining an abolition of the Slave Trade. The epistle from your Yearly Meeting, for the year 1768, was not the _first sowing_ of the good seed you mention; for I find by an old pamphlet in my possession, that George Keith, near a hundred years since, wrote a paper against the practice, said to be "given forth by the appointment of the meeting held by him, at Phillip James's house, in the city of Philadelphia, about the year 1693"; wherein a strict charge was given to Friends, "that they should set their Negroes at liberty, after some reasonable time of service, &c., &c." And about the year 1728, or 1729, I myself printed a book for Ralph Sandyford, another of your Friends in this city, against keeping Negroes in slavery, two editions of which he distributed gratis. And about the year 1736 I printed another book on the same subject for Benjamin Lay, who also professed being one of your Friends, and he distributed the books chiefly among them. By these instances it appears, that the seed was indeed sown in the good ground of your profession, though much earlier than the time you mention, and its springing up to effect at last, though so late, is some confirmation of Lord Bacon's observation, that _a good motion never dies_; and it may encourage us in making such, though hopeless of their taking immediate effect.[8] FOOTNOTES: [1] _The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Correspondence_, VII, pp. 201-202.