BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

THERE are a multiplicity of standpoints from which we must view the many-sided Franklin if we would have more than a meagre misconception of that rich and varied personality; but I think his life, regarded somewhat objectively, falls readily into three periods which have a historical quite as much as they have a biographic character. If we look upon him, as surely we must look upon him, as the greatest type and example of the Citizen which modern history knows, and recognise that it was evidently Benjamin Franklin's business and affair upon this earth to be a citizen, and only his trade and livelihood to be a printer, and his casual occupation and pastime to be, amongst many other things, a celebrated man of science-then we shall also recognise that his life is divisible into his Apprenticeship, his Journeyman - years, and the great period of his Mastership in the practical art and mystery, which he made so completely his own, in all its branches and at all its levels, of being the Complete Citizen-of his city, his country, and the world. And upon further consideration we shall find that the three great stages of his life are marked by such a progressive enlargement of the scene and the character of his civic activity as these three words-city, country, world-may stand for.

Already in his twenty-second year we have the spectacle of a certain ingenious, purposeful young man called Franklin, a citizen of Philadelphia, whom, young as he is, Philadelphia is peculiarly conscious of possessing. He is but a working printer, newly

set up in a small way of business with another man, has no position worth speaking of, and really ought to count for nothing with his neighbours. But his practical turn and his genius for thriving on a very little, which one must respect, and his searching and humorous sort of mind, which is perhaps not quite so pleasant to live beside, have made him a marked man among them. A stranger coming into that part, and taking his ease at his inn, would (we feel) be sure to hear him spoken of, not in every case with approbation, within the next twenty-four hours. Benjamin Franklin is already an asset of the place, though nobody there sees that he is on his way to become a power in the land. He does not see it himself; and if he has already done some things, and is daily exercising some faculties, that must tend to carry him into a large sphere of activity, he does those things and exercises those faculties strictly with regard to the day's purposes and to the sphere of activity in which he actually finds himself. Whatever his defects-for he has been self-educated and has lived as a kind of orphan, runaway or castaway, in two hemispheres - he is singularly lucid, singularly alive: and has drawn a wonderful number of moral inferences, considering his years, from his own experience and his own thought. But perhaps his simple and axiomatic desire to be as little as possible either an incompetent, a fool, or a rogue in his passage through this world, affords the only, as it is a quite sufficient token, that he is an original genius and a man in five millions.

Having begun at the beginning, and having a long way to go, he must needs travel at a great rate through the earlier stages of the journey; and by his twenty-seventh or his thirtieth year he has covered the whole course usually comprised in the biographies of successful men and eminently exemplary citizens. At twenty-one he had organised the

Junto, and was himself, we cannot doubt, equal to half the entire intellectual strength of that famous body and its branches. At twenty-two he has become partner in a business, his intelligence and character being reckoned a contribution amply equivalent to the other parties' capital. At twenty-three he improvises and publishes a pamphlet upon a difficult currency question concerning which opinion was fiercely agitated, and so does much to determine the colonial legislature's decision on that matter. This "Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency" is now looked upon as having been an extraordinary production for its place and time, anticipating the method and some of the positions of Adam Smith-who was then, however, an urchin six years old. In this same year our young printer takes over the Pennsylvania Gazette, of which he is manager, editor, and by far the wisest and most humorous contributor to its columns; and he makes of it in a day such a newspaper as America had not hitherto known. In his twenty-fourth year he has become sole proprietor of the growing business by an honourable arrangement with his partner, who has decided that town-work is not his vocation and wants to get back to husbandry. For Franklin, the only difficult point is to choose his creditor in making the necessary arrangements, more than one friend having spontaneously pressed upon him the offer of financial facilities for a venture of his own, if he would make it. Next year, at the age of twenty-five, he has, "acting with some friends"-who would not have acted at all in the matter but for his ingenuity in making them believe that they cared for these things far more than he did brought into being and started on a prosperous career the Philadelphia Library, the parent of the subscription libraries in America, and to-day a flourishing institution of which that country is

justly proud. In his twenty-seventh year he has begun to publish the most famous popular annual which ever came from the press. Poor Richard's Almanack was indeed influential as well as famous, and is perhaps the one secular work in the world which has educated a people and formed the character of a nation. Yet the voice that spoke in it was always the voice of Ben Franklin, printer in Philadelphia, and expressed his mind even when the words were those of other men. We might legitimately, therefore, look on his apprentice period in the art of citizenship as ending at this point, where Poor Richard begins, or earlier. But though he has already, in this so-called apprentice period, done work which would be achievement enough for an ordinary excellent citizen's lifetime, yet the more historical view justifies us in dating his second period from about his thirty-third year.

What is worth noting in his first period is less what he has done, notable as that is, than the way in which he has done it, the motives by which he has been impelled. His progress towards being a philosopher and even a person of some social importance, is neither the issue of any expansive ideologies nor the realisation of any ambitious dreams. It seems to come about, naturally and almost unperceived, from the everyday applications of common-sense to the things immediately in view, the little situations of the day and the hour. As he is a Man, he wishes to be an intelligent one, and therefore takes the trouble of thinking; and that he may think to better purpose, he seeks information wherever he can find

it. As he is a Printer, he attends to his business; and he differs from the majority in that and all other trades in recognising that his business has claims upon him, and that those claims include not only industry and intelligence but also character. He is one of the half-dozen optimists who have firmly