the citation of the precedent cheered Franklin as a CHAP. prediction. "But then," subjoined Garnier, "they have neither a marine, nor allies, nor a prince of Orange." Mar. A large part of his last day in London, Franklin passed 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 the approaching independence as an event which gave him the greatest concern. He called up the happy days which America had passed 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 had been 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. For what noble purpose will they two act together once more? 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. On the morning after his conversation with Burke, Franklin posted to Portsmouth with all speed, and before his departure from London was XXIV. 1775. CHAP. known, was embarked for Philadelphia. What XXIV. tidings were to greet his landing? 177 5. Mar. "He has left with bad designs," said Hutchinson; "had I been the master, his embarkation would have been prevented."-"With his superiority," said Garnier, "and with the confidence of the Americans, he will be able to cut out work 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. With his disappearance from the scene, the last gleam of a compromise vanished. The administration 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." XXIV. Mar. The ability displayed by him in his intercourse CHAP. with the British government has, in its way, never been exceeded. He contemplated the course of 1775. 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 responsibility, and never assumed too much. 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. 22. He was sailing out of the British channel with a fair wind and a smooth sea, when on the twenty- Mar. second of March, on occasion of the bill prohibiting New England from the fisheries, Edmund Burke, for the vindication of his party, but with no hope of success, brought forward in the house of commons resolutions for conciliation. Beyond all others, he had asserted the right of parliament to tax America; and he could not wholly justify its uprising. He began, therefore, with censuring parliament for its many in XXIV. Mar. CHAP. consistencies in its legislation on the subject; and then entered upon a splendid eulogy of the colonies, 1775 whose rapid growth from families to communities, 22. 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, speak ing 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 fishe XXIV. Mar. ries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. CHAP. 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 contemplate 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. "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 |