materials and workmen from Philadelphia to build the house in Georgia, it would be a great saving of expence at once to erect the proposed establishment in Philadelphia, and to bring the children from Georgia. Whitfield, however, obstinately adhered to his original project; and Dr. Franklin had determined not to subscribe to the accomplishment.

• I happened soon after,' says Dr. Franklin, to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me: I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three. or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold; as he proceeded, I began to soften, and concluded to give the copper. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all! At this sermon there was also one of our club, who being of my sentiments respecting the building in Georgia, and suspecting a collection might be intended, had by precaution emptied his pockets before he came from home; towards the conclusion of the discourse, however, he felt a strong inclination to give, and applied to a neighbour, who stood near him, to lend him some money for the purpose. The request was fortunately made to perhaps the only man in the company who had the firmness not to be affectedby the preacher. His answer was: "At any other time, friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely; but not now, for thee seems to me to be out of thy right senses."' (P. 85.)

During many years, Dr. F. was a member of the House of Assembly in Pennsylvania, the majority of whom were of the society of Friends, or Quakers; and he had often occasion to remark the state of perplexity into which they were thrown, whenever they were required by the crown to vote any supply for military purposes. They were unwilling not to comply with the wishes of the government, and yet they could not do this without some dereliction of their rigidly pacific principles. In this dilemma, they had recourse to that species of sophistry which may be called amphibology; in order to disguise to themselves, and to conceal from others, the deviation from their established maxims and the incongruity between their professions and their practice.

Their common mode,' says Dr. Franklin, was to grant money under the phrase of its being "for the King's use," and never to enquire how it was applied. But if the demand was not directly from the crown, that phrase was found not so proper, and some other was to be invented. Thus, when powder was wanting, I think it was for the garrison at Louisburg, and the government of New England solicited a grant of some from Pennsylvania, which was much urged on the House by Governor Thomas; they would not grant money to buy powder, because that was an ingredient

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of war; but they voted an aid to New England of 3000 pounds to be put into the hands of the Governor, and appropriated it for the purchase of bread, flour, wheat, or other grain. Some of the Council, desirous of giving the House still further embarrassment, advised the Governor not to accept provision, as not being the thing he demanded: but he replied, "I shall take the money, for I understand very well their meaning, other grain is gunpowder," which he accordingly bought, and they never objected to it.' (P. 92.)

In the course of the war with Spain in 1740, &c., in which that country was afterward joined by France, this Governor Thomas of Pennsylvania laboured in vain to prevail on the Quaker-Assembly of the province to pass a militia-law; though they had in some instances, as in the case above mentioned, suffered their anti-military principles to be relaxed by the aid of a little ambiguous phraseology. On this occasion, Dr. Franklin placed the helpless situation of the province in such strong lights, in a pamphlet which he entitled Plain Truth, that, when he soon afterward proposed a plan for forming an armed association for the defence of the province by a voluntary subscription, the subscribers in a short time amounted to ten thousand; who furnished themselves with arms, formed themselves into regiments, and elected their officers. The total absence of all personal vanity in the mind of Franklin, was conspicuously seen in this affair; for, when the officers of the Philadelphia regiment met and chose him for their colonel, he declined the honour, because he conceived himself (as he tells us) to be unfit' for the station. Most persons, who had risen from humble circumstances, would have eagerly seized the favourable opportunity, which such a command would have afforded them, for displaying their elevation and gratifying their pride: but the mind of Franklin had none of this littleness; and, instead of parading as an officer among his fellow-citizens, he regularly took his turn of duty as a common soldier in the nightly guard of a battery that was erected for the protection of the town.

About this period, Dr. F. was chosen a member of the House of Assembly in Pennsylvania, to which honourable situation he was re-chosen every year for ten years, without ever asking any elector for his vote, or signifying either directly or indirectly any desire of being chosen. This was as it should be. Here was no bribery on the part of the electors, and no mean solicitation on the part of the candidate.

In 1750, Dr. Franklin was named as one of two commissioners who were appointed to treat with the Indians at Car

lisle, in the province of Pennsylvania. The Indians wanted, as usual, to be regaled with spirituous liquors during the progress of the negotiation: but, knowing their aptitude "to get drunk," Dr. F. would not suffer them to receive any of the intoxicating fluid pending the discussions; telling them "that if they would continue sober during the treaty" they should have plenty of rum "when the treaty was over." They accordingly remained sober, because they had no power of being otherwise.

'The treaty,' says the Doctor, was conducted very orderly, and concluded to mutual satisfaction. They then claimed and received the rum; this was in the afternoon; they were near 100 men, women and children, and were lodged in temporary cabins built in the form of a square, just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walked to see what was the matter; we found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women, quarelling and fighting. Their dark coloured bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with fire-brands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagined; there was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight, a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice. The next day, sensible that they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counsellors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavoured to excuse the rum by saying, "The Great Spirit who made all things made every thing for some use, and whatever use he designed any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said, LET THIS BE FOR THE INDIANS TO GET DRUNK WITH; and it must be so." (P.97.) ·

When the army under General Braddock experienced a signal defeat near Fort du Quesne by a much smaller body of French and Indians, in 1753, and great alarm was diffused through the province of Pennsylvania, Dr. Franklin, who had now acquired a little military experience, undertook, at the earnest request of the governor, the command of some troops which were raised for the defence of the North Western frontier. While he was engaged in this office, and his men were occupied in building a line of forts, he made a remark which will be found applicable to other persons besides soldiers, but is perhaps more particularly suited to the military:

• When men are employed they are best contented; for on the days the troops worked, they were good natured and cheerful: REV. MAY, 1818.

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and with the consciousness of having done a good day's work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days, they were mutinous and quarrelsome, finding fault with the pork, the bread, &c., and were continually in bad humour; which put me in mind of a sea-captain whose rule it was to keep his men constantly at work; and when his mate once told him that they had done every thing and there was nothing farther to employ them about, "0," said he, "make them scour the anchor."' (P. 118.)

Much misconception has prevailed respecting the origin of the well-known Stamp-Act, which was passed during the administration of Mr. George Grenville in 1765, and was the primary cause of those internal feuds and irreconcileable animosities which brought on the American war, and finally dissolved the union between the mother-country and the colonies. As this act has become an important transaction in the history not only of America but of this country, and as, like the box of Pandora, it dispersed a great variety of ills over the world, we shall make no apology for quoting that part of these memoirs in which Dr. Franklin gives a clear exposition of the origin, as well as of the injustice and the folly, of a measure to which the nations of Europe may trace back many of their present calamities. The American revolution had its source in the Stamp-Act, and the French revolution naturally rose out of the American: the Stampact really formed the trunk out of which they both germi nated; and that Act was owing to certain principles, very adverse to liberty, which had been instilled in an evil hour into a certain royal breast, and have ever since had an unfortunate ascendancy in the councils of his ministers and on the whole scheme of his reign.

Some time in the winter of 1763-4, Mr. Grenville called together the agents of the several colonies and told them that he proposed to draw a revenue from America; and to that end his intention was to levy a stamp-duty on the colonies by act of parliament in the ensuing session, of which he thought it fit that they should be immediately acquainted, that they might have time to consider, and if any other duty equally productive would be more agreeable to them, they might let him know it. The agents were therefore directed to write this to their respective assemblies, and communicate to him the answers they should receive: the agents wrote accordingly. I was a member in the Assembly of Pennsylvania, when this notification came to hand. The observations there made upon it were that the antient, established, and regular method of drawing aids from the colonies was this. The occasion was always first considered by their sovereign in his privy council, by whose sage advice he directed his secretary of state to write circular letters to the several governors, who were directed to lay them before their assemblies. In those letters the occasion

was explained for their satisfaction, with gracious expressions of his Majesty's confidence in their known duty and affection, on which he relied that they would grant such sums, as should be suitable to their abilities, loyalty, and zeal for his service. That the colonies had always granted liberally on such requisitions, and so liberally during the late war, that the King, sensible they had granted much more than their proportion, had recommended it to parliament five years successively to make them some compensation, and the parliament accordingly returned them 200,000l. a year to be divided among them. That the proposition of taxing them in parliament was therefore both cruel and unjust. That by the constitution of the colonies their business was with the king in matters of aid, they had nothing to do with any financier, nor he with them; nor were the agents the proper channels through which requisitions should be made; it was therefore improper for them to enter into any stipulation, or make any proposition to Mr. Grenville about laying taxes on their constituents by parliament, which had really no right at all to tax them,' &c.

Though, however, the different houses of representatives in the North-American colonies protested against the exercise of the assumed right to tax them in a British parliament,

They were so far from refusing to grant money that they resolved to the following purpose: "That they always had, so they always should think it their duty to grant aid to the crown, according to their abilities, whenever required of them in the usual constitutional manner." I went soon after to England, and took with me an authentic copy of this resolution, which I presented to Mr. Grenville, before he brought in the Stamp-act. I asserted in the House of Commons (Mr. Grenville being present) that I had done so, and he did not deny it. And had Mr, Grenville, instead of that Act, applied to the King in council for such_requisitional letters to be circulated by the secretary of state, I am sure he would have obtained more money from the colonies by their voluntary grants than he himself expected from his stamps. But he chose compulsion rather than persuasion, and would not receive from their good will what he thought he could obtain without it.'

As we have no doubt that the above extracts contain the true history of that transaction which, in its progress, alienated the American colonies from the British crown, it is clear from the plain statement of Dr. Franklin that the real object of the British cabinet in imposing the Stamp-act was not to obtain a revenue from America; because, if that had been the sole purpose, it might have been much more effectually accomplished by other means. The colonies had been and would have continued to be liberal of their money, but they' were tenacious of their liberties: they would part with the one but not with the other. What, then, was the real object which the crown had in view in the imposition of the Stamp-act?

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