PRINTING AND BOOKMAKING.
 

FRA
 

Before he had been long in the province he was led to
study its anomalous condition. Its land was held by the
heirs of William Penn. To do what was requisite for
the comfort and security of the colony it was necessary
to lay taxes, yet the Penn family strenuously objected to
paying what the assembly thought was its share. There
was therefore continual bickering between the governor
and the popular party, which was nearly always in the
majority, and of which Franklin before long became the
head. The examination which he was forced to make
of the authority of the governors as derived from Penn
and the crown led him to the belief that colonies settled
by Englishmen were united to Great Britain through the
crown only, that the parliament had no authority in them,
and the king only as much as he had in England. Until
just before the declaration of separation from Great
Britain all discussions of the rights of Englishmen in
the colonies were based upon the lines thus supplied by
Franklin. He was an active member of the General Con¬
gress held at Albany in 1754, called to concert measures
against the French and Indians, and to it he presented a
paper advocating a limited union of Americans which in
many respects was much like that afterwards adopted
by the United States. In 1751 he was made deputy post¬
master-general, introducing many reforms. In 1757, in
consequence of disputes with the proprietaries, he was
sent to England by the colony as its agent, and with in¬
tervals he continued there until the outbreak of hostil¬
ities with the mother country. Por many of those years
he was also the agent of several of the other colonies.
His reputation had grown to be very great, and his ac¬
quaintance with leading men in Great Britain was very
extensive, when in 1764 he opposed the stamp act. Two
years later it was arranged by those who were ready to
vote for its repeal that he should be examined before
the House of Commons as to the condition and temper
of America. The examination was in the hands of his
friends, and Franklin himself arranged the interroga¬
tories. Perhaps no display before a legislative body was
ever more effective than this. His unrivaled knowledge
of the subject, the fertility of his illustrations, and the
aptness of his replies compelled acceptance of his con¬
clusions. The part he took in the transmission of Hutch¬
inson's letters to the assembly of Massachusetts drew
upon him the immediate displeasure of the British min¬
istry, and at a meeting of the privy council he was as¬
sailed with the coarsest invective by Wedderburn, the
attorney-general, for his share in the act. In 1775 he
returned home and was immediately elected a member
of the Congress, He signed the Declaration of Inde¬
pendence in 1776 and was one of the members of the sub¬
committee which drafted it, the other two members who
were most prominent being Jefferson and Adams. In
that year he was sent to France as commissioner pleni¬
potentiary, and had the happiness of negotiating a treaty
with that country in 1777. All through the war he per¬
formed the greatest services for America, Upon his in¬
fluence with the court of Prance depended the sums of
money which could be obtained for our necessities. He
was a most notable figure there, with his plain, Quaker¬
like dress, his benignant manner, and his great intellec¬
tual activity. With Adams and Jay he signed the treaty
of peace with Great Britain which acknowledged our in¬
dependence in 1788, and the year after he returned home.

The love for writing which induced Franklin at the
age of sixteen to write under the title of Silence Dogood
for his brother's paper continued a strong passion all his
life. He poured forth letters, pamphlets and newspaper
articles upon every question which in that age interested
mankind. Many of these decidedly influenced the ac¬
tions of men; none were hurtful, and all were interest¬
ing. His writings are the only ones produced in America
before the Revolution which are still read. His Autobi¬
ography, prepared in his old age, seems likely to last as
long as the language. His reputation was likewise very
high as a scientific man.    The discovery of the identity
 

of lightning and electricity was one only of the many
facts added by him to our common knowledge. He had
been led up to this by a long course of previous study.
As a printer he ranks high. In his later years in this oc¬
cupation, when he had means to buy new type, he pro¬
duced some very handsome works. He had a private
printing-office at his residence near Paris, and brought
over from that city type-founding tools so that his grand¬
son could cast letter when it was needed. The pica now
used as a standard for the point system in America is
based upon the gauges in the tools he thus imported.
He published the first magazine issued in America. It
was entitled the General Magazine. A number of his
apprentices were started in business for themselves by
him in places away from Philadelphia, nearly all being
successful.

After Franklin's return from France he was elected
president of Pennsylvania and also one of the delegates
to the convention which formed the Constitution of the
United States. Shortly after the new government was
put into operation, or on April 17, 1790, he died. The
first part of his Autobiography was published the year
after his death, the second in 1798, the third in 1818, the
fourth in 1828, but the whole was not issued until 1868.
There are two full editions of his works. Sparks's is the
older and less complete, and Bigelow's the newer. Each
is in ten volumes. It is probable, however, that within
twenty-five years enough more of his writings will be
discovered to require two more volumes. A bibliograph¬
ical list of the works of Franklin or relating to him has
been compiled by Lindsay Swift for the Boston Public
Library, and an excellent Bibliography of Franklin has
been published by Paul Leicester Ford. Valuable col¬
lections relating to Franklin are in the Boston Public Li¬
brary, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library
of Congress, the Lenox Library, the British Museum, the
Department of State at Washington, the Metropolitan
Museum of New York, the American Philosophical So¬
ciety of Philadelphia, and the library of the late Gordon
L. Ford of Brooklyn. Many societies publish pamphlets
containing reports of the speeches delivered in honor of
Franklin upon each anniversary of his birth, and there
are monuments in Boston, Washington and New York
in public places. There are more original portraits ex¬
tant of him than of any other American. A valuable
biography of Franklin in two volumes was published by
James Parton more than twenty years ago ; it contains
many facts not in the Autobiography, which closes while
Franklin was still comparatively a young man, and en¬
riches the whole with many additional circumstances.
There are besides a dozen other lives, most of them with¬
out much value. Hundreds of towns and counties in the
United States have adopted the name of Franklin, and
it has also become a common given name for individ¬
uals.

Franklin, James, an elder brother of Dr. Franklin,
from whom the latter learned the printer's art, was born
in England and served an apprenticeship there. He came
to America from London in 1716, and soon entered upon
business in Boston. In 1719 he began printing the Bos¬
ton Gazette, the second continuing newspaper published
in that city. After seven months the proprietor took it
away, but on August 6,1721, Franklin published the New
England Courant at his own risk. The paper spoke too
freely to please those who controlled public sentiment,
and the Rev. Increase Mather soon denounced it. Before
the first year of its publication expired Franklin was ar¬
rested and thrown into jail by the government for pub¬
lishing libels, and in 1728 he was forbidden to publish the
Courant or any other journal of like nature unless it had
first been supervised by the secretary of the province.
To avoid this order it was afterwards issued by Benjamin
Franklin, then an apprentice to his brother, who had his
indentures returned to him for this purpose. It was for
this journal that Dr. Franklin first began writing, and it
was from his brother that he ran away to New York and

211