CHAPTER X.

FRANKLIN.

THE Convention was graced and honored by the venerable presence of Dr. Franklin, then President of the State of Pennsylvania, and in his eighty-second year. He had returned from Europe only two years before, followed by the admiration and homage of the social, literary, and scientific circles of France; laden with honors, which he wore with a plain and shrewd simplicity; and in the full possession of that predominating common-sense, which had given him, through a long life, a widely extended reputation of a peculiar character. The oldest of the public men of America, his political life had embraced a period of more than half a century, extending back to a time when independence had not entered into the dreams of the boldest among the inhabitants of the English Colonies. For more than twenty years before the Revolution commenced, he had held a high and responsible office under the crown, the administration of which affected the intercourse and connection of all the Colonies;1 and more than twenty years

1 In 1753, he was appointed Dep- ish Colonies, from which place he uty Postmaster-General for the Brit- was dismissed in 1774, while in

before the first Continental Congress was assembled, he had projected a plan of union for the thirteen Provinces which then embraced the whole of the British dominions in North America.1 Nearly as long, also, before the Declaration of Independence, he had become the resident agent in England of several of the Colonies, in which post he continued, with a short interval, through all the controversies that preceded the Revolution, and until reconciliation with the mother country had become impossible.2

Returning in 1775, he was immediately appointed by the people of Pennsylvania one of their delegates in the second Continental Congress. In the following year, he was sent as commissioner to France, where he remained until he was recalled, and was succeeded by Mr. Jefferson, in 1785.

With the fame of his two residences abroad — the one before and the other after the country had severed its connection with England - the whole land was filled. The first of them, commencing with an employment for settling the miserable disputes between the people and the Proprietaries of Pennsyl

England, on account of the part he had taken in American affairs.

1 In 1754. See an account of

this plan, ante, p. 8.

2 He first went to England in 1757, as agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly to settle their difficulties with the Proprietaries, where he remained until 1762. In 1764, he was reappointed provincial agent in England for Pennsylvania; in

1768, he received a similar appointment from Georgia; in 1769, he was chosen agent for New Jersey; and in 1770, he became agent for Massachusetts. His whole residence in England, from 1757 to 1775, embraced a period of sixteen years, two years having been passed at home. He resided in France about nine years, from 1776 to 1785.

vania, was extended to an agency for the three other Colonies of Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, which finally led him to take part in the affairs of all British America, and made him virtually the representative of American interests. His brief service in Congress, during which he signed the Declaration of Independence, was followed by his appointment as Commissioner at the Court of Versailles, which he made the most important sphere that has ever been filled by any American in Europe, and in which that treaty of alliance with France was negotiated which enabled the United States to become in fact an independent nation.

His long career of public service; his eminence as a philosopher, a philanthropist, and a thinker; the general reverence of the people for his character; his peculiar power of illustrating and enforcing his opinions by a method at once original, simple, and attractive, made his presence of the first importance in an assembly which was to embrace the highest wisdom and virtue of America.

It is chiefly, however, by the countenance he gave to the effort to frame a Constitution, that his services as a member of this body are to be estimated. His mind was at all times ingenious, rather than large and constructive; and his great age, while it had scarcely at all impaired his natural powers, had confirmed him in some opinions which must certainly be regarded as mistaken. His desire, for example, to have the legislature of the United States consist of a single body, for the sake of sim

plicity, and his idea that the chief executive magistrate ought to receive no salary for his official services, for the sake of purity, were both singular and unsound.

But there were points upon which he displayed extraordinary wisdom, penetration, and forecast. When an objection to a proportionate representation in Congress was started, upon the ground that it would enable the larger States to swallow up the smaller, he declared that, as the great States could propose to themselves no advantage by absorbing their inferior neighbors, he did not believe they would attempt it. His recollection carried him back to the early part of the century, when the union between England and Scotland was proposed, and when the Scotch patriots were alarmed by the idea that they should be ruined by the superiority of England, unless they had an equal number of members in Parliament; and yet, notwithstanding the great inferiority in their representation as established by the act of union, he declared, that, down to that day, he did not recollect that any thing had been done in the Parliament of Great Britain to the prejudice of Scotland.1

Although he spoke but seldom in the Convention, his influence was very great, and it was always exerted to cool the ardor of debate, and to check the tendency of such discussions to result in

1 He added, with his usual quiet humor, that "whoever looks over the lists of public officers, civil and military, of that nation, will find,

I believe, that the North Britons enjoy their full proportion of emolument." Madison, Elliot, V. 179

irreconcilable differences. His great age, his venerable and benignant aspect, his wide reputation, his acute and sagacious philosophy,-which was always the embodiment of good sense,- would have given him a controlling weight in a much more turbulent and a far less intelligent assembly. When-after debates in which the powerful intellects around him had exhausted the subject, and both sides remained firm in opinions diametrically opposed - he rose and reminded them that they were sent to consult and not to contend, and that declarations of a fixed opinion and a determination never to change it neither enlightened nor convinced those who listened to them, his authority was felt by men who could have annihilated any mere logical argument that might have proceeded from him in his best days.

Dr. Franklin was one of those who entertained serious objections to the Constitution, but he sacrificed them before the Convention was dissolved. Believing a general government to be necessary for the American States; holding that every form of government might be made a blessing to the people by a good administration; and foreseeing that the Constitution would be well administered for, a long course of years, and could only end in despotism when the people should have become so corrupted as to be incapable of any other than a despotic government, he gladly embraced a system which he was astonished to find approaching so near to perfection. "The opinions I have had of its errors," said he, "I sacrifice to the public good. Within these walls