He investigated the new field of political economy with the same thoroughness as the other departments of science, and wrote on national wealth, the price of corn, free trade, the effects of luxury, idleness, and industry, the slave-trade, and peace and war. The humor and imagination in one of his letters to Dr. Priestley on war justify the quoting of a part of it: “A young angel of distinction being sent down to this world on some business, for the first time, had an old courier-spirit assigned him as a guide. They arrived over the seas of Martinico, in the middle of the long day of obstinate fight between the fleets of Rodney and De Grasse. When through the clouds of smoke he saw the fire of the guns, the decks covered with mangled limbs and bodies dead and dying, or blown into the air, and the quantity of pain, misery, and destruction the crews yet alive were thus with so much eagerness dealing round to one another, he turned angrily to his guide and said, ‘You blundering blockhead, you are ignorant of your business; you undertook to conduct me to the earth and you have brought me into hell!’ ‘No, sir,’ says the guide, ‘I have made no mistake; this is really the earth, and these are men. Devils never treat one another in this cruel manner; they have more sense, and more of what men (vainly) call humanity.’” (Bigelow’s Works of Franklin, vol. vii. p. 465.) FOOTNOTES: [18] Making of Pennsylvania, chap. ix. [19] Pillsbury’s Gulf Stream, published by the U. S. government. [20] Bigelow’s Works of Franklin, vol. ii. p. 331; vol. ix. p. 185. VI THE PENNSYLVANIA POLITICIAN While Franklin kept his little stationery shop and printing-office, sent out his almanacs every year, read and studied, experimented in science, and hoped for an assured income which would give larger leisure for study and experiment, he was all the time drifting more and more into public life. In a certain sense he had been accustomed to dealing with living public questions from boyhood. When an apprentice in his teens, he had written articles for his brother’s newspaper attacking the established religious and political system of Massachusetts, and during his brother’s imprisonment the newspaper had been published in the apprentice’s name. In Pennsylvania his own newspaper, the _Gazette_, which he established when he was but twenty-three years old, made him something of a public man; and his pamphlet in favor of paper money, which appeared at about the same period, showed how strongly his mind inclined towards the large questions of government.