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. When on the twenty-first the debate was renewed and the bill passed, both Rockingham and Shelburne, the old whig 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 invective of Sandwich, turned on his heel; no part was left him but to go home. 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 reminiscence cheered him. as a prediction. "But then," subjoined Garnier, "they have neither a marine, nor allies, nor a prince of Orange."

For some hours of the nineteenth, his last day in London, Franklin was engaged with Priestley in looking over American newspapers, and directing him what to extract from them for the English ones; in reading them he was frequently not able to proceed for the tears which were literally running down his cheeks. A large part of the same day he spent with Edmund Burke. He called up the happy years of America under the protection of England, saying: "The British empire is the only instance of a great empire in which the most distant members have been as well governed as the metropolis; but then 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 American people. Burke revered Franklin to the last, foretold the steady brightening of his fame, and drew from his integrity the hope of peace.

The next morning Franklin posted to Portsmouth; 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 a general conviction that the British ministry had irrevocably chosen its part, and had left America 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, to effect reconciliation. Its last gleam vanished on his disappearance. The administration attributed to him 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 foretold that persistence in taxation would compel independence; it was for the use of the government that once through Strahan and then through 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."

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 and precise; his frankness perfect. He never shunned responsibility, and never assumed too much of it. 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 the friend to peace; but the terrors of a sanguinary civil war did not confuse his perceptions or impair his firmness. He went home to assist in the establishment of independence, and, through independence, of peace.

He was sailing out of the British channel with a fair wind when, on the twenty-second of March, Edmund Burke, speaking for the party of the old whigs, who had mistakenly extended the revolution principle of the absolute power of parliament in Britain to the external unrepresented parts of the English empire, brought forward in the house of commons resolutions for conciliation with America. He began by pronouncing a splendid eulogy on 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.

The subject before the house was the bill prohibiting New England from the fisheries, and he most skilfully made his way through it to his great design, saying: "As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, pray 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. While 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, 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 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. While some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others 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 en

terprise, 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 contemplate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I see how profitable these effects have been to us, I feel all the pride of power melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

"From six capital sources: descent, form of government, religion in the northern provinces, manners in the southern, education, 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 narrow and pedantic 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. A revenue from America! You never can receive it, no, not a shilling. For all service, whether of revenue, trade, or empire, my hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. Let them always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government, they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance; deny them this participation of freedom, and you break the unity of the empire. It is the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member. Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England?

"All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who think that nothing, exists but what is gross and material; and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be

directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But these ruling and master principles are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive and the only honorable conquests by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race."

For three hours Burke was heard with attention; but, after a reply by Jenkinson, his deep wisdom was scoffed away by a vote of more than three to one. Ministers anticipated even less opposition in the colonies.

At the North, the state of Vermont was preparing to rise from anarchy into self-existence, peace, and order. The court of common pleas was to be opened by the royal judges in what was called the New York county of Cumberland, at Westminster, in the New Hampshire Grants, on the eastern side of the Green Mountains. To prevent this assertion of the jurisdiction of New York and of the authority of the king, a body of young men from the neighboring farms on the thirteenth of March took possession of the court-house. The royal sheriff, who, against the wish of the judges, had raised sixty men armed with guns and bludgeons, demanded possession of the building; and, after reading the riot act and refusing to concede terms, late in the night ordered his party to fire. In this way he made his entry by force, having mortally wounded William French of Brattleborough, and Daniel Houghton of Dummerston. The act closed the supremacy of the king and of New York to the east of Lake Champlain. Armed men poured in from towns in the Grants and from the borders of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. They instituted a jury of inquest, and the royalists implicated in the attack were sent to jail in Massachusetts for trial. They were soon released; but the story of the first martyrs in the contest with the king