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on the great basis of liberty and justice, and the want of men and money on the part of England, he proved that England could not but fail in her attempt at coercion, and that the ultimate independence of America was inevitable. Suppose the colonies do abound in men," replied Sandwich; "they are raw, undisciplined, and cowardly. I wish, instead of forty or fifty thousand of these brave fellows, they would produce in the field at least two hundred thousand; the more the better; the easier would be the conquest. At the siege of Louisburg, Sir Peter Warren found what egregious cowards they were. Believe me, my lords, the very sound of a cannon would send them off as fast as their feet could carry them." He then abused the Americans for not paying their debts, and ascribed their associations to a desire to defraud their creditors. The restraint on trade and the fisheries was extended by a separate bill to the middle states except New York, and to South Carolina, with constant assurances that the Americans would not fight. It is memorable that, when on the twenty-first the debate was renewed and the bill passed, both Rockingham and Shelburne, the heads of the old whigs, and the new, inserted in their protest against the act that "the people of New England are especially entitled to the fisheries.

Franklin, as he heard the insinuations of Sandwich against the honesty of his countrymen, turned on his heel in wrath; no part was left him but to go home where duty called him. The French minister, who revered his supreme ability, sought with him one last interview. "I spoke to him," wrote Garnier to Vergennes, "of the part which our president Jeannin had taken in establishing the independence and forming the government of the United Provinces;" and the citation of the precedent cheered him as a prediction. "But then," subjoined Garnier, "they have neither a marine, nor allies, nor a Prince of Orange."

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For some hours of the nineteenth, his last day in London, he was, in company with Priestley, engaged Mar. 19. in looking over a number of American newspapers, directing him what to extract from them for the English ones; and in reading them he was frequently not able to proceed

for the tears literally running down his cheeks. A large part of the same day Franklin spent with Edmund Burke; and, however much he may have been soured and exasperated by wrongs and insults to himself and his country, he still regarded its approaching independence as an event which gave him the greatest concern. He called up the happy days of America under the protection of England; he said "that the British empire was the only instance of a great empire in which the most distant members had been as well governed as the metropolis; but then," reasoned he, “the Americans are going to lose the means which secured to them this rare and precious advantage. The question with them is, not whether they are to remain as they were before the troubles, for better they could not hope to be; but whether they are to give up so happy a situation without a struggle. I lament the Separation between Great Britain and her colonies; but it is inevitable."

So parted the great champion of the British aristocracy and the man of the people. When will an age again furnish minds like theirs? Burke revered Franklin to the last, foretold the steady brightening of his fame, and drew from his integrity the pleasing hope of ultimate peace.

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The next morning, Franklin posted to Portsmouth; Mar. 20. and, before his departure from London was known, he had embarked for Philadelphia. "Had I been the master," said Hutchinson, "his embarkation would have been prevented." "With his superiority," said Garnier, "and with the confidence of the Americans, he will cut out work enough for the ministers who have persecuted him.” Vergennes felt assured he would spread the conviction that the British ministry had irrevocably chosen its part, and that America had no choice but independence.

With personal friends, with merchants, with manufacturers, with the liberal statesmen of England, with supporters of the ministry, Franklin had labored on all occasions earnestly, disinterestedly, and long. On his disappearance from the scene, the last gleam of a compromise vanished. The adininistration and their followers called him insincere. They insisted on believing, to the last, that he had private

instructions which would have justified him in accepting the regulating act for Massachusetts, and they attributed his answers to an inflexible and subtle hostility to England. But nothing deceives like jealousy; he perseveringly endeavored to open the eyes of the king and his servants. At the bar of the house of commons he first revealed his conviction that persistence in taxation would compel independence; it was for the use of the government that once to Strahan and then to Lord Howe he explained the American question with frankness and precision. The British ministry overreached themselves by not believing him. Speaking the truth to them in sincerity," said Franklin, was my only finesse."

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In his intercourse with the British government, he contemplated the course of events as calmly as he would have watched a process of nature. His judgment was quick and infallible; his communications prompt, precise, and unequivocal; his frankness perfect. He never shunned respon sibility, and never assumed too much. His single breast contained the spirit of his nation; and in every instance his answers to the ministry and their emissaries were those which the voice of America would have dictated, could he have taken her counsel. In him is discerned no deficiency and no excess. Full of feeling, even to passion, he observed, and reasoned, and spoke serenely. Of all men, he was a friend to peace; but the terrors of a sanguinary civil war did not confuse his perceptions or impair his decision. Neither Chatham, nor Rockingham, nor Burke, blamed Franklin for renouncing allegiance; and we shall see Fox once more claim his friendship, and Shelburne and the younger Pitt rest upon him with the confidence which he deserved. He went home to the work of independence, and, through independence, of peace.

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He was sailing out of the British channel with a fair wind and a smooth sea, when on the twenty- Mar. 22. second of March, on occasion of the bill prohibiting New England from the fisheries, Edmund Burke, for the vindication of his party, brought forward in the house of commons resolutions for conciliation. Beyond all others,

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he had asserted the right of parliament to tax America; and he could not wholly justify its uprising. He Mar. 22. began, therefore, with censuring parliament for its many inconsistencies in its legislation on the subject; and then entered upon a splendid eulogy of the colonies, whose rapid growth from families to communities, from villages to nations, attended by a commerce, great out of all proportion to their numbers, had added to England in a single life as much as England had been growing to in a series of seventeen hundred years.

"As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries," he continued, speaking specially of the bill then in its last stage before the house," you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that, whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hard industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contem

plate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

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Mar. 22.

"From six capital sources: of descent; of form of government; of religion in the northern provinces; of manners in the southern; of education; of the remoteness of situation from the first mover of government; from all these causes a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up. It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to prosecute that spirit as criminal; to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.

"My idea, therefore, without considering whether we yield as matter of right, or grant as matter of favor, is to admit the people of our colonies into an interest in the constitution. I, for one, protest against compounding our demands; I declare against compounding for a poor limited sum the immense, ever growing, eternal debt which is due to generous government from protected freedom. And so may I speed in the great object I propose to you, as I think it would not only be an act of injustice, but would be the worst economy in the world, to compel the colonies to a sum certain, either in the way of ransom or in the way of compulsory compact. A revenue from America! You never can receive it, no, not a shilling. For all service, whether of revenue, trade, or empire, my trust is in her interest in the British constitution. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always