On the other hand, it was Franklin’s cool sagacity that convinced first the French and then the British that there was an America; that several million people were determined to cling together as a nation. Washington was the standing proof of the willingness of Americans to fight for self-government; Franklin was the man who went far to convince the world that Americans were capable of carrying on their government after they got it. Besides his reputation as the greatest American writer of his time, and the most renowned scientific man, he gained and deserved the repute of being a main supporting pillar of the new United States of America. [Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S BIRTHPLACE It stood on Milk Street, Boston, until destroyed by fire in 1810] _Franklin in Massachusetts_ In a time when most Americans passed their lives within the borders of their own colony, Franklin was a citizen of two colonies, and an official of four. He honored Massachusetts by being born in Boston in 1706, the son of an emigrant, like millions after him--his father being of English birth. Benjamin was a human kind of boy, eager to run away to sea; went to the kind of school kept by a school-master only two years of his life; educated himself on a mixed diet of John Bunyan, “Plutarch’s Lives” and the “Spectator”; became a kind of printer’s devil to his brother James; and early got into trouble through incautious writing for the newspapers. At seventeen the graceless youth ran away from home. Yet he came back four times to visit Boston, and toward the end of his life wrote, “I long much to see again my native place and to lay my bones there--my best wishes attend my dear country.” [Illustration: THE SO-CALLED “VERSAILLES” PORTRAIT OF FRANKLIN From an engraving by Levy, owned by Clarence W. Bowen, Brooklyn, N. Y.] _Franklin as a Pennsylvanian_ On his arrival in Philadelphia in 1723, Benjamin Franklin began to make himself a commonwealth builder, and for more than thirty years he was one of the motive forces in that colony. From the first he found himself more at home in Philadelphia than in Boston. A man never overdisposed to self-denial, he enjoyed the comfort, the good dinners, the pleasant associations, the building up of social forces. Still, at that time Franklin had a much greater interest in Benjamin Franklin than in the community around him. He even showed the unusual enterprise of going abroad in 1725, a practice commonly reserved for wealthy Colonials who wanted to spend their money like gentlemen.