Produced by David Edwards, Louise Pattison and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) The True Benjamin Franklin [Illustration: THE DUPLESSIS PORTRAIT OF FRANKLIN] The True Benjamin Franklin By Sydney George Fisher Author of “Men, Women, and Manners in Colonial Times,” “The Making of Pennsylvania,” “The Evolution of the Constitution,” etc. “If rigid moral analysis be not the purpose of historical writing, there is no more value in it than in the fictions of mythological antiquity.”--CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, SR. FIFTH EDITION WITH AN APPENDIX Philadelphia J. B. Lippincott Company 1903 COPYRIGHT, 1898 BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY Preface to the Third Edition Since the appearance of the first edition there has been some discussion of the question whether Mrs. Foxcroft was really Franklin’s daughter. In the present edition I have added an appendix going fully into this question. Franklin’s plain language about love and marriage and his very frank descriptions of his own shortcomings in these matters seem to have surprised many people. I might have explained this more fully in the first edition, but to any one who knows the age in which Franklin lived there is nothing that need cause surprise. It was an age of frank autobiographies and plain, detailed, introspective statements about love affairs. Rousseau flourished in those days, also Gozzi and Madame Roland; and Casanova began writing his most extraordinary memoirs just about the time of Franklin’s death. Anyone who is at all familiar with these authors will readily understand why Franklin wrote his “Advice on the Choice of a Mistress.” His “Speech of Polly Baker” was of the same sort. It had a most extraordinary circulation because people were then looking at these matters from that point of view. The philosophic thought of that age was somewhat inclining to the opinion, since then much developed by German theorists like Nietzche, that religion had made love impure. Franklin, as at page 106, was also inclining that way. Such things must be mentioned and given their proper position and importance in a book calling itself “The True Benjamin Franklin.” There are many books describing the false Franklin, the impossible Franklin, the Franklin that never existed, and could not in the nature of things exist, and to these books those who do not like the truth are referred. Preface