Then he turned his attention to Franklin. How had he obtained those letters? And here it must be confessed that Franklin was in a scrape, and from the Tory point of view was fair game. He could not disclose the name of the member of Parliament who gave them to him, for he had promised not to do so, and even without this promise it would have been wanton cruelty to have subjected the man to the ruin and disgrace that would have instantly fallen upon him. Nothing could drag this secret from Franklin. He refused to answer questions on the subject, and it is a secret to this day, as it is also still a secret who was the mother of his son. Ingenious persons have written about one as about the other, and supposed and guessed and piled up probabilities to no purpose. Franklin told the world more private matters than is usual with men in his position; but in the two matters on which he had determined to withhold knowledge the world has sought for it in vain. Praiseworthy as his conduct may have been in this respect, it gave his opponents an advantage which we must admit they were entitled to take. If, as Wedderburn put it, he refused to tell from whom he received the letters, they were at liberty to suppose the worst, and the worst was that he had obtained them by improper means and fraud. For a time which must have seemed like years to Franklin, Wedderburn drew out and played on this point with most exasperating skill. Gentlemen respect private correspondence. They do not usually steal people’s letters and print them. Even a foreign ambassador on the outbreak of war would hardly be justified in stealing documents. Must he not have known as soon as the letters were handed to him that honorable permission to use them could be obtained only from the family of Whately? Why had he chosen to bring that family into painful notoriety and one of them within a step of being murdered? He had sent the letters to Massachusetts with the address removed from them, and he was here supporting the petition with nothing but copies of the letters. He would, forsooth, have removed from office a governor in the midst of a long career of usefulness on the ground of letters the originals of which he could not produce and which he dared not tell how he had obtained. The orator went on to cite some of Franklin’s letters to the people in Massachusetts encouraging them in their opposition. He read the resolutions of New England town meetings, and gave what, indeed, was a truthful description, from his point of view, of the measures taken for resistance in America. Franklin was aspiring to be Governor of Massachusetts in the place of Hutchinson, that was the secret of the whole affair, he said; and as for that beautiful argument that Hutchinson and Oliver had incensed the mother country against the colonies, what absurdity!