Franklin and his two fellow-commissioners, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee, had equal powers. They had to conduct a large and complicated business involving the expenditure of millions of dollars without knowing exactly where the millions were to come from, and with no regular system of accounts or means of auditing and investigating; their arrangements had to be largely kept secret; they expended money in lump sums without always knowing what use was made of it; they were obliged to rely on the assistance of all sorts of people,--naval agents, commercial agents, and others for whose occupation there was no exact name; and they had no previous experience or precedents to guide them. On their arrival at Paris, the three commissioners found a fourth person, Beaumarchais, well advanced in his work, and accomplishing in a practical way rather more than any of them could hope to do. Moreover, Beaumarchais’s arrangement was necessarily so secret that though they knew in a general way, as did Lord Stormont and all Paris, what he was doing, yet only one of them, Deane, was ever fully admitted into the secret, and it is probable that the other two died without having fully grasped the real nature and conditions of his service. That three joint commissioners of equal powers should conduct such an enormous business of expenditure and credit for a series of years without becoming entangled in the most terrible suspicions and bitter quarrels was in the nature of things impossible. The result was that the history of their horrible disputes and accusations against one another is more voluminous than the history of their services. Deane, who did more actual work than any one except Beaumarchais, was thoroughly and irretrievably ruined. Arthur Lee, who accomplished very little besides manufacturing suspicions and charges, has left behind him a reputation for malevolence which no one will envy; Beaumarchais suffered tortures which he considered almost equivalent to ruin, and his reputation was not entirely rescued until nearly half a century after his death; and Franklin came nearer than ever before in his life to sinking his great fame in an infamy of corruption, for the attacks made upon him by Arthur Lee were a hundred times worse than those of Wedderburn. It was a terrible ordeal for the four men,--those two years before France made an open alliance with the colonies,--and I will add a few other circumstances which contributed variety to their situation. Ralph Izard, of South Carolina, a very passionate man, was appointed by the wise Congress an envoy to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He never went to Tuscany for the simple reason that the duke could not receive him without becoming embroiled with Great Britain; so he was obliged to remain in Paris, where he assisted Lee in villifying Deane, Franklin, and Beaumarchais, and his letters home were full of attacks on their characters.